New Urbanism & gentrification

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Composed for a group of people I don’t know, at the request of my boss, in response to attacks by Charles Shaw on New Urbanism’s good name:

I think that Charles fundamentally misunderstands New Urbanists’ role and response to gentrification in three crucial ways.

First and foremost, New Urbanist practice plays at best an incidental role in the process of gentrification. New Urbanism is a method of implementing market and/or government investment in cities — it is not the (capitalist, corporatist, whatever it is, I agree that it’s problematic) ideology behind that investment. The forces of public and private investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment are too broad for anyone — much less New Urbanists, who hardly enjoy hegemony over the nation’s housing market — to control. As Charles Bohl wrote in an extensive article on “New Urbanism and the City” in Housing Policy Debate (with equally interesting responses by Michael Pyatok and Shelley Poticha):

“New Urbanism is not a housing program: It cannot defy the dynamics of real estate markets nor ensure that affordable public housing units will be provided without public sector involvement… New Urbanism is subject to the limitations of place-based initiatives, which do a poor job of addressing problems that originate outside the local community, such as racism; inequality; spatial mismatches; and local, state, and federal policies affecting low-income populations…

“What happens to the portion of the inner-city neighborhood that is displaced in order to create a more diverse, mixed-income neighborhood? What happens to the residents of public housing projects where highrises are destroyed and fewer units are replaced by low-rise development? New Urbanism does not provide solutions for these and other problems spawned by inner-city revitalization strategies.While the different types of housing espoused by New Urbanism might present better options for inner-city households, many will be excluded from these options without housing assistance and some type of fair share or inclusionary measures, density bonuses,and other incentives.”
(Charles Bohl, “New Urbanism and the City,” http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/programs/hpd/v11i4-index.shtml)

Further, Shaw’s claim that New Urbanism has nothing to offer to America’s poorest has no basis. Public housing revitalization, as epitomized by the HOPE VI program (which CNU helped to write the design guidelines for), has had a truly momentous impact in strengthening poor, inner-city communities nationwide. A recent (but, as of yet, unpublished) study by Danny Boston of outcomes for residents of new, mixed-income housing in Atlanta found dramatic improvements on almost every quality of life indicator — joblessness, school performance, safety, resident satisfaction, etc. Those gains have come all while investing public dollars wisely — in durable, sustainable communities, built along time-honored patterns of human settlement.

HOPE VI did indeed result in an overall loss of housing units affordable to extremely low income families; even if densities remained stable, reducing the percentage available to public housing tenants from 100% to 40% results in a significant reduction of units, and funds for replacement public housing are scarce. Yet where funds and programmatic support were available — as at Diggs Town in Norfolk, Archer Courts in Chicago’s Chinatown, Columbia Point in South Boston, at Aliso Village in East Los Angeles, or at Arverne and Edgemere at Far Rockaway in Queens — new urbanist redesigns of public housing have been accomplished without displacing a single resident. Even critical authors agree that the problem is with underlying social policies rather than New Urbanist strategies per se:

“In the transformation of public housing, NU is not categorically the culprit. Rather, the NU principles are used to justify reducing the number of public housing units overall. Instead of dismissing it wholesale, activist planners need to capitalize on the NU climate, particularly the promotion of mixed-income housing, to push for more, not less, affordable public and private housing in all our communities.”
(Janet Smith, “HOPE VI and the New Urbanism,” http://www.plannersnetwork.org/htm/pub/archives/152/smith.htm)

Secondly, the issue of gentrification is much too complex to reduce to a single perspective or a single “correct” answer — it is not a subject to be examined cavalierly. The many social and economic forces underlying gentrification interact with even individual lives in countless, conflicting ways. For instance, I am, for better or worse, a Wicker Park gentrifier — a well-educated recent arrival working as a “symbolic analyst” downtown, shopping at the boutiques and calling the cops with quality of life complaints. Yet simultaneously, my grandfather’s old neighborhood–Chinatown in Los Angeles, itself an early (ca. 1939) example of “festival marketplace” urban renewal — went through a long period of disinvestment as many of its residents (e.g., my parents) moved out to suburbia. Nowadays, Sunset Boulevard is Cesar Chavez Avenue and German fashion designers occupy the storefront where my uncle sold produce. How are we as individuals, or as communities, supposed to understand and respond to such broad forces of social change — some of which spring out of the failing codependency between America’s markets and its governments (i.e., its communities)? It’s a challenging enough question without resorting to broad-brush attacks, and I don’t trust anyone who claims to have a simple answer to a complex question.

As Ellen Dunham-Jones, a charter member of CNU puts it, New Urbanism is “a forum, not a formula.” That’s why New Urbanists created the Congress — not the Center — for the New Urbanism. The ranks of New Urbanists include many voices, who (in my experience) collectively have done tremendously thoughtful (and often effective) work on understanding the root causes and ramifications of gentrification, and addressing those factors through New Urbanism.

For example, one new initiative that CNU staff are coordinating seeks to understand how good design — including revivals of historic housing types — and streamlined regulations can help builders reduce the cost of housing. Yet most of our resources lie in our members, the ones out in the trenches and working on these conditions every day. New Urbanists include developers and architects who build and design housing affordable to both the workforce and very low income individuals; the chair of our Real Estate Development task force is a mixed-income developer in Chicago, and architects on our Board of Directors (like Ray Gindroz and Dan Solomon) have designed tens of thousands of homes — public housing, private subsidized housing, workforce housing, and market-rate housing. New Urbanists include activists from community development corporations in small Southern towns like Macon, Georgia and large Northern cities like Washington. New Urbanists even include advocates like the Henry George land-value-taxers, who despite their lack of political instinct do have a constructive answer to the problem of land speculation (and its ancillary effects, including gentrification). As New Urbanists, all of these voices engage in often-rancorous and always ongoing debate about issues like gentrification; for evidence, see the recent posts below from a New Urbanist list, only the latest of many waves of posts about gentrification. (The posts were by David Brain, John Hooker, and Emily Talen.)

Third and most obviously, gentrification existed before New Urbanism did, so it’s specious to call the latter the progenitor of the former. The following dates are mostly from Neil Smith’s openly Marxist book “The New Urban Frontier”:
circa 1870.: “embourgeoisement” coined in France
1963: “gentrification” coined by Ruth Glass in “London: Aspects of Change”
1976: ULI study finds half of US cities seeing some signs of “gentrification”
1985 December 23: “Is Gentrification a Dirty Word?” ad in New York Times
1988 August 6: First Tompkins Square riot
1993 October 8: The Congress for the New Urbanism first meets

The effects of pre-New Urbanist gentrification are on wide display throughout urban North America: for instance, the many 1960s slabs of middle-income housing along Chicago’s north and near-south lakefront, along the East River from Stuyvesant Town to Yorkville, or in the West Ends of Vancouver or Boston. By any definition, that was gentrification but categorically not New Urbanist.

Conversely, I can’t think of any examples where New Urbanism has de-gentrified a neighborhood (i.e., lowered its socioeconomic status), but examples abound of instances where NIMBYs have opposed New Urbanism with such fears clearly in mind. Examples of New Urbanist intervention in stable, working-class neighborhoods without gentrification are limited to a few infill housing developments and community plans, but that’s more because these neighborhoods’ political marginalization means that little large-scale investment or planning takes place in those neighborhoods precisely until the moment gentrification — by definition, an influx of outside investment — begins.

New Economy, New Urbanism

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and while I’m posting things I wrote at work today, a response to a question about “a certain kind of economy… conducive to the development of New Urbanism.”

Although there’s some literature out there on the impact of telecom on urbanism and economic development, not much of it has specifically discussed New Urbanism. Some of it has focused on urbanism more generally, though, and a theme that I’ve seen across the literature is that while the internet may make transferring data easier, in another sense it even further privileges face-to-face interaction. Thus, the theory goes that online retailing will ultimately hurt resellers of commodities, like big box retailers, rather than downtown merchants who can trade on the experience of personal contact; similarly, although commodity work like call centers can be easily outsourced, “creative” industries that rely heavily on personal interaction to generate ideas will continue to thrive within urban settings (cf. Florida).

New Urbanist development regulations largely arose alongside slow-growth, pro-environment political coalitions in many cities — particularly along the Pacific coast. Some authors have said that the increased mobility that the internet allows will lead telecommuters not to single houses atop hilltops, but to high-quality-of-life towns within reach of metropolitan amenities (cf. Nevarez), and that those towns will develop slow-growth (and often, although not necessarily, pro-New Urbanist) politics as a result.

Some books you may want to look for:
– William Mitchell, “E-topia” (MIT, 1999)
– Leonard Nevarez, “New Money, Nice Town” (Routledge, 2003)
– Richard Florida, “Cities and the Creative Class” (Routledge, 2004)
– Joel Kotkin, “The New Geography” (Random House, 2001)

Joel Kotkin has lately made a name for himself by disparaging Richard Florida, but some aspects of his book echo Florida’s argument: that engineering jobs thrive in manicured, suburban “nerdistans” while economies in urban areas are dominated by a “cultural-industrial complex.”

Off the charts

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I was looking at the Regenstein’s fascinating collection of Census 2000 maps again and noticed this: my census tract is in a cluster of tracts notable for its singular lack of children.

Just how singular? The “urban, very well off; numerous young, unmarried adults and hardly any children” cluster scores “nearly 4 standard deviations above the mean” for non-family households. Four standard deviations = 32/1,000,000 = 99.9968 percentile. Wow.

One recent addition from the Map Collection: scanned Social Science Research Committee maps from the 1920s and 1930s. The ethnic origin maps show ethnic areas that are mere shadows; the population density has shifted around quite a bit–Little Village and the north lakefront are denser, but the rest of the city is much less dense. (The Black Belt was among the most crowded parts of town; now the heart of Bronzeville has a suburban-level population density of

Devon dilemma

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The Trib has a middling article by Noreen Ahmed-Ullah on traffic problems along Devon Avenue:

The parking pinch is a sign of Devon’s coming of age, but some worry that it is an example of a bustling ethnic neighborhood choking on its own prosperity. Urban planners say the crowding is not necessarily a bad thing. They warn that any improvements to the area must find a delicate balance, enhancing the street without taking away its ethnic flair… Irv Loundy, past president of the West Ridge Chamber of Commerce, said Devon has a larger concentration of South Asian stores than anywhere else in the United States.

Here’s my little solution: combine the 49-Western and 49B-North Western buses, which are two separate routes only because of the most archaic of reasons. (The two ends of the #10 Western streetcar route were converted to buses back in 1948. When CTA converted the #49 middle segment to buses fifty years ago, they didn’t eliminate the distinction.) Extend the Western route east along Howard for one mile to the Howard terminal, and run express service seven days.

And voila: it’s now a one-seat ride from the Illinois Medical Center* (thanks to the medical students, it’s the third largest concentration of South Asians in the city after West Rogers Park and Hyde Park) to the heart of Devon. Since Western runs perpendicular to Devon, it avoids the traffic jams on Devon. The connection to Howard makes a better connection to the Red/Purple/Yellow lines than the current Devon-bus-via-Morse connection, which also has the disadvantage of getting stuck in said traffic on Devon.

* and Wicker Park, of course, but really, this isn’t just self-interest.

Unpatriotic MREs

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Contrary to the claims of some, the retort pouch — the foil-and-plastic thing (essentially a can married to a Ziploc bag) that precooked Indian food, camping food, military or humanitarian Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) rations, and astronaut meals come in — were not invented for the Apollo program, but for the Nazis. True, they didn’t really work until the intersection of plastics research and the Apollo program in the 1960s, but still that MRE might not be as all-American as it’s made out to be.

Last week’s absence of posts was due to a vacation last weekend (NYC–as always, photos eventually, once I’ve had time to pick through them with a fine toothed comb and then crop, resize, optimize, and adjust the contrast and angle and exposure) and a flurry of work ahead of a few deadlines this month. In particular, I’m presenting at Greening the Heartland and Transport Chicago (thankfully the same paper, but it’s not done yet!), all in the week just prior to CNU XIII.

More simply, I’m going to have to leave some things unfinished until the tide passes, sometime in June.

DIY urban reclamation

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Heavy Trash, an LA public art collective, takes direct action against gated communities by offering the public a way to view (or maybe snipe at) them:

Like the historic viewing platforms at the Berlin Wall that allowed Westerners to see into East Berlin, the Heavy Trash viewing platforms call attention to the walls of gated communities and provide visual access to parts of the city that have been cut off from the public domain.

Their earlier one-ton metal access stair to grant the public access to a fenced-off park is just brilliant.

Today in transit funding

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From yesterday’s Mass Transit Committee hearing:
– Madigan attended the hearing, appeared to be interested
– Pace has volunteered to take over regional paratransit, is looking into Medicaid
– RTA continues to be unhelpful and unsure amidst all this

Kruesi spoke to the City Club on Monday and made some realistic, although politically uncouth, remarks about raising sales taxes in the collar counties, raising gas taxes regionally, and maybe suing RTA on environmental justice grounds. Collar county officials and Metra are crying that they pay nothing for transit because they get nothing for transit — well, tough shit. Even the minimal transit service in the collar counties still requires huge subsidies from Cook County taxpayers. And if you want massive new expansions like the STAR Line, be prepared to pay higher taxes to run that service. (Update: Greg Hinz in the 2 May Crain’s says that Jeff Ladd may be on his last political favors.)

And Carole Brown, who’s caught in a sticky spot between angry riders and a political system she’s not quite part of, has taken the unprecedented (at least for the clubby world of Chicago politics) step of setting up a blog. A breath of fresh air! She cites CTA analysis showing that, if CTA had kept fare increases to 20% since 1983 (as Metra has), base fare would be $1.10 and there would be 70 million more annual rides on CTA today.

Some conjectural analysis: let’s say just half of those 70,000,000 rides are instead car trips of just three miles apiece — an average length for urban trips. That works out to:
– almost 100,000 fewer car trips a day inside Chicago — equivalent to shutting down Lake Shore Drive (at Foster)
– at 40c/mile in direct costs plus $2 in parking per trip, switching those trips to transit would save Chicago drivers $112,000,000 a year
– at city mileage of 21.5 mpg, switching those trips would save 4,883,720 gallons of gasoline and prevent literally tons of pollution: 53,720 tons of carbon dioxide, 13,419 pounds of carbon monoxide, and 1,750 pounds of volatile organic compounds (the principal precursor to smog/ozone)
– if said trips prevented the construction of just 1,000 parking spaces, that’s still enough parking to fill an eight acre site: two and a half city blocks, or the size of the eastern (street level) section of Millennium Park or Independence Park on the northwest side.

Reducing short car trips in urban areas is the single best way to reduce vehicular emissions — reducing VMT by 1% equals a 2-4% reduction in emissions, since stop-and-go urban driving is so inefficient.

Big pile of rocks

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…and some opportunities for high design on the near south side: the Near West Gazette is reporting that the big pile of rocks at 29th & Halsted (where the odd river grid meets Halsted in the north part of Bridgeport)–aka the Stearns Quarry, Chicago’s first and last, and later a landfill for incinerator ash — will become a park. From an article by Michael Comstock:

“Amenities will include prairie wetlands, boardwalks, walking trails, a soft surface running path, ornamental fencing, an athletic field, overlooks, a sledding hill [i.e., the pile of rocks], and preserved quarry walls. ‘The view from the hill is spectacular,’ said 11th Ward Alderman James Balcer. ‘You can see the whole downtown skyline.’

“While the view may be beautiful, the preserved quarry walls arte the park’s true highlight. According to the Park District… the quarry’s stone dates as far back as 400 million years ago, to the Silurian Age… The remnants of… coral reefs can be seen exposed in the quarry walls.”

Site Design Group will be the landscape architect. Also in the issue, an article by Felicia Swanson quotes Ernest Wong from SDG on a streetscaping project in Chinatown (potentially to be funded by McPier): “There’s an opportunity to look at something more modern in context… We’re exploring if there’s a way to do a new definition of what Chinatown is going towards. Chinatown could become the new architectural mecca of Chicago. There are so many award-winning structures already here.”

Bungalow courts

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The bungalow court came up on a short call with an architect last week, in reference to one building type native to Pasadena (ca. 1909, Sylvanus Marston). Although I was certainly aware of the type from movies (like the Bavarian Village in Silverlake — the apartment complex in “Mulholland Drive”), my knowledge of California courtyard housing is mostly limited to often-Mission Revival courtyards of attached and sometimes stacked maisonettes or flats. However, newly built courts of detached bungalows or cottages have proved popular in the Northwest, and the housing type might have new relevance in the era of the not-so-big house. It seems remarkably appropriate for multifamily infill within established single-family neighborhoods, or for difficult, deep sites within new towns where one might otherwise be tempted to put a cul-de-sac. Perhaps best of all, the small increments of the plan mean that it can be adapted for almost any site or market preference, with an endless variety of plans.

The National Register of Historic Places has a scanned document (ca. 1978; 5MB PDF) giving names, addresses, and descriptions for dozens of bungalow courts in Pasadena. It would be interesting to go around and see what shape they’re in today; I’ll look for a few in June.

For some more photos, scroll down to Bungalow Courts in this slide-show outline from UCSB.

A 1988 survey of San Diego’s bungalow courts and their residents found that not only has this housing type withstood the test of time–80% were still intact, 70 years after their heyday — but that they were well-liked by their diverse residents, with only 5% of the respondents dissatisfied. The courts were primarily located along streetcar lines in the then-new neighborhoods just north of Balboa Park, and many were marketed to single women (then a brand-new household type) as a neighborly, familial middle ground between expensive homeownership and hedonistic apartment life.

Many individual courts acquired social identities over time; some courts were still filled with single women who all moved in decades ago. The reasons for the courts’ passage into history seems simple but stupid in retrospect: “Due to the unfathomable popularity of the two-story ‘dingbat’ apartment complex, eight units could now be crammed onto one city lot complete with off-street parking. It is probably also true that apartment seekers in the 1960s (like everyone else) wanted modern dwellings with gleaming kitchens and green shag carpeting.” In addition, bungalow courts’ small units and lack of attached garages may have turned away potential occupants.

Gentrification today

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Mary Schmich in “the Tribune”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0504220132apr22,1,3865394.column?coll=chi-business-hed points out that gentrification’s ghosts leave behind a fuzzy, indeterminate context:

There are other ghosts, too, old people I used to see ambling on the sidewalks. Occasionally the ghost of one will appear for no apparent reason except to say, “Hey, you hadn’t even noticed I was gone.” They’re right. Walking past the palazzos I can’t always remember what was there before, or who.

John Greenfield once pointed this out: when a building or store disappears, even if it was something you saw every day for years, its memory fades alarmingly rapidly. Obviously, grandmother’s house or the daily bakery are exceptions, but I’ve noticed it countless times.

In Pilsen, the “latest flare in the gentrification battles”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0504220158apr22,1,2295748.story?coll=chi-business-hed appears to be a loft conversion by Steve Lipe. Lipe has done quite a bit of groundwork (negotiating early on with a local CDC, not advertising the project outside the community, hiring Latino sales staff, and rehabbing an abandoned building so as not to displace any residents in densely populated Pilsen) but he nonetheless provides an easy target for easily confused, angry activists.

bq. Balderas, a project opponent, acknowledged that many residents would view the project more favorably if the newcomers were of Mexican descent, but just because the potential homebuyers are Hispanics who made good doesn’t mean that they should take precedence over longtime residents, she said. “We’re the ones who did all the hard work to make Pilsen a better place. But we’re not going to benefit from it. They are,” Balderas said.

bq. Chantico Lofts has caused a split among advocates of affordable housing. Some say Pilsen residents should fight developers tooth-and-nail while others want to become partners to create mixed-income projects.