Archive for September 25, 2008

Is Congress bailing out suburbia?

September 25, 2008 / Wendy Waters / 5 comments

There’s a lot going on this week in Washington DC and the economy.  It’s challenging to follow all the strands and interpret the econo-speak and political-speak in terms of what it actually means in the big picture.

I may be off base here, but could one not interpret the current plans as bailing out the suburban American way of life — propping it up?

First, the automotive industry is also receiving their corporate welfare cheque.  Atlantic Monthlyeconomic writer Megan McArdle picked up on this.  Sneaking through under the shadow of the banking bail out is a gift to the big three auto makers of a $25 Billion low interest loan. Her analysis:

Yes, I favor intervention when it looks like there’s a risk of a really severe recession.  But there is no such rationale here, not even arguably.  It’s pure pork, with a soupcon of economic nationalism thrown in.  If the Big Three can’t make autos people want to buy, then they should liquidate and open up the market to those who can.

The big three auto makers have built lobbying for roads and freeways (and the resulting way of life) part of their business plan.  While other global companies make cars to fit more compact cities and higher fuel prices, the big three lobbied for cities to be built around the car.  Here we go again.

Second, the banking bail out may also involve propping up suburban living — that’s where the houses in default are.  If the tax payers become stake holders in a bailout, they may collectively become owners of thousands of distant suburban homes that only have value if automobile travel and highways remain subsidized by the US.

Have I had too little sleep lately, or is anyone else seeing an implication for cities of these plans?

Category: sprawl, transportation /

Parking and cities

September 25, 2008 / Wendy Waters / 6 comments

Few things can make a street feel less engaging and less safe than a parking lot or stand-alone parking garage.

In most cities, new buildings — whether private homes or office towers — must offer a certain amount of off street parking. But are those minimal standards too many in an era when transit, walking, cycling and overall less driving is becoming more common and even essential?  Do parking spaces enhance or detract from a neighborhood?  Probably depends on the neighborhood.  There is increasing discussion on city and planning blogs as well as in the press about the relationship between parking and creating livable urban areas — or should I say the inverse relationship.

For many businesses and retail or restaurant entrepreneurs, something that frequently stops them getting their dream business open is city hall demanding more parking.  The most ludicrous bylaw on parking I’ve heard is in Vancouver — and I doubt it is a-typical.  If you want to open a restaurant that doesn’t serve alcohol, you do not need to provide parking.  If you want to serve alcohol, you need to provide off street parking.

As reported via Planetizen on MSNBC there is an article describing how a number of planning departments in North America are starting to make exceptions.

Alice and Jeff Speck didn’t have a car and didn’t want one. But District of Columbia zoning regulations required them to carve out a place to park one at the house they were building.It would have eaten up precious space on their odd-shaped lot and marred the aesthetics of their neighborhood, dominated by historic row houses. The Specks succeeded in getting a waiver, even though it took nine months.

D.C. is now considering scrapping those requirements — part of a growing national trend. Officials hope that offering the freedom to forgo parking will lead to denser, more walkable, transit-friendly development.

Opponents say making parking more scarce will only make the city less hospitable.

If a city is less-hospitable to drivers needing to park, is it “less hospitable?”  Are neighborhoods built before the automobile “unhospitable” or are they different and even walkable?  And, if they are “less hospitable” why are real estate values holding in many such areas while falling elsewhere? Again, from MSNBC article:

“Half the great buildings in America’s great cities would not be legal to build today under current land use codes,” said Jeff Speck, a planning consultant. “Every house on my block is illegal by current standards, particularly parking standards.”

This suggests that revitalizing older neighborhoods might mean returning to their roots — walkability — rather than trying to make them fit the automotive era.  Indeed, this is happening:

In Milwaukee, one of a small group of cities that has eased minimum parking requirements, did so because they were impeding redevelopment of struggling neighborhoods, said John Norquist, the city’s mayor from 1988 to 2004.

The MSNBC article is worth a read.  The author raises the dilemma between making a city work for cars and work for people, which are not mutually exclusive all of the time.  Even people who live in walkable neighborhoods want to get around by car sometimes.

But this doesn’t mean automobile use should come first in city planning.  Designing cities around places to park large empty metal shells appears to be coming to an end in some municipalities.

Category: development conflicts, planning policy, transportation, urban history /

Edge city growing pains

September 21, 2008 / Wendy Waters / One comment

In the past couple weeks there have been (at least) two excellent blog posts about “edge cities.”  Edge cities are small cities or large towns interconnected with and attached to a larger metro area like a suburb.  Unlike bedroom communities, edge cities contain business parks as well as homes and significant retail space.

I expect we’ll be hearing much more about edge cities in the coming years.  They have the potential to offer people more affordable homes — and perhaps more space — than living in prime urban areas, but unlike many suburbs sometimes have the density to offer walkable neighborhoods (now or in the future), a variety or retail and restaurant locales, and rapid transit to the larger metro area’s business districts, as well as significant employment and business opportunities themselves.

Right now, we’re starting to see edge city growing pains.  In particular, the challenge of making these places slightly more urban, with higher density housing, retail and restaurants, which in turn will support more transit.

Dave Atkins of the Dave Writes Blog (and a book reviewer for All About Cities) offers an interesting summary of what’s coming to his edge city of Westwood, outside Boston.

Westwood is a town of almost 15,000 located on route 128 about 13 miles southwest of downtown Boston. Developers have just broken ground on Westwood Station, a 135-acre mixed-use, transit-oriented Smart Growth community—and an attempt to, in one massively-planned effort create a new mini-city. Its advocates describe a new urbanist utopia. But the fault lines of change are many:

  • The project is seen as a long term solution to local financing needs—a cure for the cycle of suburban property tax overrides necessary to keep schools funded. But the current economic downtown may jeopardize everything.
  • A significant number of residents oppose the scale of the project and feel betrayed by the town. Lawsuits to force traffic mitigation are followed by large public meetings of angry citizens. The project is supported by most, but some fear it will destroy the community as it pits one side of town against the other.
  • Another development, Legacy Place, only a mile away in Dedham, will complement or compete with this project.
  • Within the span of only a few years almost 2 million square feet of new mixed-use development will be completed—on top of two existing towns: Dedham and Westwood—towns that historically were one town. Within a decade, this region is likely to be transformed.

We may be witnessing the birth of a second generation “Edge City.” Can the mistakes of the past be avoided? Will this be a massive suburban sprawl nightmare or a model for the future of urban planning? Will the project integrate with the town or be a separate, tolerated entity?

Atkins asks important questions about what is happening in Westwood, which could also be asked of projects around North America.

Ryan Avent of the Bellows Blog, meanwhile, quotes from a recent article in Mother Jones about how edge cities typically grow until they have enough homes and businesses to create major motor vehicle traffic jams, but then do not evolve further to communities that would support a good transit system.

The density-gap corollary to the laws of density: Edge cities always develop to the point where they become dense enough to make people crazy with the traffic, but rarely, if ever, do they get dense enough to support the rail alternative to automobile traffic.

Of course, in any attempt to increase density, anywhere, numerous local residents often fight against it.  Sometimes for good reasons, but often for the wrong reasons — wanting to stop any change at all.  This creates growing pains.

Category: communities, development conflicts, planning policy, transportation, Uncategorized, urban history /

Future transit oriented retail developments

September 17, 2008 / Wendy Waters / One comment

When more people are taking mass transit, it creates new challenges and opportunities for offering urban retail conveniences.

Recently Richard Layman offered a good discussion of what might be ahead:

Picture the following scenario: Mr. or Mrs. suburban Anoka pulls into the parking structure adjacent to the train station along the Northstar Commuter Rail Corridor in Anoka. It is 6:50 a.m. He or she has 10 minutes to complete some errands and buy some essential sundries before boarding the 7 a.m. train headed for downtown Minneapolis. He or she can buy coffee, a breakfast sandwich and a newspaper before boarding the train.

If there is extra time, the same transit rider could drop off dry cleaning to be picked up later, leave the car at the nearby “convenience auto” stop for a wash and an oil change and deposit the toddlers at day care or pre-school.

The transit commute home in the evening presents more possibilities. How about a take-away, prepared food counter where a broasted chicken or take ’n bake pizza could be secured for the evening meal or a “mini-fitness” workout locker room?

Of course, the challenge with these “transit station marketplaces” is attracting customers and patrons during the midday hours when the train volume and passenger traffic will be at their low point.

 It seems that transit oriented “park and ride” stations as described by Lehman (who lives in the Washington DC area) may face the challenge of not having an adequate “daytime” population to patronize restaurants and retail.

Perhaps a key to future transit stations will be ensuring enough people live there or nearby.  For example, combining the concept of a transit station with a lifestyle centre complete with condominiums and townhomes.  Or, putting park-and-ride transit stops in existing”town centres” or satellite city downtowns seeing a renaissance could help.

Putting at Transit-Oriented retail development in the middle of a low-density suburb sounds like a recipe for retail failure, which could also lead to a failure to attract more transit users as going to an abandoned mall is far less appealing than going to a “happening place” full of people.

Category: commercial development, transportation /

Energy-efficiency: haven’t we done this before?

September 12, 2008 / Wendy Waters / 4 comments

Roof-top solar-powered hot water heaters, architecture appropriate to the local climate and using more natural air and light, are among the ideas being put forth as “new” green initiatives.  Many ideas being discussed here as novel, sound familiar either in North America or around the world.

In Greece a decade ago, I remember towns where almost everyone had a solar powered hot water heater on their roof.  Each room typically only had one light bulb and people were careful to turn it off when they were not using it.

In Tucson I lived in an older home with large overhanging eaves from the roof.  Combined with the thick plaster walls it stayed cool in hot summers (cool being a relative term in an Arizona summer).   It had no heating system, which meant for some cold winter days however.  The technology of the down jacket was handy for staying warm.

In Australia in 1980, I similarly remember houses being designed to stay cool.  In winter, only the living room had an electric space heater.  People used big thick blankets in the bedrooms and often an electric blanket to warm everything up before going to bed.  Presumably you heated only the room that you really used while awake, instead of all the rooms.  Makes sense.

Of course,  clotheslines for drying clothes remain illegal in many communities or specific residences within them.  But, I expect that to change soon.

Green building codes call for the better use of natural light and air.  Large windows that opened used to be the norm in office space and homes.  Then came cheap energy along with artificial lighting and air conditioning.  But so many places that today use air conditioning do not need to do so, or not year round.

My favourite new “green term” this week is “living building” — a building designed such that it uses water and resources in a more sustainable way and even puts more into the energy grid than it consumes.   In my mind, I’m thinking “tree house.”

Category: ecological issues, urban history, urban technologies /

The planet vs cities and sprawl

September 6, 2008 / Wendy Waters / 4 comments

Much ink and webpage space has been devoted to celebrating the world’s “new” urbanism.  We talk about city-living as if it were the invention of the current generations.  We talk about our cities and urban and suburban spaces as if they will always be there.

Two articles this week remind us that the planet and the flora and fauna that also inhabit it can take back cities easily.

First, from Planetizen comes a link to the story about a family of bobcats who have settled in an abandoned suburban home in Lake Elsinor, California.

Second, from the Economist comes a story about finding evidence of former cities and suburbs in the Amazon.

In a paper published in this week’s Science they look at part of Brazilian Amazonia called the Upper Xingu. Here, they found, humans flourished between about 1,500 years ago and 400 years ago. Moreover, these people lived in urban societies that, even if they did not resemble traditional cities, matched them in population and social organisation.

Each cluster had a central settlement, two large daughters 3-5km (2-3 miles) away to the north-west and south-east, and two smaller daughters 8-10km away to the north-east and south-west. All of these settlements, mother and daughters, were fortified with palisade walls and ditches, and contained streets aligned north-west—south-east, north-south and north-east—south-west. These streets linked up with cross-country roads that ran through the farmed area around a settlement to other centres of population within the cluster, including smaller settlements still, which were unfortified.

The most characteristic feature of each settlement, regardless of its size, was a plaza—an open space that acted as a cemetery and may have been a marketplace. It was also, the archaeologists suspect, a place of political assembly, just as the agora in an ancient Greek city was both marketplace and legislature.

Many now-excavated Mayan and Aztec/Nahua and other meso-American sites had also been completely taken over by nature.  Pyramids appeared only as hills complete with trees and plants.

The planet is capable of taking back our cities and our sprawl.

Category: sprawl, urban history /

From factories to bedrooms and boardrooms

September 1, 2008 / Wendy Waters / 2 comments

Some North American cities are experiencing strong demand for office, residential and retail space, particularly in the core areas of the metropolis.  Meanwhile manufacturing has declined, leaving some former factory buildings under utilized.

A result is that city governments are allowing these spaces to be converted or redeveloped into other uses.

New YorkCity is one such place.  According to the NY Daily News ..

“The Bloomberg administration had a strategic plan from the beginning – to rezone or redevelop manufacturing areas to promote, originally, office space,” said Pratt Center Executive Director Brad Lander.

“But it’s worked out to be almost entirely residential development,” he said. “There’s a real concern it’s gone too far.”

More than 20 Bloomberg rezonings have converted manufacturing land into residential or commercial uses, transforming neighborhoods like Red Hook, Long Island City and the South Bronx into trendy residential addresses.

Seth Pinsky, head of the city Economic Development Corp., said many of the rezonings, in Brooklyn‘s Greenpoint and Williamsburg for example, sought better uses for run-down, largely vacant manufacturing sites.

Should residents and the broader business community be worried?

I’m not an expert on New York.  But as a general statement, I’d say people should be cautious about such conversions, but also view them with a broader long-term perspective.  They may simply reflect an evolution in the purpose of cities rather than short sighted decisions.

Converting industrial space may represent a shift in the economy of cities away from manufacturing and toward more service oriented industries and knowledge-economy work that are people oriented. A  city wanting to support these clusters will need to find more space for residences and more room for office space.

Still, city governments and tax payers need to be cautious about converting industrial space to residences.  Business users, whether industrial or office, typically pay much higher property taxes compared to home owners.  More people, however, typically means a higher demand for city services from garbage collection to policing.  A rapid shift away from industrial uses will likely result in either higher taxes or reduced services, or both.

Another reason to be cautious about converting too much manufacturing space to office or residential use is that new and future styles of manufacturing may need space tomorrow. Not everything is made overseas and higher fuel prices may support new innovative products being manufactured in North American cities.  For example, the Blackberry mobile device is made in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Of course, manufacturing of some products is likely not coming back to North America — the entire supply chain associated with them is in another part of the world.  And places like New York that once were centres of manufacturing may not be the locations of new, future manufacturing.  The Blackberry example is worth noting — it’s not being made in Toronto.

New York City is now about global knowledge-based service industries, finance, fashion management, etc. Perhaps supporting those clusters is what the city government and residences need to focus on.

A shift in the global and North American economies is underway and this will necessarily being a shift in real estate use.

Category: clusters, economic development, planning policy, residential development, revitalization, urban history /