Next American City

Development Aims to Get Rubber City Rolling Once More

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-02-06T20:00:00+00:00

Downtown Akron Credit: Ian Freimuth

Last week, a study in Akron, Ohio found that a plan to revamp the former industrial city’s downtown is not only economically viable, but would bring nearly 15,000 jobs to the area within 20 years.

By adding almost 5 million square feet of new office, retail and residential space to the streetscape, development would also generate about $90 million in tax revenue for the city, according to the study.

Like many Midwestern cities, Akron has an urban core anchored by several major businesses – such as tire giant Goodyear and Purell manufacturer GOJO Industries – along with a few cultural centers and a handful of hospitals. But in the space between them, there isn’t much.

Which is why University Park Alliance (UPA), a local non-profit development corporation, devised the Core City Development Plan. Unveiled last May, the project aims to make Akron denser by infilling a huge swath of land near the University of Akron, the city’s third-largest employer and geographical epicenter.

“It is not a plan that’s been sitting on the shelf,” said UPA executive director Eric Johnson. “It is executable.”

Citing what he calls “super-ultra-conservative estimates,” Johnson said that, between strengthening existing anchor businesses and attracting new companies to over 3 million square feet of added corporate space, the plan has earned the economic legitimacy to move forward.

Although specific details have not yet been made public, the plan calls for four separate construction sites slated to break ground later this year. The building would occur within 50 square blocks – a compact but appreciable trapezoidal chunk of the 62-square-mile city. Flanking the target area are Main Street to the west, Market Street to the northeast, and Exchange Street to the south.

As previously noted, faded industrial cities across the U.S. have spent the past few years trying to revive much-needed businesses in their metro areas. Non-profits have taken the lead, collaborating with local officials and private entrepreneurs to give their home cities the necessary shots in the arm. Can Akron place its bets on a single, sweeping makeover from its most visible development corporation?

Smile, and the City Smiles With You

Christine McLaren | Lab|log — 2012-02-06T16:04:49+00:00

Will this disembodied face make Berliners happier? Credit: Julius von Bismark

Christine McLaren is the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This story originally ran on the lab’s blog.

Think about the last time you saw a friend, family member or colleague smile about something that made them happy. Did you smile too? If you did, did it make you feel a little happier at the same time?

If you are an average human being, the answer to both of these questions is probably yes.

But think about this: If you were to find out that most of the people in your city were smiling about something that was making them happy, would you smile too? And would you, in turn, feel a little happier at the same time?

That, it turns out, is a much more complex question to answer.

In another post I prodded a question that is becoming increasingly relevant as society’s interest in the emotional side of city life grows: How much about a city’s emotions do we really want to know?

Sparked by a German art installation that first made tracks in 2007 known as the Feel-o-Meter—a giant neon smiley icon that analyses the emotions of a city’s citizens, and changes its expression to reflect the overall mood of the city—I dug into the pros, cons and potential that our recent interest and ability to measure the city’s emotions holds.

This project, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. Other projects such as Mappiness, the Emotional Cities project and Colin Ellard and Charles’ Montgomery’s Testing Testing experiment at the Lab, are just a few of many examples that indicate our current acute interest in not just understanding, but publicizing the feelings and emotions we experience in day-to-day city life.

But in prodding the should-we-shouldn’t-we question, there is an obvious paradigm that can’t be ignored. We can talk all we want about how this knowledge could influence policy—but what about how it would influence us, as individuals?

We are well aware of our innate ability to be influenced by the emotions of others. It’s why babies start to cry when other babies around them cry, and why we sometimes can’t help but to smile and laugh when others are smiling and laughing, even if we don’t want to.

But to what extent does this primal mechanism work on a grander scale—say, the scale of a city? Is simply knowing the overall mood of the thousands of people around us enough to tip our own emotional scale?

To try to find an answer this question, I cornered the most qualified psychologist I could think of—University of Amsterdam professor Dr. Agneta Fischer.

Former president of the International Society of Research on Emotions and steering committee member on the Consortium of European Emotion Researchers, Fischer specializes in the study of emotional contagion—or how our own emotions are influenced by those of others.

And the answer she gave me, in short, is yes… within reason.

“What most research shows is that the closer we are with others, the better it [emotional contagion] works. It also means that the more similar we are with others, the better it works,” Fischer said.

“So it depends on your frame of reference; whether you see those other people as similar to you. And that can be manipulated in many ways.”

In other words, if I live in New York, my ability to be effected by the feelings of New Yorkers would depend on the extent to which I identify as a New Yorker myself at that moment. That also means the effect would be even more exaggerated if this self-identification were emphasized by, say, comparing our emotions as New Yorkers to those of citizens in a different city.

It harkens to something we learned this fall during the Lab’s time in New York from Emanuele Castano, a social and political psychologist who focuses on the study of empathy.

In talking at the Lab about how we can look to build empathy and conviviality into our cities, Castano pointed to the social categorization process that is constantly at work in our brains. By putting people in in-groups or out-groups, depending on how we are identifying ourselves at any given moment, he said, we can actually curtail empathy toward the out-group.

At the same time, however, the opposite is true toward those in the in-group. This means that the more we identify with our fellow citizens, we are not only more likely to catch their emotions, but we’re also more likely to feel empathy toward them.

“The way that we categorize a person will have an impact on the level at which we catch the emotion,” Castano told me recently in an interview.

“Emotional contagion is one of the building blocks of empathy. It’s the first ability we need to have to develop empathy.”

But it’s not only closeness or social identity that would determine the likelihood of us catching our city’s emotions. When it comes to contagion, not all emotions are made equal.

The more specific the emotion, for instance, the more difficult it is to catch, said Fischer.

“You can catch anger, for instance, but catching disappointment is much more difficult because it’s a lot more complex to recognize those emotions. One requirement for emotional contagion is at least some sort of recognition of the emotion, or expecting the emotion,” she said.

The basic emotions—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise and sometimes contempt, shame or pride—are literally easier to recognize. The more specific an emotion gets, the more specific the experience needs to be for someone else recognize, understand and therefore catch it.

“It gets more cognitively complex,” said Fischer.

It also depends on how much risk there is for us in mimicking or catching an emotion. Less risk equals stronger contagion, which ultimately points to what I would consider one of the more beautiful of all psychological processes: Happiness is more contagious than sadness.

“If you look at spontaneous mimicry, people mimic more smiles than frowns. It’s a sort of ‘low-cost.’ It’s easy to smile,” said Fischer.

Thus, a giant smiley representing the overall good mood of your city “would certainly reinforce neutral moods, and it would also work in the sense that people who are slightly happy would become more happy, and people who are neutral would become more happy. And people who are a little melancholic, yes, they would all go in the positive direction,” said Fischer.

Of course this is by no means a silver bullet solution for sustainable well-being. So let this not be misunderstood—Berliners who will see the Feel-o-Meter on a day-to-day basis upon its reinstallation should not take this as a cue to forego their meaningful pursuits.

In the end, of course, it’s not the emotion itself, but the context that really matters.

“If you realize other people are happy, the sheer fact that they’re happy, this will work—but not as something continuous… it wouldn’t work forever. People will see the smiley and mimic it, but when something else happens that will be gone, so it’s a bit superficial. So it needs more… it needs to be related to some sort of motivational relevance for the things that people do in the city,” said Fischer.

“Knowing that people are happy is effective, but knowing what’s making them happy will give the effect more endurance.”

Photos by Julius von Bismark

The Economic Mixed Bag That is the Super Bowl

Diana Lind | Next American City — 2012-02-06T12:37:58+00:00

A $720 million football stadium — worth it? Credit: Carl Van Rooy

Last night’s Super Bowl was played in a four-years-young stadium. The stadium, located in Indianapolis’ downtown, opened in 2008, the same year Indianapolis won the bid to host the Super Bowl. This past week, the NPR program Planet Money produced a terrific podcast about the “economic mixed bag that is Super Bowl XLVI” and “how much cities are willing to pay for football stadiums.” The podcast essentially presents a profit and loss sheet for Indianapolis’s stadium and other investments in hosting the Super Bowl. Spoiler alert: according to Planet Money, the stadium and the Super Bowl weren’t good investments in the end.

The stadium cost over $700 million, and according to Planet Money, the state of Indiana will pay almost 90 percent of that cost. While the NFL claims that hosting the Super Bowl brings in $300 to $500 million to its host city, Indianapolis only expects to bring in about $150 million.

But Planet Money thinks the NFL’s math is actually too optimistic because it’s so simplistic. The NFL takes the number of people who will attend the event and creates some kind of multiplier effect (which seems to be about $1,000 per person). But that money — which takes into account the money spent at hotels and restaurants — is just the aggregate sum spent in the city. Much of that money will be spent in chain hotels and restaurants, whose profits will go back to corporate headquarters far from the Super Bowl host city. So, for example, a hotel room costs four times its average rate during Super Bowl weekend; this is a boon for the hotel chain, but has no effect on hotel employees who are still making their regular salary.

Planet Money also makes the astute observation that the Super Bowl displaces other activities, like trips to the museum or theater or other cultural activities. Locals are spending money on Super Bowl Sunday, but they’d probably spend their money anyway. (Not sure I agree that people would spend so much money in downtown Indianapolis on any regular Sunday, but it is clear that millions of dollars exchange hands every day and that figure should be deducted from any estimate of what the Super Bowl brings to its host city.)

What Planet Money doesn’t mention is that the stadium probably did create some short- and long-term jobs that wouldn’t have just beed created elsewhere. That Indianapolis hosts the Indy 500 and is already geared toward sports tourism, suggesting that retailers and commercial entities might be better suited to this influx of people and ready to capitalize on it. That for a city that rarely registers on the news, this is great marketing. That the stadium, as an investment in downtown, might be crucial to the redevelopment of downtown Indianapolis in general and probably catalyzed economic development in the rest of downtown. Finally, and only somewhat relevantly, it just needs to be said that the stadium is right across the street from an Amtrak station — how many cities can boast that kind of smart, transit-oriented planning?

But I agree, the stadium is not great for the local economy and given the total cost it doesn’t make financial sense. That said, it doesn’t mean that big projects, or even big stadium projects, can never make sense for a city. They just have to be done in coordination with an overall plan for a city’s downtown. And as far as bloated stadium projects go, this seems like one of the more integrated stadiums that I’ve seen in a while. The problem, therefore, is the profit and loss sheet. Taxpayers paid for this project and aren’t getting the money back. Meanwhile the private sector, particularly the multinational private sector, is getting a free ride.

This stadium was built largely off of taxpayer money. And most taxpayers didn’t get a say in that decision. Rather than just build a stadium, that money should have been spent more broadly on other projects in the downtown. The Super Bowl proves the idea that “if you build it, they will come.” But there are other things, beyond stadiums, that could be built to attract people and investment to the downtown. Imagine if the state had invested $1 million in 720 different projects in the downtown. That would have been pretty, well, super.

Maryland Governor’s Gas Tax is Right Way to Fund Transport

Ben Ross | Greater Greater Washington — 2012-02-03T16:58:31+00:00

Credit: Cindy Seigle on Flickr

This piece originally ran on Greater Greater Washington.

In his Wednesday state-of-the-state speech, Governor Martin O’Malley proposed ending the exemption of gasoline from Maryland’s 6 percent sales tax. This is the best way for the state to get more money for transportation.

Ending the sales tax exemption, rather than increasing the gas tax beyond the current 23.5 cents per gallon, accomplishes two things. First, sales tax revenue keeps pace with inflation. With the current structure of the gas tax, politically difficult tax increases are needed just to keep transit operations and road maintenance constant.

Second, we now have an opportunity to refute a widely believed myth about transportation funding. Once upon a time, drivers paid for roads through the gas tax. Most people think that’s still true, but it’s not.

Maryland’s gas tax goes into the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, along with the sales tax on car sales, fares paid on MARC trains and MTA buses, and revenues from BWI Marshall Airport and the Port of Baltimore. When the gas tax was last raised in 1992, the 23.5-cent state tax was 33 percent of the pretax price of gasoline. The sales tax on other purchases was 5 percent. The heavy tax on gas could be described as a user fee paid by drivers.

Today, though, the state gas tax is a little more than 7 percent of the price of gasoline. When drivers buy gas, they pay 7 percent into the Transportation Trust Fund and get 6 percent back from the state’s general fund through the exemption of gasoline from the sales tax.

Ending the exemption would convert the gas tax back into a true user fee. Drivers would then pay a share of the cost of maintaining roads, just as transit riders pay a share of the cost of transit operations through their fares.

Many myths surround the subject of transportation funding, in Maryland as in other states. Transit advocates need to be vigilant as the legislature debates this issue to make sure that new funding builds transit lines and walkable grid streets rather than repeating the mistakes of the past. The better the public understands the realities of the state budget, the easier this will be.

In Response to AZ Ban, Tucson Students Hold Their Own Ethnic Studies Classes

Valeria Fernández | Feet in 2 Worlds — 2012-02-03T13:25:12+00:00

A long way from Tucson: The Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas. Credit: Flickr user mirsasha

This piece originally ran on Feet in 2 Worlds.

Instead of going to class at Tucson Magnet High School last Tuesday, high school senior Juan Quevedo entered a different type of classroom, protesting with hundreds of others the cancellation of his Mexican-American studies program by the Tucson Unified School District.

Inside the Casino Ballroom, organizers from Unidos, a youth group that opposes the ban, held an all-day teach-in on culture, critical thinking and Chicano studies with roundtables where the students could engage in dialogue.

“It would be illegal now for the teachers to teach us [Mexican-American studies], so we are coming here to learn all the things they don’t want us to,” said the 18-year-old Quevedo.

The students went back to school on Wednesday, but Unidos will continue to hold teach-ins on Saturdays. A representative from Unidos said that independent student groups may also choose to walk out again.

The controversy entered a new phase on Dec. 27, when an Arizona administrative judge ruled the classes were in violation of a 2010 state law that bans ethnic studies when they promote the “overthrow of the U.S. government.” As a result, this January the Tucson School Board and school administrators proceeded to suspend the Mexican-American studies classes and remove books that were considered inappropriate from classrooms.

In his ruling, Judge Lewis Kowal sided with findings presented by Superintendent of Education John Huppenthal who argued that “students were being indoctrinated to develop resentment on a racial basis.”

Some of the books that were taken from classrooms include Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years and Occupied America. There are reports that teachers were also advised against teaching Shakespeare’s The Tempest, because of its racial themes.

So for the past few weeks, Quevedo and other students have protested what they believe is an arbitrary ban to their education via walkouts.

“It is very impressive, because students have come together from high schools to middle schools to protest against this,” said Jesus Romero, a former MAS student and member of Unidos.

“We want to plant a seed, to keep learning about our history and culture,” Romero said. Sixty percent of the over 55,000 students in the Tucson school district are Latino.

Like Quevedo, another 800 students enrolled in the Mexican-American studies (MAS) classes in Tucson found themselves having to switch gears mid-semester.

“We’re teaching the traditional curriculum, if a student was in the Mexican-American history perspective classes they defaulted to a traditional history class,” said Sean Arce, co-founder and director of MAS.
Nicolas Dominguez, an 18-year-old student that attended the Unidos teach-in, said he was disheartened and stressed when he discovered his classes had changed from one day to the next.

“It slows us all down,” he said. “Our teachers want to do something but they’re stepping on glass, they don’t know where to go.” Dominguez was taking classes on Latino literature, Mexican-American history and the Social Justice Education Program.

He especially liked his literature class when they were analyzing hip-hop songs and reading magazines to look at how women are portrayed in society.

HB 2281 was introduced by state Republican Rep. Steve Montenegro in 2010 after he was approached by then-Superintendent of Education Tom Horne—now the state attorney general— specifically to be applied in Tucson.

“One of the reasons we brought this bill forward was because of the curriculum, the text books they were using, some of them had violent material aimed at inciting violence against another race or class of people,” said Montenegro.

Supporters of the MAS program deny Montenegro’s and Huppenthal’s assertions.

The school district was faced with loosing 10 percent of its funding, about $15 million, for not being in compliance with the law. Four members of the board, with the exception of Adelita Grijalva, voted to eliminate the classes.

“The law is unjust, it’s racist and it’s discriminatory,” said Grijalva. “Our classes aren’t designed to overthrow the government or for ethnic solidarity.”

Teachers and students that filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of HB 2281 contend that an audit commissioned by Huppenthal himself found “no observable evidence” that MAS violated the law.

“He didn’t like the findings of his own commissioned audit, which spoke of higher graduation rates,” said Arce about the documented academic success of the program. “He came up with his own findings, which are not factually based. Misinterpretations of historical text and historical pictures, based on fear and hate mongering for the Latino community,” added the teacher, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Arce maintains that the findings, and even the judge’s ruling, were subjective and tied to a hostile climate for Mexican immigrants in the state—and linked to passage of SB 1070, a law that made it a state crime for an immigrant to not carry documents authorizing their presence in the U.S.

Backers of the ethnic studies law said that it is doing what it was intended to do.

Montenegro emphasized that the law “doesn’t prohibit the teaching of ethnic studies in its true nature.”

“It prohibits the teaching of resentment against other people,” he said.

Students from Unidos disagree with Montenegro’s assertion and plan to hold more of their own classes in the future.

“They’re operating like the Nazis did in the 1940s, when they were banning books, were censoring. Even the politics behinds this have sort of a Nazist, fascist, racist orientation,” said Augustin Romero, a founder of the MAS program and director for student equity in Tucson.

“We are going to be here, and we’re going to learn,” said Daniel Montoya, a 19-year-old former MAS student that founded Unidos. “It doesn’t matter if they create laws to stop our education, we’ll get our education anyway.”

Philly Debates Shrinking School District

Patrick Kerkstra | PlanPhilly via The Notebook — 2012-02-02T17:42:53+00:00

Pepper is one school on the short list. Credit: Flickr user Jukie Bot

This piece originally ran on PlanPhilly and later on the Philadelphia Public School Notebook.

At the far southwestern edge of Philadelphia, just north of the airport and two blocks away from the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, lies George W. Pepper Middle School.

By Philadelphia standards, the neighborhood is sparsely populated, with a vaguely suburban quality: The homes have driveways, garages even, and the streets are broad.

The school, built in 1976, matches its environment, with huge ball fields and a sprawling main building that totals nearly 400,000 square feet.

Unfortunately for Pepper’s students and staff, the school’s distant location made it a prime target as the School District of Philadelphia looks to close and consolidate schools in order to cut thousands of empty classroom seats from its inventory over the next few years.

Tuesday night, at a community meeting held at Bartram High School, district officials explained Pepper was picked for potential closure principally because so few of its students live near the school.

Though enrollment at Pepper has been plummeting in recent years, the school still has more students (483) than Tilden or Shaw, which are other middle schools serving Southwest Philadelphia. But the vast majority of Pepper’s students live closer to Tilden or Shaw than they do Pepper.

“This has nothing to do with academics, nothing to do with performance,” Bill Montgomery, the district’s director of facilities management, said at the community meeting.

Rather, Montgomery said, Pepper made the list because of its immense size and the fact that most of its students will have a shorter commute attending Tilden.

Between Pepper, Tilden and Shaw, the neighborhood middle schools have the capacity to serve 3,000 students, but only about 1,000 are enrolled. Under-enrollment is a problem in most Philadelphia neighborhoods (though notably not the Northeast), and the abundance of empty seats is particularly pronounced in the district’s Southwest planning area.

Pepper is one of nine schools the district has targeted to reduce its inventory of empty seats, as detailed in the district’s facilities master plan. Since November, district officials have been making the rounds at a series of community meetings, where they have explained the plan to parents and students, and fielded some pointed questions. The session at Bartram High was the 10th of 17 scheduled sessions.

About 50 community members attended last night’s meeting, and while there were one or two questions about Pepper, most people there seemed resigned to the school’s fate.

Indeed, officials were asked many more questions about subjects such as school budgets, the transfer process and violence in the schools.

One parent sharply questioned the district’s proposal—part of its facilities plan for the Southwest—to convert Shaw Middle School into a 6-8 institution, instead of serving just seventh and eigth graders. Shaw was too violent, she said, for young sixth graders.

“If Shaw becomes a school that has to take in sixth-graders, their safety will become an issue Shaw is a very violent school,” said Joy Herbert at the meeting. “Is that being considered at all? Because let me tell you as a parent that scares the hell out of me.”

Herbert, who has a daughter at Shaw, is vice president of a pro-school voucher organization called DISCO, or Democrats Impatient for School Choice Organization.

District officials disputed her characterization as Shaw as dangerous, contending that—because of the school’s low enrollment—it took just a handful of arrests in a year for the school to be labeled persistently dangerous by the state.

Acting District Superintendent Lee Nunery has attended most of the facilities meetings, but he was not there to answer questions last night. There, was, however a member of the School Reform Commission at the meeting, as has been the case at each session to date.

“The topic of school closings is not a good-news kind of topic,” said SRC member Joseph A Dworetzky as the meeting drew to an early end last night. “But this is something that hasn’t happened for many, many years, and no organization can be healthy if you’re not thinking about how you’re using your resources.”

New Orleans to Stop Releasing Criminal Records of Homicide Victims

Matt Davis | The Lens — 2012-02-02T14:56:55+00:00

Nola police will no longer unveil the skeletons in a victim’s past. Credit: Phin Percy

This piece originally appeared on The Lens.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas announced today he will no longer release the arrest records of homicide victims, reversing a controversial and unevenly applied practice that had come under intense criticism in recent days.

The about-face comes a week after Serpas took more than a day to release the arrest record of a Good Samaritan homicide victim in the Algiers neighborhood, compared to a few hours for most other victims.

That release last week came shortly after The Lens reported that the department wasn’t following its usual practice in releasing the victim’s record. Other news outlets followed suit. A search of a newspaper database shows more than 25 newspapers, as well as the Huffington Post, ran an Associated Press story over the weekend examining the controversial policy.

Since then, talk show hosts, columnists and on-air TV editorialists have ripped the policy. And state Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, drafted a bill to prevent the police from releasing such information.

The practice was taking heat even before a would-be carjacker in Algiers killed Harry “Mike” Ainsworth, who turned out to have a record stretching back years for drug possession.

Two City Council members criticized Serpas when he appeared before the council’s Criminal Justice Committee on Jan. 18.

Serpas told the committee that most homicides in the city were “black males killing black males,” and said releasing their arrest records helps the community have an informed discussion about homicides. Ainsworth was white.

Activist group Safe Streets / Strong Communities this week began a petition calling for the practice to stop, and it had gathered 184 signatures before organizers closed today after the policy change. Executive director of Safe Streets / Strong Communities Yvette Thierry said the group is still discussing its reaction to the news.

Morrell said Serpas spent more time crafting the press release about Ainsworth’s arrest record than the arrest records of other homicide victims.

“The press release for Mr. Ainsworth rehabilitated him,” Morrell said. “It said he had worked to be part of the community in the 8th District, but that same level of care did not go into the press releases on the other victims whose grieving families had to suffer the embarrassment of having their loved ones’ arrest records paraded publicly.”

Morrell said he thought community pressure had a role in forcing Serpas to change his mind.

“I think it was really a perfect storm of issues coming together,” Morrell said. “I know you can’t talk about yourselves, but The Lens’ pressure to release Mr. Ainsworth’s arrest record along with the pressure from community groups on this practice, coupled with my legislation, I think it really gave the police chief no option. He realized that this was not an issue that was going to go away.”

Serpas announced the decision in a press release this afternoon and was unavailable for further comment. He now plans to release monthly aggregate statistics on the number of homicide victims with a history of felony arrests, but without naming the victims.

“I believe it is necessary to share with the community the obvious and direct link between criminal behavior and the horrible acts of murder in our city,” Serpas said in his news release. “I have always said, however, that there are very good arguments to share and not share this public information.

“After consulting privately with local clergy leaders over the last weeks, starting today, our press releases will no longer include the individual public arrest record of a homicide victim.”

A Demolition Dictionary

Kyla Fullenwider | Next American City — 2012-02-01T19:29:47+00:00

Credit: Kyla Fullenwider

In 2011, the City of Baltimore’s Housing Department oversaw the demolition of more than 300 unsafe structures throughout the city, including a seven-acre demolition site on the city’s east side. In 2010, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing promised to demolish 10,000 of the city’s most blighted and dangerous properties before his term ends in 2013. And in Youngstown, Ohio, a shrinking population has left the city with 4,000 vacant structures, most of them slated for demolition.

What Baltimore, Detroit, Youngstown and an increasing number of U.S. cities with shrinking populations have in common is a problem Americans are unused to solving: How to creatively and safely deconstruct our cities. In places like Baltimore—which has lost a third of its population since 1950 and where, depending on who you ask, almost 20,000 properties sit vacant—this breaking down and reinterpreting of place is already happening.

Suggestions abound from artists and policy-makers alike. A 2002 Brookings Institute/CEO for Cities report highlights a number of plausible solutions to promote faster and better development of vacant properties, many of which we are now seeing implemented. Some of these solutions—like vacant lot revitalization programs, data visualization to increase transparency and creative financing strategies—are attempts to address the very complex problem that is urban redevelopment.

But in the haste to attract developers and their money, many cities have overlooked a most important and essential component of responsible redevelopment: Communicating the potential health hazards, necessary health precautions and contractor’s responsibilities to the people who live and work near a demolition site.

In a 2011 report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation defines “Responsible Development” as “an approach that combines economic, community and human development strategies to provide area residents, businesses, and the surrounding neighborhoods with the maximum benefit from the revitalization efforts.” This definition and the tactics outlined for getting there—including “using strict safety protocols to minimize the health hazards for residents of neighborhoods affected by demolition activities”—is a big step toward gaining national standards and protocols for urban demolition, which the U.S. has yet to establish in any meaningful way.

As a result of the lack of national standards, cities and contractors are left to make it up as they go along, often creating standards on the fly or after the fact. This was the case in St. Louis after a 2007 study found that children living in low-income areas with significant demolition activity “showed significantly higher levels of lead in their blood than in children where no demolition had taken place.” The report goes on:

Despite such findings, federal laws and regulations provide no protections to ensure that lead exposure is minimized during demolition… likewise, states and municipalities typically do not require contractors to ensure lead exposure is minimized.

That contractors and developers are left to police themselves is a little like asking food manufacturers to decide what to include on nutrition labels. It is not only inefficient and ineffective, but an egregious conflict of interest.

And yet, this is exactly what happens in cash-strapped cities across the country. Desperate for any development to take place in deteriorating neighborhoods, municipalities are uncharacteristically timid—reluctant to require, for example, even the most basic forms of communication with residents near a demolition site. Sure, some cities have spearheaded such initiatives, but most are spotty and half-hazard at best.

Responsible redevelopment benchmarks—like public health standards—must include a standard set of communication protocols that publicly and clearly articulate potential health risks, necessary precautions local residents should take, and the contractor’s responsibilities and protocols. It is the onus of the city (and its elected officials) to protect and inform its residents of any city-permitted activities that could potentially impact their health.

To be sure, urban demolition is a complex, risky and exhaustive endeavor for cities and developers. It is expensive, logistically challenging and just plain ugly. But—for now—it is a necessary part of the creative deconstruction of many great American cities. And so rather than look the other way, we should increase transparency around the demolition process both for the sake of residents and developers. By creating a national standard for best practices around demolition—including standardized, public-facing communication protocols—we make it easier for contractors to do their job right and for cities to protect the health of their residents.

Digital vs. Analog Ways of Transforming Cities

Diana Lind | Next American City — 2012-02-01T19:18:47+00:00

Walkscore, a favorite civic tech app, notes that our Storefront has a decent walkscore but an unfortunate transit score.

The other day I got a phone call from Josh McManus to talk about his work and Next American City’s Storefront for Urban Innovation. Josh is a Next American Vanguard who started a project called CreateHere in Chattanooga, Tenn. CreateHere has done remarkable job during the past five years to retain arts and culture in the city, develop a city visioning process, grow the city’s leadership and help local small businesses plan for growth. But Josh knew that he didn’t want to only affect Chattanooga and that many of the ideas he’d developed in Tennessee could apply elsewhere.

So he was lured to Detroit, where the Hudson Webber Foundation said that it wanted to see 15,000 people living in downtown by 2015. They had a vision but they still asked: How do we get there? Josh’s answer is a new project called D:Hive, a “toolkit” for Detroiters new and old. D:Hive sees that there is an essential challenge for many newcomers: “Greater Downtown Detroit can be hard to navigate for individuals seeking resources and information about finding a residence, starting a business or social enterprises, or learning about institutions that seek to assist them as they deploy their talents in the city.” But Josh pointedly mentioned that he isn’t going to create an app for that — instead he’s creating a storefront space to gather people and ideas in person.

As Next American City prepares to ramp up its Storefront and casts aside its print publication in favor of an online weekly, I’m constantly torn between the analog and digital. The question of how best to impact cities came up again last week upon reading about how Living Cities held its first Trends in Focus event. Its focus was none other than civic tech. If you have read Next American City’s Open Cities column, you know that we’ve been following the civic tech scene for a long time now. We’ve long been enamored with the way that technology can help engage citizens, help government do its job a little faster and for a little less money, and potentially transform the way we see and exist in our cities. That said, we also have had reservations about the digital divide (not just in terms of access, but digital literacy) and the way that digital technology sometimes works around, but fails to solve, our cities’ most pressing problems.

Living Cities is talking about this issue with a critical eye and a particular focus: low-income people. As Tracey Ross reports on the Living Cities blog, the panelists at the Trends in Focus event—four out of five of which were participants in Next American City’s Open Cities event in 2009—came to these four conclusions about civic technology:

1. The innovation to date in this space has often been driven by the perspectives of technologists, and not yet fully informed by a clearly articulated agenda from city officials.
2. Innovations in Civic Technology are mostly transactional rather than transformational.
3. Information technology is spurring a renegotiation of responsibilities between citizens and government.
4. More concerted attention has to be paid to how these trends can be harnessed for the benefit of low-income people.

These are terrific points to make, and completely spot-on. Yes, it’s great to have an app that helps you route your commute on transit, but it’s also important to improve the transportation system itself — something an app just can’t do. Yes, it’s great that technologies like SeeClickFix or 311 are helping government do its job more efficiently, but it would be great to better understand how they benefit all citizens and not just the ones who are tech-literate. These critiques point to the right areas for improvement in civic tech. But what they don’t explicitly point out is that all the above points seem to represent challenges in leadership, in connecting people to technological opportunity, and in ideas. These aren’t technical difficulties: They’re softer problems of how we actually build communities in cities and how those communities and government collaborate to create economic and social opportunities for everyone. And that’s where the analog comes in.

This year’s Code for America fellows have arrived in Philadelphia and we’ve just invited them to present their work at the end of February at our Storefront. We’re going to invite our neighbors, local businesses and others to come and join us in this discussion. Hopefully the fellows will get some feedback before they head home to the West Coast. In our real-life chat room, perhaps we will step a little further away from the transactional and toward the transformational.

In Toronto, the Fight for Transit City Continues

Yonah Freemark — 2012-02-01T17:00:02+00:00

Toronto transit street art. Credit: Flickr user jmv

This piece originally ran on The Transport Politic.

Transportation is an intensely political game in Toronto. Canada’s largest city, home to millions of daily transit users, has been fighting for half a decade on how to expand its rail network over issues that might be familiar to inhabitants of many metropolises. Should trains be put in a subway or remain on the surface? Should extensions be developed downtown or in the suburbs? Should funding come from the public or private pocketbook?

The election of Rob Ford to the mayoralty in fall 2010 seemed to answer some of those questions: All new urban rail projects would be built underground in order to avoid disrupting traffic. Most new lines would be designed to extend into suburban business districts, rather than reinforce the network in the center city. And an emphasis would be placed on finding private financing to cover costs. Almost as soon as he entered office, Ford managed to dismantle the light rail surface-running, publicly funded Transit City plans his predecessor David Miller had imagined and, in one case, actually brought to the construction stage.

In the process, no one seemed to notice that the mayor, who never sought full approval from the council in renegotiating the funding contract with Ontario Province, didn’t have the legal authority to trash the plans.

For Toronto, this once again puts the city’s public transportation future up in the air. Miller’s project would have funded three new light rail lines and a refurbishment and extension to another by 2020; only a six-mile segment of the Eglinton Crosstown corridor would have been underground, compared to 29 miles overground on the rest of the plan, all at an Ontario-funded cost of C$8.2 billion. Ford squashed plans for the Finch Avenue and Sheppard Avenue light rail lines and killed the planned extension of the Scarborough RT; in their place would be a 12-mile fully-underground Eglinton line and a refurbishment of the Scarborough line — a total of about 15 miles of fixed-guideway transit at the same cost, serving far fewer Torontonians in the process. A subway extension along the Sheppard corridor would be paid for by the private sector. In theory.

The new mayor claimed he had a public mandate to build only subways; people hated Miller’s cheaper light rail lines, he said.

These changes brought on by the mayor’s honeymoon in office, however, have come to an end. Left-wing and centrist members of the city council banded together to push back on the administration’s efforts to reduce public services a few months back — and now a majority may be in favor of going back to Miller’s Transit City plans, especially since many on Finch Avenue northwest of the city center feel completely excluded from current plans. Ford’s own counselors suggested that private businesses would only be able to contribute 10 to 30 percent of the Sheppard subway’s costs. Karen Stintz, who chairs the board of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), recommended last week moving parts of the Eglinton corridor back above ground to save up to C$2 billion, limiting the extension of the Sheppard subway to one stop (instead of five) at a cost of C$1 billion, and adding a busway to Finch Avenue for C$400 million.

Ford’s response so far: “I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it. They don’t want streetcars.” At a meeting today, Ford sympathizers on the TTC board voted against continuing to work with provincial planners despite Stintz’s recommendations—putting her future in jeopardy, according to one observer. The mayor, who continues to label the Transit City light rail services designed to run in independent guideways “streetcars,” does not take criticism well.

But the mayor may be an increasingly irrelevant player here, since a majority on the council may be able to overrule him. In the process, Toronto may backtrack on its transit policies, taking the city two years back in time.

As for the public reaction, people do not seem to be screaming in the streets about the potential loss of their much-promised subways in favor of twice as many route miles of above-ground light rail. In the name of fiscal efficiency, one does wonder how it ever made sense to anyone to prioritize building subways through areas of only moderately dense development. Ford’s unwillingness to change rather comes across as the same old fight to “end the war on cars” he promised during the 2010 elections, a stand against getting in the way of a few drivers for the sake of speeding the commutes of many transit riders. In the meantime, the inhabitants of Toronto have seen few improvements to their daily commutes and delays in acting on future proposed services.

Nonetheless, the intense disagreement between Ford and his council counterparts — one that seems unlikely to die down at least for the next few months — suggests that public involvement is necessary. It might be reasonable to suggest a direct vote on the options available: With C$8.2 billion, what would you do? Think big: You never know what might come next.

Mine, Yours, Ours: The Space Saver Project

Sana Venjara | Next American City — 2012-02-01T13:30:29+00:00

Thomas Buildmore, “Today was pretty awesome!!” Credit: Christopher P. McManus

In the summer of 2008, artist Christopher McManus moved to Philadelphia and came across several traffic cones tethered together in front of a property about two blocks away from his apartment. While the sight initially gave him pause, the rest of the neighborhood remained unfazed.

The cones were used as strategic “space savers” to personally reserve a parking spot on the resident’s street. An especially common sight during the colder months when parking is scarce, this locally accepted (yet illegal) practice is virtually a sacred custom for Philadelphians. Try and mess with one of the construction cones, folding chairs or broken pieces of furniture holding a spot, and be prepared to get your tires slashed or windows shattered. At least, that is what the space saving mythos would have you believe.

Responding to the lack of aesthetic consideration for the functional practice, and attempting to initiate a conversation about personal ideas of ownership in public spaces, McManus organized The Space Savers Project. The citywide public arts project, in conjunction with the University Science Center’s Breadboard, calls on local artists to design and create alternatives to objects traditionally used to hold parking spaces.

“Space saving is as natural as taking out the trash in the morning,” McManus said. “We are trying to get a reaction out of people and re-imagine what space saving in the city can look like.”

In December, 10 artists presented their versions of space savers in various parking spots throughout Philadelphia before moving to an indoor space at the Esther Klein Gallery. Artist Linda Yun expressed guilt for commanding a part of the street—a feeling she then used to inspire her space saver, entitled Move Along/ Please Stay, which doubled in its function as a stray cat sanctuary. McManus jokes that the work “weighs as much as her guilt,” for Yun ironically created the heaviest piece of the installation, a practically unmovable work in the city streets.

Benjamin Monette’s work, Territory, was inspired by the innately self-serving idea of the space saving. He writes: “The practice of saving parking spaces reminds me of the Greek myths of Thesus and the Minotaur: The eternal struggle between rational human thought and our more beastly instincts.”

A citizen’s ability to extend a sense of private ownership into the public is a provocative central theme of the exhibit, and one that each artist highlights individually. It poses an interesting question: Does the luxury of a home equal the right to a parking space?

The Philadelphia Parking Authority recently addressed the issue (http://philapark.org/2012/01/winter-is-here/), reaffirming the illegal nature of “space saving” while, interestingly enough, acknowledging the Space Savers Project and detailing Philadelphia’s unique tradition. The provocative installation has led to quite a few opinionated responses. While shoveling a street does not afford you ownership, it is a personal investment in a neighborhood. The creative solutions produced by residents highlight the greater need for infrastructural improvements within Philadelphia—and a possible compromise with citizens who supplant the city’s snow removal services with individual efforts for themselves and their neighbors.

New Jersey Cities to Experiment With ‘Hybrid’ Charter Schools

John Mooney | NJ Spotlight — 2012-01-31T17:54:26+00:00

Credit: Michael Surran on Flickr

This piece originally ran on NJ Spotlight.

A great deal was made of New Jersey Governer Chris Christie administration’s last round of charter school approvals, and the lack of any suburban charters on the list.

But the urban ones that were approved are interesting in themselves, including two in Trenton and Newark that are trying a new model of education, mixing online learning with face-to-face instruction in a setting unlike any other in the state.

Or at least that’s the pitch.

The person making the pitch is Ben Rayer, a self-described education “entrepreneur” out of Philadelphia who won approval to bring the new model to two of New Jersey’s toughest cities.

Newark Preparatory Charter School and Trenton Preparatory Charter School follow what some call part of the “hybrid” model of schooling that combines the online with more recognizable classroom approaches. Rayer said in an interview this weekend that it’s not all that radical.

‘We are trying to take the best of both worlds, and take the things that are out there today and are successful,” he said. “All we are doing is taking the effective practices that have been used, and applying today’s tools to make that work.”

Rayer is no newcomer to charters. He is the former president and chief operating officer of Mastery Charter Schools, the Philadelphia-based network that has largely won praise for its work in improving some of that city’s lowest-performing schools.

Rayer left Mastery, which mainly uses traditional classrooms and methods, in 2008 for a stint in the Philadelphia public schools. Despite his experience, his plans for Newark and Trenton will likely stir up some debate in New Jersey.

Online learning continues to be an unproven phenomenon in many critics’ eyes, and one most often connected with private, for-profit interests. The effectiveness of its teaching have already drawn questions in two other charter schools approved for next fall, which would be almost entirely online.

Rayer, founder of Touchstone Education, a charter management organization (CMO), does not hide that he hopes to take his model national. He has already drawn impressive sums from some big names in education reform.

One is the Charter School Growth Fund in Colorado, which is putting up more than $3.6 million for Rayer’s CMO. The fund is headed by Kevin Hall, former president of the Broad Foundation, a big force in education reform circles.

Rayer’s dual involvement with the CMO and as a founder of the schools drew some questions from New Jersey’s Office of Charter Schools’ staff in reviewing the application. The agency stressed in its initial review that the school must ultimately select a CMO through a public bidding process. An addendum said that such a process would be followed.

But it’s not just the technology that’s different. The school’s application said the model is based on personalized learning, with each child on a course of study customized to his or her level. They would just as commonly study in workstations, much like an office setting, Rayer said, where they work online and teachers would come to them as they need help.

The approach is detailed in the application:

- Online learning is used as the basis for developing basic skills and concepts in all curricular areas.

- Mini lessons are used to introduce new content and (state curriculum) standards for instructional units.

- Seminars provide personalized instruction and intervention and the application and synthesis of learning.

- Finally, demonstration allows for the evidence of standards mastery through problem solving, writing and presentations. Students work on different subjects at their own pace and advance through mastery of the subject matter as determined by daily informal assessments.

It would be a longer school day and school year, although Fridays would be a shorter schedule for students, as teachers use the time to go over data to plan and reflect on their lessons. The so-called Data Analysis Days (PDF) are a trademark of the Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia.

Teachers would be divided into their own tracks as well, with master teachers, senior teachers and associate teachers. Rayer even asked in his application for a waiver from the state’s tenure laws, allowing him more freedom for hiring and firing teachers. The bid was turned down as something not allowed under New Jersey statute.

Another waiver request is still pending, he said, that would allow multiple schools under the same charter, even if not in adjoining communities. Although he received separate approvals for both Trenton and Newark, Rayer would prefer they be one charter, which would give him more flexibility to add schools.

There is some uncertainty about the Trenton campus, at least for next fall, he said. If it opens, the application says it would be located off Jersey Street in Trenton, amid a complex of state and county offices and warehouses.

The Newark opening next fall is more certain, Rayer said, with a location still to be finalized but expected to be in the downtown area of the city. He said the national headlines of the Newark’s school reform efforts drew him to the city, including the $100 million Facebook gift and Gov. Chris Christie’s appointment of a new superintendent, Cami Anderson.

“The excitement around reform is very interesting to us,” he said. “We want to be in a place that wants to see change.”

And Rayer said the money helped, too, with considerable foundation support in the city right now.

“This will allow us to experiment to see what the real model would look like,” he said. “What has been proposed is something that really hasn’t been done elsewhere.”

Washington State City Puts Transit Authority in Hot Seat

John Stang | Crosscut — 2012-01-31T13:30:54+00:00

Sound Transit: Service to Federal Way has been suspended until further notice. Credit: KDavidClark on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on Crosscut.

A Washington state legislator representing Federal Way, a city just over 20 miles south of Seattle, wants the state to do annual performance audits on Sound Transit, the region’s public transit authority, contending that it needs feedback to improve a tarnished reputation.

“It’d be a series of audits designed to make (Sound Transit) heroes to the public. Right now, they’re not heroes to the public,” said state Rep. Mark Miloscia, who introduced a bill Thursday to require annual performance audits.

The State Auditor’s Office is set to begin an audit shortly — expected to be finished by September — to see how Sound Transit has dealt with shrinking tax revenue, whether its ridership statistics are accurate, and whether the authority can meet its constructions obligations on time and within budget.

Miloscia said his proposed additional yearly audits would provide regular feedback to Sound Transit to ensure it is meeting its stakeholders’ concerns. His fellow 30th District House member, Rep. Katrina Asay, is a cosponsor of the bill.

An underlying factor in the current and possible future audits is that the public approved an $18 billion bond issue in 2008 that included extending Seattle’s light rail line to Federal Way by 2023. Last year, Sound Transit said the predicted revenues could only handle extending the rail line to Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wa., and no farther south.

Federal Way Mayor Skip Priest, in a Dec. 6, 2011 letter to Sound Transit, wrote, “For decades, Federal Way voters have been hearing empty promises that trains will reach their community… I am hearing daily from residents who are outraged by the way that Sound Transit has marginalized this community’s needs.”

Miloscia said Federal Way residents will end up paying $240 million in taxes because of the 2008 ballot without getting the light rail line they were promised in the campaign.

He said his bill is not retaliation for that situation, but a way to help Sound Transit improve its planning and performance year by year.

Sound Transit is working on a light rail tunnel between Westlake Center in Seattle and the University of Washington. And it still plans to extend the current line another two miles south of SeaTac International Airport under the 2008 package.

Sound Transit spokesman Kimberly Reason said the authority already has outside accounting firms doing annual audits to check its finances. The State Auditor’s Office’s last audited Sound Transit in 2007. And the authority’s audits are available on its website. “We have a rigorous audit program,’ she said.

The authority’s legal staff has not yet studied Miloscia’s bill, so Sound Transit does not have an opinion about it. Reason said Sound Transit wants to eventually extend the rail line to Federal Way, but the recession has trimmed South King County’s tax revenue by 31 percent to shrink the authority’s revenue. “Every jurisdiction has been hit hard by the recession,” she said.

Sound Transit wrote to Priest that the authority is not legally allowed to transfer tax money from a more revenue-prosperous “sub-area” and its capital projects in its three counties — Snohomish, King, and Pierce — to make up for less-than-expected tax income in the South King County sub-area covered in the 2008 ballot.

“Mayor Priest is disappointed, and we understand,” Reason said.

The State Auditor’s Office has so far taken no immediate position on Miloscia’s bill, said agency spokeswoman Mindy Chambers. The Legislature tends to call for audits or to trim audits in many bills, and the auditor’s office probably won’t know what is feasible within its budget until the end of the legislative session, she said.

Don’t Cut Tysons Corner in Two

Jamie Scott | Greater Greater Washington — 2012-01-30T18:01:54+00:00

Tysons Corner. See the highways? Credit: La Citta Vita on Flickr

This piece originally ran on Greater Greater Washington.

Virginia’s Fairfax County is planning to turn Tysons Corner, a commercial suburb just outside the District of Columbia, into a dense, walkable, urban center. This transformation will include the creation of street grid and better bike and pedestrian facilities. But two major thoroughfares will weaken pedestrian circulation and divide the new Tysons in two.

Route 123 and Route 7 are major six-lane roads running through the heart of Tysons Corner. The Silver Line, a planned extension of the D.C. Metro, will run along portions of either road, meaning that many pedestrians will be entering Tysons along these arteries.

But the construction of the Silver Line through Tysons Corner isn’t the only work being done in the corridor. Fairfax County is currently widening Route 123 from six to eight lanes.

The creation of a grid of streets coupled with bike/pedestrian improvements is necessary to facilitate movement within an urban Tysons, particularly to and from the Metro stations. The widening of 123, however, moves Tysons Corner in the opposite direction.

As a pedestrian, crossing six lanes of a major arterial road can be daunting. Adding an additional lane in each direction can make it even more difficult. Since Route 123 runs parallel to the Silver Line through the middle of Tysons, residents and employees will inevitably need to cross this busy street.

Last week the National Building Museum in D.C. hosted an event on the Tysons redevelopment plan. Matt Ladd, a Fairfax County planner, said that lanes on 123 are 12 feet wide. The plan calls for a reduction to 11 feet, but that still means pedestrians would have to cross an 88-foot road, not counting any turn lanes.

This certainly isn’t impossible. Infrastructure improvements like pedestrian islands and leading pedestrian intervals can make crossing easier. The problem is that crossing major streets like this isn’t attractive and it makes for a pedestrian-hostile space.

Ladd also mentioned that the county’s plan calls for wide sidewalks and a double row of trees along 123. These additions will make walking along the road more pleasant but don’t make it any easier to cross.

Crossing 123 will be even more difficult at the Tysons Central 7 metro station because the tracks are at grade. Pedestrians will either have to cross over or under the tracks to get from side to side. Again, this isn’t an impossible scenario. But if the county wants to make Tysons a walkable, accessible urban space, it will have to solve these barrier problems.

Today’s Tysons lacks any real neighborhoods, in large part because of wide roads, on-ramps, mega-blocks, parking garages and other major built environment factors that break up any coherent community. The new urban Tysons will overcome some of these, but a major eight-lane highway will act as an abrupt and unnatural edge to any future neighborhoods or districts that will stunt their growth and weaken them.

If residents find it too difficult or unpleasant to cross major roads, they may choose to patronize businesses on their side or use parks that are easier to reach. The physical division can also create social divisions and isolate communities.

The county can’t just rip up state highways, so the roads will always be an issue. But planners must be careful to prevent the roads from becoming enormous barriers to a true urban space. The county could narrow the lanes further and convert one lane for street parking.

Ladd suggested that because the county is planning for redevelopment over 40 years, these options could become a reality at some point. Hopefully the county doesn’t wait that long to solve the problem. Encouraging strong urban growth in a transit-oriented Tysons Corner should be a priority now, not decades down the road.

An Open Letter to David Axelrod, Re: Urban Politics

Diana Lind | Next American City — 2012-01-30T13:00:39+00:00

Some pointers for you, sir. Credit: Talk Radio News Service

Last week, David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, announced that after the 2012 election season he’ll return to Chicago to run a political institute at the University of Chicago. But this isn’t just some political think tank. Axelrod’s ambition is:

to help encourage young people who are going to be the David Axelrods — and better — in the future so that we’ll have a new generation of people who will be active in politics and public life.

He goes on to say that there’s going to be an urban slant to the whole thing:

Mr. Axelrod, a former journalist, will serve as the institute’s inaugural director and said it would lean toward a focus on urban politics, in part because of the city around it.

Doubly interesting. What should David Axelrod do with this new institute with a leaning towards urban politics? Here are a few ideas:

- The next generation of urban leaders wants to be involved in politics, but so many of us are thwarted by the simple fact that it costs an insane amount of money to run a political campaign in any major city. Some of Next American City’s Vanguard members have run for or gotten into office, but they are working in areas where the financial barriers are lower. In major cities like Philadelphia or Houston or Los Angeles, the financial barrier for getting into politics is — to borrow from the Rent is Too Damn High guy and Matt Yglesias — too damn high. So, Mr. Axelrod, if you’re going to be teaching urban politics, perhaps consider a course on urban fundraising — or better yet, think about ways to change the pay-to-participate aspects of urban politics. If it didn’t cost so much to run for office, many more qualified people would do it, upping the quality of our elected officials.

- Another thing about the young generation: They need partners in the establishment. And they also need folks in the establishment to occasionally get out of the way. Too often the establishment fails to hand off the baton (see Rebecca Ryan’s great thoughts on intergenerational leadership using this very same metaphor). Consider having courses co-taught with people from different generations, and not always with the younger person in the T.A. role.

- Think about urban, political best practices beyond the mayoral level. Mayors work together through the U.S. Conference of Mayors and theC40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. But we need to do a better job of getting folks like state senators and those serving on city council to be more in tune with urban best practices from around the country.

- Steal some folks from the economics program to help think about how to deal with municipal finance crises.

- Finally, elected officials aren’t the only ones who represent and care for their communities anymore. Community organizations, community development corporations and others often have much more interface with local constituents than elected officials do. It would be great if this political school would do more to recognize that these informal groups are increasingly bearing the burden in cities and to innovate in ways of fostering collaboration between informal and formal service providers in cities.

These are just a few of my ideas. What else should Axelrod add to the curriculum?

‘The Third Jihad’ and New York City’s Culture of Marginalization

Sana Venjara | Next American City — 2012-01-27T21:06:59+00:00

Poster for the film. (Non-free use) Credit: Michael @. Schimdt

The screening of an anti-Muslim film for nearly 1,500 New York City police officers as a part of a terrorist training initiative has Muslim officials calling for the resignation of Ray Kelly, police commissioner of New York, and a retraining of all officers that were exposed to the film.

The Third Jihad, a 72-minute film warning against the dangers of shar’ia law, umbrellas everyday Muslims as active threats against America. The narrator says, “Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate…when in fact if you look a little closer you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.” The repeated theme of the film is the homegrown threat of Islam (it seems that in this case Islam and terrorism are synonymous), consistently showcasing a black and white flag, denoted as the flag of the Muslim faith, flying over the White House.

With the infiltration of this rhetoric on a civil service level, a post-9/11 narrative of fear and misjudgment continues to shape the city to this day.

When the Village Voice broke this story about a year ago, deputy NYPD commissioner Paul Browne was quoted saying that the film was “found to be inappropriate,” and falsely reported that “it’s not shown for any purpose now.” Zaed Ramadan, president of the Council of American Islamic Relations, had also approached Kelly about the issue last Fall, who reportedly promised, “to take care of it.” However, Kelly himself makes a 30-second appearance in the film.

While the Human Rights Watch has called for a “real investigation…with real results,” Mayor Bloomberg has offered only strong condemnation and little disciplinary action. Bloomberg went on to say that he doubted the movie swayed any police officials and felt no reason for a retraining effort (this from a vocal supporter of building the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”) .

The real issue lies beyond the screening of an inflammatory movie. By consciously perpetuating a discriminatory narrative, the city and the police department have normalized the language of that narrative and, as a result, ostracized whole communities. These issues are not merely semantic. As Reza Aslan notes in his work, How to Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, it is exactly this Islamphobic rhetoric that continues to lump together the greater Muslim community with terrorism that can actually enable the spread of the global jihadism, through the organization’s recruitment of disenfranchised and ostracized Muslim youth.

These facts further exemplify a need for better dialogues between New York Muslim communities and the city’s civil servants in order to actively move past a mistrust that has dominated New York for the past decade.

Actually, Roosevelt, It’s All About Density

Roger Valdez | Crosscut — 2012-01-27T16:18:38+00:00

Roosevelt High School: To be dwarfed by rezoning? Credit: Joe Mabel

This piece originally ran on Crosscut.

Discussion and debate about rezoning Seattle’s Roosevelt neighborhood has gone on for months, through dozens of blog posts, what seems like thousands of comments, and even e-mail exchanges with members of Seattle’s City Neighborhood Council.

After a long and rancorous debate, the City Council opted to up zone blocks in the center of Roosevelt owned by Hugh Sisley from their current 40 feet to 65 feet. The up zone came in spite of consistent and vocal neighborhood resistance, and a failed effort by Councilmember Nick Licata to amend the proposed change.

Some on-the-record comments and exchanges after the Council’s vote to rezone shed some light on what future land use debates might look like:

It’s not about “density.”

Opponents of the rezone say the issue was not density — that is welcoming more development and new people to the community — but the view from 65th. The neighborhood was willing to “take” more density than even Mayor Mike McGinn wanted. In the words of Tony Provine of the City Neighborhood Council, opposing the rezone was about the neighborhood trying “to preserve what was most important about Roosevelt.”

For opponents of up zones, that meant “restricting heights on the three blocks near the high school” in order to maintain “the prominence of the high school and preserving the heart and soul of the neighborhood.” Sisley and his management practices, blighted houses and profits weren’t the issue.

But should those three blocks really be treated any differently than other places in the neighborhood, where there was agreement to “take” more density? If we take the opponents at their word, saving the view from the sidewalk on 65th is worth leaving the Sisley properties in their current state of disrepair; an idea even Nick Licata, an opponent of the up zone, agreed would have been the outcome.

The city council is in the pocket of developers.

Long time anti-growth advocate John Fox weighed in on an e-mail chain debriefing the rezone with members of the neighborhood council. Fox says the Seattle City Council is an obedient servant of development interests. His evidence is the city elections website, which he says “indicates that now a huge chunk of incumbent contributions (about 40 percent) come either from downtown or out-of-town interests.” Fox goes on to say that when put together with people affiliated with “elite interests . . . it’s the majority of support that incumbents receive.”

But why, if the Council is so beholden to development interests, was the Roosevelt process so drawn out? Why didn’t the final rezone plan include heights like those found near Vancouver, British Columbia light rail, where 120-foot towers are common? Instead the battle over Roosevelt was over 25 feet: The difference between what opponents would want to allow (40 feet) and what the developer was advocating for (65 feet).

The press is in the pocket of developers.

Fox says that in the late 1990s the Seattle Weekly “weathered quite a storm of criticism” for an article entitled “Who REALLY Runs Seattle,” a catalog of the interwoven connections between media ownership, developers, business people, city staff and other “power brokers.” He suggests that media outlets like the Seattle Times, Crosscut and PubliCola are suspect because they take advertising, placing them firmly in favor of new development and slanting what they publish.

This discussion is as old as the written word. There is no question that, in spite of its efforts to remain objective, the press can be subject to influence. Moreover, there has been a visible shift from beat reporting that looks for “just the facts Ma’am,” to more gonzo, point-of-view journalism. While this shift no doubt provides cover for journalist-posing PR types, the majority of journalists have simply grown tired of feigning objectivity. Try conducting an in-depth survey of an issue in any community without developing an opinion. Many of us who write and blog simply support a different point of view.

Some journalists and writers don’t agree with up zone opponents. That does not mean they are being paid by the other side.

People who are here now come first.

Provine makes it pretty clear: We were here first! Preference on land use decisions, he says, should be given to the people who currently live in a neighborhood. “I don’t understand your desire for livable neighborhoods,” Provine said in a comment addressed to me, “yet your willingness to disregard the people who actually live there.” Provine asks plaintively, “So who are they livable for?”

The answer is that zoning changes will make Roosevelt more livable for the neighborhood’s current residents: Boosting the neighborhood’s development capacity means more people in Roosevelt’s commercial core, more customers for local businesses and the replacement of blighted and abandoned buildings. It will also improve the experiences of Seattleites who move in to new housing created on the Sisley properties and those using light rail throughout the region. Provine and many other opponents of Roosevelt’s zoning change believe that people living in Roosevelt right now are more important than its future residents or residents of other neighborhoods.

The bigger question for the city is whether the specific priorities of people currently living in the neighborhood should win out over the creation of a denser, more connected, more livable city. That means the debate really is about density — accommodating more people in a smaller space.

The City Council never seemed to join this fray. Instead the discussion was confined to the proposed height of a few buildings in Roosevelt. All sides of the debate agreed that more leadership is needed to answer the bigger question: What will Seattle do about encouraging more growth around transit citywide and will our land use policies favor people who got here first, or the residents of Seattle’s future?

It is important to remember that density isn’t about buildings after all. To steal a phrase from Soylent Green, density is people. And more, new people will mean a more vibrant neighborhood and economy for Roosevelt.

Sprawl, Under Any Other Name, is Still Sprawl

Richey Piiparinen | Rustwire — 2012-01-26T23:36:34+00:00

Pfft. Might as well look like this. Credit: Flickr user faceless b

This piece originally ran on Rustwire.

Recently I wrote about the grocery chain Giant Eagle wanting to open up a megastore less than a mile away from an existing store in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville. I argued this type of sprawl development is counteractive for a number of reasons, including its erosion of small business.

Well, the local politicians heard citizen concerns, and they have amended the plans. Good news, right?

Not exactly. What they decided was to make the store even bigger than originally planned, creating a 100,000-square-foot “Market District location” that will be “unique to Strongsville.”

And the uniqueness part, exactly? It’s design. You see, politicians are sensitive to the plight of local businesses. As well, pols get the American psyche’s attraction to “being one’s own boss,” and they have their ear to the rail that the public has become turned off by the old, vapid stretch of big-box strips that don’t exactly harken back to a time when Main Street meant that people walked and people talked and there were actual local businesses around.

The solution, then? Let’s pretend. Said the assistant to the Strongsville mayor:

The front facade will be totally different from other big box stores. It has different heights and sections and looks like different businesses are housed there. It will be very pleasant to look at…

Part of that quote bears repeating because when I read it I lost my coffee. Looks like different businesses are housed there.

Rendering (Source: Rustwire)

Nice. This idea of putting out small businesses and coming up with a design that disguises the eater of small business as a series of small businesses – it’s quite a concept. One that no doubt serves to keep up the illusion that sprawl works, or that pols care about small businesses, for that matter.

In fact the design concept is but one part of a larger, failing economic development strategy in Ohio that can be mottoed as thus: Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Now, why do we keep up with the illusion? Especially when the reality is a stagnant region with little-to-no job growth, and a concomitant infrastructure footprint that has become so unsustainable that Ohio Department of Transportation recently announced that Cleveland’s Innerbelt Bridge—the connection between New York and Chicago—will have to remain weak-kneed at the risk of Minneapolis 2.0 despite assurances that the bridge plan was funded in totality.

Innerbelt Bridge (Source: Rustwire)

Part of the reason for this—in a few words—is the sprawl lobby.

The sprawl lobby is real, and it’s powerful not only in Ohio but everywhere. It largely represents road and home construction companies, developers and home builder associations with deep pockets, and in the case of Ohio is tied to the farm lobby. Yes, the farm lobby has been fighting for farmer’s rights for generations, which means in the current context a refusal to allow agricultural zoning to occur as it would deflect from potential windfalls if and when the farmer decides to get out of the milking cow business.

In all, the old slash-and-build model is entrenched in state legislatures and local municipalities, and it will stay there until a smart growth lobby emerges or the country collapses from its intrinsic weakness occurring from the predatory growth of its fringe.

Now, back to politics, or more specifically: The bind that heavily conservative pols such as those in Strongsville put themselves in by catering to the sprawl lobby at the expense of their constituent’s stated principles – you know, the economic manifest destiny that is the small business owner; the optics of traditional America like the small town feel; and that right to work for a respectable living wage.

It is a predicament for these communities, no doubt. Re-enter the pretending, then, if only to make the dissonance more palatable. More exactly, when arguing for a big tenant that will be bad for local business and the small town aesthetic, the Strongsvilles of the world will often turn to the tenant’s marketing arm to sell the message: We can give you what you want if not what you need. In the case of the proposed Market District it is the want for the “food experience.” From the Giant Eagle website:

Each Market District® location buzzes with a sense of excitement uniquely its own and no two stores are exactly alike. Whichever location you visit, you are sure to have an amazing food experience. Enter our foodie destination and let all of our best food ideas and discoveries delight and inspire the food lover in you.

Echoing, Giant Eagle marketing manager Daniel Donovan told the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The site is currently being considered for our first ground up Giant Eagle Market District in Northeast Ohio, a store concept geared toward food enthusiasts, offering a wide assortment of unique items in an environment where a passion for food can be nurtured.

The temptation of that old American food fetish. The ease of telling oneself the big-box conglomerate is just an old-school block of small business. Illusion versus principle.

At least it is a tough call these days. Wrote Cleveland.com commenter Strongmom about the upcoming rezoning vote that can in fact block the proposed Market District:

Oh, you guys had to go and make this hard, eh? I was leaning toward a no vote because I think the shopping should stay toward the center of town. But Market District? Really? I am familiar with the concept store in Pittsburgh. If it’s like that then it would be a huge asset to this community. But really… I do think the shopping should stay central in the city. decisions…. decisions…

In the end, perhaps the crux of this country’s problems is the pretending we still have choices when we really do not.

St. Louis Arch Grounds Plan to Quietly Remove Connections, Close City Streets

Alex Ihnen| nextSTL — 2012-01-26T18:41:11+00:00

The lid and the museum entrance continue to shrink. Credit: nexySTL

This piece originally ran on nextSTL.

A foundation aiming to revamp the grounds near the famed Gateway Arch in St. Louis presented its second update to the city Wednesday night, its first in 12 months. There wasn’t a lot of news, nor the typical enthusiasm this time. There were no specifics offered regarding design, no mention of Cathedral Square, or the south end. Final design for a new Kiener Plaza is reported to have been completed, but was not revealed. What was heard was an overt scaling back of the ambitious rhetoric we have come to expect. A scaled-down “lid”, covered previously on nextSTL, was shown, but changes were not explained. If you want to know where the process stands, this January 2011 story still works. Except for the revelation that one of only four pedestrian crossings to the central Arch grounds, Pine Street over I-70, will be eliminated. Yes, another city street will be closed, and an existing connection between downtown and the park will be removed.

Not a single local media story included the detail that if the presented plan comes to fruition that Pine Street will no longer connect the city with the Arch grounds. Don’t worry, I’m sure we will be told, little exists on this block of Pine Street, businesses have turned their back on it. The traffic counts likely don’t dictate that it has to stay open. With Pine Street gone, visitors will find yet another dead end as they attempt to navigate their way to the Arch. The distance between accessible crossings (Washington Avenue to Chestnut Street) will reach more than 1,500 feet. The superblock of the Crowne Plaza, Gentry’s Landing and Mansion House will be expanded another block to a total of five.

Over the past two years, river water gauges, a beer garden and ice rink, Cathedral Square restaurant, Eads Bridge enhancements and more have disappeared from the plan without so much as a mention from the foundation, CityArchRiver, or local media. Adding a tree-top walk on the east side, by far the least ambitious east side plan by any of the final design teams has been scrapped. The gondola is on hold and will only happen when and if it can be bonded independently. The museum entrance continues to shrink.

The doomed walkway. (Credit: nextSTL)

In Februrary 2010, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had this to say:” [I-70] forms a forbidding and confusing barrier along the park’s western boundary…preserving options to remove Interstate 70 — even if it can’t be accomplished by 2015 — should be on the table.”

How a shrinking one-block lid, and the removal of an existing connection to downtown suddenly erases the barrier of I-70 is nonsensical and the Post-Dispatch should reconsider its statement.

The “lid,” a legacy of decades-old planning, is the most significant design element for which funding has been announced. The preoccupation with the removal of Memorial Drive for a land bridge across I-70, instead of the current sidewalks, is baffling. Again and again we hear that pedestrians will have an unobstructed stroll from Luther Ely Smith Square to the Arch, unencumbered by having to cross Memorial Drive. Closing the street will force traffic onto Market and Chestnut to 4th Street. And how will pedestrians get to Smith Square? They’ll cross 4th Street…where all the traffic from Memorial Drive will be diverted. The change will not decrease a visitors interaction with traffic by a single vehicle.

During the update, Memorial Drive was referred to as “dangerous” on numerous occasions. A vehicle count of 2,000 per hour at peak was stated. That number is a small fraction of what is found on Kingshighway at Lindell Avenue (and many other St. Louis streets), the crossing from the city’s most vibrant, dense neighborhood to it’s most visited park. The idea that the Arch grounds redevelopment will encourage people to explore downtown, but they won’t visit the Arch if they have to walk across Memorial Drive is irreconcilable. A visitor is to wander downtown, cross literally dozens of streets, but then require an oasis of pedestrian bliss at Luther Ely Smith Square?

The expense of building this lid—of seeking to enhance an existing pedestrian crossing by eliminating downtown streets—appears to be the removal of the pedestrian crossing at Pine Street. If there were an urban planning version of The Onion, this proposal could produce a suitable headline. No explanation was given, but one can only conclude that rebuilding the Pine Street I-70 overpass isn’t in the budget. That money has to go to rebuilding Interstate ramps. The design goal to “mitigate the impact of transportation systems” has been co-opted to mean removing city streets.

To be sure, there are smart design elements to be found when one looks deep into the details of the re-envisioned Arch grounds. Raising Lenor K. Sullivan Boulevard a nearly imperceptible 2.5 feet will keep it out of the river for at least half of current flood events. This makes the riverfront a more viable, predictable place for events and businesses to operate. Great Rivers Greenway has pledged $15 million, or about half the cost of the change. New ramps winding down to the riverfront will provide accessibility and offer new views and offer a comfortable walk compared to the awkward stairs that exist today. A re-programmed Courthouse and shiny Keiner Plaza can be presumed to be positives. Each improvement will have a positive impact on the visitor experience.

The removal of the north parking garage, Washington Avenue and portions of Memorial Drive, the 91-acre park, routinely criticized for its lack of activity, will be adding 11 acres. Why? How much more vacant, deactivated land does downtown need? It’s apparent that adding green space is easier than truly mitigating traffic infrastructure. Speaking of which, it was stated that not only is CityArchRiver mitigating said infrastructure (one of its 10 stated design goals), it’s also maximizing traffic infrastructure. It takes a twist of the tongue and mind to believe such a claim. The language, the justification and the premise of the project seem to be off-track. What was once billed as an effort to “weave connections and transitions from the City and the Arch grounds to the River” is now something else entirely.

Traffic will be forced onto a single street. (Credit: nextSTL)

The era of silver bullet, top-down civic planning is having one last hurrah (one hopes). The most expensive single element of the plan, the “lid” at $57 million, is going to happen. Our civic leaders have willed it so. Each decade in the decline of St. Louis has its monument: The Arch, highways, Scottrade, Edward Jones Dome and now back to the Arch. Mapping Decline author Colin Gordon highlights the absurdity when he states, “St. Louis lost 50,000 people in the 1980s and the city’s solution was to build a new hockey arena.” And so it is that St. Louis lost 30,000 people in the 2000s and our civic energy went into a $500 million Arch grounds project.

As reiterated by CityArchRiver Wednesday night, this effort, the hundreds of millions of dollars, is predicated on attracting additional tourists and hoping that some percentage of them spend the night in a downtown hotel. If all goes according to plan, more tourists mean more money in the local economy, equals a more prosperous city. It’s trickle-down urbanism.

What continues to happen is dictatorial civic planning in the absence of community leadership. The public waits around for a year to be presented with an update that isn’t much of an update, save the removal of a connection to the Arch. Any critique or feedback is ignored. Engagement isn’t sought. Institutional constituencies are stand-ins for public input. The process is being dictated by a nervous desire to do something, anything. Not a single interest group or constituency is allowed to question the fragile plan (save City to River). Apparently, numerous feasibility studies, comprehensive traffic counts and design iterations have been completed, all out of public view. We’re told to accept the plans. After all, they’re on a deadline and they’re raising money. We should remain seated quietly and be grateful.

Find Out Which Industries Have Grown, and Where

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-01-26T17:27:25+00:00

Notice that promising ring of blue around Ohio and Michigan? Credit: The Urban Institude MetroTrends blog

The Urban Institute today alerted us to this nifty interactive map showing where jobs have been created and lost in different cities throughout the U.S. Users can toggle through different industries to see which areas enjoyed job growth between June 2009 (the official “end” of the recession) and last year.

Some of the statistics come as no surprise—of course Washington, D.C. area has created a few government jobs—but did you know that Nashville also added a ton of workers to the public sphere? In fact, the Nashville Business Journal reported last May that while the city has lost thousands of private-sector jobs, nearly 25,000 of its residents have gone to work for the government over the last decade (though it appears that the tide reversed slightly in 2011).

New York City has lost over 8 percent of its financial workers, and Las Vegas a whopping 30 percent, but bankers and accountants seem to be doing just fine in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Well-known tourist destinations like New Orleans and Miami have seen steady growth in the leisure and hospitality industry, but Worcester, Mass. has them both beat in that department, most likely because Northeastern vacationers are today more likely to opt for a cheap holiday close to home. And manufacturing, while spotty throughout the length of the Rust Belt, seems to have had a decent time in northern Ohio and Michigan. Maybe the industry really is making ground-level a comeback?

Ultimately, these numbers don’t say much about the U.S. economy overall. But they could certainly prove useful in assessing the state of local economics—not to mention providing a valuable resource to those entering the workforce or thinking about a career change.