Next American City

WATCH: Livestream of Tonight’s Reimagining Urban Highways Event

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-02-23T21:08:47+00:00

Credit: Flickr user HGruber

Tonight, beginning at 6:30pm, we will kick off our Reimagining Urban Highways event at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Nearly 400 of you RSVP’d, which both flatters and excites us. However, we know that not everyone lives close to Philly, and even those who do might have busy schedules, or can’t get away from the computer, or just flat-out can’t make it for whatever reason. But don’t fret, because we have arranged for the event to be live-streamed.

So if you’d like to tune into the discussion about the best alternatives to I-95—an elevated segment of which cuts Philadelphia off from its waterfront, and is generally an eyesore and a nuisance—click here. Our very own Diana Lind will give a 10-minute presentation, alongside other experts like Ashwin Balakrishnan of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, Thomas Deller of the City of Providence and Harvard University Loeb Fellow Peter Park. Aaron Naparstek, another Loeb Fellow and founding editor of Streetsblog, will moderate.

We have also begun circulating a petition asking the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which will either have to rebuild or dismantle I-95, to consider alternatives other than returning to the status quo. Click here if you’d like to sign.

If you’re following along on Twitter and would like to join the conversation, use the hashtag #urbanhighways.

Chicago Commits to Downtown Buses

Yonah Freemark — 2012-02-23T17:59:27+00:00

A series of bus lanes will link commuter rail stations, downtown and the Navy Pier.

This piece originally ran on The Transport Politic.

A year and a half after Chicago won $24.6 million in federal funds for the construction of an urban circulator downtown, the city announced this week that it will contribute $7.3 million in tax increment financing to improve the state of bus service in the urban center and link commuter rail stations to office buildings. Together, the money will provide for painting dedicated bus lanes on the Madison/Washington and Clinton/Canal Street pairs for a total of two miles, offer signal priority, improve bus shelters and add bike lanes. New buses and a small bus transit center at Union Station are also part of the plan.

Though the improvements will be most visible to customers using the new dedicated “Central Area Transitway” connecting Union Station and the Navy Pier northeast of the loop, the new lanes will also be used by seven existing Chicago Transit Authority bus routes which already collectively carry 32,000 riders a day on 1,700 buses.

There is nothing new about the idea of improved circulator service in Chicago’s downtown core. Following the failed efforts of planners in the 1960s and 1970s to expand the city’s subway system, Mayor Richard M. Daley announced in his first year of office (1989) that he wanted to construct a center-city light rail line linking major tourist attractions, commuter rail stations and the business center. By 1993, the plan had morphed into a $775-million proposal that would include eight miles of median-running track designed to carry four routes—the first running east-west along Madison and/or Monroe Streets between Oglivie Transportation Center and Michigan Avenue; the second heading north-south along the river to Navy Pier; the third running south to McCormick Place Convention Center; and the fourth heading north to the Magnificent Mile of North Michigan Avenue.

The plan came surprisingly close to being realized. The federal and state governments each agreed to chip in $250 million, and local businesses in the Loop—concerned about their ability to compete with retailers on North Michigan Avenue and convinced of the importance of linking commuter rail passengers to the center—agreed to a special tax district that would also raise $250 million. The project would have reshaped the image of and mobility in Chicago’s inner core.

Yet in fall 1993, the U.S. Congress cut off most funding for the project. In 1995, the state pulled out of its share. Business leaders suggested they might double or triple their contribution to the project through neighborhood taxes, but North Michigan Avenue leaders pushed back, suggesting the project gave an unfair advantage to retailers in the Loop. The project died. By 2006, hoping to do something, the city had settled on the idea of a Navy Pier-Union Station busway.

Unlike these previous plans, the new proposal for Chicago will offer only minimal improvements to circulation in the downtown core: Customers will save an estimated 1.1 minutes on travel between Union Station and Michigan Avenue. The priority lanes will be beneficial, but buses will continue to stop at almost every cross street on Madison and Washington, limiting the amount of travel time that can actually be reduced. And the focus on serving the Navy Pier—a tourist trap that is scheduled for a major renovation–speaks to the limited degree to which this route will serve actual commuters.

Nevertheless, the connection between the commuter rail stations west of the Loop and the central business core provided by the bus link will offer the potential for improved circulation downtown. Improved service to Union Station must be a priority, since it is not linked to the L rail rapid transit network (the nearest station is about half a mile away) and it is the focus of the region’s commuter rail and intercity rail improvement efforts. The seven bus lines that will share parts of the route will split off and continue to other parts of the city, meaning that customers who are arriving on the #14 from Jeffery in the South Side, for instance, will have a quicker trip once they reach downtown.

If the CTA designs signage well enough, customers attempting to make the trip from Oglivie Transportation Center—another commuter rail station—to Millennium Park would have six services to choose from, offering fantastic headways of one minute at peak and two minutes off-peak. But the city will have to be careful not to place too much emphasis on the “Central Area Transitway” brand that it will give to the bus that runs the full route from Union Station to Navy Pier, because the most important element of this improvement project is its provision of minor improvements to many bus lines, not just a single one. It should be clear to customers that if they want to take a certain trip, they have several options.

Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s leadership, Chicago is taking an incremental approach to the improvement of public transportation in the city, steering away from the mega-fantasies of the Daley era. The CTA is already planning to invest in similar bus priority improvements on Jeffery Boulevard in the South Side for the #14 bus and along the north-south spine of Western Avenue as part of a citywide BRT plan that would fill in the gaps missing from inadequate rail service in certain areas. Slowly but surely, the city’s bus lines are scheduled for improvement.

Yet the city’s bigger ambitions remain apparent. In the application for the federal urban circulator grant in 2010, the city included the following map, documenting potential new transit routes for the center city along dedicated rights-of-way, clearly modeled after the improvements suggested by the 2009 Central Area Action Plan, which proposed light rail lines on the Carroll, Clinton, Monroe and Lakefront Corridors. They would either be placed underground or along dedicated transit routes, like the McCormick Center busway (for the Lakefront route).

For lack of funding, it will be a long time before any such routes see the light of day. In the meantime, painting a few bus lanes and offering existing lines priority at signals represent a reasonable step forward.

More Lanes Alone Won’t Clear Up the Highway

Matt Johnson | Greater Greater Washington — 2012-02-23T16:14:28+00:00

A segment of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Credit: Doug Kerr on Flickr

This post originally appeared on Greater Greater Washington.

Widening the Baltimore-Washington Parkway would let it carry more vehicles, but would not make traffic any better. That’s the conclusion from a federal study that looked at adding a third lane in each direction.

The study, by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), looks at widening the parkway between Route 50 and the Baltimore Beltway in Maryland. FHWA will be sending the results of the study to Congress soon.

FHWA is studying the widening because Rep. Dutch Ruppersburger (D-Md.) inserted an earmark into the FY 2010 federal budget. There’s no actual proposal to widen the parkway (at least not yet).

There’s a very good chance that nothing further will come from the study. And that’s the way it should be. The region does not need to invest hundreds of millions in this corridor simply to move more cars. Increasing mobility means moving more people, and here that should mean improving transit options—something this study didn’t look at.

The study looked at four options for widening the parkway in addition to a no-build alternative. Two alternatives looked at adding a lane in each direction in the median. The other two alternatives studied adding a lane in each direction to the outside of the roadway. Space constraints mean that any widening requires a combination of both inside and outside widening as well as rebuilding numerous overpasses and underpasses.

The difference between the two inside and two outside designs is in design standards. For each type of widening, the consultants looked at AASHTO-compliant standards and National Park Service standards.

The AASHTO options called for adding a 12-foot wide travel lane, a 10-foot wide outside (right) shoulder, and a 10-foot wide inside (left) shoulder. The NPS options included adding a 12-foot wide travel lane, an eight-foot wide outside shoulder with curb and gutter, and a three-foot wide inside shoulder with curb and gutter.

Estimated costs ranged from a high of $565 million for the AASHTO outside widening option to a low of $343 million for the NPS inside widening option.

Despite the investment, though, the study shows that the parkway would be just as congested as it is today by the year 2040. FHWA expects any increase in capacity to be matched by a corresponding increase in vehicle trips. A widened parkway would carry more cars, but it ultimately wouldn’t shorten people’s trips.

Widening the parkway is the wrong approach from a growth perspective, too. Maryland’s Prince George’s County has long had a problem focusing growth in the “developed tier.” Adding freeway capacity will only increase the pressure to build in parts of the county and the region that do not have the infrastructure for it.

Adding lanes to the parkway would also hurt the developed communities it passes through. In many places, it already forms a significant barrier between neighborhoods. More traffic and more pollution along the roadway will hurt many residents and the pastoral image the National Park Service believes the parkway should exude.

Staff at the meeting stressed that further studies would need to look at options beyond just widening the parkway. Other options could include improvements to transit, other roadways or spot “improvements” along the parkway.

If any money were available for widening, it would be better spent on improving transit between Baltimore and Washington. Maryland could speed up trains on MARC and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor and add capacity for more trains, extend the D.C. Metro’s Green Line or create incentives for carpooling.

As the region continues to grow, we need to focus on building livable and walkable communities. Widening a freeway encourages traditional sprawl, and it sends the wrong message about the region’s priorities.

Comments on the study are still being accepted, though only for the next 2-3 weeks. If you have thoughts on whether the parkway needs extra lanes, you can submit written comments on the project’s website.

The next step for the project team is to finalize a report to Congress showing the estimated costs, benefits and impacts of adding a third northbound and third southbound lane to the roadway. Beyond that, it’s up to Congress to decide whether to leave the parkway as-is, undertake further study or begin to plan for construction.

End of the Roads: When Highway Removal Works

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-02-23T14:00:08+00:00

San Fran’s Embarcadero Freeway in the 1980s. Credit: Todd Lappin on Flickr

Like many steps forward in urban policy, the idea of removing highways has always faced its share of detractors.

There’s something daunting about making changes, in any way, to a piece of infrastructure that serves anywhere from 20,000 to over 100,000 vehicles a day. Critics have a right to express understandable concerns about gridlock and economics when planners announce that they want to remove or convert a major thoroughfare in their city.

It’s vital, then, for advocates to hold up examples of where highway removal has worked. The numbers exist to back up claims that the practice can restore a city’s social fabric and facilitate local development, all without severely impacting traffic or commerce. We just need to make sure our neighbors know that.

Today, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released a report that may serve as an important resource for future discussions about the issue. Coinciding with Next American City’s Reimagining Urban Highways conference in Philadelphia—in which experts will posit alternatives for the future of I-95—the report looks at case studies from five cities around the world that have successfully turned highways into thriving boulevards or parks. From Milwaukee to Seoul, highway removal has served as a painless way to generate billions of dollars in investment for once-blighted areas.

For example: Since 1959, San Franciscans had to deal with the elevated Embarcadero Freeway cutting then off from the city’s eastern waterfront (and ruining their view of the Ferry Building). Nonetheless, voters kept rejecting plans to tear it down—until 1989, when an earthquake damaged it beyond repair and forced the city to consider alternatives.

Now instead of an elevated highway, the Embarcadero is a six-lane boulevard flanked by pedestrian walkways 25 feet wide. There are street lights, palm trees and waterfront plazas. Thousands of residential units have gone up, increasing the housing stock by over 50 percent, and jobs in the area have grown by nearly a quarter. The Ferry Building now contains a farmer’s market and retail shops. Neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity have seen a revival, whether they the freeway used to isolate them directly (Rincon Hill) or simply held back the entire area from flourishing (South Beach).

One city not included in the ITDP report is Dallas, where an ambitious capping project has been underway for the past three years and may be completed this fall. The Woodall Rodgers Freeway, a recessed eight-lane artery connecting two interstates, slices right through downtown Dallas, separating its burgeoning arts district from a residential neighborhood. For years, pedestrians looking to cross had to do so over a handful of noisy, ugly and foul-smelling bridges.

But recently, the city partnered with the Texas Department of Transportation and private developers to cap a three-block portion of the freeway with a 5.2-acre green space. If built as planned, it will come replete with a restaurant, dog parks and 400 newly planted trees, among other things.

“We had a lot of trouble initially explaining the concept,” said Linda Owen, president of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation. Locals didn’t know how the capping would work, and had visions of impenetrable steps and inclines.

But once it was understood that the deck would remain level with the street grid and easily accessible, enthusiasm grew. Furthermore, investment in the area took an upswing almost immediately upon the project’s announcement, with construction on a large condo building breaking ground in October 2009, the same month the city began building the deck. Today, according to Owen, the $110-million project enjoys universal support from the city council.

Now about 80 percent complete, the park will perhaps serve as a precedent for similar sites throughout Dallas. City leaders, said Owen, have been talking about enhancing neighborhood connectivity, especially in South Dallas. If the impending park over the Woodall Rodgers succeeds, it will show that even a Sun Belt city crisscrossed with highways can reclaim space for a shared common purpose.

Push (and Pushback) to Move NYC Juvenile Offenders Back to City

Eddie Small | The New York World — 2012-02-22T16:14:30+00:00

Credit: Connie Ma on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on The New York World.

Two of Euphemia Adams’ sons have been through New York City’s juvenile justice system. Based on the nature of the boys’ charges, which included assault and robbery, both were placed in facilities upstate—well over 100 miles from their home in Staten Island.

“I had to take the bus to the ferry, ferry to the train, and then I went to Metro North and had to take another train up to visit,” their mother recalled recently. “When the kids are upstate, it takes more time to get to visit them than you have to actually be with them.”

One of her sons made it out and is now a stay-at-home dad with two children of his own. Another ended up heading back into crime, and to adult prison. Adams can’t help but wonder: Had the second son been housed in a facility closer to home, would he have had a much better chance at rehabilitation?

New York State appears set to embark on an experiment to find out. Following years in which New York City’s juvenile offenders were sent upstate for rehabilitation, only to fall back into crime, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget for fiscal year 2013 includes a proposal to keep New York City’s young detainees near their families. If approved by the legislature, the governor’s plan would give New York City the authority to stop sending juvenile offenders upstate, as long as the courts determine they don’t need to be placed in a secure facility.

For years, the recidivism rate among the city’s juveniles has vexed the agencies and advocates that try to help them. Approximately 350 young city residents at any time are detained in facilities operated by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), the majority of them located upstate, in towns where the facilities serve as important sources of employment.

As the city seeks nonprofit organizations to run non-secure facilities in the five boroughs, unions representing workers at the state-run facilities are pushing back. They contend the city is not in a position to provide either the services or security that sent juveniles offenders hundreds of miles from home in the first place.

Members of two of the state’s labor unions—the Civil Service Employees Association and the Public Employees Federation—say the Cuomo plan, known as Close to Home, suffers from lack of clear strategy. Together, the unions represent approximately 5,000 OCFS employees, and members could lose hundreds of jobs.

Representatives maintained that employment losses were not their main concern. “The issue is whether or not this is good public policy,” said Stephen Madarasz, director of communications for the Civil Service Employees Union. “In the case of this proposal, there is no plan. There’s really no plan explaining how this is going to work. It’s just a concept that they’re going to do.”

Taurina Carpenter of the Public Employees Federation put the stakes even more strongly. “They’re putting the community at risk. They’re putting the kids at risk,” she said, referring to the Cuomo administration. “These kids are way more difficult to handle than they know.”

Indeed, juvenile offenders are typically sent upstate for one of two main reasons: They have either been charged with a designated felony—a legal term encompassing violent crimes such as murder, kidnapping and arson—or the courts have decided that they need services best offered by upstate facilities, such as drug abuse programs or a high level of mental health services.

According to Jacqueline Pittman, whose son was sent upstate to the Tryon juvenile justice facility when he was 12, these services often leave much to be desired. “There was no type of support from the staff,” she said. “They just made the kids feel down.”

Avery Irons, director of Youth Justice Programs for the Children’s Defense Fund – New York, agreed that state services have not always lived up to their promise. “The point of the OCFS facilities was to have a greater level of security but also a greater level of service for kids that have higher needs,” she said. “They’ve for many years failed in that mandate, but they are trying to reform now.”

It might be too late.

Close to Home seeks to reboot a system that currently sees 89 percent of boys and 81 percent of girls who have been released from a state facility get rearrested by their 28th birthday, according to the New York State Juvenile Justice Advisory Group. The advisory group noted that Ohio, Illinois and California, as well as Michigan’s Wayne County, home to Detroit, are among the states and localities that have witnessed a reduction in crime and recidivism after shifting their juvenile justice systems “from centralized state-run facilities to local continuums of care.”

“The general theory is people—kids, in this case—are better off close to home,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit reform organization. “When you look at the results of the kids who go up, who are not close to home, this would have to be pretty bad to be worse than that…. It’s basically not mathematically possible.”

A plan for keeping juvenile offenders within New York City will not emerge until the Close to Home legislation has passed, according to Tia Waddy, a spokeswoman for the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which oversees juvenile detention for the city. However, during a forum at The New School on Feb. 2, agency Commissioner Ron Richter expressed strong support for the proposal.

Said Richter, “I don’t think that you can for a moment not stop and cherish the opportunity to have New York City’s youth moved hundreds of miles south to actually be confined—when necessary—in locations that are just miles away from their mothers and fathers and siblings to be rehabilitated.”

The Hidden Tax on Exurban Living

Angie Schmitt | Rust Wire — 2012-02-22T13:00:30+00:00

Exurbs in Illinois. Credit: Allix Rogers on Flickr

This piece originally ran on Rust Wire.

Another edition of our ongoing series “Lies Cleveland Tells Itself” is one of my personal favorites: That it makes economic sense to move 15 miles farther away from work in order to save several hundred dollars (maybe a grand?) on property taxes.

First I want to congratulate the region’s realtors (also shout out to Cleveland Magazine) for so thoroughly selling people on this monstrous whopper. They’ve kept the housing market humming for three decades on this falsehood even as the regional population flatlined. So congrats!

But the truth is that people are trading a cheaper tax bill for a much, much larger transportation tab, and in most cases they’re coming up short.

Transportation costs—that includes car payment, insurance, gas, maintenance and depreciation—are American households’ number-two expense, right behind housing. Americans spend about 18 percent of their income on transportation—more if they have a relatively low income and own a car, less if they have relatively high incomes and live near transit.

The problem is, people consistently underestimate how much money they spend on transportation. If you drive a financed car, you should assume that every mile you drive is costing you 50 cents—about the federal reimbursement rate.

Let’s say you move to Avon, a Cleveland exurb, from Lakewood, one of Cleveland’s inner-ring suburbs, in order to save money. Let’s say you make $65,000 a year and own a $150,000 home.

So in Lakewood, your property taxes are going to cost you $4,345. If you live in Avon, you will pay, $1,488 less a year in property taxes or $2,857. Avon is generally considered to be a tax haven. Lakewood, on the other hand, is consider to be a high-tax area.

In addition, Lakewood has a 1 percent income tax. That will cost you an additional $600 per year. So right now, the total damage for living in Lakewood is just over $2,000.

There is a 15-miles difference between Lakewood and Avon. Assuming one person commutes to downtown, that is an additional 30 miles per day our Avon household must commute. In other words, 150 miles per week.

At 50 cents per mile, our Avon family is paying an additional $75 per week to live in Avon. Assuming that person works 45 weeks a year, the extra transportation bill is about $3,375. So the Avon resident’s actual cost are approximately $1,300 more. And that doesn’t include the loss in productivity the Avon family experiences spending an additional 40 minutes per day—over three hours a week—on the road. If the Avon family could bill for that time, at $25 per hour, that would be an additional $3,375 dollars a year this family would forfeit.

Granted not everyone commutes downtown anymore. I’m going to argue the Avon home is still more expensive.

Check out the map below by the Center for Neighborhood Technology:

People who live in sprawling exurban regions drive more. People in Lakewood walk more, drive shorter distances and have access to transit. In short, they have lower transportation costs.

Let’s figure this generously. The Avon family works in suburban Westlake, so does the Lakewood family. Their commutes are equal.

Again, the Lakewood family can eliminate 84 miles per week—assuming two drivers, about six miles per day, per driver—by driving shorter distances, walking to various destinations. The Avon family cannot.

That’s $35 per week, and over 52 weeks, that’s $2,184 per year.

You will see in the above chart that the average Avon family is spending $200, give or take, more per month than the average Lakewood family. That’s $2,400 a month, or about $400 more than the tax burden of living in Lakewood, plus times saved.

Lakewood, even with its high taxes, is a bargain compared to Avon, especially if you value your time.

Ride The Tide of Light Rail, Virginia Beach

Bradley Heard | Greater Greater Washington — 2012-02-21T16:55:07+00:00

The Tide light rail system in Norfolk, Va. Credit: VaDOT on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on Greater Greater Washington.

Just six months after opening, Virginia’s first light rail transit system, located in Norfolk, is already exceeding ridership expectations. Now it’s time for the Commonwealth’s largest city, Virginia Beach, to hop aboard and extend the light rail all the way to the Atlantic oceanfront.

Dubbed “The Tide,” South Hampton Roads’ light rail system made its debut in Norfolk on August 19, 2011. The initial $338 million segment, operated by the regional transit agency, Hampton Roads Transit (HRT), is 7.4 miles, has 11 stops and is currently located only within Norfolk’s city limits.

The system connects Norfolk State University, the downtown central business district, Harbor Park (a minor league baseball stadium) and the region’s premier medical center complex, including Eastern Virginia Medical School, Sentara Norfolk General Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters.

I had the opportunity to experience the Tide’s inaugural weekend while visiting my parents in my hometown of Virginia Beach. We were among the over 75,000 people who boarded the trains during the first three days, when HRT was running a free promotion to introduce the community to the new light rail system.

Initial weekday ridership during the first year was projected to be only 2,900. However, the six-month data shows that those early projections have been blown away. About 4,642 people ride The Tide during an average weekday. An even higher number—4,850—use the system on Saturdays, with 2,099 usually riding on Sundays.

Virginia Beach wary of light rail, but preserving its options

Originally, HRT had planned for The Tide to extend from downtown Norfolk all the way to the Virginia Beach oceanfront, along an abandoned Norfolk-Southern rail right-of-way. However, the transit agency needed the consent of both cities to move forward, and Beach residents voted down the proposal in 1999. Therefore, Norfolk proceeded on its own.

In recent years, however, the resort city has signaled that it may be warming up to the idea of light rail. For example, Virginia Beach’s 2009 Comprehensive Plan adopted a new urban growth strategy that is designed to direct the majority of the city’s future growth to eight defined “strategic growth areas” (SGAs). Six of these SGAs are located along the city’s portion of the abandoned Norfolk-Southern right-of-way currently used by The Tide in Norfolk. The comprehensive plan even gives a positive mention to light rail as an “alternative transportation” option.

In 2010, Virginia Beach contributed the $15 million in matching funds necessary to purchase the 10.6-mile stretch of Norfolk-Southern right-of-way which runs from the city’s Newtown Road border with Norfolk to Birdneck Road in Virginia Beach—approximately a mile from the oceanfront. Additional right-of-way will need to be acquired to extend the existing rail lines to the city’s convention center and ultimately to the resort area near the oceanfront.

Tide promises a “tsunami” of smart growth possibilities for region

For The Tide to become the truly regional transit system it was intended to be, it must extend to the Virginia Beach oceanfront. The resort city’s portion of the abandoned Norfolk-Southern railway corridor has already been identified in the Hampton Roads Regional Transit Vision Plan as a priority rapid transit extension corridor.

HRT has begun a federally required transit extension study/alternatives analysis to determine what mode of rapid transit, if any, is appropriate for the corridor. The four alternatives being considered are (1) doing nothing; (2) enhancing local bus service; (3) building a bus rapid transit (BRT) line; and (4) extending The Tide’s light rail line.

According to the study, an extension of The Tide light rail system to the Virginia Beach oceanfront would bring approximately 1.1 million square feet of residential and commercial development within a quarter-mile of the corridor, or 90,000 square feet per corridor mile—the highest and most dense level of transit-oriented development predicted in the region. Those development projections double when taking into consideration the whole half-mile transportation analysis zone (2.3 million SF/191,000 SF per corridor mile).

The study anticipates that the Beach extension of The Tide would have eight stations, all of which lie within the city’s 2009 Comprehensive Plan-designated strategic growth areas.

After being inspired by my inaugural Tide ride in Norfolk, and prior to looking at any planning documents, I decided to create my own map of potential Virginia Beach light rail stations. Based solely on my knowledge of the area from growing up there, I was able to identify all eight of the stations that HRT recommended in its study, plus a ninth one (at North Plaza Trail). Here’s my map:

In April 2011, HRT suspended the Virginia Beach Transit Extension Study until it could get 9-12 months of actual ridership data from The Tide’s initial Norfolk segment. Having now obtained six of those 9-12 months of data, HRT should have no problem concluding that regional ridership will support the extension of light rail to the Beach.

Particularly in light of Amtrak’s recent announcement that its popular Northeast Regional trains will directly service Norfolk’s Harbor Park by the end of 2012, it makes even more sense to extend The Tide to Virginia Beach. That way, tourists and business travelers from as far north as Boston could seamlessly travel to most of the region’s prime destinations without ever having to rent a car.

To paraphrase (in a shamelessly corny way) an early 1980s Blondie hit, “The Tide is High”—in Norfolk. Virginia Beach needs to catch the wave and extend the region’s light rail system to the oceanfront as soon as possible.

When it Comes to Healthcare, Class, Race and Place are Recurring Themes

Beth Fitzgerald | NJ Spotlight — 2012-02-21T15:30:10+00:00

Different IVs for different cities. Credit: Bob Harwig on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on NJ Spotlight.

The wide disparities in health between black and white Americans are more a matter of place—where people live—than of race.

That was one of the recurring themes at “Taking Good Care: A History of Health and Wellness in the Black Community,” a day-long conference held at Rutgers-Newark last week.

It was sounded implicitly by former Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who delivered the 32nd annual Marion Thompson Wright lecture.

“Today we could all do more for our own health than all the medical discoveries in the past 100 years. We need to take care of our own health,” Elders urged.

And it was made explicitly by Dr. William F. Owen Jr., former president of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in his talk, “My Genetic Code or My Zip Code: Which is More Important?”

Owen cited studies identifying six major social determinants of health outcomes: Education, food quality, housing, public transportation, clean air and water, and cultural competency.

He added that these problems affect everyone caught up in them, regardless of race.

“Addressing the social determinants of health is not addressing something for blacks, it is addressing something for every American who is under that circumstance. So this is not a race-related issue. It doesn’t even need to be discussed in the context of race.”

“My point is these are actionable matters,” Owen said, individuals may not be able to change their DNA, “but I can, should and must impact these matters.”

Still, it won’t be easy to change individuals or institutions. The U.S. healthcare system, Elders said, is a flawed system, and healthcare providers are not up to the task of delivering culturally competent care to a diverse population.

Elders also indicated that those aspects of healthcare most directly influenced by the patients themselves often reflect the reality that an individual’s health status is diminished by insufficient education and low socioeconomic status.

There are also cultural traditions at work: African-Americans are less likely to go to the doctor for routine preventive care, “because if you don’t hurt and you don’t bleed, in the black culture you aren’t sick.” The result, Elders said, is that a disease like high blood pressure, which often has no symptoms, “kills us because we don’t get a check up.”

For many of the ills of healthcare, she had the same prescription: “Education, education, education. We have to educate our people, and the group that is going to most help us to improve healthcare is going to be our patients.”

Owen agreed on the importance of education, citing one Harvard study that found “more education, measured in four-years blocks, resulted in a longer life, less heart disease, less diabetes and an improved sense of well-being.”

Some might argue, Owen continued, that “this is simply a reflection of less deleterious health-related behavior” because the better educated are less prone to smoking, drinking and other risky behaviors. But Owen said that when behavioral factors are built into the model, the advantages of education don’t go away.

More strikingly, Owen said, “Race did not impact the model.” Regardless of whether the individual is “white, black, green, purple—there is something about more education that results in improved health.”

Former Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders.
Credit: Fred Stucker

For Dr. Clement Alexander Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, the interplay of race and health informs our understanding of the American experience.

“I think race matters in a society in which race has been the organizing principle and race has been the lens through which we view real and perceived differences,” said Price.

“If we were as attentive to social class, to inequalities in education, inequalities in the distribution of health, we would be less obsessed with the racial origins of disparity than with the social inequalities that race has oftentimes served as a guise for.”

The disturbing statistics on African-American health, for Owen, lead to a far more fundamental question: “What is race?”

Race “is a social construct and so especially in countries like America, that have had, pun intended, such a colorful history around race, race becomes a convenient and visible way of identifying other problems.”

He said the conversation is usually couched in terms of health disparities between black and whites, “but I am talking about health disparities for Americans and it’s a social issue.”

Blacks are concentrated in areas of New Jersey, such as Newark, that are deemed “food deserts” for their insufficient availably of affordable, nutritious or fresh food. “But there are food desert studies showing absolutely no difference in terms of blacks and whites in their health. I can take poor white families, drop them in a food desert,” and the impact on their health is the same, Owen said.

“Race is in many ways a surrogate for socioeconomic status,” Owen said. Health statistics certainly reveal difference among races, “But then I ask the question, what is the credible aspect of the difference, what is it accounting for? Is it race, or is race telling me something else about a difference?” Owen said.

“I am making the argument that race is a surrogate. It’s telling me something else and the something else is socioeconomic status—where you live, how you are educated, what sort of supports you have.”

Even the availability of public transportation makes people healthier, regardless of race. Public transit gives people a way to get to their healthcare providers, but it’s also deeply connected to the problem of poor nutrition, Owen said.

“Is it any surprise that if you purchase your food from the convenience store, gas station or liquor store, that you find yourself consuming a poor diet?” Owen said. He cited a study that found “2.5 million American live more than one mile away from a store that has nutritious food, and they have no auto access. Public transportation is a substantial health benefit.”

Owen also cited a report on 22 studies around the world that confirmed that higher exposure to carbon monoxide increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke. African-American are concentrated in cities with higher concentrations of carbon monoxide, and their higher level of cardiovascular disease and stroke, “are not a reflection of race.”

The day-long conference, which drew more than 600 attendees, is held annually during Black History Month by the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience. Topics ranged from the healing work of enslaved black women to the current controversy over whether it is possible to develop a prescription drug targeted to black patients.

Dr. Marcus L. Williams, president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, said his organization is working with the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association to reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease and stroke by 20 percent by the year 2020.

Williams said the major contributing factors in heart disease are diet and other social determinants: “So the key to this is actually you,” he told the audience. “It is about you being empowered.”

Sympathy for the Suburbs

Diana Lind | Next American City — 2012-02-21T02:22:52+00:00

A new exhibit at the MoMA links the suburban single-family home to the foreclosure crisis with provocative results.

The foreclosure crisis changed the housing market forever by lowering housing prices, altering the character of neighborhoods and creating a seemingly limitless supply of abandoned properties, but surprisingly, it has done little to change the kind of housing that gets built. Sure, new subdivisions are fewer and farther between, and the average size of houses seems to have plateaued if not declined, but the single-family-two-car-garage-grass-lawn style house is still undeniably America’s favorite housing type. A provocative exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Foreclosed, wants to change that, by insisting that suburban single-family homes have played a role in the foreclosure crisis. Curated by Barry Bergdoll and produced in less than three years (lightning-fast for large museums like MoMA), Foreclosed presents five architectural projects that rethink the suburbs from their economic underpinnings to their aesthetic character. But while the exhibit’s thesis that sprawl is toxic jives with that of many urbanists, the architectural remedies on display seem almost as problematic.

There’s good economic and environmental data to support the claim that the suburbs are unsustainable. Each single family house requires its own heating/cooling, plumbing and electricity, missing out on the efficiencies of multi-family housing; the lack of density in the suburbs requires that the people who live there own a car, or often two or three cars, just to take care of life’s daily business, unlike walkable urban environments where people only drive for long trips; all that time spent driving means less time exercising and socializing, whereas urbanites walk off the calories and benefit from the ways that ideas circulate more freely in cities; and there’s the burden of homeownership (30 percent of the U.S. population pays more than 30 percent of their income on housing) that can drain a family’s financial resources. If it does nothing else, the exhibit will convince you that the American Dream has turned into something of a nightmare.

But Foreclosed seethes with disdain for the suburbs, and the lack of an empathetic understanding of how the suburbs function and are changing, ultimately makes the exhibit look less visionary than ignorant. As an urban dweller who is deeply frustrated by the social, economic and environmental consequences of sprawl and car-centered communities, I too want to see clever ways of retrofitting these parts of the country. But saying that, I wish the exhibit had improved upon the suburbs rather than suggest transforming them beyond recognition.

It was critically apparent that none of the architects participating in the exhibit actually live in the suburbs (a fact confirmed by the exhibit’s curator). To Bergdoll, the last great American architect to live and work in the burbs was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park at the turn of the 20th century. This outsider perspective on the suburbs is the exhibit’s crucial flaw and inevitably influenced the architects to propose interventions in suburbia that have all the grace of a superblock in the middle of the city grid. Despite their good intentions, their efforts at sustainability and their smart alternatives to homeownership, the architects’ wrath for the suburbs has caused them to create projects that annihilate the suburbs rather than improve them.

The exhibit begins with pages from The Buell Hypothesis, an ingenious and cheeky “screenplay” in the form of a Platonic dialogue that argues against the suburbs (if you can’t make it to the exhibit, I urge you to read the Hypothesis nonetheless). In addition to the screenplay, the Hypothesis delivers quantitative data about a handful of sites around the country that have been deeply altered by the foreclosure crisis. Five of these sites were then chosen as the locales for Foreclosed teams to rethink the design of the housing and economic structures of these suburbs. The Hypothesis suggests that the dominant symbol of single-family homeownership is ruinous: “If you change the narratives guiding suburban housing (such as that of the American Dream) and the priorities they imply—including spatial arrangements, ownership patterns, the balance between public and private interests, and the mixtures of activities and services that any town or city entails—then you begin the process of redirecting suburban sprawl.”

In order to change the narrative of the American Dream, the teams have attacked it. With the exception of Andrew Zago’s project in Rialto, California that retains a cul-de-sac structure while beefing up the housing density, these projects are aggressively anti-suburban in their form. For example, WORKac’s Nature-City replaces a neighborhood’s dominant single-family house typology with large multi-family buildings. The winding cul-de-sac roads are then met with a grid form. This disrespect for the rhythms of a suburban lifestyle is most apparent in a project by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS. With a site in inner-ring suburbs of The Oranges, New Jersey, the MOS team took on the challenge of numerous foreclosed and abandoned structures as well as crumbling streets that are difficult for the city to maintain. But the team’s response included a three-story structure that would occupy former streets—as if this would be any easier to the city to maintain, as if this intrusion in the grid would be convenient or desirable at all to current inhabitants of the town.

These fanciful responses seem most ignorant of a basic cause of the foreclosure crisis: With cheap money, we simply overbuilt the country. Even without building new homes, we are still probably a few years away from reaching a point of real demand that will drive the housing market. The problem in The Oranges isn’t that it needs new housing or buildings—The Oranges lost almost 10 percent of their population between 2000 and 2010—but rather that it needs people with jobs. Unfortunately none of Foreclosed’s projects propose ways of removing housing, an incredibly difficult but important task that has stymied communities from Detroit to Phoenix.

The best proposals, those lead by Jeanne Gang and Andrew Zago, focus on retrofitting the existing infrastructure. In Cicero, Ill., Gang’s team explored how housing needs shift over time and proposed a buy-as-you-go housing typology that responds to these changing needs. Centered around a former factory that would be reused as housing, Gang’s proposal also replaces the common form of home ownership with a limited equity collective. “It decouples the ownership of homes from that of the land beneath them; residents own their spaces, and thus have an incentive to care for them, but land and shared amenities are jointly owned by all, in a private trust.” This reduces what Gang calls the “casino effect” of the housing market.

Zago’s team took a traditional cul-de-sac and improved upon it. Seeking to relax the boundaries of the typical single-family home, the project proposes spaces that are privately owned, land banked or owned and maintained by the community. With a mix of single family homes, townhouses and multifamily homes, this project demonstrates a kind of sympathy for suburban tastes that the other projects lack.

Zago’s principal metaphor is “misregisration”—a fancy word for the printing problem that leaves blurry images—and uses this concept to blur the indoor/outdoor connections of housing and of private/public space. This is the most apt metaphor of the show. Suburban demographics, housing and lifestyles are blurry at the moment. The distinctions between suburbia and cities are as unclear as a misregistered photo. Instead the urbanist community dogmatically champions density—see Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City or Market Urbanism’s blog—in a way that is ultimately myopic. The Modernist responses to suburbia that try to erase what is there to create something anew, rather than accept what is there to advance it, would not have been acceptable if they were proposed for an inner city—why is it ok to treat the suburbs this way?

It’s important to take a long view of the suburban/urban divide and realize that the pendulum has by now swung all the way to cities and may be swinging back to the ‘burbs. Poverty, unemployment and environmental degredation are now facing cities and suburbs in equal measure. But there are good reasons to expect that the suburbs, with their ethnic diversity, will become increasingly vibrant places. By contrast, you look at places like New York where the dynamics of globalization and wealth disparity has radically changed its sense of community. The 2010 Census noted that on the prime East Side of Manhattan “about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere… Since 2000, the number of Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters swelled by more than 70 percent, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000.” This commodification of New York and its experiences is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the guilelessness of a 1st-generation strip mall.

Urbanists should look beyond the simplistic view that suburbs are, ipso facto, unsustainable. Los Angeles, essentially one of the country’s largests suburbs, also has one of the country’s lowest carbon emission rates when counting transportation and residential energy usage. More important than reducing car emissions may be to reduce the amount of energy derived from coal and increase alternative energy.

All this suggests that unlike the saying that “you are what you eat,” you may not be where you live. I would be willing to bet that the carbon footprint of the average person in any of these suburban communities is far lower than that of the architects participating in Foreclosed. The average person drives 15,000 miles per year ; that’s just three roundtrips from New York to LA in one year. I’ll be the first to admit I have flown more than 15,000 miles per year for the past two years—and could have flown more miles if I’d accepted every out-of-town invitation offered to me.

We need to stop demonizing the suburbs and start recognizing that we are all in this together. Is it better to annihilate suburbia or perfect it? Pragmatic solutions, like changing zoning to encourage density, more sustainable landscaping and agriculture, could be relatively easy to enact and would go a long way to improving the vitality of the suburbs. As CityLAB has shown with its Backyard Homes project in Los Angeles, just adding auxiliary buildings could increase density and make the suburbs more amenable to non-traditional households.

These radical visions that are so insensitive to the suburbs remind me of the Modernist public housing projects that were once foisted on inner cities. Created by well-intentioned but essentially ignorant architects and planners, those buildings made sense in theory but not in practice. They didn’t respond to the rhythms and needs of the people who would be housed there, because the architects didn’t really respect or understand the lives of poor people. MoMA should have found some architects who could love and live in the suburbs, showing us the way to make the most of suburban housing instead of wishing it didn’t exist.

Arena or Amazon: Does Seattle Know What’s Important?

Jordan Royer | Crosscut — 2012-02-20T15:41:02+00:00

Another sports arena for Seattle? Credit: Dcoetzee on Wikipedia Commons

This piece originally appeared on Crosscut.

We witnessed two blockbuster deals for Seattle and the region last week. One, the proposal to build a multi-use sports and entertainment venue in the SoDo neighborhood, captured the imagination of sports fans everywhere. The other, the announcement of Amazon’s intent to purchase there blocks in the Denny Triangle from the Clise family received nominal coverage. By any economic measure, though, the Amazon deal is much bigger for Seattle, with no public funds expended.

What does this say about us? And how does this reflect how we will negotiate with the NBA, the arena ownership group and others in the coming weeks? Will we be optimistic while at the same time maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism? And will we separate the emotional from the economic?

First, consider the Amazon deal to build 3 million square feet of office space, creating thousands of jobs, including the revenue that will create new shops and restaurants, and real estate excise taxes (REET) for the city. This is a huge long-term commitment that will continue to pay huge economic dividends far into the future. The thousands of high-paying jobs that will grow here because of this deal dwarf the economics of a new arena. As our vice president would say, “this is a big f#%&ing deal!”

In most cities this would be the biggest deal in decades. There would be press conferences, celebrations and photo ops—but not here. Not in Seattle. Here, we are under the trance of something that transcends economics. We see an opportunity to get back what was stolen from us: Our beloved Sonics.

We have been given an opportunity at redemption by a local guy from the neighborhood, Chris Hansen. Hansen graduated two years behind me at Roosevelt. I never knew him but am proud nonetheless that he is stepping forward with this plan. Hansen has made a proposal to the city to bring back the team that is both generous and audacious. The mayor and the county executive are completely right to work with him to find a way to make this happen.

I don’t doubt Hansen’s civic pride as the driving force for his proposal. Because, let’s be honest, the year-to-year economics of an NBA franchise don’t add up. The return on investment comes upon the selling of the team. Ask the former ownership group of the Sonics—the people who have their names on the symphony, opera, aquarium and zoo. These are the people who tired of the cash calls to prop up the team the last time. And ask David Stern, who said before the last players’ strike that the NBA business model doesn’t work. All one can say is: Duh, David.

Will the new Sonics play substandard basketball and ticket sales dwindle and luxury boxes remain empty? Who knows?

The job of elected officials and the community at large will be to take off the rose-tinted glasses for a while and separate the longing for a team from the economic consequences—unintended and intended. As a basketball fan, I find this exercise personally very difficult. I want the Sonics back. I too was captivated by the opportunity to bring our team back as well as the intriguing idea of an NHL team. We’ve only had three championship teams in Seattle and one of them was the 1917 Stanley Cup winning Seattle Metropolitans.

Our emotional attachment to sports explains why the blockbuster Amazon deal was pushed to the “also happened today” status last week. Because if we were analyzing these events based on the economic benefit to the city, there really is no contest—the Amazon deal is the clear winner. And this deal happened entirely between private parties. You’d think a little celebration would be in order.

Similarly, the economic benefit of an arena to the city and region for other business sectors needs to be accounted for. The seaport (Full disclosure: I work with the shipping industry) needs to be part of the cost-benefit analysis of the arena proposal. The impact of five sports teams, events and three stadiums and an exhibition hall adjacent to busy marine terminals, which move over a million containers a year, deserves to be studied seriously to make sure that our emotional and civic needs don’t detract from our more basic need to keep our economy chugging along and creating good-paying jobs.

Amazon offices in Seattle. Credit: Amazon

Beyond these questions, investors in the arena complex will eventually want some return on their investment. While we don’t know who makes up the investment group, one can guess that some will have real-estate interests in the area. Since the team itself will only cost money, other avenues of profit must be opened. Will there be opportunities for investors to build hotels, condos and restaurants? Is the new arena (likely a mall with a basketball court and hockey rink) a catalyst for more development and rising property values? Who knows?

What kind of traffic mitigation is planned for the area to keep things moving while not threatening the port’s international competitiveness? How many new parking spaces will be needed? It’s doubtful that fans from Bellevue paying $100 for a ticket will be taking the bus in.

And finally, why has Seattle Center always been rejected so out of hand? Aren’t we investing millions in traffic improvements there? Wouldn’t it by great for Lower Queen Anne businesses to be bustling again with Sonics fans? Three million square feet of office space being built by Amazon is within walking distance to the Seattle Center. The Gates Foundation is right there. We know that KeyArena is not big enough to house all the restaurants and shops that are part of the new NBA economic model. But there must be space to build what’s desired there.

I remember, as Chris Hansen does, the magic of going to the Seattle Center to watch the Sonics’ greats of Slick Watts, Gus Williams, Marvin Webster, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, Downtown Freddy Brown and all the rest. I was heartbroken when our team was stolen from us. I am cheering for a deal to happen and believe Mayor Mike McGinn is doing the right thing. My heart is right there.

My questions stem from the side of me that knows the long-term success and growth of our city and region is most dependent on the job growth and dynamism of the private economy. Sports are part of neither the private nor public economy. Sports occupies that realm where it’s easy to lose perspective and common sense.

INTERVIEW: Ellen Dunham-Jones’ “Big Design Project for the Next Generation”

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-02-19T22:38:48+00:00

Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

In anticipation of the twentieth Congress for the New Urbanism coming up in May, Next American City will run interviews with several of the event’s key speakers and participants. To kick off the series, NAC spoke with Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design and Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, the quintessential guidebook for making sprawl more sustainable. Here she discusses vital demographic shifts, different redevelopment strategies and some of the more impressive retrofitting projects going on in the U.S.

Next American City: A recent survey found that for the first time, most Americans prefer a walkable neighborhood to a large house. What do you think accounts for this shift in national opinion, and what does it mean for how we plan our suburbs in the near future?

Ellen Dunham-Jones: I think it reflects some of the changes in demographics. The reality is that the generations we have designed the suburbs for have grown up to the point where the baby boomers, who were the original babies for the suburbs and are now mostly empty nesters, no longer need minivans to cart kids around. In fact, their households, for the most part, don’t even have kids anymore. And then you have also got an enormous number of Gen Y, folks in their twenties and thirties, whose jobs are out in the suburbs. But they’re frankly looking for some nightlife. They’d like to meet people. They don’t want to just go around in cars everywhere. They are looking for those kinds of walkable neighborhoods where they can socialize.

I think that’s the same dynamic at work with a lot of the baby boomers. There are still plenty of households in suburbia that have children, but two-thirds of suburban households do not have children in them, and as people desire to get a little more social, they are finding that walking is great. They’re really looking for that life that exists in those walkable places.

NAC: In suburban communities around the country, have you found that local leadership and developers are on the same page with this shift? Are they heeding the public’s growing penchant for more urban-like places to live, or are they still caught up in the thirst for sprawl?

EDJ: In different markets you see very different dynamics happening. But overall, one thing the recession has done is it has given the municipal planners a chance to catch their breath and talk to their communities about what kind of future they really envision. Before the recession, most of the redevelopments that were trying to be more walkable were really developer-led—developers who saw the underperforming asphalt in suburbia as an opportunity to address growing markets. But zoning codes and buildings codes had not caught up with that. The recession has allowed many communities to revise their regulations and really position themselves to capture that coming demand as the economy fully recovers. But it varies: There are certain communities that are still very interested in going back to the old model of sprawl, and there are plenty of developers who do that too.

NAC: Let’s talk for a moment some of the changes in different suburban communities around the country that you’ve seen and studied. What projects stand out in your mind, and what types of receptions do they get?

EDJ: What’s interesting is there are so many different projects. [Retrofitting Suburbia co-author] June Williamson and I have been cataloging these for many years. We’ve got about 250 projects in the database right now. We categorize them according to three different overall strategies.

The first is simply re-inhabitation with more community-serving uses. There are loads of examples of dead big-box stores, or dead malls, that have been re-inhabited with libraries, schools, medical facilities [or] religious facilities, and some of them are really creative. Lots of gyms and recreation facilities going in. On the other hand, often there’s a holding pattern until the economy recovers and more investment might be possible. But they tend to really help the social sustainability of a community, and they provide that cheap space that Jane Jacobs wrote about years ago, that allows the low-profit to come in and, in many ways, to complete a suburban community that hasn’t had space for the arts or for new schools. [There are] a lot of charter schools going into these spaces, and a lot of artists and theatre groups going into old spaces. Those tend to be received very well, although they are not really fundamentally changing the physical fabric. But they’re still at least keeping the lights on, doing good things.

The second category, redevelopment, is where you tend to get the environmentally sustainable features. That’s where you see an underperforming property more or less bulldozed and urbanized—building on top of parking lots and putting in much more up-to-date green infrastructure. And those projects that stand out—places like Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, outside of Denver—have done a remarkable job of replacing a 100-acre big mall with 22 walkable blocks, lots of green buildings and public streets. It’s the downtown that Lakewood never had. There are about 15 of those projects built in the country now, and another 25 that are in various stages of development. The economy definitely slowed the progress on a lot of the big dead mall retrofit redevelopment. But there are all kinds of redevelopment. Sometimes it’s infilling office parks. In some cases it’s entire subdivisions or garden apartment complexes that have been redeveloped. In those cases there is some displacement, and those need to be handled very carefully. The extension of transit further out into the suburbs has triggered massive retrofit. In Denver, it’s been the dead mall: Eight out of the 13 malls in the Denver area have announced plans to be retrofitted.

The third category, which is really quite surprising, is re-greening. It was very common, before the Clean Water Act, for commercial properties in suburbs to be built on the wetlands. We’d drain them and put in some culverts. Now that those properties are going dead, there is an opportunity to either reconstruct the wetlands or put in parks. We’re finding that dead property is reducing property value around it, but if you put in a park or well-designed bioswales and other kinds of green infrastructure, you are increasing neighborhood property value. These projects are seen as increasing sustainability and improving community. Nobody likes to see a dead, declining property.

NAC: Among the three that you mentioned, how do you decide which approach is the best for a community? I imagine that New England suburbs would demand a different approach than, say, Phoenix.

EDJ: Yeah, there is definitely no one-size-fits-all on any of it, and I’d say in general it’s always each community that figures out what’s appropriate for a particular property. I’m based in Atlanta, and I think there are certain parts of Atlanta where greening makes great sense, and other properties where redevelopment makes sense. What June and I have been encouraging in other new urbanists—like Galina Tachieva and her book, The Sprawl Repair Manual—is more looking at metro-wide: Looking at where are all the vacant properties, the underperforming properties, and doing what we call a gray field audit so that strategic decisions can be made. Where are the ecosystems where we can reconnect and get in parks and re-green? Where are the transit and employment centers and the places where we really ought to be redeveloping? And also where should we be really trying to maintain affordable cheap space where we want to keep some re-inhabitation?

In general, I don’t think it’s so much that one region benefits more from a strategy. All three strategies are all useful within a metro, and they’re often even all useful within a single property. Northgate Mall in north Seattle is an older mall that is actually thriving. They wanted to expand, but they had to strike a deal with local environmentalists who were mad that the headwaters of a local creek had been paved over and culverted for a parking lot. So they re-greened that portion of the parking lot in order to get permission to expand. They also built new senior housing, as well as general mixed-use, around the new bioswale that they built there. All three strategies have been employed in different ways to help make the Northgate Mall function as a better neighbor and really be a community anchor.

NAC: So you have been a professor of architecture and urban design for over a decade. Have these sorts of issues become part of the curriculum? Are urban design students being taught these, or are they still learning the same things that they had been taught 5-10 years ago?

EDJ: I have actually been teaching for 25 years now. June and I have been incredibly gratified constantly meeting professors at other schools who say, “Oh yeah, I assigned your book or I had my students work on this.” I see an incredible outpour of interest. I just got back from a two-day workshop with June at the University of New Mexico, and I was astonished at the students who put in really long days and stayed even longer on a Saturday than they had to because they are really eager to learn this. The argument that June and I make—and I think it resonates well with students—is that we spent the past 50 years designing and developing suburbia, and yet all of the unintended consequences of that, and the continued resource depletion that we’re very well aware of, means that the big design project for the next generation is going to be retrofitting suburbia.

New Orleans Bids Adieu to Final FEMA Trailer; Those in Need of Cheap Housing Say Hello

Ariella Cohen — 2012-02-17T19:08:29+00:00

A sticker warning against residential use is mandatory but often missing from resold trailers. Credit: Ariella Cohen/The Lens

Just in time for Mardi Gras, the Department of Homeland Security announced this week that the last family in New Orleans living in a FEMA trailer was moved to a permanent home. Six and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, the news is certainly welcome. Yet there is a part of the story that didn’t make it into the triumphant release: The eight-foot by 32-foot travel trailers, which became synonymous with the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, are still housing disaster victims.

From a May 2011 article by The Lens, our partner in Nola:

Bought at government auctions or from entrepreneurs reselling them, the trailers are appearing in increasing number along the path of the tornados that ravaged Alabama and other parts of the South last month. Jacked up on cinderblocks above severed tree limbs and piles of trash, the trailers cut a lean white silhouette eerily familiar to anyone who spent time in the Gulf Coast region in the past five and half years.

For many Katrina survivors, the sight of the trailers triggers memories of mysterious rashes, burning eyes and chronic breathing problems linked to the formaldehyde the trailers emit. Yet in Alabama, not even a federal ban on residential use of the trailers can curb the market for these low-cost housing units.

Yep, you read that right. Even after the government banned residential use of Katrina-era FEMA trailers because of high formaldehyde levels, businesses are selling them—and finding a market in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

To understand how this sad postscript came to be, read here.

Destined to Fail: Rust Belt Cities Without Rail

Rick Brown | Rust Wire — 2012-02-17T16:15:48+00:00

Delavan Station on the Buffalo Light Rail. Credit: Matt Johnson on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on Rust Wire.

Any major American city that solely relies on streets and highways for its transportation network will fail to remain competitive and will falter economically over time. That includes cities with bus transit systems that rely on the same streets and highways.

By rail, I am including subways, commuter rail or light rail (tram, trolley and modern streetcar). I am not including BRT (bus rapid transit), because they use the same thoroughfares as traditional buses and automobiles. Even the sprawling cities of the south and west—like Dallas-Forth Worth, South Florida, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Salt Lake City—have learned that they cannot rely solely on streets and highways to efficiently operate a regional transportation network.

Sadly, too few Rust Belt cities are heeding this message. There is talk, but for the most part only talk, about adding some sort of rail service here and there, but it is hardly focused. Detroit is a perfect example of a large city that has vastly over-relied on streets and highways. Hence, it is largely sprawled out in a low-density spatial pattern that helps hinder its recovery. The hope for a 3.4-mile light rail line down Woodward Avenue recently faded as the design has now been altered to a BRT. While better than nothing, BRTs do not have the WOW factor of rail.

Other sizeable Rust Belt cities currently missing the train include Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati,** Rochester, Akron-Canton, Syracuse, Albany, Hartford, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Toledo, Dayton, Greater Lansing and Grand Rapids.

Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Credit: Sean Marshall on Flickr

Why do I think incorporating rail is so important to the long-term viability of our Rust Belt cities? Several reasons:

• A city’s transportation infrastructure must be comprehensive and multi-modal, not solely focused or over-weighted toward a single element. Should that single element fail (i.e. the I-35 bridge in the Twin Cities) the whole system is impacted.

• A multi-modal transportation approach is much more environmentally sustainable in an era of higher energy costs, aging populations, global warming and climate change.

• A multi-modal transportation approach is more affordable and approachable to the less fortunate and helps foster greater social equity within the community.

• Incorporating rail into a region’s infrastructure helps make the city more competitive nationally and globally by reducing transportation network delays, commuting times and overall congestion.
• With the exception of subways, commuter rail and light rail service are significantly less disruptive to the continuity and social fabric of the community than new highway construction.

• Incorporating rail services into a region’s transportation program encourages redevelopment and reinvestment in older neighborhoods, while also increasing densities along and near the rail corridors.

• Rail services are beneficial toward placemaking.

• Rail services does not carry the latent social stigmas and stereotypes of bus transit service.

[As an occasional bus commuter myself, I questioned the continued existence of the last bullet point in the 21st century. That was until I overheard comments during a forum whether to develop a modern streetcar or bus rapid transit corridor. Apparently, certain segments of the population continue to associate bus transit service with the poor, immigrants and the disadvantaged. While this perception is flat out wrong, it unfortunately still lingers. That makes promoting BRT a much more difficult endeavor, no matter how sleek and fancy the features.]

Personally, I am a bit miffed at the fact that cities in the south and west have been provided funding for rail transportation projects, while cities in the Rust Belt tend to be told that a BRT is their only viable (or fundable) option. That in itself gives those cities in the south and west an unfair advantage.

Fortunately, some cities in the Rust Belt have seen the light at the end of the railroad tunnel and have invested in one of the three traditional rail options. From a Michigander’s viewpoint, Chicago is the best and most obvious example. One need look no further that the choice of emphasizing rail service in Chicago to emphasizing car travel Detroit to see a clear difference in outcomes. I love both Detroit and Chicago, but all of us in Michigan need to get our individual and collective heads out of the four-wheeled cocoon. Other Rust Belt cities with rail service include Philadelphia, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland (Red Line to the airport), St. Louis and even Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis. Credit: skyscrapercity.com

So, the question remains. How can cities of the Rust Belt generate the political will and support, as well as the monies, to develop rail systems? Here are some ideas:

• Immediately incorporate rail services into your all of your planning efforts (not just transportation) and reemphasize its importance at every opportunity. This means incorporating rail at the local, regional and state levels.

• Emphasize increased densities along important transportation corridors to help justify the use of rail.

• Repeatedly bend the ears of your local, state, and national politicians.

• Coordinate with freight railroads to protect existing freight rail corridors for anticipated future passenger rail use.

• Set aside (or protect) right-of-way along rail corridors or road corridors for modern streetcars whenever an opportunity arises.

• Continuously support increased funding for mass transit in local, state and national budgets. Speak out when highway advocates attempt to underfund or defund mass transit programs.

• Emphasize the economic, environmental and societal benefits of rail versus more highways.

• Create an 30 second elevator speech about why rail service is critical to your community’s future and use the speech at every opportunity.

• Advocate for and support other communities (even your competitors) in the Rust Belt. It is high time we worked together as a unified political voice to attract projects and funding.

• Point out the inequities of funding rail services in other regions of the country, while asking areas of the Rust Belt to accept BRT instead.

• Keep the topic front and center in the media through use of web pages, newsletters, press releases and especially via social media resources.

• Work, coordinate and cooperate with all rail, mass transit, alternative transportation, environmental and social justice advocacy groups. They can bring a lot of powerful voices to the table and provide an army of support.

• When the budget allows, set aside matching monies for necessary studies, plans, corridor acquisition and construction.

• Celebrate and promote every small victory in your community and the entire Rust Belt and also learn to adapt quickly from each defeat.

• Don’t give up–keep pursuing the goal.

**This is soon to change: Cincinnati plans to break ground for a new streetcar system today.—Ed.

Food Forest

Robert Mellinger | Crosscut — 2012-02-17T00:46:01+00:00

Gathering on Beacon Hill. Credit: Friends of the Food Forest

This is an excerpt of a longer piece that originally ran in full on Crosscut.

Sandwiched between 15th Avenue South and the play fields at the southwestern edge of Jefferson Park, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, are seven acres of lonely, sloping lawn that have sat idly in the hands of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) for the better part of a century. At least until this spring, when the land that has only ever known the whirring steel of city mowers will begin a complete transformation into seven acres of edible landscape and community park space known as the Beacon Food Forest.

The end goal is an urban oasis of public food: Visitors to the corner of 15th Avenue and South Dakota Street will be greeted by a literal forest—an entire acre will feature large chestnuts and walnuts in the overstory, full-sized fruit trees like big apples and mulberries in the understory, and berry shrubs, climbing vines, herbaceous plants and vegetables closer to the ground.

Further down the path an edible arboretum full of exotic looking persimmons, mulberries, Asian pears and Chinese haws will surround a sheltered classroom for community workshops. Looking over the whole seven acres, you’ll see playgrounds and kid space full of thornless mini-edibles adjacent to community gardening plots, native plant areas, a big timber-frame gazebo and gathering space with people barbecuing, a recreational field and food as far as you can see.

The entire project will be built around the concept of permaculture — an ecological design system, philosophy and set of ethics and principles used to create perennial, self-sustaining landscapes and settlements that build ecological knowledge and skills in communities. The concept of a food forest is a core concept of permaculture design derived from wild food ecosystems, where land often becomes forest if left to its own devices. In a food forest, everything from the tree canopy to the roots is edible or useful in some way.

“If this is successful,” explains Margarett Harrison, the lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest, “it is going to set such a precedent for the city of Seattle, and for the whole Northwest.”

She may be understating it. There is no other project of Beacon Food Forest’s scale and design on public land in the United States—a forest of food, for the people, by the people.

The idea for the Beacon Food Forest first emerged in 2009 during a group project for a permaculture design course led by Jenny Pell of Permaculture Now! From early on, the group—led by Beacon Hill gardener and sculptor Glenn Herlihy—held casual meetings with the Beacon Hill community. These led to the formation of a steering committee called Friends of the Food Forest—a team initially composed of Herlihy and two others from the permaculture class, Jacquie Cramer and Daniel Johnson. In 2010, the group secured $22,000 in Neighborhood Matching Funds from the Department of Neighborhoods.

Plans for the site. Credit: Beacon Food Forest.

Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs and posted fliers. And Seattle residents responded. The first meeting, especially, drew permaculturalists and other intrigued parties from all around the city.

One afternoon the design team showed up on site and discovered the play fields inundated with the tents, pageantry, barbecues and crowds of a typical afternoon of Samoan cricket playing. The design had to be revised to accommodate their short-cut up to the fields and plans were made to interview members of the Samoan community to find out what kinds of plants they would like to have along the edge BFF shares with the fields.

More than 70 people, mostly from Beacon Hill, attended the second meeting in mid-July, where proposed designs were laid out on giant sheets paper with markers strewn about so the community could scribble their ideas and feedback directly onto the plans. A dozen elderly Chinese women participated with the help of a translator hired by Friends of the Food Forest. Some neighbors praised the idea, while others shared deep concerns over vandals, theft, and management. More than anything else, the enthusiasm to get to work was palpable.

“They wanted everything from bees, to classrooms, to gardens, to kids’ playgrounds, bikes racks, fruit trees (lots of fruit trees and berries) and open space,” explains Jenny Pell, looking simultaneously overwhelmed and full of admiration.

“As much as we are promoting permaculture,” Herlihy noted, “we have to allow other gardeners to freely express their ideas in their ways.”

To make everyone happy, the space will include more familiar urban farming features alongside the food forest: Community garden plots, collectively managed plots, orchards and edible arboretums, as well as a new concept Friends of the Food Forest are calling a “Tree-Patch”—much like a standard garden plot, but with a tree.

If anything, the food forest is a testing ground to see whether the citizens of Beacon Hill—and perhaps someday other Seattle neighborhoods—can manage their own public space in a way that benefits the entire community.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

New Orleans Rails Against Trimming Mental-Health Care

Tom Gogola | The Lens — 2012-02-16T17:24:21+00:00

The Louisiana state seal. Credit: Britt-knee on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on The Lens.

New Orleans city officials are aggressively pushing back against a “devastating” proposed $15 million cut to inpatient mental health and substance abuse services now being offered at LSU Interim Hospital.

The cuts were included in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s recent budget, and they are part of an effort to close a $251 million state budget shortfall this year. The plan includes a $34 million hit on hospitals statewide.

The proposed cuts at LSU’s operations in New Orleans include:

▪ at least 110 employees,
▪ the hospital’s twenty-bed, inpatient detox unit,
▪ nine of 38 beds in the psychiatric unit, and
▪ half of the 20 mental-health emergency room beds.

The Criminal Justice Committee of the City Council met Wednesday afternoon to talk about the cuts and their potential impacts on New Orleans’ most vulnerable populations, most of who are not criminals. But many mentally ill people end up in jail when services are slashed.

And a city in crisis “can’t go forward” unless critical services kept in place, Councilwoman Susan Guidry said.

Speaking as part of a panel addressing the committee, Municipal Court Chief Judge Paul Sens said it was already “staggering, the amount of money that is being wasted by not giving these people the services they need.”

Sens reported that over a recent 16-month period, he and his colleagues ordered 246 psychiatric evaluations for mentally ill people who came before the court.

“One hundred and sixty of those people were found to be incompetent,” he said. “Normally in that situation, they are referred to University Hospital, they stay there three days, and are cycled back into the system.”

Twenty-three of those 160, he said, “cycled back through the system 75 times.”

“This system is never going to change,” without inpatient clinical care, he said.

Paying for that care is another matter in an era of Medicaid cuts from Washington.

Dr. Roxanne Townsend, chief executive officer of LSU Interim Hospital, told the committee that the hospital has already seen its budget shrink by some $150 million since 2009, down from $955 million to $804 million.

“This is the first time we have had to touch behavioral-health services,” she said. “We do anticipate that there will be an overflow into the emergency room.”

Unfortunately, the emergency room is slated to lose four beds as well.

“These [proposed] cuts are happening to a system that has been on a road to improvement, but it is fragile,” said New Orleans Health Commissioner Dr. Karen DeSalvo.

She cited the “extremely short timeline and somewhat arbitrary nature of the cuts,” and noted that the city does not “have room to absorb these cuts,” given the various and ongoing post-traumatic disorders and social ills that continue to befall New Orleans.

The Jindal administration has maintained that it did not request or require any specific cuts to mental health or substance abuse programs at LSU Interim Hospital, a point echoed Wednesday by Dr. Tony Speier, an assistant secretary at the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

Speier defended Jindal, who he said heard the “cry for assistance for mental health services” coming out of New Orleans in 2008, and has worked with local mental-health providers to expand the service base for its citizens.

Jindal critics at the Advocates for Louisiana Public Healthcare maintain that the governor essentially raided $50 million in Medicaid money generated at LSU Interim and gave it to his Department of Health and Hospitals to shore up that department’s $489 million shortfall.

Those critics argue that Jindal has consistently tipped the scales in favor of reimbursing private Medicaid providers over public and charity hospitals such as LSU Interim.

Councilman Jon Johnson said he invited Jindal to speak at the council’s upcoming city Housing and Human Needs Committee meeting. Johnson said he’ll urge Jindal to reconsider the cuts.

This is nothing new for the state,” he said. “The state administration has always looked at health care as an area that they will go into and cut because, frankly and honestly, it is one of the areas where the state has the latitude to go in and make cuts. It should not happen… Those mental health beds that were taken out of the city of New Orleans need to be returned to the city of New Orleans!”

Fast-Changing Citizenship

David van der Leer | Lab|log — 2012-02-16T15:30:36+00:00

Europeans being European. Credit: confrontaal.org

David van deer Leer is a blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This story originally ran on the lab’s blog.
With research by Stephanie Kwai.

Citizenship can no longer be defined exclusively as rights and responsibilities related to the modern nation-state. Today, some refer to it as legal or economic status, whereas others refer to it as group, ethnic or cultural identity. For instance, I live in New York, but rarely see myself as a Dutch citizen, even though I technically am. For years, I convinced myself to identify as a European, which was frequently reinforced by my American colleagues, who often enthusiastically gave me their “Oh that is so European of you” response.

A little over ten years ago, with the expansion of the European Union and the introduction of the Euro, Euro-identifying was the zeitgeist among well-educated young Europeans. It allowed us to position ourselves as forward-looking international thinkers without identifying ourselves as global citizens, which was quite inconsistent with our social-welfare-state upbringing. En masse, we moved to Berlin, London and Paris. Not to be in Germany, England or France, but to be in; to have a life in these specific cities.

At present, I think that few of us would dispute our European-ness to the extent we did several years ago. It’s possibly a result of the current turmoil in the European Union, but I wonder if there’s a deeper reason. After almost six years in New York City and several years of intense international travel, I found that my fondness for European-ness had started to fade (well before last year’s Euro crisis). Our European zest was rooted in a time marked by writings about “global cities” (Saskia Sassen’s term), “non-places” (or “non-lieux,” coined by Marc Augé to describe transit hubs and other transitional places designed to be moved through or consumed, without leaving a trace of our engagement with them), and “flexible citizenship” (Aihwa Ong’s term for the ways modern technocrats and professionals navigate nations to select the best options for investments, work and family).

We lived with books by architects and sociologists celebrating the number of hours they spent in flight and the blankness of transportation hubs. I believe our inclination toward European-ness was strongly related to, and possibly masked by, these grand concepts that welcomed the loosening of national ties, while something arguably different was happening in the nodes that these global networks were connecting.

While the concept of citizenship shifted from nation to international region (something described as the denationalization of citizenship) during the 1990s and early 2000s, our daily experiences often moved in the opposite direction. We traveled to see cities; we moved to live in cities; we wanted to make these cities our own; and most important, we started to feel responsible for these cities. Our lives gravitated toward the metropolis, but blinded by the complex contemporary concepts, we didn’t recognize how this urban rearrangement was changing our understanding of citizenship. The people I grew up with hid (inadvertently or not) behind the veneer of their European-ness, while individuals from other corners used cosmopolitanism similarly. Both, however, never came with the same rights or responsibilities as we have come to know them today under the normative concepts of citizenship of nation and region.

Luckily, we have become increasingly self-conscious as urban dwellers and have started identifying as such more often. Looking back at my last years in Holland, I should probably admit that I secretly felt more Rotterdammer than I had ever proclaimed to have felt European, or Dutch for that matter. Without hesitation, I would put effort into making Rotterdam a better place through my work. On the contrary, I would be hard pressed to say the same about fighting for my country if asked.

These days I am at the point of daring to identify myself as a New Yorker. I love the freedom and opportunities the city provides and feel a genuine sense of responsibility to it as my own. I want to actively work to improve what I can through my projects, making me wonder if we should reposition the rights and responsibilities of citizenship more subtly (not to be mistaken as a revival of the Greek polis or Medieval city-states).

For many metropolitan areas today, city-state citizenship is a naïve goal—although I can’t help toying with the idea: New York as an independent nation? What is noteworthy are the types of rights and responsibilities that citizenship afforded in the old urban settlements, which may grant incredible insight for us today. Sassen alluded to this possibility in her book Territory, Authority, Rights, and it has been illustrated by the past year’s cultural uproar, echoed in metropolitan regions around the world. The benefits and eligibility of citizenship are becoming increasingly and effectively analyzed, questioned and altered by minority groups that find one another in the urban context and organize themselves, unafraid to speak up. I feel the 20th-century commitment to our countries of citizenship diminishing, but in its place, there’s an increasing responsibility to act within our direct communities to make our cities better.

Notes for JFK’s speech to West Berlin. Credit: Kennedy Library and the U.S. National Archives

John F. Kennedy’s historic 1963 speech in West Berlin comes to mind, where he mistakenly referred to a pastry while attempting to celebrate the freedom of the urban dweller embodied by the Berliner. In Kennedy’s use of the city, its inhabitants became the ultimate assertion of liberty with the intrinsic sense of associated responsibility, which seems to reassert its relevance today. I would not argue: “Ich bin (ein) Berliner,” but should perhaps make the leap and comfortably argue that I am a New Yorker.

Food for Thought:

▪ Is my intuition right and are we indeed becoming urban citizens again? Or better said, are we reinterpreting models of urban citizenship?

▪ Having grown up in Europe and now living in the U.S., I realize my point of view is probably rather Western. I wonder if similar shifts in the experience of citizenship were taking place during the 1990s and early 2000s in other parts of the world and to what extend the interpretation of citizenship is shifting there now?

Brooklyn’s Arena Is Coming. What’s Coming Next?

Neil deMause | The Brooklyn Bureau — 2012-02-16T13:30:29+00:00

Sunset over Atlantic Yards. Credit: Flickr user Creggor.

This is an excerpt of a piece that originally appeared in full on The Brooklyn Bureau in conjunction with City Limits.

In December 2003, developer Bruce Ratner stood in the old Brooklyn council chambers at Borough Hall and presented a dream that, he promised, would remake the borough’s future. The dream was called Atlantic Yards, and as Ratner envisioned it—and celebrity architect Frank Gehry promised to make real, accompanied by a few hastily-assembled balsa-wood models—it would deck over an old Long Island Rail Road yard to make way for housing and office towers, plus an arena to lure the New Jersey Nets to the borough. Rap superstar Jay-Z, newly anointed as a minority Nets owner, offered a brief statement as cameras flashed; “We are on the threshold of restoring Brooklyn to its rightful place on the national stage!” roared Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, shortly before tearing up while recalling his boyhood sorrow at seeing the Dodgers depart for Los Angeles.

Atlantic Yards certainly put Brooklyn on the national stage, but not in exactly the way that Markowitz envisioned it. What came next was eight years and counting of very public neighborhood strife: protests and lawsuits by residents angered at the use of tax dollars and state eminent domain powers to tear down two city blocks of buildings to benefit a private developer; accusations and counterclaims in the wake of Ratner signing a “community benefits agreement” to promise jobs and affordable housing to local groups in exchange for their endorsing the project; cameos by high-profile local opponents like actor Steve Buscemi and novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose “open letter to Frank Gehry” in Slate raised Atlantic Yards to national attention; and on and on, all documented religiously in the borough’s numerous blogs (in particular journalist Norman Oder’s voluminous Atlantic Yards Report and leading to an award-winning documentary, “Battle for Brooklyn”).

All that—aside from a few straggling lawsuits — is done now, and the Barclays Center basketball arena is now taking shape at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush, with its grand opening set for this September. (The first act: A concert by Jay-Z, to be followed by the arrival of the newly minted Brooklyn Nets.) Almost everything else about the project, though, has changed. “Miss Brooklyn,” the 500-foot office tower that was supposed to anchor the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, has been scrapped. The 6,430 units of housing—2,250 of them at “affordable” rates, though many critics have noted that most of the discounted rates would still be well out of the reach of most Brooklynites—are uncertain, with no groundbreaking set for even the first tower. Both Gehry and his designs are gone, replaced by a cheaper building that features a facade of rusted steel girders in place of the legendary architect’s glass-walled plan.

Lost in all the tabloid headlines has been a deeper question: Now that the first stage of Atlantic Yards is set to arrive, what will Brooklyn get for its near-decade of discord? What will the project—possibly the biggest single change to arrive in the borough since Robert Moses rammed the BQE through a half-dozen neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s—mean for Brooklyn residents, workers and businesses?

Click here to read the rest of the article.

A Rotating Tower of London

Matt Bevilacqua | Next American City — 2012-02-15T20:47:59+00:00

At 80 stories, the structure would teem above this low-rise high street. Credit: Dynamic Architecture

Because it’s late afternoon on a Wednesday, here we present a mesmerizing video rendering of what developers hope will be the planet’s first rotating skyscraper, slated for construction in London sometime this year.

Each floor on the 80-story tower will move independently, creating a fluid effect not unlike the background for Windows Media Player circa 2005. The firm behind the project, David Fisher’s Dynamic Architecture, seems set on eventually bringing the concept to four additional cities: Paris, New York, Moscow and Dubai (the original intended site of the prototype, which makes sense because a dancing skyscraper sounds very Dubai-esque).

Anyhow, this is worth a minute and a half of your time:

(video found via Construction Digital)

Sometimes, Less is More for Trip Planning Tools

Kurt Raschke | Greater Greater Washington — 2012-02-15T17:52:04+00:00

A bus parked at Union Station in Los Angeles. Credit: Flickr user LA Wad

This piece originally ran on Greater Greater Washington.

Matt Johnson argues that transit trip planning tools should show riders a wider range of options, illustrating how the schedules of connecting services (like bus and rail) mesh. That’s often true, but for for a transit system with high-frequency routes, the best way to improve the usability of transit may be to show fewer times, not more.

If a person is traveling between two points that are served by a high-frequency grid of routes, then what does it matter when they are leaving? When you provide a rider with a rigid itinerary—“here’s how to get there if you leave at exactly 5:17pm”—you give them the impression that if their departure time changes, then they have to re-plan their entire trip. With high-frequency routes, that simply isn’t the case.

If a rider can take the trip entirely using high-frequency routes, doesn’t it seem so much more liberating to tell the rider to “show up any time and arrive within 45 minutes”?

Simplifying directions like this helps riders internalize the route network and encourages spontaneity. Instead of having the sense that every transit trip starts with a visit to Google Transit, riders gain the sense that they can travel whenever they want.

Jarrett Walker emphasized the value of grids, and of high-frequency transit services, during his talk in Washington, D.C. last week. “Frequency is freedom,” he says. A regular grid of frequent services makes it easier to get around without having to consult an online trip planner before every trip, though many riders still rely on Google Transit and local trip planners to figure out how to get around.

In fact, the worst thing a trip planner can do is recommend that a rider take an infrequent, irregular service just because it happens to be there when the rider is starting their trip. A great example of this is the Route 305 bus in Los Angeles; as Walker explains, it’s a low-frequency service which runs through a high-frequency grid:

That means that the 305 is the fastest path between two points on the line only if it happens to be coming soon. If you just miss one, there’s another way to get there faster, via the much more frequent lines that flow north-south and east-west across this entire area.

Why should a trip planner ever recommend that a rider take a bus like the Route 305? Doesn’t it make more sense to show them to how to use the high-frequency grid to their advantage?

Our hapless, misdirected rider will doggedly wait for that infrequent route to come along, because it’s what their itinerary lists. But if they’d received an itinerary which used the high-frequency grid, they’d be on their way a lot sooner.

Of course, even in cities with the most comprehensive high-frequency grids, some trips require going outside the grid. Then, there may be no choice but to ask the prospective rider when they’re traveling. But even in those cases, the trip planner’s itinerary should still include information on the frequency of the services being used.

Simply put, out in the real world, things happen. A rider might get to the bus stop or train station 10 minutes or even 30 minutes after they’d intended, so doesn’t it make sense to tell them up front how long they’ll have to wait if they miss the planned trip?

NJ Tries Turning Foreclosed Homes into Affordable Housing

Colleen O'Dea | NJ Spotlight — 2012-02-15T16:38:42+00:00

Credit: Taber Andrew Bain on Flickr

This piece originally appeared on NJ Spotlight.

Chaos or crisis: Either word (or both) will do to when describing New Jersey’s affordable housing situation and its residential real estate market. Lawmakers on Tuesday launched a new effort to address both problems, providing low-cost housing and dealing with the flood of foreclosures at the same time.

The New Jersey Residential Foreclosure Transformation Act(S1566/A2168) seeks to create a new state agency that would buy up foreclosed properties and turn some of them into affordable units.

“Not only will it provide more affordable housing, but it will reduce the number of boarded-up houses that drag down property values, build up neighborhoods, and boost the economy,” said state Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union), cosponsor of the bill in the Senate. “It’s positive in so many ways.”

The bill would create an agency within the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency to purchase and deed-restrict foreclosed properties to be used as affordable housing.

Lesniak said that more than $500 million is available from the State Affordable Housing Trust Fund, federal dollars and money from the recent foreclosure settlement. The agency also could take advantage of the bonding capabilities of the HMFA.

The bill, said Lesniak, has the potential to turn 10,000 foreclosed properties into affordable housing. He expects the measure to create new “workforce housing” for teachers, firefighters and middle-class families.

State Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), the other cosponsor of the bill in the Senate, called it a “novel approach” to solving multiple problems “without contributing to overdevelopment and sprawl.”

A large supply of properties is ready to be tapped.

“There are tens of thousands of vacant foreclosed homes in New Jersey, with many more being added every day,” said Lesniak. “They exist in every municipality in the state.”

The website RealtyTrac lists 35,456 New Jersey properties in some stage of foreclosure, including pre-foreclosure, auction and bank ownership.

Jeffrey Otteau, president of Otteau Valuations Group, put that number much higher, at 150,000.

Otteau said the bill would go far beyond creating more affordable housing and reducing vacancies. It would also help stabilize the entire housing market and boost consumer confidence, which could lead to more home sales and the economic activity associated with them, including the purchase of furniture, appliances, carpeting and other items.

The bill is slated for its first hearing in Trenton on Thursday before the Senate Economic Growth Committee.

The bill has support from a broad coalition that includes New Jersey municipalities, realtors, builders and bankers.

“This legislation helps both homeowners and mortgage holders and puts into place a program that will stabilize housing prices, preserve residents’ quality of life and address the state’s dearth of affordable housing,” said Dominick Paragano, president of the New Jersey Builders Association.

Michael Affuso, senior vice president and director of government relations with the New Jersey Bankers Association, said the bill should also help address the public safety concerns surrounding vacant properties. Their number is expected to rise precipitously at some point, when the largest mortgage lenders, essentially stopped by a December 2010 state Supreme Court order, start filing foreclosure actions again.

“The existing process to deal with abandoned properties in foreclosure will be strained to its limits,” Affuso said.

The concept also has the backing of affordable housing advocates, though they do not support a provision that would give communities a two-for-one bonus against their state Mount Laurel obligations for transitioning foreclosed homes into low-income units.

“They’re just giving away the store if they do that,” said Kevin Walsh, associate director of the Cherry Hill-based Fair Share Housing Center, who called the bill “overall, a good piece of legislation.” He added, “A person can’t live in a bonus, they can live in a house. At minimum, they should cap that.”

Lesniak’s response to the suggestion of a cap on the two-for-one affordable housing credit: “Absolutely not.”

This is not the first time Lesniak has declined to revise a bill to gain the favor of the center.

Two years ago, he sponsored a bill that would have replaced the then-Council on Affordable Housing quotas with a modified system that Walsh called inadequate. Gov. Chris Christie didn’t like the bill either, but for other reasons, and vetoed it. Lesniak has abandoned that fight, at least temporarily.

Regardless of the political give and take, few would deny that the state has a critical need for affordable units. The 2011 Out of Reach report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that almost 6 in 10 renters could not afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the state. Before it was eliminated, COAH estimated 138,000 low- and moderate-income units were needed in New Jersey through last year and another 104,000 would be required through 2018 to ensure all residents an affordable place to live.

According to the DCA, about 135,000 new and refurbished affordable housing units have been approved statewide, with about 75,000 completed as of March 1, 2011. As of February 3, municipalities reported $268 million in unspent Affordable Housing Trust Fund balances.

The New Jersey League of Municipalities supports Lesniak’s bill or other measures to give officials “clear guidance on affordable housing policy” and help them in allocating those housing funds.

“Municipalities have been hesitant to expend dollars without certainty that any units that result from an expenditure will count towards their respective housing obligations,” said Michael Cerra, senior legislative analyst with the league. “S-1566 provides an incentive and certainty for local governments to act, and creates a classic win-win scenario for families in need of affordable housing.”

Some of the turmoil in state’s affordable housing arena can be traced to COAH’s recent history, which is a case study in chaos.

COAH was established in 1985 to ensure that cities and towns in New Jersey lived up to the first Mount Laurel decision, which determined that towns have a constitutional obligation to ensure that residents have affordable places to live.

Several years ago COAH decided to abandon its much-maligned low- and moderate-income housing quotas, which were calculated according to a complex formula, opting instead for a system that tied affordable housing to future growth.

The appellate court overturned the new rules and told COAH to go back to its old formula. The state Supreme Court stayed that ruling in January 2011 but has yet to hear the case.

To complicate things, COAH itself no longer exists, at least not for the moment. Last June, Christie filed a reorganization plan abolishing COAH and transferring its duties to the state Department of Community Affairs.

The Fair Share Housing Center contested that plan, saying Christie “unlawfully consolidated power by transferring the powers of an independent agency over which the governor previously had no direct authority to a department led by one of his cabinet members,” according to Walsh.

The appellate division stayed the implementation of rules that would have implemented the plan. Attorneys for Fair Share and the state are scheduled to argue the matter before the judges in Trenton today.