At Strong Towns, we’re part of a growing chorus, spanning across disciplines, bearing a message that communities making forward-thinking, high-return public investments will be positioned more strongly for the future. The mechanisms of growth we’ve outlined at Strong Towns are each unsustainable in the long run, as is much of the development they have enabled us to produce.

Form follows function.

While I am always reluctant to quote secondary online content, I would be remiss to skip the following Wikipedia commentary about the origins of this phrase, which architect Louis Sullivan (evidently) made famous:

Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th Century Chicago at the very moment when technology, taste and economic forces converged violently and made it necessary to drop the established styles of the past. If the shape of the building wasn’t going to be chosen out of the old pattern book something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. It was “form follows function,” as opposed to “form follows precedent.”

Sound familiar? We are together part of a dialogue about how to harness all the interrelated processes that cities accomplish, in ways that secure tandem environmental and fiscal sustainability. We don’t have a choice. Truly functional places in the future will house spaces that perform at much higher rates of return than what we currently have. They will produce energy as well and use less of it. They will perform more than one role at once. Our definition of function is shifting rapidly, hence will form.

On that much we all agree. The dialogue gets more colorful at finer grain, however. An aesthetic approach, for example, prioritizes fostering of attractive places that will draw talent (especially talented younger people), cultural vitality, private investment and job creation. An operating approach, for lack of a better term, establishes higher-amenity areas based on criteria ranging from proximity to transit, existing infrastructure, or job concentrations. More broadly, a regional approach emphasizes investment in connecting productive nodes (of employment, housing, et cetera) into a network. Urban/suburban rhetoric doesn’t fit in any of these approaches. They overlap. One size won’t fit all.

What is common among the successful cities of the future, and the neighborhoods and submarkets that bind them together, is functionality. Effective networks of people and institutions, vital job markets, courageous civic leadership are essential for transition to a new form. But each is undermined by the burdens of unproductive land use and infrastructure providing low return on investment.

The key function of modern cities is to harness the talents and skills of its people. The form that follows is a city of intentional and high-return infrastructure and design.

The transition is noticeable. Residential building permit data for Minneapolis illustrate the fundamental reversal from market emphasis on single-family unit construction (maroon) to multi-family unit construction (blue), starting in 1996. Denser living will never be for everyone, but it seems to be increasingly attractive to many.

Human networks are the premise of urban economies. By providing a physical format for exchange of ideas, development of trusting relationships, communication about reputation and quality of products and services, cities reduce the costs associated with trade (as well as training and education or cultural events, for example). As Bob Weissbourd presents in his collaborative “Dynamic Neighborhoods,” concentrations of people and investment follow the development of stable, vibrant networks.

The majority of population, intellectual assets and economic activity located in U.S. metro areas continues to grow. We have to wonder: How can cities’ physical form be encouraged to fill in, to maximize the product of this combination of ideas and relationships? Public and private actors share a compulsion to intensify what fruits emerge from urban economies.

Ed Glaeser has asserted that decisions falter when based on “the all-too-common error of confusing a city, which is really a mass of connected humanity, with its structures.” With increasing market demand for structures that increase human connectedness, Glaeser’s bifurcation loses some of its value. As the housing crash reminded us, the development pattern of core cities isn’t a mistake – it’s an eclectic but durable form that has withstood the stresses of growth and prosperity as well as economic crash. Cities, and the neighborhoods that comprise them, are strongest when most flexible. Denser land use makes more efficient use of infrastructure for transport, housing, training and education, leaving more public resources to invest in people, who are the most essential asset in any city.

In Glaeser’s words, a city is a mass of connected humanity. True. But the degree to which that humanity is connected in a city is influenced by how the city’s structures allow people to interact. The growing momentum of higher-density building will provide basis for experimentation, and for us to better understand the relationship of structures, land use, innovation and productivity.

For Donjek, it’s been a vivid and productive road in 2011. I hope you’ll indulge my short list of key developments.

In February, after an intense competition against three other teams, Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition judges awarded victory to the Donjek team, led by Kennedy Violich Architecture and the Tom Leader Studio. My role on the team focused on developing a narrative for the future of the Mississippi River as connector of North and Northeast Minneapolis, on the future of industrial uses currently on the river, and historical research of land uses dating to 1860. Read my February post, and visit what has now become the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Initiative.

Following an application and interview process, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton appointed me in March to represent Saint Paul on the Metropolitan Council. The Council operates the region’s expanding transit system (mainly bus, light rail and commuter rail) and its wastewater treatment system. The Council also provides affordable housing, guides local planning with an overarching regional framework, and funds priorities like brownfield remediation, transit oriented development, and affordable housing. Its regional scale allows the Council to undertake these core services in a cost-effective and aligned way, and I am invested in advancing its work.

In April, Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak presented the Minneapolis Saint Paul Metropolitan Business Plan to an audience of policy makers and thinkers at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. As project manager, lead researcher and writer of the plan, I was gratified by their charismatic joint presentation of a document that links together a panoply of interrelated efforts currently underway in the region. See the final business plan and executive summary, or see the mayors’ comments and other content at the Brookings web page.

In September, I completed work on an extensive reuse study of the historic Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota, along with team lead Stark Preservation and collaborators Claybaugh Preservation Architecture and Peter Musty LLC. The project represented a demonstration of how the value of land can evolve. The Mississippi River-front location was attractive for the manufacturer for one set of reasons in 1870; today, the location and historic portions of the building derive value in a very different marketplace, driven by demand for access to a rehabilitated river and its views. Read my earlier post with more detail about the reuse study.

Toward the end of the year, I presented findings of a Donjek economic impact study of a prospective linear park in downtown Minneapolis, linking the downtown employment base, light rail and bus transit, the Minneapolis Central Library, and the Mississippi River, via underutilized spaces ripe for redevelopment with both open space and structures. Stay tuned for more detail about the study and its findings; in the meantime, take a look at the 34-story Nicollet Residence development now approved to proceed at the southern boundary of this space.

It’s December 30, and time to unfold the map leading into 2012. I wish you good luck and look forward to working together.

Over the last few months, I’ve been partnering with a client to examine potential redevelopment sites along a planned rail transit corridor. As I described in this previous post, some property owners and users are in search of sites that are not only near station areas and other nearby assets, but clearly and conveniently connected.

In my home market in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region, the same impulse can be observed. Take, for example, the 34-story residential redevelopment recently approved by the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which is adjacent to a light rail transit platform at the Nicollet Mall station, next to the prospective Gateway Park, and reachable (both by pedestrian and transit mall and skyway) from all work, civic and entertainment locations in the central business district.

The Minneapolis example, however, made for easy site selection – its value is obvious. As customer preferences shift and transportation (both in mode and in cost) evolves, new opportunities will arise to identify and redevelop less evident, but very high-potential sites. Welcome to the future.

Related Articles:

• The Business Case: Connect to Your Surroundings
• Urban Economies: Going With the Flow
• Charles Landry: City Making in Minneapolis Saint Paul

Connections bring foot traffic, and foot traffic underlies prosperous places. We depend on and value connections in different ways than in the past. Census data released this year confirms falling commuting by car and rising use of transit, bike commuting, and walking. America’s two largest demographic groups – Baby Boomers and the “Millennials” – are aligned in driving this trend.

Stronger links between buildings and their surroundings have long been values of urban designers. Increasingly, because these links present a business case by reducing vacancy and increasing lease rates, commercial tenants, property managers and owners are focusing on connections to neighboring property.

Connections nearly always involve interaction with both private and public sectors. Consider these examples:

• Average space per employee has fallen from 500-700 square feet to 200 today, and is still dropping. Accommodating the needs of more employees, and maximizing spillover benefits, involves the public and private sectors, and can distinguish property owners and increase demand and values.
• In 2011, transit in the region will move over 80 million passengers, including 69% who choose transit instead of their cars. In Minneapolis, the number of bicycle commuters increased by 27% from 2007-10. Property owners and managers prepared to engage these audiences will link to a growing base of consumers arriving by bicycle and foot.

Donjek has demonstrated expertise in real estate finance, public/private sector negotiations, and planning to help owners, managers and other users of urban real estate increase the function and desirability of property. More specifically – we can work with you to:

• Serve as your “R&D” function to take advantage of ways to attract feet
• Enhance visibility, increase safety, and boost foot traffic
• Create value by taking advantage of proximity to nearby large employers or institutions
• Produce real-time analysis of TIF cash flow of any district that may contain your property
• Monitor the development process of nearby parcels in transition, for impacts on your transportation, zoning, or other assets
• Create communication about these initiatives in a way that sets you apart.

The preferences of businesses and their customers are evolving. Tenants and their customers are leading the way, and you have an opportunity to attract and retain them with innovative strategies that reflect an evolving set of demands.

Related Articles:

• Mobility Understood Best at Metro Scale
• Donjek Project: TOD Metrics/Picturing Value in Walkable Neighborhoods
• The Big Sort: A Small Summary

That’s why I take issue with an interpretation recently put forth by respected author and speaker, Richard Florida, in a pair of short posts (“America the Stuck” and “The Geography of Stuck“). He distills his interpretation into a claim that “America can be divided into two distinct classes, the stuck and the mobile.” These “classes,” in his view, are not only sorting themselves geographically, but by state: Residents of coastal states are mobile, others are not.

In my view, the Census data really don’t support this narrative. As Florida and others have documented, America’s economic and cultural landscape is increasingly metropolitan. Those metro areas with the highest proportion of residents born in another state are found primarily in states that Florida highlights as “mobile”:

These data don’t support the “two class” thesis for two reasons. First, while clearly in-migration is good for regions in forms including new ideas, cultural vitality and diverse labor pools, the specific kind of mobility Florida is calling out doesn’t appear to correlate with economic strength. The right column in the table shows each region’s rank (out of 366) in income growth from 2009-10; these aren’t the nation’s star performers. Second, as the map below illustrates (click on it for a larger image or see the source brief here), mobility continues to occur within states, from rural or micropolitan regions to larger metros and among metros. This is occurring in the states he calls mobile, and in many of the states he deems “stuck.” As it turns out, neither label accurately reflects recent trends.

There are structural shifts underway, and Florida has named some aspects of these in recent years. This most recent chapter strikes me as a departure from his record of nuanced analysis. Some American communities are clearly less mobile than others, but these dynamics haven’t developed in clean ways that follow state boundaries in an either/or fashion. They’ve developed by region, subregion, and neighborhood – and that’s where our focus belongs.

Related Articles:

• Productivity and Design Merge in the Gated City
• Urban Economies: Going with the Flow
• Minneapolis Saint Paul Metro Business Plan (and Executive Summary)

Visual rendering of a revitalized Hudson Manufacturing Building. Image: Stark Preservation Planning and Peter Musty.

I’m currently in the process of concluding work with a historic reuse team focused on next steps for the H.D. Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota. The City-owned Hudson Building is of substantial size, and offers open floor plans and high ceilings – a blank, solid canvas. The Hudson was featured as a “hot property” recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

From a finance perspective, the chief hurdle for historic reuse is reconciling long-term lease rates or purchase prices, with a rehabilitation investment that may include remediation, demolition, site costs, and a collection of items that can petrify typical investors: HVAC, roofs, stormwater management, vertical circulation, accessibility improvements. My role on the team, led by Will Stark of Stark Preservation Planning, has been to:

• Evaluate and quantify the long-term financial gap between the value of the building’s net income and its required investment
• Identify funding sources and mechanisms that private and public parties could employ to make reuse of the building feasible in a financial sense
• Inform scenarios for the City’s next steps with the building, with financial analysis. Cost, speed, and scale of reuse each impact the financial outlook for its future
• Narrate findings related to the downtown marketplace and project finance, to citizens, the City Council, and other stakeholders.

Historic structures offer uncommon attributes for the very reason that their construction occurred in a different marketplace. In the late 1800s when the Hudson Company put up the Hastings facility, materials including stone and lumber were available at lower real cost than today. The proximity of the building to the Mississippi River distinguishes the building regionally, in part because regulations have evolved to protect the river from development impacts. The reuse or demolition of the structure will, either way, continue to influence the health of downtown Hastings.

Related Articles:

• Victory in the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition!
• Layers of Stone, Layers of Finance at Historic Fort Snelling
• St. Paul’s Rice Park: Part Catalyst, Part Message

In the meantime, I'm preparing for two events where I will present as a panelist. On October 5, I will be in Washington, D.C. to participate in an intensive one-day conference on economic vitality, coordinated by the Living Cities Integration Initiative. I will be joining Tracey Nichols, Director of Economic Development, City of Cleveland; Olga Stella, Vice President of Business Development for the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation; Leslie Anderson, Executive Director of New Jersey Redevelopment; and Paul Graziano, Commissioner of Housing & Community Development for the City of Baltimore.

The following week, I look forward to walking down the street to the University of Minnesota's Saint Paul campus on October 12 for the 27th Annual Conference on Policy Analysis. The conference topic is this year focused on defining the public good and the role of government in the state; I will participate in a panel with Caren Dewar, Executive Director, Urban Land Institute-Minnesota; Ann Mulholland, Vice President with The Saint Paul Foundation; and Mark Vander Schaaf, Director of Community Planning and Development at the Metropolitan Council.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to present in each of these forums; even more, anticipating all that my colleagues will have to say on the issues of urban economics and policy that form the core of my work.

Last: While I'm unable to attend (and post from) the Inner City Economic Summit to be held by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City in Chicago on October 3-4, I hope readers present there will share a summary for the rest of our collective benefit.

Amen.

The policy arena is stocked with arguments over which strategy or which sector provides the most efficient return for job creation (for a sample, search "jobs per dollar" on Google – although, as this commentary indicates, your results will be different than mine).

This dialogue, however, does not usually consider the spatial issues involved. How many jobs, and of what type, are created across a city or region? Employers rely on a workforce that is trained and educated, able to reach the workplace reliably, and able to transport a product – by rail, by digital means, or other mode of movement. Employers and the economies of which they are part also rely on relationships that form networks around industries, innovations, or particular skill areas. Success or failure in each of these areas is all about how our cities are designed and how intensely infrastructure is used.

It's relatively simple to evaluate job creation initiatives if direct public expenditures and jobs ("full time equivalents") are the only terms examined. As I suggested a few months ago, Steven Johnson and Ed Glaeser illustrate this would miss a substantial part of the essence of why and where jobs are created. The last few days' eruption of interest in Avent's message indicates we're headed for a more nuanced, comprehensive view of how urban design and productivity are linked. That's a very good thing.

*Postscript: Thanks to Ryan Avent for including this short post in his list of commentary pieces on the Gated City. See the others here.

Given that a primary filter of mine is that of placemaking, I wondered what this shared musical experience means for our work in urban design and redevelopment. Current Donjek projects include an initiative on urban open space, focused on building links between residents and workers to a major riverway and to the green space itself. An (implicit) goal is connecting people to each other using open space as the medium, to create a distinct experience. Another current engagement relates to exploring reuse of a historic industrial building; a substantial element of the community’s preservation interest is to use the structure to connect people today to yesterday’s residents and the heritage of the place. In each case, physical design acts as a language that allows us to relate to others.

Music and other performances can trigger a powerful connection among us. Our places can become more vital and durable if we build and preserve them with connection in mind. 

This week, I leave for travel that will include time spent with family in Holland, and I’m looking forward to exploring another tradition’s approach to city building and public finance. A few examples I’ve touched in here at the Cents of Place include:

• Understanding the value created both by access to transportation, and by a mixing of real estate asset types, remains a driver in Donjek projects. The Dutch connection is diluted in this piece, but I cited evidence from the Lowlands suggesting the premium for commercial real estate located near rail stations exceeds 10%.
• Highlighting the historical connection of urban success stories and concerted public investment, I cited the model of Amsterdam as it emerged from the Middle Ages in reviewing Joel Kotkin’s 2006 book, “The City, a Global History.”
• As a past adjunct instructor of economics, I could not be expected to forego some consideration of the fascinating period of Dutch history that centered on the mania of the tulip bulb. Similarly, I could not be expected to forego the comparison to the housing bubble, which I did in 2008.
• Given the intensive construction underway outside the Donjek office, which will lead to easy access to nearby light rail transit, I’ve been reminded of the promising product of Dutch firm, the Ooms Avenhorn Group. Using street infrastructure for more than multimodal transportation, the geothermal systems collect and store warm and cool water beneath road surfaces for climate control in nearby buildings.

This is a small, unscientific sample of ideas. There are a great many who have both a more authoritative and more comprehensive perspective on Dutch planning and development. Call me a student. With luck, I will bring home more ideas for applying the most effective Dutch practices in American central cities.

Photo: Courtesy Flickr/Tashenka

Waterways remained critical as arteries to transport commodities and other inputs for trade and commerce; they also provided the doorway through which most entered frontier towns like my place, St. Paul. Over time, comparative pricing and relationships to rivers changed – railroads, then cars and trucks, airplanes, and digital thoroughfares provided radically cheaper modes of overland movement. 

Ports facilitate accumulation of value through transfer of material from one transportation mode to another. In the past, the fact that river ports fronted riverways was only significant in that barge transportation was cost-effective. As freight rail (for long runs) and trucks (for shorter runs) compete with river navigation, many river ports have declined. Minneapolis' Upper Harbor Terminal, for example, has managed falling volumes in recent years, the region's barge traffic dominated by the St. Paul (downriver) harbor.

Today, the relationships of "prices" continue to shift. In particular, the pressure to attract and retain talent is familiar to American mayors and business operators across the country.  In addition to creating recreation amenities, urban riverfronts also create collective open space that draws the eye through the city landscape. When perceived as safe and clean, access to river frontages creates substantial property value and economic potential. In addition to moving things in and out, the role of some riverfronts has expanded to focus on use as open space magnets that  make places more distinct and attractive. 

Our river, the Mississippi, formed and shapes both Minneapolis and St. Paul in important ways. Earlier this year, a team to which I served as regional advisor won the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition, now evolved into the Minneapolis Riverfront Development Initiative. I've been engaged for several months managing a project focused on strengthening the connection of downtown Minneapolis to the Mississippi via the Gateway. Comparable efforts have been underway in St. Paul over the last twenty years, including the Great River Park master plan developed in the last year. This subject, conveniently, presents an opportunity for field work: I'm looking forward to August visits to Roman river towns Maastricht, Ghent, and London.

Open space and riverfronts cannot by themselves replace key economic functions such as port activities. Still, as larger forces transform cities, the prominence and role of rivers continue to be key in distinguishing prosperous regions.

Photo courtesy of pmarkham/Flickr.

True to form, Landy offered a compelling and global perspective on what differentiates successful cities and metropolitan areas from those in decline. Each region's approach is key: Is the dominant strategy an "urban engineering paradigm," or "creative city making"? Presented directly to us in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region, Landry asked: Is this a city of projects, or is the project the city?

Most of the audience, I believe, share Landry's underlying confidence that urbanization can and ought to bring about a greener, more productive, healthier and happier world. In that vein, he offered five threads found in great cities. In each case, I've offered editorial comments:

• Anchorage: What is a region's gravity, which attracts people and ideas? The importance of robust networks of people and activity – industry clusters – can't be understated. It's true for people involved in chemistry, and for people involved in music (and for those involved in both at the same time!). See the Metropolitan Business Plan for more.
• Possibility: What's the potential for the place? Youth development, education, and workforce development (for the young and mature) are the critical areas of possibility for a place. No urban region can thrive without investing in the young, and their potential to generate new ideas.
• Connection and Reconnection: Beyond the need for physical connections to give community members and workers access to their most significant destinations (whether work, school, civic, religious), successful regions maintain strong bonds well beyond their borders. High rates of immigration and import/export activity, and the ability to communicate a region's message in the global arena are two examples of such ties.
• Learning: To me, Landry's citation of the importance of learning extends beyond the realm of education, which (as I suggested above) is a cornerstone for effective regions. Learning needs also to include the degree to which governance is flexible and intelligent enough to incorporate emerging trends and past experience, in planning for the future.
• Inspiration: Establishing shared values and shared identity are crucial, so that a region can articulate what is its inspiration. Why are we here? What do we have to communicate to the world? What is our contribution to the cultural, economic and political life that surrounds and includes us? 

Landry's framework of these five threads offered a provoking platform to consider how regions like Minneapolis Saint Paul move forward. Unfortunately, the speaker's efforts to speak in detail about the Central Corridor LRT line (and even specific sites along it) were neither specific nor reflective of context. He also appeared unprepared to discuss how manufacturing and other industry play a role as economic engines, job providers or as gateways for workers to earn good wages.

As Ed Glaeser argues in the Triumph of the City, places are powered by people, not buildings. Landry's presentation was worthwhile as a full (if high-altitude) depiction of how "creative city making," focused on harnessing talent, can craft durable regions in the 21st century.

From here forward, the Cents of Place blog will continue to focus on the issues in which you and I share an interest: Public finance, redevelopment, land use, urban economics, policy. Posts will, however, be shorter and more frequent than has been typical over the last four years. 

For today, I am pleased to post the final Minneapolis Saint Paul Metropolitan Business Plan, its executive summary, and a companion framing piece produced by our region's partners at the Brookings Institution. These documents will, I hope, remain in development in the near future, to reflect the increasing momentum and consensus around the importance of a region-scale agenda for innovation, human capital, education and workforce, spatial efficiency, key industry clusters and governance. Like other metropolitan economies, ours depends on intential approaches to each.

Thanks for continuing to read the Cents of Place blog – I hope you will find it valuable in this new format.

We’re drawn to the challenge of remaking places that are more durable, more competitive, and more attractive for people who live there. If we systematically rethink street width, the basis of land and property tax, and the high-risk design we’ve adopted for many American communities, we’ll have more resources to invest in our real assets – people and their skills. Our interest at Strong Towns is to change physical layout as a way to restore order to our financial house, and to reduce the risk we bear to national and global trends such as climate and energy instability.

Tight budgets on the state and federal level – surely promising to get tighter still, as our previous post described – are helping focus attention on more deliberate and intense use of existing infrastructure. Whether we’re talking about the High Line, stormwater management at the Gophers football stadium, or the Complete Streets discussion, policy is increasingly structured around the search for multiuse infrastructure. In each case, literally doing more with less translates to more a productive system.

And while it may be impolitic in some quarters to say so, together we represent another key form of infrastructure: Developers and traders of ideas. Innovators in every sector are connected through “liquid networks,” says entrepreneur and author Steven Johnson, in his new book “Where Good Ideas Come From.” Approaching innovation from a historical perspective, drawing on brain research and sociological literature, Johnson makes a case that won’t surprise all the people who make up the Strong Towns forum: How we design places and use land directly impacts how innovative is the activity taking place within it.

Building design can form rich environments that encourage ferment and exchange of ideas, Johnson notes. Built in 1943 as a temporary structure, Building 20 at MIT housed faculty and student research in an open plan easily reconfigured for new projects. Over fifty years of adaptation, Building 20 produced significant research across fields including IT, linguistics and acoustics.

Inspired by models like Building 20, Microsoft in 2007 built a headquarters for its research division designed explicitly to cross pollinate employees’ ideas. Apparently also inspired by its generic moniker, Microsoft named their facility Building 99. “Building 99 – like Building 20 before it – is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw,” writes Johnson. “It is designed to leak.” Walls feature surfaces for writing and erasing. Work spaces are all modular and can be built and rebuilt as the project or day inspires. Research confirms that active horizontal, diverse social networks are multiple times more innovative than uniform, vertical ones. Leaking is valuable.

Cities do best to leak too. That’s one of the themes revisited through economic geographer Edward Glaeser’s “Triumph of the City,” released early this year. Glaeser documents the rise of single-industry marketplaces – whose collapse is now epitomized by conditions in Detroit – which, through sheer dominance, eroded the quality of information spillover among workers. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press by combining use of winemaking tools from his native Rhineland, his metallurgy background, and existing Chinese printing methods. Dialogue led to tinkering, tinkering led to more dialogue, and innovation emerged. On a modern scale, the same process takes place every day, and it’s much more likely to take place in physical environments that connect people in consistently unexpected ways – cities.

Cities themselves aren’t the source of innovation, and Glaeser warns of the error of “confusing a city, which is really a mass of connected humanity, with its structures.” Still, our structures and our physical layout can serve to intensify idea exchange, or inhibit it. A compelling public and private interest exists to support the leakiest land use and urban design we can devise.

Prospective internship projects will include work on Donjek engagements, as well as initiatives related to the nonprofit Strong Towns and the Metropolitan Council. A sample of past Donjek projects is available here, and content relating to past projects is available through the Donjek Projects category of this blog.

Interested applicants may learn more online at the Donjek website (www.donjek.com), at the company’s Cents of Place blog (www.donjek.typepad.com) and on Twitter (@commers). Please submit a one-page cover letter, resume and short writing sample by Friday, April 29 to Jon Commers, Donjek, Inc., 2500 University Avenue West, Suite E2, St. Paul, MN, 55108. Or, email: internship@donjek.com.    

This morning, the competition's supporters and sponsors (including the Walker Art Center, the University of Minnesota's College of Design, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, the Minneapolis Parks Foundation, and others) gathered on Nicollet Island to announce that our team is the winner of the competition!

The process, inside our team, unfolded like a charette, only on a broader and deeper scale than I’ve seen before. Since early November, this team pulled together volumes to inform a thorough approach to a complicated river corridor. There are many meeting points in the project area that each represent opportunities: Where North meets Northeast, river meets shores, trails meet bridge heads, industrial meets other land uses, central business district meets neighborhoods. Hydrology, bridge design, area culture and history (indigenous, pioneer and more recent), land use economics, institutions, equity of access to parks – these topics and many others received focused, research-driven attention. Led by Tom Leader, and Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich of KVA, this team produced an innovative approach to tie these issues all together in physical space.

It's a privelege to be a member of this team. I've also marveled at the compelling mix of collaborators who made this possible, from the sponsors to standout project manager Mary DeLaittre. That we will together have the opportunity to continue working, focused on a particular site to be determined on the Upper River in Minneapolis, promises to be a professional highlight.

See the final proposal here.

I have served as the project manager of Minneapolis Saint Paul's role in this work (see a previous piece about the work), and continue to find the idea of business planning to be an effective way to analyze strengths and weaknesses in those elements that differentiate those regions that thrive.

The draft plan explores how fresh, disruptive ideas are developed, passed through networks, cross-applied and used to create businesses and jobs. It considers to what degree all students – young and older – are able to access education and training opportunities, and transfer these skills to a workplace setting. It addresses the networks that comprise "clusters" among industries or among people involved in the region's high concentration of business headquarters, and how the region's systems and development pattern (transportation, housing, open space) serve or undermine competitiveness.

I hope you'll take a look at the materials. Please take time to look at these products and share your response. Specific questions about content may be directed to me at commers@donjek.com, and comments or changes may be sent to Snezhana Bessonov at Urban Land Institute – Minnesota, at snezhana.bessonov@uli.org. The documents are:

• The Minneapolis Saint Paul Metro Business Plan (discussion draft)
• The region's investment prospectus (pictured above)
• The presentation given by Mayors Coleman and Rybak to the Global Metro Summit in Chicago, Illinois on December 7.

I am very pleased to announce that I will be participating in a final round of competition in the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition as part of a team led by the Tom Leader Studio and Kennedy and Violich Architecture. The competition is facilitated by a collaborative of arts, design and open space organizations, and will culminate in public presentations by the four teams selected as finalists. Other firms on the team are ConsultEcon and Sherwood Engineers.

The collaborative of sponsors is a unique and creative one, including the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Minneapolis Parks Foundation, University of Minnesota College of Design, and the Walker Art Center. The competition's project manager is the inventive Mary deLaittre of Groundwork City Building. 

I joined the team with enthusiasm and I'm pleased to report that Donjek and its collaborators have been selected as one of four finalist teams, chosen from 55 applicants. According to Bill Morrish, a jury member for the competition and Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School of Design (and founding director of the University of Minnesota's Metropolitan Design Center), the competition drew interest of teams hailing from fourteen countries across five continents. 

Teams will converge on Minneapolis late this month, and submission and public presentation of ideas will be presented in late January. The role of Donjek is to provide public finance and economic expertise, as well as local, regional and historic context to inform the ambitious goals of the team. Stay tuned for more details about our proposal! 

Brookings Metropolitan Business Plan Initiative

Management of the initiative's process and production of the Minneapolis Saint Paul metropolitan business plan continues to progress. Along with members of the leadership team, I am preparing for our region's presentation of a plan to an international summit of metro areas to be held in Chicago in December. Represented will be Minneapolis Saint Paul, Seattle, Cleveland, Munich, Barcelona, Seoul, and Torino. A few questions particularly present right now include:

• How do private and public institutions adjust to the reality of a metro-centric economy?
• How can a climate of economic and budget stress make transitions more (and not less) politically acceptable?

West Bank LRT Implementation Study

Donjek was retained early this year as part of a team including Ellerbe Becket, Close Landscape Architecture, Collage Architecture, the Lander Group and Kimley-Horn Associates to examine redevelopment opportunities in a long underutilized area adjacent to the University of Minnesota and downtown Minneapolis: Washington Avenue on the campus' West Bank.

I've posted about the potential of this area before; with the street's conversion to pedestrian transit mall on the other side of the Mississippi River, the West Bank's section of Washington Avenue is poised for transformation. It's convergence of high transit access, adjacency to the University and downtown, and concentration of entrepreneurs and immigrants means the sky is the limit for the future of Cedar-Riverside and the West Bank. Recent questions:

• The scale of change in transportation infrastructure and land use is likely to be more dramatic for the Central Corridor LRT line than the region's first line, the Hiawatha. How do public agencies and community members approach expectations and consensus building for the future?
• Car parking continues to drive debate in such redevelopment discussions. Who is leading the way in thinking about conversion of car parking infrastructure to other uses as cars shrink in size and number?

Donjek has also recently been retained to represent an investor and institutional user as they explore sites for an educational facility, and is working on a team led by TKDA to evaluate considerations around commercial district planning for a Minnesota township. On a volunteer basis, I am also co-chairing a task force focused on the dramatic potential of the West Midway area of Saint Paul, where industrial and commercial land use, heavy and light rail infrastructure, and a growing neighborhood are converging. 

It's all good news and good work, and I pledge to report it more faithfully on the Cents of Place! Thanks for reading.

Stakeholders are invited to review and comment on the draft “baseline overview” of the Minneapolis Saint Paul metropolitan business plan included in this post. The baseline overview represents an inventory of the conditions of the Minneapolis Saint Paul metropolitan region, and is intended to be representative rather than comprehensive. More information about the plan and its development is available below.

Please submit your comments and critique by Friday, August 6 to:

Jon Commers
Project Manager 
Metropolitan Business Plan Initiative 
Ph. (651) 645-4644

Email: regionalbusinessplan@donjek.com

Comments and suggested changes will be incorporated into the baseline overview through consideration by the steering committee of its sponsors, outlined below.

Background 

In 2009, the Brookings Institution approached leaders in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region about a pilot initiative to apply a business planning approach to regional economic development. Partners including the Itasca Project, City of Minneapolis, Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), Regional Council of Mayors, City of Saint Paul, Target Corporation, Urban Land Institute Minnesota, started an initiative to undertake business planning for the metro area’s regional economic development. Additional funders including the Minneapolis Foundation, Saint Paul Foundation and Wells Fargo Foundation have provided financial support to the project.

Objectives

The baseline overview has been developed around a vision for the region as a world class, international center of commerce with unsurpassed vibrant communities and natural beauty. A multitude of factors – economic, social, cultural, political – are involved in efforts to realize this vision. The end goals of the business plan, articulated both by the Brookings Institution and by the region’s involved partners, are:

• First and foremost, to create a document that identifies and connects major themes at work in the region, providing the basis for stronger consensus about how our metropolitan area will thrive in the next century
• Second, to use the findings of the metropolitan business plan to inform how federal agencies partner with metro regions across the country. Participating regions in the Brookings Institution pilot project include Cleveland/Northeast Ohio and Seattle/Tacoma, in addition to the Minneapolis Saint Paul metropolitan area.

Baseline Overview Content

The focus of this attached document is to inventory the following:

• Strengths and weaknesses that have formed the region’s current economic conditions
• Barriers that inhibit the region’s reaching its full potential as a prosperous, vibrant place
• Opportunities that exist to use our strengths to overcome our challenges
• Strategies (currently in use or not) which represent promising steps to move the region forward in areas of significance

The analysis is organized using six “levers of prosperity,” a narrative that emerged from the Blueprint for American Prosperity process undertaken by the Brookings Institution in recent years. Each lever represents a short chapter in the baseline overview, describing major themes and relevant strategies:

• Regional concentrations of firms, talent and ideas and quality of life in the region (download)
• Human capital – our people, their education and skills – and how to maximize individuals’ access to quality jobs and the productivity they bring to the workforce (download)
• Innovation-enabling infrastructure which provides an environment where marketable ideas are valued, developed and commercialized (download)
• Spatial efficiency, or how we design the physical layout of our future region to be a more efficient in its land use, transportation, and overall carbon footprint (download)
• Effective public and civic culture that reinforces high levels of engagement, values transparency, and supports long-range decision making (download)
• Information resources that provide a basis for identifying opportunities in the regional marketplace (
  download)

The full draft is available here; it outlines a market analysis and environmental scan on a global and national level, as well as the individual discussions outlined above. Please provide comments and critique on any of the sections, or on the baseline overview in its entirety.

Note: An abridged version of the following post was also published online at the Star Tribune's Your Voices forum. Your comments are welcome in each forum.

The realities of climate change, rising gas prices and budget constraints compel us to use our developed area more intentionally and productively. Our assets will need to produce multiple benefits – parking lots become stormwater collection systems, roofs become collectors of energy, and road rights of way become tillable land area. All around us is space that we’ve underused over time.

Bridges are a good example. Inhabited bridges, or bridges that support a superstructure of residential and commercial buildings, are being reconsidered as an innovative way to add capacity, jobs, tax base, green space and character to urban centers. As in many cities located on major waterways, bridges can serve as iconic landmarks that structure the urban landscape and hold powerful symbolic connotations of community integration. And beyond symbolism, inhabited bridges capture space from the air, to house jobs or shared spaces. 

Certainly not a 21st century innovation, bridges that contain residential and commercial uses have been an historic solution to limited available land for development in medieval European cities. From the 12th to the 18th centuries, at the apex of their popularity, mixed-use bridges were built throughout Europe. In economic terms, their construction shows that the value of proximity outweighed building and maintenance cost. Notable and popular examples include Old London Bridge, Ponte Vecchio, and Ponte di Rialto (here are the shops). The Old London Bridge was built in 1209 and housed nearly 200 shops as well as numerous residences that provided the revenue for the bridge’s construction and maintenance. 

Still standing in Italy, the Ponte Vecchio of Florence and the Ponte di Rialto of Venice (built respectively in 1345 and 1591) continue to be iconic structures and popular tourist attractions lined with flourishing shops. With little land available for expansion, medieval cities built inhabited bridges to maximize available space while minimizing government expenditure on maintenance through the taxation of residential and commercial entities inhabiting the bridge. The popularity of inhabited bridges, however, all but vanished following the 18th century as the demands of traffic and outward movement escalated, and the value of proximity fell in relation to construction and maintenance costs. 

Nonetheless, the inhabited bridge may not be a mere relic of the past but innovative solution to modern urban problems. The surviving Italian inhabited bridges testify to their modern applicability and the lasting import of their unique construction.  

Following their heyday, numerous plans for inhabited bridges have both been proposed and denied due to their perceived impracticality in a world dependent on motor vehicles. However, at the turn of the 21st century, the idea of inhabited bridges has gained greater attention. Construction of inhabited bridges appears to offer significant benefits and opportunities for the modern city. The “Living Bridges: The Inhabited Bridge: Past, Present & Future” exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1996 brought the concept of inhabited bridges to global attention and was met both with enthusiasm skepticism. A large component of the exhibit was an architectural competition to design an inhabited bridge. 

Again, in 2009, a similar competition was undertaken to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the construction of the Old London Bridge. While much of this interest has not begotten bridge construction, the inhabited Zaragoza Bridge crossing the Ebro River in Spain was constructed in 2008 to combine a pedestrian walkway with exhibition spaces focusing on water sustainability. Although new construction, the Zaragoza Bridge is an initial effort at redeploying the inhabited bridge for modern development. 

As global and economic factors converge to redirect our attention inwards, we are faced with cities that are compartmentalized by networks of major roadways. Communities and businesses within our cities are separated by natural barriers like rivers as well as man-made ones. Symbolically and physically, these communities are in need of being bridged. The inhabited bridge may serve to restore a disjointed urban social fabric, and release space for the creation of jobs, tax base, green space or others uses in places across the country.

Photo: Ponte Vecchio detail. Courtesy of Flickr/CGoulao

Shared experience of regions in the U.S. and internationally suggests that rail transit infrastructure endows nearby property with a substantial value premium. Economist Joe Cortright analyzed 94,000 home sales in 15 metropolitan U.S. markets, and found that homes located within walking distance to varied amenities are valued more highly in the marketplace than comparable property situated elsewhere. Examining two neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cortright identified that a typical home in the Wilmore demands a premium of $34,000 or 12% of median value, compared to much less pedestrian-accessible Ashley Park. The experience of other metro areas including Jacksonville, Chicago, Sacramento and Austin reflect premium levels of $10,000 or more for homes of median value in neighborhoods with high levels of non-auto access.

Early evidence of light rail transit (LRT) lines in this region is consistent with Cortright’s findings. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies released preliminary results of a second-phase study of property appreciation near the Hiawatha LRT Line in Minneapolis.  The process, using residential sale data, has found positive impacts of roughly 25% on single- and multi-family housing located near station areas. Candidly, the Hiawatha Line has been a success in terms of ridership but isn’t particularly effective in stitching neighborhoods together with downtown. If effects are favorable here, they will be so for coming lines that connect Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and Minneapolis’ downtown to its south side and suburbs beyond.

It’s not just residential property values that are influenced by accessibility. Analyses undertaken for the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Realtors found a 23% premium in California’s Santa Clara County land values within ¼ mile of light rail transit stops.  Another study of the San Diego LRT system found land value premiums as high as 72-91% for commercial land located near station areas on particular lines; the same study found that commercial land on other lines was discounted by the presence of the LRT stations. A 2007 study of the dense network of Dutch rail stations concluded that commercial property within ¼ mile of a rail station exhibited a land-value premium of over 12%.

Recently, Donjek was hired by a client in the Southeast U.S. to explore national models for financing development adjacent to LRT investments. We focused on multiple tools used to great effect nationally:

• Transportation Development/Improvement Districts (TDDs, TIDs)
• Special Assessment Districts (SADs)
• Tax Increment Financing (TIF) / Project Development Financing Districts
• Tax Abatement 
• Joint Development 
• Transportation Utility Fees (TUFs) 
• Air Rights, Grants and Loans

Each region is distinct in its history, its disposition about public/private partnerships, its attitudes toward transit, and how high-impact regional decisions are formulated and implemented. These tools are applicable in degrees depending on these and other factors.

LRT and fixed-rail transit infrastructure doesn’t belong everywhere. And as the Federal Transit Administration has made clear in the last week, the federal government doesn’t intend to build systems that can’t be supported by ridership in the long term. 

One key element to making transit work – for the environmental and fiscal health of the country and its communities – is concentrating development and redevelopment potential where it will be most accessible. These public finance tools can be part of that equation.

In the second, I co-founded Strong Towns, an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization calling for big change in American land use, last fall with Chuck Marohn and Ben Oleson of the Community Growth Institute. We’ve been producing research, building relationships and growing networks on Facebook and Twitter over the last six months. Our message – that current land use patterns are financially unsustainable and are eroding our ability to invest in our people and places – has been attracting attention of late. See us on the newswire at Planetizen and at the Switchboard at NRDC blog, and join us in developing these ideas by following us at Facebook and Twitter.

 Today, we have released a report titled “Minnesota’s Most Vulnerable Cities,” which addresses the following question: If federal and state aids disappeared tomorrow, and citizens wished to maintain existing services, how large a property tax increase would be required? How sensitive are our cities to the risk (and very likely eventuality) that state and federal aids fall?

View the report here. Make comments, throw darts, suggest solutions – help us develop tools to build Strong Towns.