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California Valued for Cash, Not Candidates
New Geography - 4 hours 45 min ago
p>California may be the country’s most important and influential state for technology, culture
and lifestyle, but has become something of a cipher in terms of providing national political
leaders. Not one California politician entered the 2016 presidential race in either party and,
looking over the landscape, it’s difficult to see even a potential contender emerging over the
coming decade.
We are a long way from the California dreamin’ days of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and
even the early Jerry Brown era. Today we approach national politics largely as spectators – and
our rich residents as donors – to storms brewing in other regions.
In contrast, New Yorkers clearly have the moxie to rise. Ted Cruz even lambasted “New York
values” in his to-date failed attempt to derail Donald Trump. Just watch Trump and his
new consigliere, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, in action, they’re quintessential New York
egomaniacal tough guys.
The Democrats also have a big New York imprint, with the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, a
former New York U.S. senator and current resident. Her diminishing challenger, Bernie Sanders,
is an aged Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
And, waiting in the wings, with his billions and his ego ready to propel him, sits former New
York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Some East Coast observers see him as a potential running
mate for Clinton, which certainly would make fundraising less important.
But it’s not just New York’s political culture that has shaped this election. The biggest nonTrump drama of the race has been the bitter conflict between two Florida politicians, the
departed Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, now the rapidly fading hope of establishmentarian
Republicans. Texas, too, has expressed at least the more doctrinaire aspect of its political culture
in inflicting Ted Cruz on the electorate. Even the Rust Belt has had its moment, in the quixotic,
but at least fundamentally decent, campaign of John Kasich.
Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished
Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based
Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of
us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A
Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County,
CA.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA (Hillary Clinton Looking Forward) [CC BY
2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Categories: New Urbanism
How Self-Driving Cars Will Change More Than Just Traffic
Urbanophile - Sun, 2016-03-06 12:25
Photo by Michael Shick, CC BY-SA 4.0
My latest piece is online in the Washington Post. I was asked to contribute about carless cities
and driverless cars. I see these as two separate things. Carless cities is a niche phenomenon of
relevance to only a few places because the vast bulk of the existing American landscape was
designed around the car. Driverless cars, however, have the potential to profoundly transform our
society. Here’s an excerpt:
The locus of power in the automobile industry might also shift from Detroit to Silicon Valley. In
the case of music, newspapers and other industries where digitization has already shifted power
in that direction, we’ve seen vast industrial disruption. Massive wealth has accrued to a handful
of insiders in technology, as tech advances have undermined many formerly middle-class
occupations. The auto business is one of the major bastions of good-paying jobs that remain.
Keep in mind that one reason President Obama bailed out GM and Chrysler is because more than
1 million jobs in the United States are linked to the auto industry. Yet the tech industry does
most of its manufacturing outside the country. Apple employs 700,000 people offshore
(including subcontractors), compared with only 43,000 people in the United States. If Silicon
Valley wins the driverless car industry, we may see this shift accelerate.
Click through to read the whole thing.
Conveniently, Paul Roales, a friend at Google who is very interested in driverless cars, recently
organized an invigorating salon discussion on the topic in New York. I’m indebted to him and
the others in this discussion for some of the ideas I used.
Categories: New Urbanism
Intentional (Sub)Urban Community
John Sanphillippo - Sat, 2016-03-05 21:41
Many folks dream of living in close proximity to like minded people – preferably on a tight
budget. These visions range from large extended families, “maker” types looking for an arts
compound, self organized retirement villages, and all sorts of other affinity groups. There’s an
understandable impulse to want to build a specially designed place from scratch. Unfortunately
it’s almost always a miserable and hideously expensive experience to build much of anything,
particularly if it diverges in any way from the standard tract house, strip mall, or office building
model. In many locations permits, impact fees, as well as zoning and building code restrictions
make these sorts of highly specific projects nearly impossible to construct at any price.
Google
Enter salvation in the form of a budget motel. This is a standardize run-of-the-mill pre-existing
“product” well known by all the relevant authorities. Banks understand commercial loans for
such buildings and can sell them on to pension funds in the secondary markets all day long. City
planners know exactly how to categorize and manage these properties. The fire marshal has
already put a stamp of approval on the wide fire lanes that wrap around these buildings.
Minimum off street parking requirements are already satisfied. It’s all plain vanilla cookie cutter
stuff. And it’s the kind of property that very few people actually care about, so tinkering with it
won’t set off any alarm bells in the community.
There’s also an economy of scale. Dollar for dollar you get a lot more space in an old motel than
a similar amount of square footage from a collection of individual homes. I count at least two
dozen rooms each with its own private bath. This building type is amazingly flexible and can be
reorganized in all sorts of ways. Two or more rooms can be combined to create larger
apartments. Living and work spaces can be merged or segregated as need be. Friends, family
members, and business associates can mix or keep a respectful distance depending on the
particulars. Second floor additions for some or all of the units are a viable option. And a motel
can easily be co-owned by a group of investors or converted to condo units each with separate
ownership.
Yes. Yes. I know. These motels are UGLY. But ugly is the beauty part. They’re a blank slate that
can easily be transformed on a really slim budget over time.
Google
Here’s a 1947 motor lodge. Not too long ago this was a rent-by-the-hour establishment suffering
from decades of deferred maintenance. It had been squeezed hard like a piece of fruit until all its
juice was extracted. Then, it was purchased at a good price by a savvy investor who gradually
brought the place up to a better standard room by room and upgraded the hotel’s reputation.
Fresh paint, landscaping, cost effective decor, and good management did most of the heavy
lifting.
The original covered parking spots (one for each room) were re-purposed as outdoor living
rooms, although they still satisfy municipal off street parking requirements. Regulations insist
the spaces exist. They don’t dictate that they have to be occupied by cars per se.
Half the pavement was ripped up and planted with shade trees and attractive shrubbery. The
required fire lanes and parking are still in place – just more thoughtfully and attractively
organized.
Crushed stone was used in place of some required parking spots, but the spaces accommodate
outdoor seating just as easily as cars. Strategically placed hedges break up the pavement and
create the suggestion of individual gardens at each doorway.
The interiors are all simple and embrace the streamlined minimalist aesthetic of the 1940’s. Plain
white walls, simple furniture, and unadorned windows provide a clean backdrop for a few well
chosen accent features.
Notice how the tiles around the tub faucet were patched with broken pieces in complimentary
colors in a mosaic style. This was no doubt a playful cost saving technique when the plumbing
needed to be retrofitted. The same mosaic pattern can be seen in the walkway. Cheap. Attractive,
Functional.
Both the budget motel and the (now) upscale hotel are on the same lackluster block in a
forgettable suburban location. Buildings like this exist everywhere and they’re often available at
reasonable prices for those who can see their potential.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
The Urban Ethnic Shuffle
John Sanphillippo - Sat, 2016-03-05 01:16
I recently heard a well respected (white) commentator use the term “ethnic cleansing” in the
context of gentrification. As in… such-and-such neighborhood used to be black and now it’s lily
white. It made me think about the way demographic migrations are interpreted by different
groups.
This is the south side of Dallas, Texas. This was once a white middle class neighborhood. By the
1960’s white flight to new suburbs created an economic vacuum that was filled by poor blacks.
The white exodus is generally characterized (by the whites who left) as a need for a better school
district, finding a bigger newer home with lower property taxes, and moving away from crime to
a safer neighborhood. What may or may not have happened to the old neighborhood as a result
of their departure was of no concern. People are free to pursue their own enlightened self
interests.
Parts of south Dallas are currently experiencing a revival. The same qualities that once doomed
the neighborhood to abandonment are now celebrated by a significant segment of the middle
class. Being closer to downtown is a plus since it means short easy commutes to work and ready
access to culture. Having a smaller more manageable house in a vibrant walkable area is more
attractive than an isolated McMansion in the exurbs. Homes that once sold for $50,000 not that
long ago now sell for $300,000 and up. The buildings of south Dallas didn’t change. The street
grid and location didn’t change. Instead, the market changed and money flowed accordingly.
You know… enlightened self interest style.
The reintroduction of middle class residents is being interpreted by some as “urban ethnic
cleansing” which is entirely different from the way those same people interpret white flight.
Walking away from a neighborhood is seen as a harmless passive act. Moving in is viewed as an
act of aggression and displacement.
South Dallas isn’t an inner city ghetto. It’s just an ordinary first ring suburb that was left to rot by
the larger culture. Now that culture has rediscovered its inherent charms. As a nation we’re
fundamentally unable to have a meaningful conversation about why some people are persistently
poor while others are free to choose where and how they live. So instead we talk about hipster
brew pubs and hand crafted artisanal coffee shops as if organic groceries were the real source of
the problem.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
The Great Vancouver Exodus: Why I’m Almost Ready to Leave the City
New Geography - Sat, 2016-03-05 00:38
It was one of those Sundays in early January when you wake up to bright, stark sunlight
streaming through your blinds.
My fellow Vancouverites might know the one. It’s been grey and dreary for months. You open
your curtains to a brave new world and see, with sudden, startling clarity, all of the dust that had
gathered in the cracks of your life while you had been hibernating through the long winter.
Every year, on this particular day in January, I find myself wandering around the city alone in an
unsettled daze—one hand on this first pulse of summer, wondering how, with all of the dust and
cracks, I can keep on pushing forward.
It was freezing out, being January and a cloudless day, but I needed to get out of the house.
At that point, I had been “home” in Vancouver for a month after spending half a year in Europe.
In that month, I spent a lot of time with my head between my hands complaining to friends about
how torn I was between feeling the need to put my adult life together in my hometown and
wanting to get on a plane back to Europe in search of a new place to call home.
My best girlfriend then said to me, “Get away from the city. Go for a walk. Go to Stanley Park,
wander into the forest and think about it. What do you really want? What makes you happy?
Don’t think about what society says you should be doing. Think about what you should be
doing.”
“But it’s coooooold,” I said.
“Oh princess,” she said. “Suck it up, bundle up, and thank me later.”
And so, on that particular day in January, I dug out my warmest clothes, which, either ironically
or coincidentally, looked very Pacific Northwest—red plaid flannel shirt, TNA Sea-To-Sky
sweater (that one every girl in Vancouver owns), dark jeans, brown combat boots, fur-lined
parka, knit gloves, and white toque (that’s what we call beanies in Canada).
I walked to the SkyTrain (the Vancouver metro) and rode towards the glass towers rising out of
Vancouver’s downtown core. I passed the offices of the Central Business District where all lights
had been switched off for the weekend, and to the far end of the downtown Vancouver peninsula
where the 1001-acre Stanley Park is located.
I meandered into the park. West Georgia Street turned into Lost Lagoon into a forest trail where
the light got darker and the trees thicker with every step I took.
In the month that I had been “home,” I had come across a lot of questions, which were driving
me to bouts of insomnia, frenzies of SkyTrain platform pacing, and uncharacteristically
melodramatic speech.
Away from the bustle of the city and my 9 to 5 job, I was able to start working through
these questions.
“Am I meant to settle down in this city, or is my home to be elsewhere in the world?”
“Is it wiser for me to lay the foundations for my future in Vancouver, or should I start digging
elsewhere?”
“If I am meant to stay, do I have the courage to do so?”
“If I am meant to leave, do I have the courage to do so?”
As I wandered deeper into Stanley Park, the din of traffic from the Lions Gate Bridge fading into
a cacophony of crows in the trees and my breath misty puffs in the crisp January air, I found my
answers.
And it broke my heart.
It’s time to leave Vancouver.
There is an interesting phenomenon that has been occurring at an increasingly rapid pace over
the past number of years.
We call it the “Exodus of Millennials,” or, as I like to put it “The Great Vancouver
Exodus.”
There is an affordability crisis in this city. Vancouver is ranked the 2nd least affordable city in
the world next to only Hong Kong. Considering what it costs to live in places like New York or
London, our dilemma here should be quite apparent.
Housing prices have grown at an alarming rate. As of 2016, 91% of single-family homes
are valued at over $1 million. Our salaries have not grown to match.
One of my best friends is a realtor. For years, she has been saying, “Get into the market as soon
as you can.”
The rest of us who are less educated in real estate would talk about waiting for the real estate
bubble to burst.
I entered the industry myself recently and began paying attention to trends and numbers.
Vancouver’s bubble isn’t going to burst anytime soon. It’s either get in as soon as possible, or
get out of town.
It’s ridiculous, really.
Let me put it this way.
For four years, I worked full-time. One of my offices was on Burrard where the rent per square
foot is the second highest in Canada. One of my other offices was a block away and I had an
unobstructed view of the Olympic Cauldron. I spent a lot of time ordering people around.
You’d think I was doing pretty well for myself.
In those four years, I first lived in a 300 sq. ft. apartment that cost 1/3 of my salary and was
located on Drake between the noisy Granville and Burrard Bridges. I then moved to Commercial
Drive and lived in an unremarkable 1-bedroom walk-up that hadn’t been updated since the 70s.
Every so often, I’d come across a stray silverfish.
In that time, I tried to save for a down payment. Four years of saving later, all I could afford was
a single-roomed shoe box in an up-and-coming (read: will be safe in 20 years) neighborhood.
It was then that I decided it wasn’t worth spending my hard-earned money on a shoe box that I’ll
nevertheless be paying off for twenty years. So I bought myself a one-way ticket to
Europe instead.
Note: the person I used to share the apartment on Commercial Drive with now lives up the street.
He pays $850 a month (1/4 of his salary) for a 75 sq.ft. bedroom in a 100-year-old house shared
with some ten people. The house is so old it appears impossible to keep clean, every stair is
caving in the center, and the floorboards are obnoxiously squeaky. It recently sold for $1.4
million.
Over the past few years, I have found myself at increasingly more going-away parties.
“My start-up got funded in New York,” says one departee (yes, I made that word up).
“I just got promoted to head office in Toronto,” says another.
And every one of them says things like, “I’m moving to San Francisco, London, Berlin, Madrid,
Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, whatever, because I can’t afford to be here anymore.”
For the most part, my core group of about five friends remained unaffected. However, having
spoken at length to them recently, I realized that they are all seriously considering joining the
Exodus.
They all started thinking about it at the same time. Their timelines for leaving fall within the
same year. Their reasons for leaving are similar. My consideration of the aspects of my own
Exodus line up perfectly with theirs.
In fact, in the month that I’ve been “home,” one of my closest friends has already made it to San
Francisco.
My best girlfriend is in the process of saving to move somewhere tropical with her husband
so they can work as diving instructors.
Even the realtor, who has been making a killing off of our real estate market, is ready to go.
“I’m going to London next year to get my Master’s,” she said. “We are so secluded here and I
feel like there’s a lot more I could be doing for both myself and the world.”
I’ve seen the outrageous amounts of money realtors pull in. She has all of the makings of a
realtor—smart, driven, ambitious, organized, well-spoken, well-dressed, attractive, and
trustworthy—and she is good at it.
For someone like her want to give up a real estate market like Vancouver is saying something.
When it comes to business, Vancouver is a satellite city. I dare even say that Canada is a satellite
country.
As a marketer who often works cross-border with the US, I have always been miffed at the huge
discrepancy between marketing budgets allotted to the US vs. Canada.
“There just isn’t enough of a market in Canada,” I’m always told.
Fun fact: the entire population of Canada can fit into the State of California.
When it comes to international business, Canada usually concedes to the decisions of the US
division. When it comes to national business, Vancouver usually concedes to Toronto.
If you’ve never experienced this, allow me to tell you that it is frustrating to have to follow
directions from a voice over a phone located three time zones away and in a completely different
part of the country.
Therefore, everyone is leaving. Those of the ambitious, career-oriented kind are all fleeing for
greener (and more affordable) pastures elsewhere. This is happening so rapidly and thoroughly
that the entire future of the Vancouver economy is being threatened.
Twenty-five countries later, I still think Vancouver is one of, if not the most beautiful city in the
world.
But it is precariously poised to become a ghost town and I am far from ready for the afterlife.
And so, all reason is pointing me to join the Exodus.
By this point, I had wandered from the north end of Stanley Park to the south end.
I sat down on a bench by the water somewhere between Second and Third Beach facing the
sunset.
I was terrified. Is it really true that I am meant to leave everything familiar because I am being
priced out of the housing market in my hometown?
Yet I silently thanked my best girlfriend.
My head was clear.
I need to leave Vancouver.
My walk ended at the stone-stacked Inukshuk at the far end of English Bay. The Inukshuk is an
iconic symbol of Vancouver, having been the basis for our 2010 Winter Olympics logo.
I stood there for a while, watching the last orange rays of sunset disappear behind the mountains
and shivering in the winter chill.
I realized I was saying goodbye.
It’s almost time to join the Exodus.
Grace Pacifica Chen is a Vancouver-based marketing consultant, brand manager, travel
blogger, and creative writer. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @pacificachen.
Categories: New Urbanism
The Union Station Transit Center and Wilson Station Rehab Are Rolling Along
Grid Chicago - Fri, 2016-03-04 21:04
The new temporary entrance to the Wilson stop on the north side of the street is almost finished.
Photo: John Greenfield
Steven Vance and I took advantage of today’s sunshine to check out the progress of two major
transit projects that are slated to wrap up this spring.
CDOT rendering of the Union Station Transit Center, looking west.
The $43 million Union Station Transit Center will be a key enhancement to the Loop Link bus
rapid transit corridor. Located on Jackson between Canal and Clinton, the new facility will
replace a surface parking lot. The Chicago Department of Transportation is spearheading this
project.
Looking southeast at the construction site. Photo: Steven Vance
The transit center will include sheltered staging areas for CTA buses, plus an elevator leading to
an underground Amtrak pedway. That will allow customers to make fairly seamless transfers
between buses and trains.
Looking east at the the construction site. Photo: Steven Vance
Meanwhile in Uptown, the CTA is completing the first phase of the $203 million Wilson Station
overhaul. Phase I, which started in March 2015, included the demolition and reconstruction of
the southbound Purple Line Express track, the westernmost of the four-track elevated structure
that accommodates Red and Purple service.
Looking east at the new elevator structure. Photo: John Greenfield
Phase I also included building a new Loop-bound platform with temporary entrances at the north
and south side of Wilson, as well as a temporary entrance a block south on Sunnyside, which
will be used during a later stage of the project. The northern temporary entrance on Wilson
appears to be nearly finished, and the new stairs to the new platform are coming along as well.
Looking south: The stairway to the new platform is taking shape. Photo: John Greenfield
Presumably, Phase II of the project will include demolishing and rebuilding the platform and
metal tracks that are currently in use. The latter are more than a century old.
As the Update Update recently pointed out, it’s remarkable that the CTA has been to rebuild this
heavy train infrastructure over the course of a year without suspending train service. I’m looking
forward to climbing the stairs to the spanking new platform and taking a ride on the smooth new
rails.
Categories: New Urbanism
You Asked, We Answered: 6 Examples of What Makes a Great Public Space
Project for Public Spaces - Fri, 2016-03-04 16:57
In Millennium Park, Chicago children play in the water feature to escape the summer heat |
Image by PPS
People often ask us, “What makes a public space great?”
When PPS was recently approached by USA Today to provide a list of the best city parks in the
U.S. for their upcoming interactive webpage, we were excited for the opportunity share our
thoughts on this question that has been at the core of our work for 40 years. After narrowing
down our extensive library, our co-founder Kathy Madden submitted 20 parks for consideration.
A handful of our selections were chosen for the shortlist (now available online for your vote)!
Some of those chosen included some longtime favorites, such as Central Park in NYC, Jackson
Square in New Orleans, Millennium Park in Chicago, and Boston Public Garden.
Although famous spaces like Central Park will always top lists like these, we wanted to take the
opportunity to highlight some other examples of great public spaces around the world—
including a few that may sometimes fly under the radar.
So, how do we decide if a public space is great? Good question, since it might seem pretty
subjective—one person might feel deterred from the same place that another feels a deep
attachment to. This is why we created our Place Diagram.
A successful public space generally needs to offer four qualities: it should be accessible, it
should be comfortable and have a good image, people should be able to engage in an array of
activities, and, it should be sociable. With these characteristics in mind, the possibilities are
endless as to what type of public space can be successful, whether it’s a street, waterfront,
playground, market, or park.
Looking even more closely at the qualities of the Place Diagram, we’ve identified a few other
attributes that contribute to making a public space great. While being a place to meet, a place for
exchange, or a place of local or national pride, great public spaces can also be characterized by
the presence of people remaining when they have no pressing reason to stay. You might call
this the “lingering factor.” Successful public spaces are also well-managed: this includes
cleaning, offering food or services, or scheduling events, and such implementations can be
managed the community, by individuals, by the city or district, or through local partnerships.
Great public spaces also serve as the heart of a community, often connecting two or more
separate neighborhoods together, and encouraging a central point where people can interact
and participate in the public realm. Another important but sometimes overlooked element of
great public spaces is their ability to highlight an area’s cultural identity – whether through
local practices, location, history, design, architecture, or art. This is crucial factor for creating a
sense of place that can withstand the test of time.
With these ideas in mind, we have gathered a few examples from our Great Public Spaces
database that highlight each of these qualities.
Nyhavn – Copenhagen, Denmark
A mixture of activities, car-free spaces, and a strong cultural identity add to the success of
Nyhavn in Copenhagen |Image by Bill Smith
Nyhavn canal has been around for a while – it was dug from 1671-1673 to allow ships access to
Kongens Nytorv. Up until 1950, Nyhavn was well known for being a red light district with seedy
bars, tattoo parlours, and strip clubs. Since then it has changed quite a bit, but this colorful
history gives the location with a distinct cultural appeal to the still-popular location. Surrounded
on both sides by a variety of brightly colored buildings, the canal is small and intimate. It is
easily accessible, as everywhere in Copenhagen is within walking distance.
Since it is a canal, there are no cars getting in the way of the experience, and it is completely
pedestrian and bike friendly. A strip exists on both sides of the canal filled with access to
activities such as boat riding, restaurants, bars, and a range of places to sit and relax and take in
this site that epitomizes Copenhagen. The tiniest ray of sunshine on the canal will draw people
out to the cafes in an instant, encouraging sociability and activity. Nyhavn is quaint, aesthetically
pleasing, well-managed, and oozes authenticity which makes you feel like you’re actually a part
of Scandinavian culture – we think it is an excellent example of a successful waterfront place.
Jemaa El-Fna – Marrakesh, Morocco
Market vendors offer their goods to locals and passersby in Jamaa-el-Fna in Marrakesh | Image
by SuperCar-RoadTrip.fr
Located beneath the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in the heart of the Medina, Jemaa el-Fna
has served as Marrakech’s main market square since its foundation in the 11th century. Today
the market bridges the old and new sections of Marrakech, and it continues to serve the
community as a vibrant hub for trade, social life, and cultural expression. During portions of the
20th century the square was also used as a transport station, but since 2000 it has been closed
entirely to automobile traffic. A lively source of entertainment for the local community as well as
travelers, the marketplace functions as both a traditional market and an open-air stage for various
musical, religious, and theatrical performances.
On one side of the square stands a traditional North African market, or souk, selling food, spices,
carpets, brass and wood works, and tourist trinkets. All through the day, and well into the night,
the marketplace offers an eclectic variety of services such as dental care, traditional medicine,
fortune-telling, henna tattooing, and storytelling for children. The bazaar is well known for its
hundreds of colorful umbrellas that shield shoppers, performers, and merchants from the harsh
North African sun. As a market, theater, and public gathering place, Jemaa el-Fna is a repository
of Moroccan cultural traditions both ancient and new, and we feel it is an excellent public space.
Mission Dolores Park – San Francisco, California, USA
Locals relax and take advantage of the sun and spectacular views in San Francisco’s Mission
Dolores Park – Image by Tim Riley
San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park, is not only situated in between two historic and culturally
diverse neighborhoods – the famous Castro and Mission Districts – but it is a beautiful eight
square block park nestled on a hillside with broad sweeping views of the San Francisco
downtown and Bay Area skyline. The park is conveniently located only a few blocks from
bustling Market Street which links to neighborhoods all over the city. Accessible by light rail,
Dolores Park is also walking distance from the BART, multiple MUNI and bus lines, and the
Haight Ashbury neighborhood. There are benches bordering the park and scattered throughout,
but most people prefer to sit on the sloped ground which faces the spectacular views of the city.
Besides the great views, the park features opportunities for activities such as basketball, tennis,
walking paths, and a playground, and it is not uncommon to see people throwing a frisbee, or
dogs chasing balls. It is happily shared by families and young people at all hours of the day, and
a bonus is that it’s surrounded by some of the best cafes the city has to offer – it is the perfect
place to bring a cup of coffee and a muffin with the morning paper. Mission Dolores Park is
quintessentially California – it is placed in the pathway of sunshine, dotted with palm trees, it is
often the center point for events and parties of an alternative nature, and we feel it is a great
example of a local park.
Turkenmarkt (The Turkish Market) – Berlin, Germany
Berlin’s bustling canalside Turkenmarkt draws a mix of people from all over the city to
experience the diverse goods it has on offer | Image by Bernard Oh
Neukolln’s Turkenmarkt, a streetmarket in Berlin, will make you believe you’ve been
transported to Istanbul. Berlin has the third largest Turkish population of any city in the world, so
it is no wonder that the Turkish Market is one of the city’s liveliest and exciting marketplaces.
This is the largest Turkish market in the city and is easily accessible, spanning along the river
Landwehrkanal half a mile from Neukolln to Kreuzberg. These neighborhoods remain the center
of Turkish immigrant life in Berlin, and are becoming increasingly popular due their cultural
appeal. Though the market caters more to a Turkish immigrant population, it is more common
now to see Turkish women in headscarves shopping alongside trendsetting artists and musiciantypes, all using the market as a local food source.
In addition to perhaps being the best place for fresh fruit and vegetables in Berlin, you can also
find olives, herbs and spices, clothing, Turkish pizzas, unbeatable kebaps, and other delicacies.
Often people settle along the river to sit and some of their purchased goods and relax, or simply
wander up and down the market browsing all of the products on offer. Turkenmarkt epitomizes
the cultural mix of Berlin, and the setting of this market, as well as the delicacies on offer, cannot
be beat. We feel it is an excellent example of a public space – in fact, an LQC type example that
shows public spaces do not have to be large, or permanent, to have a positive impact on the local
community.
Luxembourg Gardens – Paris, France
Moveable chairs can be found dotted on pathways around Luxembourg Gardens in Paris | Image
by Byron T.
Luxembourg Gardens came about as a result of Henri IV’s assassination in 1610. His wife,
Marie de Medicis, could not continue living in the Louvre with his memory. She had the Palais
du Luxembourg and the surrounding gardens built to replicate her childhood home, Florence’s
Palazzo Pitti. The Luxembourg Gardens were completed in 1625, and the park itself has been
open to the public since the 17th century. The construction of nearby streets and avenues during
the Second Empire reduced its size, but not its general appearance. In the present day, this selfmanaged park, which closes at sunset, has a multitude of strolling paths, and is filled with
hundreds of movable chairs that users take situate to their liking.
The Luxembourg Gardens may well be one of the most successful parks in the world, partly
because it is so well integrated into the fabric of the city around it, which makes it easily
accessible. There are also many things to do there, evidenced by the wide range of people who
use it: children, older people, Sorbonne students, people cutting through on a lunch break, etc.
People come to stroll, play chess, to sit and read, people watch, to sit at one of the cafes or to
bring their children or grandchildren to one of the many attractions for kids. Organized activities
at the park include tennis, outdoor concerts, pony rides, puppet theatres, and toy sailboat rentals,
which make this public place full of endless activity, encouraging people to linger. It is one of
our favorite public spaces, and it continues to be a leading example in terms of providing a mix
of easy access, activities, aesthetics, and sociability.
Khan el Khalili – Cairo, Egypt
Khan El Khalili in Cairo is a market that inspires us to make the best out of urban alleyways |
Image by Stephen Friday
A charming labyrinth of narrow alleys, the Khan El Khalili Bazaar, or the Khan, is a major souk
in Cairo, Egypt. It is located next to two of the city’s major landmarks, the Al-Hussein mosque
and prestigious Al- Azhar University. Originally the burial site of the Fatimid caliphs and part of
the Fatimid Great Eastern Palace, Khan El Khalili Bazaar was constructed in 970 AD, the same
year as the founding of Cairo. While the bazaar’s layout has been drastically modified since then,
it continues to function as the city’s major center of trade and a popular destination for tourists
and locals in search of treasures.
The bazaar itself is an architectural draw, with monumental gates that resemble the commercial
complexes of the Ottoman empire. Visitors to Khan El Khalili Bazaar will find themselves
transported back in time to a traditional Arab souk, lost in the scent of spices and bustle of trade
that takes place in the market daily. The many shops arranged around small courtyards stock a
variety of goods from soap powder to fabrics, stones, and souvenir toy camels. While the market
is not strictly organized by the types of goods, its major crowd-pullers such as gold, copper and
spice are still clustered in certain sections. Khan El Khalili is an important shopping area for
locals and continues to preserve the market tradition of old Cairo – we feel it is offers creative
inspiration as to how urban spaces can be transformed into public treasures.
***
While these six great public spaces might be exemplary, they are just a few of thousands around
the world that are worth highlighting. Such a range of unique and functional public spaces is
what inspired us to create our Great Public Spaces resource—an inspiring collection of the
world’s treasured places that are loved by locals and visitors alike, and a collection that’s
growing every week.
Do you know a great public space that deserves some recognition? Nominate your favorite place
to be featured on our Great Public Spaces resource! We’d love to hear from you.
The post You Asked, We Answered: 6 Examples of What Makes a Great Public Space appeared
first on Project for Public Spaces.
Categories: New Urbanism
Explore National Transportation Change Trends by Age Group
Grid Chicago - Fri, 2016-03-04 15:34
Cross-posted from City Observatory
In some ways, the urban renaissance of the last decade or two has been quite dramatic.
Downtown or downtown-adjacent neighborhoods in cities around the country have seen rapid
investments, demographic change, and growth in amenities and jobs. Even mayors in places with
a reputation for car dependence, like Nashville and Indianapolis, are pushing for big investments
in urban public transit.
Because many of those who work in urban planning live in or near these walkable, transit-served
neighborhoods, it may be easy to imagine that their changes are representative of the overall pace
of transition to a more urban-centric nation. Butas we and others have discussed before, in at
least one way — transportation — change has actually been excruciatingly slow at the national
level.
According to the American Community Survey, from 2006 to 2014, the proportion of people
using a car to get to work declined — from 86.72 percent to 85.70 percent. Even among young
people, the shift seems underwhelming: from 85.00 percent to 83.94 percent. (Though, as we
stressed last week, these Census data only cover journey-to-work trips and tend to overstate the
extent to which households rely exclusively on cars for their transportation needs.)
The changes for transit, biking, and walking are, obviously, similarly small. Transit mode share
increased from 4.83 percent to 5.21 percent; among those 20 to 24, the increase was 5.53 to 6.35
percent. The overall share of walking commutes actually fell.
In fact, we’ve built a little tool to let people explore these data in an interactive way, selecting
mode type and age ranges to see how things have changed, and haven’t, over the last almostdecade. The tool displays the same data in two ways: first, as a graph (above), and then as a
simple table (below), for those who find that easier to read. (On the graph, yes, we have allowed
the y-axis to begin at numbers larger than zero — in large part because the changes are so small
that a chart that began at zero would be unintelligible. We will trust our readers to be
sophisticated enough at reading graphs to understand.)
So what’s going on here? Well, as we wrote about just last week, the single greatest determinant
of people’s transportation choices isn’t what mode they think is the coolest — or even whether
there’s a train or bus station nearby, though that obviously helps. The most important factor is
their city’s land use pattern: are there things close by to walk to? Is the city compact enough —
and pedestrian-friendly enough — that there’s an fast, safe, and pleasant way to get from a transit
stop to their place of employment? When you step out of a train station, do you see this:
The terminus of the Green Line light rail in downtown St. Paul. Credit: Google Maps
…or this:
The Arapaho light rail stop in Dallas. Credit: Google Maps
This kind of built environment doesn’t change nearly as fast as attitudes — or as quickly as jobs
can relocate from suburban office parks to downtown lofts. But it does change, and it’s why we
insisted last week that thinking about “the future of urban transportation” in terms of apps and
hacks, rather than fundamental urban design, is a huge mistake.
There is more encouraging news, however: if you drill down to mode shifts by metropolitan area,
the changes are much more pronounced, especially among younger people. In a follow-up post,
we’ll let you see exactly how much has changed in your city.
Categories: New Urbanism
Oakland Mayor Has an Affordable Housing Action Plan
Next City - Fri, 2016-03-04 15:22
(Photo by Rich Johnstone on flickr)
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf wants to add 17,000 units of affordable and market-rate housing in
the Bay Area city over the next eight years, as well as protect another existing 17,000 affordable
homes.
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The goal is the anchor of an expansive blueprint to help ease Oakland’s affordable housing
shortage released by Schaaf and other city officials Thursday. The mayor told the East Bay
Express that protecting Oakland residents from displacement is her administration’s highest
priority.
“This is an action plan based on the housing equity road map,” said Schaaf, “fed through the lens
of feasibility.”
The “Oakland Housing Action Plan” includes modifications to existing renter protection
programs, as well as potential strategies to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort —
including infrastructure and housing bonds and cap-and-trade funds. If everything on the 52-page
report was enacted, it could require the city council to pass dozens of laws to ease the way for
development and increase tenants’ rights.
Schaaf said at a press conference Thursday that it would take council months to consider all of
the policies in the report.
Equitable growth isn’t a new concern for Oakland. The city is increasingly seen as a destination
place as well as a safe, vibrant option for renters and buyers new to the Bay Area, but
affordability concerns and the erosion of stable, middle-class work has led to concerns about
displacement of longtime residents struggling to hold on to homes and good jobs. Between 2006
and 2011, 10,508 homes — more than 7 percent of the city’s households — were foreclosed and
repossessed. Most were occupied by people of color — and had been for generations.
Since taking office last year, Schaaf has floated a number of plans regarding Oakland’s growth
and keeping the city affordable, including encouraging San Francisco to build affordable housing
units in Oakland.
In an interview for Next City’s 2014 feature “Oakland Wants You to Stop Calling It the ‘Next
Brooklyn,’” Schaaf spoke more broadly of her plans to increase the city’s supply of affordable
housing dramatically during her tenure. “So much of a family’s support structure is
geographically based,” she said. “To the extent that we can protect people where they are, I think
we can do that more quickly than we can build new buildings, and you preserve that ecosystem
of support.”
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Explore National Transportation Change Trends by Age Group
Streetsblog Capitol Hill - Fri, 2016-03-04 15:20
Cross-posted from City Observatory
In some ways, the urban renaissance of the last decade or two has been quite dramatic.
Downtown or downtown-adjacent neighborhoods in cities around the country have seen rapid
investments, demographic change, and growth in amenities and jobs. Even mayors in places with
a reputation for car dependence, like Nashville and Indianapolis, are pushing for big investments
in urban public transit.
Because many of those who work in urban planning live in or near these walkable, transit-served
neighborhoods, it may be easy to imagine that their changes are representative of the overall pace
of transition to a more urban-centric nation. Butas we and others have discussed before, in at
least one way — transportation — change has actually been excruciatingly slow at the national
level.
According to the American Community Survey, from 2006 to 2014, the proportion of people
using a car to get to work declined — from 86.72 percent to 85.70 percent. Even among young
people, the shift seems underwhelming: from 85.00 percent to 83.94 percent. (Though, as we
stressed last week, these Census data only cover journey-to-work trips and tend to overstate the
extent to which households rely exclusively on cars for their transportation needs.)
The changes for transit, biking, and walking are, obviously, similarly small. Transit mode share
increased from 4.83 percent to 5.21 percent; among those 20 to 24, the increase was 5.53 to 6.35
percent. The overall share of walking commutes actually fell.
In fact, we’ve built a little tool to let people explore these data in an interactive way, selecting
mode type and age ranges to see how things have changed, and haven’t, over the last almostdecade. The tool displays the same data in two ways: first, as a graph (above), and then as a
simple table (below), for those who find that easier to read. (On the graph, yes, we have allowed
the y-axis to begin at numbers larger than zero — in large part because the changes are so small
that a chart that began at zero would be unintelligible. We will trust our readers to be
sophisticated enough at reading graphs to understand.)
So what’s going on here? Well, as we wrote about just last week, the single greatest determinant
of people’s transportation choices isn’t what mode they think is the coolest — or even whether
there’s a train or bus station nearby, though that obviously helps. The most important factor is
their city’s land use pattern: are there things close by to walk to? Is the city compact enough —
and pedestrian-friendly enough — that there’s an fast, safe, and pleasant way to get from a transit
stop to their place of employment? When you step out of a train station, do you see this:
The terminus of the Green Line light rail in downtown St. Paul. Credit: Google Maps
…or this:
The Arapaho light rail stop in Dallas. Credit: Google Maps
This kind of built environment doesn’t change nearly as fast as attitudes — or as quickly as jobs
can relocate from suburban office parks to downtown lofts. But it does change, and it’s why we
insisted last week that thinking about “the future of urban transportation” in terms of apps and
hacks, rather than fundamental urban design, is a huge mistake.
There is more encouraging news, however: if you drill down to mode shifts by metropolitan area,
the changes are much more pronounced, especially among younger people. In a follow-up post,
we’ll let you see exactly how much has changed in your city.
Categories: New Urbanism
Public Housing Residents Take Charge of NYC Waterfront Development
Next City - Fri, 2016-03-04 14:48
(Photo by Oscar Perry Abello)
From the southern tip of Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge to a little past the Manhattan Bridge,
a stretch of NYC waterfront is performing woefully below its potential to create jobs and
improve lives, say residents.
It’s not for lack of planning. There are, by some counts, as many as 12 different plans that cover
the area in varying extents, stretching back at least 20 years. None of them has been fully
realized.
It’s not for lack of community involvement. There are, by some counts, as many as 60 different
community organizations involved in said plans, some of which are more than 60 years old.
Could it possibly be because there’s a string of public housing communities along a particular
stretch of this waterfront? Five public housing communities, with at least 12,000 residents
(officially, and probably many more unofficially). A mix of people mostly of African-American,
Hispanic and Asian descent.
“They’re always ignored,” says Victor Papa, president of Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, a
six-decade-old nonprofit in the neighborhood. Papa is also a lifelong resident of the
neighborhood, though not a public housing resident.
Whatever the reasons why this waterfront has remained neglected for so long, two tides of
change have thrust the neighborhood into the spotlight, one literal and one financial: the
NYCHA plan to lease out “underused” open space in public housing communities for private
development, and the continuing ramifications of Hurricane Sandy, which famously put huge
swaths of the area underwater.
A map of the South Street-East River waterfront, with NYCHA public housing communities
overlain in gray. (Credit: NYC Open Data/Google Maps)
Intending to write a new history, public housing residents along the waterfront have joined with
their neighbors, stretching all the way down into the Financial District, to create a new CDC: the
South Street East River Community Development Corporation (SSER-CDC). At their first board
meeting, in January, Aixa Torres was elected interim board president.
Torres first moved into NYCHA’s Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses in 1958. She turned 6 that
year. Smith Houses, built right next to the Brooklyn Bridge, turned 3. It’s one of the eight
NYCHA developments slated to lease land to private developers.
Like many Puerto Ricans back then, Torres’ parents, brother, two sisters, aunts, uncles and
cousins spent Sundays with Resurrection Lutheran Church, where pastor and founder Ruben
Dario Colon shepherded a community-oriented, social-justice focused congregation. Colon was
one of the organizers of the first Puerto Rican Day Parade, which also took place in 1958.
“I come from that background,” says Torres, who has been president of the Smith Houses
Residents Association since 2010. “Rev. Colon walked with Martin Luther King. After King was
killed, even before his birthday became a national holiday, on the Sundays before his birthday
we had sermons about him. We all grew up in that sense of social justice and serving the
community.”
Smith Houses was at first the only targeted public housing community to come out against
NYCHA’s plan to lease public land to private developers. With Smith Houses leading the way,
six of the other NYCHA public housing communities came to their side. NYCHA agreed to slow
down the process. Meanwhile, 320 Smith Houses residents won a lawsuit forcing NYCHA to
take care of unmet repairs going back years.
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Torres brings the experience and support network from those victories with her to also serve on
the new CDC board, alongside Papa. The questions they face are urgent. There’s NYCHA’s land
use plan, the rebuilding of the South Street Seaport where many residents shopped and worked,
and in January HUD awarded $176 million for a storm protection plan covering the SSER-CDC
waterfront all the way around to the northern tip of Battery Park City on the Hudson River side
of Manhattan. How that HUD money gets contracted out, and whether any of it will create jobs,
contracts or other opportunities for existing residents, is a big point of discussion for the CDC.
“It’s important for the residents, not only in Smith Houses but all along this part of the waterfront
to have a voice in what’s happening,” Torres says. “People from other parts of the city think they
can just come here and just say what to do, and part of it is because so much of this waterfront is
public or subsidized housing.”
“I pay over a thousand dollars a month rent, and I’m not the only one. And I pay taxes on my
pension too,” adds Torres, who retired from the NYC Department of Education a year ago after
heart surgery. “There’s this misperception of housing residents that we’re not contributing
anything.”
Equity is built into the new CDC. According to its bylaws, a minimum of three board members
must come from each of five categories: tenant associations, property owners, community-based
organizations, businesses and individuals/other interested parties.
Also on SSER-CDC’s agenda: small business incubation and preservation, open space design for
the waterfront, and what they’re calling “cultural resiliency” — highlighting and leveraging the
diversity of the neighborhood as a key feature of the waterfront. Planning discussions are already
beginning for a major waterfront cultural festival in 2017.
The biggest challenge, Papa says, will be getting the two communities on either side of the
Brooklyn Bridge to think as one when it comes to the waterfront. All of the public housing
communities are on one side, and Wall Street is on the other.
“There’s traditional barriers between each side,” Papa explains. “Neither has ever really been
invited to think of the use of the waterfront together, until now.”
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Market Urbanism MUsings March 4, 2016
Market Urbanism - Fri, 2016-03-04 13:48
(the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami / credits to Laritmo.com)
1. Where’s Scott?
Scott Beyer spent his second week in the Oklahoma City area, finding a place in the relatively
wealthy northern college suburb of Edmond, OK. This week he wrote for Governing about New
Orleans‘ music noise issue, and profiled a man in Forbes who escaped Cuba by raft for Miami.
There are over 1.1 million Cuban immigrants in the United States, and even more than other
immigrant groups, they have clustered, with over two-thirds living in greater Miami. What unites
this group is not dislike of their home country, but the need to leave the Castro brothers’
Communist regime.
2. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group:
Nolan Gray found another great Daniel Hertz article: Great neighborhoods don’t have to be
illegal—they’re not elsewhere
John Morris shared Donald Shoup‘s contribution to a Washington Post series on cities
becoming less car-dependent (h/t Nolan Gray)
John Morris also found a post at Medium calling for repeal of segregationist zoning policies
Jeff Fong shared a short podcast interview with Alain Betaud
Sandy Ikeda shared Bill Easterly‘s research on the largely unplanned emergence over 400 years
of single block in Soho
Mark Frasier congratulates Zach Caceras‘ work seeding local reforms at Startup Cities
Adam Lang‘s ongoing frustration with urban renewal in his Philadelphia neighborhood which
we previously covered
3. Elsewhere:
New Geography reposted Nolan Gray’s recent article on Jane Jacob’s Hayekian approach
William Fischel will be speaking Tuesday at NYU about his new paper: The Rise of the
Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the
Growth Machine
Chris Hagan‘s WBEZ radio piece about population loss in Chicago‘s North Center
neighborhood due to restrictive zoning
Nick Zaiac wrote Maryland Is an Over-Regulated Disaster: Here’s How to Fix It and published
a report at The Maryland Public Policy Institute
Commutes in the U.S. are getting longer, reports the Washington Post’s Wonkblog.
4. Stephen Smith‘s Tweet of the Week:
SROs provided that without subsidy, without even tax abatements, until we banned their
creation. https://t.co/iPM4iuy27y
— Market Urbanism (@MarketUrbanism) February 29, 2016
Categories: New Urbanism
Worldwide links: Los Angeles Olympics, 2024?
Greater Greater Washington - Fri, 2016-03-04 13:15
by Jeff Wood
Los Angeles wants the 2024 Olympics and says it can do the job for cheap, Greyhound is
looking for a new lease on life, and in Georgia, voters just lost their chance to decide whether to
fund MARTA expansion. Check out what's happening around the world in transportation, land
use, and other related areas!
Photo by Michael Li on Flickr.
Olympic Trials: It costs a lot to host the Olympics, and recently most of the willing bidders
have been cities in countries with horrible human rights records. A lot of cities in wealthier
countries have said no to hosting, but Lost Angeles says it has a model for running the Games at
low cost, and wants to use it in 2024. (ESPN)
Greyhound makeover: Greyhound, which many have long viewed as a travel mode of last
resort, is working to attract younger riders and stay relevant. By creating new apps and
upgrading its aging fleet, the company hopes to compete on shorter haul routes that have been
long dominated by the airline industry. (Dallas Morning News)
MARTA never had a chance: Many Georgia voters thought they'd be voting this fall on
whether to expand MARTA. That won't happen, though, as the measure won't be on the ballot
because suburban legislators scuttled a vote on the bill proposing to put it there. (Curbed Atlanta)
Denver's disputed plan: Blueprint Denver, which in 2002 said which parts of the city should
develop and which should stay the same, is due for an update. Local density opponents say that
prevailing interpretations of the plan have been too friendly to developers. (Westword)
Healthy town: In England, new towns are focusing on health outcomes for residents, with places
fighting diseases like diabetes by promoting active living and restricting fast food near schools.
Ten new towns are planned for 170,000 residents by 2030. (Mashable)
For transit, regional > local: In a number of European cities, regional associations called
Verkehrsverbund handle transit operations and coordination. Doing it this way rather than having
local, individual agencies run most transit systems, could mean more ridership, lower costs, and
better land use decisions. (MZ Strategies)
Quote of the Week
"The London Congestion Charge is better than nothing but does not do the job as effectively as it
might since it is not closely related to the congestion costs any given journey creates and, as a
cordon charge, in fact generates an incentive once you have paid the charge to use your vehicle."
- Paul Cheshire, Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of
Economics.
10 comments
Did you enjoy this article? Greater Greater Washington is running a reader drive to raise funds
so we can keep editing and publishing great articles every day. Please help us be sustainable by
making a monthly, yearly, or one-time contribution today! Click here to support Greater Greater
Washington.
Categories: CNU blogs
Friday photo: Merchants Square
West North - Fri, 2016-03-04 13:12
The entrance to ye olde Public Parking lies immediately beyond ye ancient Bank Drive Thru…
Jokes aside, Colonial Williamsburg’s Merchants Square is an interesting 1930s-era transitional
exercise in proto-shopping center design. As the site’s National Register nomination notes, this
development largely explains why early shopping centers on the East Coast adopted a “Colonial”
dress with red bricks, white columns, and pitched roofs. I wish that more of the era’s shopping
centers had taken its lead in planning, rather than architecture, and moved the parking from in
front to mid-block.
On a recent visit, it was surprising to see how far retail has sprawled around Williamsburg —
exacerbated, no doubt, by sales-tax revenue rivalry between the City of Williamsburg and the
surrounding James City County. Yet many of the new “lifestyle shopping villages” at the
outskirts, namely New Town and High Street, suffer from subpar locations and high vacancy
rates, and none has emerged as the Class A champion. I wonder how a less conservatively
managed Merchants Square could have grown by just one or two more blocks north or south,
adapting to the town’s growing and changing clientele of students, local residents, and tourists.
Alas, we will never know.
Categories: New Urbanism
Rescuing New Ideas From the Purgatory of Old Bureaucracy
Grid Chicago - Fri, 2016-03-04 12:56
Louisville has solid transportation goals, but it’s having trouble delivering on them.
Your city may have a complete streets policy. Your mayor may say all the right things
about making streets work for walking, biking, and transit. But if the inner workings of
government — city budgets, agency protocols — aren’t set up to enable big street design
breakthroughs, all you’ll get are scattershot improvements.
Writing for Network blog Broken Sidewalk, Chris Glasser of Bicycling for Louisville says his
city is ready for safer, multi-modal streets — it just needs to figure out the mechanics of making
change happen:
In the city budgets of the last three years, there has been funding for sidewalk improvements, for
bike lanes, and for road repaving — all the ingredients needed for a complete street. But all that
money is in separate pots, all going to separate projects. We’ve got the ingredients we need, but
no recipe to follow to make a better street. We don’t provide any funding for the holistic
approaches that make the street safer for everyone. This needs to change.
In Louisville, we have an 8-year-old, 160-page document that’s gathering dust and the promise
of a multi-modal plan that’s more than a year overdue. What we don’t have is a strategy or
funding source for implementing complete streets. Instead, we come by our most people-friendly
streets somewhat haphazardly…
Why is this important? Here’s just one example: Metro Louisville Public Works is currently
considering a redesign for Jefferson Street through Downtown. Their design features bus islands,
a protected bike lane, and curb extensions for pedestrians. Four driving lanes would be taken
down to three. These are all great things — design concepts that benefit all users.
But there’s one big problem. There’s no money for a project like this. To be sure, there is money
in a city budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. For instance, “bike money” could pay for this
project — but at the cost of 75 percent of its annual allotment on a bike lane that goes 0.9 miles
and for which the vast majority of the project cost is not related to a bike lane. There is money
available, just not money for this complete street project.
Glasser’s first goal is to implement “a funding mechanism for holistic roadway redesign.”
Elsewhere on the Streetsblog Network: Baltimore InnerSpace assesses what went wrong for the
Red Line project and offers some advice for local transit advocates. And Bill Lindeke at Twin
City Sidewalks asks, “How would Gandhi drive?”
Categories: New Urbanism
An institution demolished in the Flickr Pool
Greater Greater Washington - Fri, 2016-03-04 12:15
by Elizabeth Whitton
Here are our favorite new images from the Greater and Lesser Washington Flickr pool,
showcasing the best and worst of the Washington region.
A post-apocalyptic Post building. Photo by Rob Pegoraro.
ATU Protest. Photo by Kristine Marsh.
Navy Yard. Photo by Brian Mosely.
Winter's back? Photo by Ned Russell.
Crowded Light Rail. Photo by charmcity123.
Got a picture that depicts the best or worst of the Washington region? Make sure to join our
Flickr pool and submit your own photos!
Comment
Did you enjoy this article? Greater Greater Washington is running a reader drive to raise funds
so we can keep editing and publishing great articles every day. Please help us be sustainable by
making a monthly, yearly, or one-time contribution today! Click here to support Greater Greater
Washington.
Categories: CNU blogs
Rescuing New Ideas From the Purgatory of Old Bureaucracy
Streetsblog Capitol Hill - Fri, 2016-03-04 11:50
Louisville has solid transportation goals, but it’s having trouble delivering on them.
Your city may have a complete streets policy. Your mayor may say all the right things
about making streets work for walking, biking, and transit. But if the inner workings of
government — city budgets, agency protocols — aren’t set up to enable big street design
breakthroughs, all you’ll get are scattershot improvements.
Writing for Network blog Broken Sidewalk, Chris Glasser of Bicycling for Louisville says his
city is ready for safer, multi-modal streets — it just needs to figure out the mechanics of making
change happen:
In the city budgets of the last three years, there has been funding for sidewalk improvements, for
bike lanes, and for road repaving — all the ingredients needed for a complete street. But all that
money is in separate pots, all going to separate projects. We’ve got the ingredients we need, but
no recipe to follow to make a better street. We don’t provide any funding for the holistic
approaches that make the street safer for everyone. This needs to change.
In Louisville, we have an 8-year-old, 160-page document that’s gathering dust and the promise
of a multi-modal plan that’s more than a year overdue. What we don’t have is a strategy or
funding source for implementing complete streets. Instead, we come by our most people-friendly
streets somewhat haphazardly…
Why is this important? Here’s just one example: Metro Louisville Public Works is currently
considering a redesign for Jefferson Street through Downtown. Their design features bus islands,
a protected bike lane, and curb extensions for pedestrians. Four driving lanes would be taken
down to three. These are all great things — design concepts that benefit all users.
But there’s one big problem. There’s no money for a project like this. To be sure, there is money
in a city budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. For instance, “bike money” could pay for this
project — but at the cost of 75 percent of its annual allotment on a bike lane that goes 0.9 miles
and for which the vast majority of the project cost is not related to a bike lane. There is money
available, just not money for this complete street project.
Glasser’s first goal is to implement “a funding mechanism for holistic roadway redesign.”
Elsewhere on the Streetsblog Network: Baltimore InnerSpace assesses what went wrong for the
Red Line project and offers some advice for local transit advocates. And Bill Lindeke at Twin
City Sidewalks asks, “How would Gandhi drive?”
Categories: New Urbanism
Four days left and just $2,119 to go!
Greater Greater Washington - Fri, 2016-03-04 11:16
by David Alpert
We're so close! Thanks to readers' generosity and our matching donors, we're so close to hitting
our goal for our reader drive. We need just $2,119 more to get the rest of our matching funds.
Can you get us there before our party on Tuesday, March 8?
We're close to the top! Original photo by ekelly80.
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Categories: CNU blogs
The Week Observed: March 4, 2016
City Observatory - Fri, 2016-03-04 10:20
What City Observatory did this week
1. Cities can’t solve all our problems. Like other people who think and work about cities and
urban issues, we’re often focused on how ground-level changes can make cities better—things
neighborhood groups or local government can do. But though local actors are important, we
can’t lose sight of the fact that cities don’t exist in a vacuum—they very much depend on state
and federal policy for everything from the condition of the macro economy to climate change.
We’re fast reaching the point where if they are to succeed, cities need to federal government to
step up.
2. Explore national transportation change trends by age group. As we’ve written before, even
with the move of young highly-educated people and jobs to cities, moving the needle on
transportation use is incredibly hard, because it depends in large part on the slowly-changing
built environment. In this post, we built an interactive tool to look at exactly how much
transportation behavior has changed (at least in commutes) by age over the last decade or so. In a
future post, we’ll break it down by metropolitan area—where the news is a bit rosier.
3. The problem with how we measure housing affordability. By far the most common benchmark
for whether housing is “affordable” is whether a household spends more than 30 percent of its
income in rent or mortgage payments. But there are some problems: 30 percent is a very
different burden for someone on a very low income compared to higher incomes; it doesn’t
include other location-based costs, like transportation; and it doesn’t take into account what
people get for that housing: a substandard apartment in a neighborhood with few amenities, or a
better unit with access to good jobs and amenities?
4. CBO on highway finance: The price is wrong. A new report from the Congressional Budget
Office confirms something we’ve known for a while: drivers don’t pay the full price of their use
of roads, and as a result, drive much more than if they weren’t being shielded from the true costs
of driving. Other financial arrangements that took into account the costs of congestion and
maintenance—not to mention environmental and human costs—might lead to more efficient use
of our car transportation system. The report also warns that the stimulative impact of new
highways appears to be waning.
The week’s must reads
1. We’ve expressed reservations about inclusionary zoning as an affordable housing strategy for
a variety of reasons, including its effect on the market and its limited scale. At streets.mn,
University of Minnesota Professor Evan Roberts offers a cogent synthesis the skepticism,
breaking his arguments into four parts: 1) IZ puts all the funding burden for affordable housing
on a very small number of people—developers and purchasers of new housing; 2) IZ makes the
financing of affordable housing opaque; 3) IZ is a passive response to the problem of
affordability that makes no affirmative commitment to provide a certain amount of housing; 4)
and IZ discourages new market-rate housing.
2. Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking is one of the most influential urban policy
books of the last ten years, forcefully arguing that city residents suffer for the sake of plentiful,
ostensibly free parking supply. In the Washington Post, he updates his arguments about how
parking requirements hurt the poor by driving up housing construction costs. He points out that a
single parking space can cost $24,000—several times the median net household worth among
Hispanics ($7,700) and black Americans ($6,300). Forcing all residents, whether or not they own
a car, to help subsidize required parking spaces at their homes, businesses, and shops is an
unnecessary burden. It’s counterintuitive, but free is a bad price if you’re concerned about the
poor.
3. The New Yorker covers the growing number of “micro-unit” apartment developments in its
hometown, interviewing Brookings’ Alan Berube and the Furman Center’s Ingrid Gould Ellen.
While these newly-built homes aren’t affordable to lower-income renters—something that
shouldn’t be a surprise, as we’ve written—they do help meet the growing demand for housing
for single-person households, including young people and the elderly, making for more flexible
neighborhoods that allow people to “age in place” and allow larger units to filter to younger
families.
New knowledge
1. The debate over streetcars often focuses on their perceived shortcomings, including whether
their added expense is worth the limited time and capacity savings over bus routes, or their
usefulness as instigators of infill development. A newly published study from two Florida State
researchers looks at the issue from another perspective: whether, and how, the kinds of people
who ride streetcars are different from people who ride light rail, another popular form of rail that
tends to run in its own right-of-way, as opposed to on the same roadbed as cars, like streetcars.
They find that ridership sources are different for each type: light rail tends to attract more
“utilitarian” riders going to, for example, jobs, while streetcars appear to attract riders motivated
by “tourism and special activity” centers.
2. Though transportation conversations often pit different modes against one another—
”bicyclists” and “drivers” and “bus riders” and so on—most people depend on multiple modes
over the course of a typical week, if not a typical day. A new survey of BART riders in the San
Francisco Bay Area has a lot of interesting information, but perhaps the most interesting is the
breakdown of how people arrive to BART stations: over a third walk, about 6 percent bike, a
little under a tenth take the bus, and just under 40 percent either drive themselves or get dropped
off. It’s a good reminder that most transportation environments depend on the interplay of
multiple modes.
3. Governments make sure to measure how many people use major pieces of road infrastructure,
like highways, and transit agencies are able to release detailed ridership information, but we hear
far less often about “walkership” (feel free to insert your own made-up word there). But new
sensors installed in Chicago’s Loop have an estimate for us: over the course of the last week of
February, more than 1.61 million trips were taken on foot on a 4,000-ft. stretch of State Street.
While we don’t think of walking as “mass transportation,” that represents 230,000 trips per
day—more than all but one of Chicago’s eight heavy rail lines.
This week, The Direct Transfer, Jeff Wood’s daily roundup of all the urbanism news that’s fit to
print—from Brookings Institution reports to updates about local zoning and transportation
debates—went to a “premium” model, worth $15 a month or $150 a year for the full daily email.
We’ve always seen The Week Observed as a complement, rather than a competitor, to The
Direct Transfer—a digest from a particular perspective, rather than a comprehensive link
rundown—this newsletter offers great value for money if you need to stay on top of the country’s
urbanist news.
The Week Observed is City Observatory’s weekly newsletter. Every Friday, we give you a quick
review of the most important articles, blog posts, and scholarly research on American cities.
Our goal is to help you keep up with—and participate in—the ongoing debate about how to
create prosperous, equitable, and livable cities, without having to wade through the hundreds of
thousands of words produced on the subject every week by yourself.
If you have ideas for making The Week Observed better, we’d love to hear them! Let us know at
jcortright@cityobservatory.org, dkhertz@cityobservatory.org, or on Twitter at @cityobs.
Categories: CNU blogs, New Urbanism
Headlines for Friday, March 4
Grid Chicago - Fri, 2016-03-04 10:02
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Senior Crossing Metra Tracks Hit by 60 MPH Train is Uninjured (Tribune)
IDOT Demolishes South Side Bridge After Deficiencies Found Last Year (Chicagoist)
Large Excavators Will Tear Apart Viaduct on Western/Belmont This Weekend (DNA)
Play Set in Bike Shop To Explore Misunderstandings Between Bicyclists and
Motorists (ATA)
Village of Bartlett Starts New Bike and Run Advisory Committee (Daily Herald)
MPC Examines January Travel and Transportation Patterns in Chicago
Developers, Resident Groups Using TOD Calculator to Understand Building Impacts
(Harvard)
Construction Photos of TOD Building at Milwaukee/Elston (Chicago Architecture Info)
Get national headlines at Streetsblog USA
Categories: New Urbanism
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