Nothing Costs More than Free

A lot of info to digest from both the book Free by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, which appropriately the book is offered here at the linked site for a similar rate, and this review in the New Yorker of the ideas by Malcolm Gladwell of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers fame.

Now, I have to say that I feel like I always disagree with Gladwell's assertions. Something about his logic and my logic just never seem to align. Given those titles mentioned above alludes to the quasi-statistical basis that seems to captivate Gladwell. I see him as a bit of a Bizarro Freakanomics guy, who have a much deeper background in solid statistics.

But, the point is to relate Anderson's message to what it might mean for Cities, and more specifically the organization of cities which are always defined by the transportation systems. Gladwell writes, paraphrasing from Anderson's book (my emphasis in bold):

Since the falling costs of digital technology let you make as much stuff as you want, Anderson argues, and the magic of the word “free” creates instant demand among consumers, then Free (Anderson honors it with a capital) represents an enormous business opportunity. Companies ought to be able to make huge amounts of money “around” the thing being given away—as Google gives away its search and e-mail and makes its money on advertising.

If we were to create Fare Free Mass Transit (as MATA Trolley is now is are, and more significantly, car travel) what would be the benefits?

First of all, the amount of revenue mass transit systems bring in barely cover the costs of operating their own fare collection systems and certainly not their operating budgets. What some cities around the globe have found that the value generated by writing off the cost of fare travel is actually recovered by the overall value that transit creates "around" the system.

A city's job is to create and maintain an environment suitable for commerce and improved quality of life for its citizens. Both original motivations for the creation of cities due to the clustering of people.

If transit becomes easier and more convenient (and cheaper) to use than car transportation and its auto-oriented development counterpart, the city and people within the city begin to reorganize around the new, dominant form of transportation. Transportation decisions are made by government. We've just been duped into making all the wrong ones in the name of "progress," as generations of individuals grew up with the idea of the Corbusien City, impacted greatly by moments like the New York World's Fair:

Because the car was technology and technology meant progress, we leapt into a rabbit hole unaware of the repercussions.

If somebody gives you the "that is social engineering" line, respond that all forms of transportation define how cities structure themselves because cities, while we think of them as timeless, are actually rather fluid. The only things that are timeless are those things/places that we love and wish to maintain as "timeless."

Free Transit (and by free I may just mean convenient - as itunes has proven cheap may not be necessary, but EASY absolutely is) would immediately increase ridership which means mobility. And mobility is what lubricates markets, i.e. commerce as well as access to labor/talent and vice versa jobs.

Cars create mobility as well you might argue. The difference is the spatial arrangements of the two. Cars dislocate people while transit concentrates people which is necessary for the "movement economy". The predictability of a certain number of people passing by your business in a given timeframe.

As we have discussed previously, this is the future of retail, locating in areas where the most people pass by. Currently, these are where highways meet arterials, but the public realm is a disaster and effectively is sociofugal. Whereas transit oriented development encourages more pedestrian friendly environments, clustering development into spatial arrangements that encourage vitality, safety, and synergy. All necessities.

Frankly, utilizing "the blink" method, I'm guessing that financially a City would get MORE back from increases real estate value, development and property taxes, as well as the increase in sales tax revenue from this reorganized city.

I'm not trying to take your car away or practice spooky "social engineering" but rather attempting to rearrange and balance our transportation systems for a positive social, environmental, and commercial outcome; so that the private form that is currently a necessity becomes the luxury and vice versa.

We've taken to the car like a junky to a new drug, creating a period of dislocation and isolationism. It's time to enter rehab.

Outsider Review: Ballpark in Arlington

From Deadspin:

The stadium itself was a scandal, an unabashed land grab that lawsuits would later describe as "sordid and shocking" and "astounding, unprecedented and blatantly illegal." It was also Bush's signal achievement as an owner. I'll leave the details to others, but in essence, Bush and his fellow Rangers owners somehow contrived to privatize the city's power of eminent domain. Then they went shopping. They bought up land on the cheap for the twin purposes of baseball and speculation, and dropped a hideous, plagiarized ballpark in the middle of it all, next to an artificial lake, with thin bands of granite circling the exterior that might as well be police tape.

The Future of Suburbia

Both existing and future. Gonna have to start growing yer own food. From NYT which lists it currently as amenity. But, someday it will ratchet up one notch to necessity:

At the 220-home Serenbe project near Atlanta’s airport, the cachet of local produce has been added to retiree-friendly businesses, including galleries, a bed-and-breakfast and three restaurants. Steve Nygren, an Atlanta restaurant impresario, started the project on his 900-acre farm.

The problem is that this is still in "niche market" phase serving a solitary demographic.

Density and It's Role in Civilizing Man

A new paper in Science makes the argument and Jonah Lehrer from Wired discusses:

The larger implication is that the birth of human culture was triggered by a new kind of connectedness. For the first time, humans lived in dense clusters, and occasionally interacted with other clusters, which allowed their fragile innovations to persist and propagate. The end result was a positive feedback loop of new ideas.

WE are smarter than ME. S-M-R-T.

-------and------------

Grist puts statistics to Herman Daly:

It’s almost like the economy is embedded in an environment, and degrading the latter ultimately degrades the former.

Please tell me that line was written facetiously.

Sprockets Prefer Communism

Obviously, American millennials don't share a similar history as these East Germans, but this is one worry that I have: swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. In this article, Der Spiegel discusses the causes and implications of the primarily young East German led re-emergent preference for Communism:

His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."

Naturally, I believe that capitalism, when done right, is the most democratic economy, but typically the bottom-up democratic version gets overwhelmed by cycles of business growth and monopolies. Thus, corrupting markets and showing protections are necessary.

As we know, Millennials are communitarians. The opposite of the more defensively individualistic Baby Boom generation. But, this is a pretty fascinating case of people, often not old enough to remember the Berlin Wall, concocting a fake history because the current system has abandoned them rather than simply fixing the system to adapt more appropriately to their needs.

Of course, if fixing the system were so easy, we would have been able to accomplish it already.

Cost of Transit

TreeHugger has an article up that ranges from NYC upping their subway fares to the various costs among international subway/transit lines to the differences between zone- or distance-based pricing to standardized fares:

Meanwhile, San Francisco's BART and DC's Metro -- two of the newest U.S. metro systems (1972 and 1976, respectively; LA's subway is the newest) -- are the only American networks listed here to rely on zone or distance-based pricing. The further you travel, the more expensive the fare.

Such a system potentially makes the per mile cost of those subways cheaper. In cities with fixed fares, meanwhile, riders who travel short distances are effectively helping to pay for the cost of those who travel longer distances.

Still, I tend to think the costs of zone-pricing outweigh the benefits. Not only can it make subway travel considerably more expensive than it might otherwise be, but it presumably adds more management costs for the subway and more complication (and okay, aggravation) for riders who don't want to get their ticket out every time they leave the subway. I'm not sure fast-paced New Yorkers could stand for the kind of turnstile gridlock that could ensue, in the way that Bay Area or DC riders might be able to.

Dallas DART has a bit of a hybridized system where one purchases "premium" to travel between Dallas and Fort Worth, typically on the TRE. As you can see on the map, Dallas' system is pretty spread out suggesting the majority of trips would be pretty long in comparison with say a more dense system like Chicago.

While I haven't shied away from the idea of fare-free transit, my trips on DART consist mostly of shorter trips from Downtown to American Airlines Center for events/games, to CityPlace for West Village or Target, or to Mockingbird Station for food and drinks.

Much more rarely however, I do take the TRE to DFW or to the once a year trip to Fort Worth, which is eminently more enjoyable than the drive down 30. Apparently, there is WiFi on the TRE as well, but I didn't happen to bring the laptop or sync it with my Iphone. With either however, I can browse, listen to music, post on this blog...ALL more interesting than sitting on I-30.

Back to the point of the article, I tend to back a fare plan that is NOT distance based and more standardized fare. As the article suggests this makes short trips subsidize the long ones. But, in high quality cities, those short trips can be accomplished by cleaner means than what one Dallas City official refers to as "not light rail, but welter-weight rail," which is still cleaner and more efficient than personal automobile use AND produces better and more efficient land use and building patterns.

Rather than taking comparatively expensive short trips on the welterweight rail, one would take streetcar, walk, or bike (caveat: in cities where those forms of transportation are amenable, pleasurable, and safe). And, since long trips are now relatively cheap, it encourages long trips by welterweight rail rather than personal car.

The only problem I have with Dallas' system is that to go to the airport currently, which I have done exactly once now via TRE, is that it is a "premium" trip. I don't mind that Dallas to Fort Worth or vice versa is a step up in price scale for distance but shouldn't DFW be a sort of neutral ground for both cities rather than being more expensive for one city to get to than its sibling?

Raise the Hammer: Crowd Sourcing and Gate Keepers

Interesting take.

Filesharing is a tragic missed opportunity for the music industry to dramatically extend its reach to potential listeners - and potential customers. Just as free radio play increased music revenue and cheap videos increased movie revenue, free or cheap music filesharing could also have increased music industry revenue - if the industry embraced it instead of resisting it.

Make No Little Plans

As Chicago prepares to party like it's 1909, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan of Chicago, the WSJ covers it here:

The plan advises: “The city which brings about the best conditions of life becomes the most prosperous.” London’s citizens, it warns, who rejected the 1666 plan proposed by the great Christopher Wren, put their own “perverse self-interests” first and cost the city “millions upon millions in money to repair in part the errors which might have been avoided so easily, besides years of inconvenience and loss due to congestion of ­traffic.”

Some of us even have Burnham awards... cough cough.

Take note Dallas, a City of equal ambition but lacking any direction, forces tugging it every which way. Now quoting from John Norquist's Wealth of Cities:

"...if urban proximity and its efficiencies end because government policy spreads population and markets randomly over the landscape, then the wealth produced in cities dissipates."

Business and improved quality of life in cities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, as cities are the only entity NOT created by political act, as they are evolved from mere aggregations of people facing similar hardships looking for safety and eventually became bubbling cauldrons of cultural foment.

So in this way, they transcend boundaries and are organic constructs. Cities are products of economic activity and as I quoted Mumford here,

"The purpose of transportation is to bring people and goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within that limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes."

As Norquist goes on to say, this ease of transport, of goods reaching markets, of synergies formed by proximity, create frictionless markets. The idea behind highways was to aid in this movement however, highways, in actuality and ironically, have dispersed us to the point where markets (and our cities) have broken down, becoming so fractured with barely a pulse.

Productivity and synergy are lost as we actually infused increased "friction" between markets that include the cost of construction and maintenance of these highways, the distance between producers and markets, the cost of personal automobility and the energy to get between two places (read: fluctuating and unpredictability of gas prices), and "externalized" costs that somebody has to pay for eventually including pollution, decline of real estate prices, obesity, healthcare and health impacts of collisions, etc.

Highways started as a means of linking cities and aiding in intercity commerce. But the monster has grown beyond its cage into a construction for the sake of construction industry, lacking purpose, a snake swallowing its own tail. They are important in linking city perimeter to city perimeter, but never should have been constructed within city limits, allowing for highway friendly business and logistics uses towards the edge of the city which are often associated with blight, ie nobody wants to be near them.

See my post on Valencia, Spain and the image of a suburb of Valencia shown below:

Moving from West to East (or Left to right), you see highway, industrial/shipping/freight uses, then the train station for passenger and freight, then the remainder of the town full of little blue dots. These dots in a previous iteration of Google Earth indicated images uploaded into google earth. I classify these also as indicators of health because they are indicative of places people love enough to photograph and share with the rest of the world. (Also, note that the highways and industrial uses encroach very little into the actual city of Valencia.)

See the affect the inner loop has on the City of Dallas. Nothing wants to be near the freeways. Note: the only successful piece of urbanism in downtown Dallas is the four-block stretch of Main Street fully buffered by a cocoon of the city from the impact of the freeway.

We should start tearing these out as I suggest similar to the ringstrasse in Vienna. It's good for business.

(Ringstrasse overlaid onto Dallas)

While this is no small plan, it is not something that can be done overnight. As Jan Gehl suggests, these things must be done incrementally. It has taken Copenhagen 45 years of slowly removing cars from the streets and returning them to the people. Now the city is filled with that most precious of urban health indicators, babies.

Step 1 should be about reducing the immediate affect of the highways by taking out all clover leafs in the downtown area, as Vancouver has begun to do here. Thus, making the highways here context-sensitive, meaning responsive and sensitive to their immediate surroundings. There are no one-size fits all solutions as TxDOT will thrust their standards upon cities.

Removing clover leafs and replacing the off-ramp system with more city-friendly "urbanized" streets that hug the highways like frontage roads diminishes the negative impact of the high speed ramping by forcing slower traffic onto the frontage roads. These frontage roads should look and act like urban streets with parking, sidewalks, street trees, etc. Furthmore, by eliminating the space eating cloverleafs, this effort begins to open up land for development that the City in cooperation with the state can turn over as part of a redevelopment RFP for areas adjacent to highways.

Quote for the Day

Being Millennial to the extreme right now: reading and highlighting a book, The Wealth of Cities by John Norquist; checking email from the Iphone; posting to the blog; and having a beer and lunch at a neighborhood bar, or "third place."



Extracted from said book, 'Mark I. Gelfand in A Nation of Cities,

"The Democratic mayor of Richmond told the meeting (ed. note: at the 1935 United States Council of Mayors meeting discussing how to deal with the depression) that if municipalities would simply learn to live within their incomes, all their problems would disappear."

Apropos, given the post/discussion on municipal budgets lately.

Tight Rope

Planetizen review of the NYC High Line.

Victory: Defeat. A Potemkin Village

My unit in Victory. When should we mention that every unit in the W tower is owned by men?

Ok. I have had an empty link at the side of this page for about a year now with the promise of analyzing (at the time) why Victory would fail. Failing is such a harsh word, but it has in many ways thus far, particularly when compared to the promise and hype. Ultimately, given the amount of investment it will get rolled back into the city fabric it tried to avoid like a little kid squirming away from something icky to prevent catching cooties from...what? Authenticity?

Well, we still haven't created that part yet either. Hopefully, it will begin spreading from very true urbanism, embodied by State Thomas. A place I have long called the best piece of reinvigorated authentic urbanity. We'll come back to this neighborhood when the author of the article does.

Thanks to Lindsey who forwarded me this article from D Magazine:

The Failure of Victory Park.

"It is sleek, chic, and modernist. Translated,
that means it is cold, barren, and unfriendly."

The writer Wick Allison hits on all the points I've caught hell for in places like on Dallas Metropolypse, suggesting the architecture belongs in somewhere in the antiseptic third act of the 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the W was still a 2-dimensional imagination, I had this to say:

"looks like Kubrick's vision of a dystopic future."

Clearly, I need new movies to reference. Next time I discuss Millennials, I will reference Juno. I promise.

God forbid I dare critique ANY new development because ALL development is good development. I guess this City has fallen so far that we ARE desperate for something, anything. Even if deep in our bones we know the flaws embedded in the work, usually stemming from compromises made with engineers or 80's style developers set in their ways.

That wasn't the case with Victory, however. From the outset of design, mistakes were made. First of all, the designer of American Airlines Arena, and Fort Worth hero David Schwarz sited the venue oddly. "Let's cant it. Ya know, to be different." Forcing every block around it to accommodate oddly configured shapes and patterns forming a mish mash of grids, former grids, and irregularities.

Next, most importantly and by design, the City was excluded. Presumably, a developer led decision, they chose NOT to be a part of the City, by re-routing roads and proposed DART alignments to avoid Victory as much as possible. Lesson: You can't be exclusive in the 21st century city, isolating yourself as a development prevents it from ever becoming a neighborhood, which all known and successful places are at their root. You might as well cut off your own hand and plant it in the ground hoping for it to sprout a body.

Now take a look at State Thomas. Say what you will about what happened to the historic neighborhood, but the destruction was from Office speculation in the 80's that ripped apart the largely African-American neighborhood that was there. The current development was about curing the destruction.

"To see Jacob's ideas at work in Dallas, go to the corner of Allen and State in Uptown, and walk down either street. You will see buildings constructed on a human scale, out of natural materials, with narrow side streets."

It's not coincidental that the writer picked the same intersection that I often describe as the best part of the City. Re-investment brought about by the first TIF in Texas saved this portion of Dallas when there WAS no "uptown". It created uptown. Now that it has been colonized by yuppies is time to create more supply of urbanism.

Back to Victory. There are other flaws, but ultimately they all come back to that decision to disconnect although it is hard to blame them. There was very little TO connect to nearby. The transportation network was/IS a disaster, LoMac in particular. So they had to create a neighborhood all to themself and frankly that is typical of Dallas area development.

The roads are SO bad (meaning hostile and inhumane) that you have to play defense. You have to create a destination so great to literally pull people into your site off those bad streets. In a future post I have outlined, I will write about how "We Will Never have a Fifth Ave., Champs Elysees, or Michigan Ave." With that said, transportation always comes first and building and development are a reaction. If you don't get it right, you fail.

To create their destination they relied strictly on what was inside the walls, events at AAC, Ghost Bar, the now defunct n9ne, not the space between the walls, which is what people remember, where the return to, and what really creates "place." It is (near?) impossible to create a lasting and true place this way. At the very least, Victory teaches us lessons.

So what else went wrong? Let's count the ways shall we...

1. Road Alignment - Have you noticed that the most prominent open space, AT&T Plaza terminates Field St. Houston St., the one that Victory essentially uses as a service drive. This is one of the bad roads Victory has to pull people from, except the back feels more like the front and the retail is in the back, which is actually the front... I'm confused. Exactly.



2. Block Size - The blocks are too narrow to create efficient buildings. Don't get me wrong efficiency should never be the mark by which anything is judged, but it's probably still wise to be cost effective. The buildings are about 140-145' wide. A garage is 120' minimum width, leaving barely, and I mean BARELY enough to get some liner use there. This is particularly important if they are going to be completely crazy and try to park each building individually in an area with thousands of empty parking spaces. So it means that everybody has to be pulled way up on top of the garages and away from the streetscapes.

3. Phasing - They built everything on one side of the street. Retail more than any other use needs more of itself nearby. Mall designers and retailers have very specific dimensions to make retail cross shop and create spin-off business, aka synergy. It's the one good things malls have done for us beyond nostalgia for Gen-Xers. Not unexpectedly, the retail tenants move out and/or close down one by one.

The built form created by the W and its in-line brethren act more like a curtain of urbanity, a facade of "cool". Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain however. In fact, this seems a lot like Dallas' reputation anyway. So it DOES work in a Koolhaasian nihilistic sort of way. If this was meant, it would be a genius work of art. I'm guessing this was actually a happy little accident.

4. Retail Programming/Branding - Too much testosterone. Even the developers admit it. And yes, all men bought in the W.

5. Lifeless Architecture - Stale, antiseptic, lifeless. You choose the descriptor. The D Mag article covers this.



6. Streetscape - Doesn't soften the hard edges of the buildings enough. I'm willing to reserve judgment until the rest is built here.

7. Park - Here I'm referring to the little dog-shitting venue in front of the House by Stark and Yoo. Now I have talked up the virtues of dogshit on this blog previously. No, seriously. This doesn't feel like a public park. There is a wall and grade change disconnecting it from the street. And no street in front of the buildings it serves makes it feel like theirs...which, in fact, it is. That's the point. Ours, not yours. Stay away from our happy little retail development you tens of thousands of daily visitors to AAC.

Someday when I get more time perhaps I can put together some sketches of the areas around Victory in attempt to pull it off its island.

No Explanation Necessary

ht: Will, found here at GreaterGreaterWashington: Link.

Fun with Numbers/Dallas Budget

So in light of the City of Dallas experiencing a nearly $200 million dollar budget deficit, I thought I would have a little fun with numbers while we watch education, police, fire, and presumably every other necessary service get slashed while road maintenance and upkeep retain highest priority.

First of all, I should say that compared to many other cities that I have been to and worked in, Dallas is getting off light. The city is both lucky and unlucky given its defined boundaries. Many smaller cities are experiencing much more severe budgetary constraints. For example, one city of approximately 100,000 had a projected shortfall of $250,000,000 equalling $2,688 per person. And THAT number was strictly for infrastructural upkeep and maintenance (and upgrades. Can't forget upgrayddes. That's how I will spell it from now on whenever an engineer uses the term road improvements or upgrayddes because it is such a bastardization of terminology), meaning no new construction. Compare that number to $146 per person in Dallas. That's nearly 20x.

Building low density sprawl had come home to roost. We simply can't afford the level of infrastructure that sprawl expects. The primary issue is that logically and throughout history level of services and amenities increased with greater density. It makes sense, more people sharing burdens and costs, the more can be achieved with that pooled wealth. The countryside couldn't afford sewer and roads and power, etc.

This is why I state over and over that Deep Sustainability comes in two forms, self-sufficient and very sparse (the Jeffersonian Ideal) or the very dense cities (but I expect due to material constraints this means lower scaled, but still dense building in the model of Florence, for example). As we know, the very necessitation of human settlement patterns (and community) is shared common hardships and then, in turn, quality of life improvements through gains in standard of living brought about by the economics of sharing, trading, cooperation, markets, etc.

This pattern can be traced directly to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Imagine ourselves as lonely neanderthals at the bottom of the pyramid, rising to the highest of levels during times such as the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the even the technological revolution of today leading to increased levels of interconnectivity. And then crash back down to the yellow in our fractured and disconnected society via the car, the television, etc.


With out new found wealth and suburban explosion, we expected the best schools and similar level of infrastructural support to follow. For a time it worked, but upkeep has proven to be the problem. The infrastructure and population density are spread so thin that we put so much pressure on such brittle apparatus that it begins to collapse due to overuse often caused by our dendritic arterial system versus a more choice-laden, adaptable and dispersive grid network and underfunding.

So getting back to why the City of Dallas's budget shortfall is 20x less than that of smaller cities as discussed earlier, Dallas is lucky in that it is landlocked by its suburban neighbors. Dallas proper can do very little in the way of new growth, which has mostly happened in areas like Rockwall, Mansfield, and Frisco, meaning less no roads (despite everyone from the City to the State, to COG, and to TxDOT's best efforts). So we can ideally focus our efforts on QUALITATIVE over QUANTITATIVE growth.

This is unlike Houston which annexes all of its growth. The future of these two cities can go either way from this tipping point we have reached due to their nature. Houston could become much more responsible with its growth, spending, inertia, and annexation or Dallas could be more successful as it can focus on a much smaller land area.

Where this bites Dallas in the butt, is that there are so many commuters coming in from Richardson, Plano, Arlington, Mesquite, et al., this means Dallas ends up with a very high freeway miles per capita number. Essentially because commuters' trips to Dallas are subsidized at the expense of state and federal taxpayers, but the real cost is the burden on the well-being of the City itself.


Often when the argument of mass transit comes up, I'm both dumbfounded and frustration by the simplicity of the dollar values and supposed wastefulness that is bandied about. Such things as revenue generation, long-term maintenance, real estate values, etc. are always ignored in favor of startup costs strictly against Mass Transit. Well, how about we take a look at how much embedded wealth we have sunk into all of our roads in Dallas.

**Disclaimer: Very rough numbers.

The chart above shows the City of Dallas at .88 freeway miles per 1,000. This chart from 1999 shows freeway equivalent miles at 1.291. I'll use this number because freeway equivalent sounds an awful lot like freeway. Call me crazy, but I'll assume it costs something similar. Also, note how many Texas cities in the top ten. And we wanna build another one as part of the Trinity River Project? Sounds like a good plan (or a racket).

So we know that we have the freeway equivalent of 1.291 lane miles per 1,000 people, approximately 1.3 million people at a density of 3,605 per square mile. And a land area of 385 total square miles. This suggests that 1 freeway lane mile in a congested urban area can cost upwards of a $100 million multiply that over the 1678 freeway lane miles in the city and we get a cost of $167 billion or a cost of $130,000 per person.

But, what about the other roads? Since Dallas was built on mile-square arterial grids we're going to apply this pattern to get a sense of how many overall road miles there are per capita in this city. As you can see in the graphic below, each super block is bound by 1 mile length arterials and further broken up into blocks by internal collectors or residential streets. The total perimeter equals four miles, but I'll go with half that or 2 miles because each arterial is shared by another 1-square mile super block.



Internal to this superblock, I will estimate approximately 10 miles worth of neighborhood streets cross this block. This is more difficult to get a sense for as each superblock is subdivided differently due to geography, density, or whim. But, to assume the equivalent of five N-S and five E-W streets is pretty conservative considering that leads to about 800' x 800' blocks, not unusual for the 'burbs.

At 3,605 people per square mile in the city that means that these blocks then have .00277 of residential street per capita (not unreasonable as that equals 14' of street frontage) and .00055 arterials per capita. I'll cost the residential streets and infrastructure at $5 million per mile (which assumes NOT a very nice streetscape) and $10 million per arterial.

If we are to extrapolate these superblock numbers over the entire city that means we have spent $7.2 billion on arterials, and $1.8 billion on residential streets and infrastructure. Add in the freeway equivalent costs and we are at $176 billion dollars JUST for construction, or $135,384.62 per Dallas resident. Did we realize we can't afford that?

Next time somebody complains about a transit line costing X amount of dollars throw some similar numbers like that at them. We already know the difference in quality of place the two create.

Maybe to save our budget and essential city services, we can stop building or "upgraydding" roads and start building for people, not for cars.

Better caption? Money Well Spent or Return THAT Investment?

Links o' the Day - Now with Less Gasoline

In Amsterdam, Bicycle trips have surpassed Car Trips.

"The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam," reports Bike Europe. "Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use."

Brown Air, Gray People. The State of the Air: A report on air quality. Ya know, another one of those things we can't assign a value for, so it finds no place in modern economics, so we ignore it...until we're all dead.

Houston, which ranks number five in ozone this year, is a very unusual city. Its mayor Bill White has done something few, if any, mayors nationally have done: confronted both the state and federal environmental agencies himself for their failure to address the dangers air pollution poses to his residents. At issue is benzene, a known carcinogen. Texas does not have a legal limit for benzene, and because of it, cities with concentrations of oil refineries and chemical plants, such as Houston, suffer staggering benzene emissions. Last year, White filed a petition to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for their lack of responsiveness to industry when it comes to benzene emissions. He’s also appealed to the EPA to address the state’s Flexible Permit, which he believes is at the root of the issue for plants finagling their way past emissions limits.

Some of the key health stats from the report include:

* Six out of ten people (61.7%) in the United States live in counties that have unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.
* Roughly six out of ten people (58%) live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone.
* Roughly three out of ten people live in an area with unhealthy levels of short-term levels of particle pollution, which is an increase from last year’s report.
* One in six people lives in an area with unhealthy levels of year-round particle pollution
* Just under one in eight people lives in the 37 counties with unhealthy levels of all three: ozone and short-term and year-round particle pollutio.

More than tossing crumbs to the rabble, building Good Parks are Good for the Economy. (Ignore the grammatical error):

By offering free or inexpensive recreation, parks also save residents money. In Boston, for example, the study determined that the economic value of direct park use was $354 million.

The health benefits of exercise in parks offer further savings. The study calculated $19.9 million in medical savings realized by residents in Sacramento because of active recreation in parks.

According to the report, "numerous studies have shown that the more webs of human relationships a neighborhood has, the stronger, safer and more successful it is." Well-used parks offer many ways for neighbors to get to know each other, and efforts to create, save, or care for parks create further community cohesiveness. This "social capital" can reduce a city's costs for policing, fire protection and criminal justice. Because the economic value of social capital can't be measured directly, the report cited as a proxy the amount of time and money residents contributed to "friends" groups and other park-oriented organizations and agencies.

But, of course, in Neo-classical economics we can't valuate "social capital" so it gets "externalized".

Making the Car-Free Choice. Hint: It's much easier in San Francisco than it is in Dallas and their challenge is to drive less than 125 miles in a month??!! Wimps. Or as Tyler Durden says, "LET GO!"

That's the idea behind the annual Car-Free Challenge sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit TransForm (formerly TALC -
transportation and Land Use Coalition). The Challenge's over 160 participants pledged to drive less than 125 miles in June, much less than the Bay Area average of 540, or the U.S. average of over 1,000. Many participants contributed blog posts about their experiences on the Challenge website. More than just a group of footloose young professionals living in The Mission, challenge participants were remarkably diverse group living mostly in the Bay Area but also Sacramento, Los Angeles, and cities outside of California.

And expanding on my assumption that the Love Affair with the Car is much like Stockholm Syndrome, planetizen examines the axiom, is it a marriage or a fling?

Developers have been keen to capitalize on the advantages of car-sharing for their projects. Over 30 developments in the New York City area have recently incorporated Zipcars to their parking plan, providing a much-appreciated service to residents, and acquiring marketing benefits, tax deductions, and LEED credits along the way. With typical ratios of one car-share vehicle replacing the need for 10 to 20 privately-owned vehicles (when located adjacent to sufficient transit facilities, please see this post for more details), new residential and mixed-use developments can significantly reduce the amount of materials and land devoted to parking.

This is key as I show in my old presentation on Housing the Millennials, there are several ways to save on parking which I've been suggesting to local developers in the DFW market and in NYC developers are doing just that by providing car sharing services. Other ways might include offering bikes with units, vespas, zip car memberships, transit passes, etc.

The key is the realization that the car is not necessary for mobility and the parking provision was created strictly for said mobility.

The Ends of a Means

What happens when one country crosses the tape first in the global race to the bottom. One can only wonder how many other disasters await out there thru corner cutting...




Link from WSJ.

Couple Us Designers Wondering We Could Go Family Style on Yer Competition

So, we have our winning entries for the Re:Vision Dallas competition. And the results are as predictable, superficial, and cliche as the competition title itself.

Behold:

(Of note: Not one of the three finalists were from Dallas.)

From simply a graphic rendering and architectural standpoint, all of these remind me more of this than anything I would really like to see happen in the city:

So every team engaged in some serious green washing and green gadget sustainability, which was not to be wholly unexpected. I was actually intrigued at first by this "X" district because a team actually started looking at their site contextually to deal with this site. Until I got a closer look at it. They basically just took the google earth axon view into photoshop and literally added a green connection from the project site to the Trinity River. How novel.

Of course, this would be nice, but they did nothing substantive to address the real issues affecting this site. A green blanket was laid over a fallen city, covering the highways, clover leafs, rail lines and vacant properties so that no one can see its dying eyes. Of course, this is an easy slight of hand with photoshop and a few snappy design catch phrases. No mention or apparently thought was given to how to address all of the grade changes, elevated and sub-grade highways, etc. that provide these impassable barriers.

I advised two groups that competed for this, suggesting to both that the constraints of this site were ALL beyond the boundaries of the actual project, not all of which are physical. No developer would look at this area. It had(has) no context. The freeway has gutted and bombed out both sides of it.

While in the mean time, the country is in deep and transformative recession. Rather than seeing something that addresses in an economically and physically sustainable manner a solution for job losses and failing industries, I still see highways and clover leafs. The two teams I consulted with ended up with solutions looking at how to reuse plain fuselages and the concrete road building industry as structural elements for prefab housing units. Taking one dying industry void of demand and repositioning them into areas of need, in town affordable housing.

Along these lines, I suggested carrying the theme further and restitching the fabric, grid, and parcels, that I-30 ripped to shreds in a methodical, phased, and context sensitive manner. Break down the dying industry of roads and cars, for one of the 21st century, the new American city.

Instead, we get a correlated level of depth and duplicity that puts a blue heron flying across the page:

But how does this building fit within its site you ask?

Towers in the park: We don't want to frame the public realm, those areas critical for vital street life and local commerce, the areas that belong to all of us and make us love and be proud of our cities. We want to make self-referential buildings. In the words of a friend of mine, "IT'S ALLLLLL ME."

Which, in the end, I guess is a fitting eulogy for outside architects embodying globalist architecture where everything is nameless, placeless, and anonymous. It's all on a computer screen.

From the results shown on the website, I felt that "Commonwealth" did the best job of capturing this wholistic view of community healing and rebuilding.

Affordable Housing errr, Hire Me!

Here is Michael Pyatok's recent presentation regarding workforce housing for Downtown Dallas. Unfortunately, there is very little in the way of deep analysis and recommendations and, unfortunately more "look at my projects!" While there are a number of creative solutions here, these are mostly the types of infill densities we should be looking at (and are currently) in other inner ring infill areas, not downtown.

Also, the types of affordable housing done in San Francisco, due to subsidy and land prices resembles more the market rate developments here in Dallas. Can we do quality affordable housing? I believe so, but we have to do better than the inclusionary component currently in downtown where on a per square foot basis the price point is the exact same as the market rate housing. Meaning that the affordable units (legal definition) are about 500 sq.ft. Hardly appropriate for families. These units ALWAYS seem to be vacant by the way. Go figure.

That, of course, is not to say that affordable and workforce housing as a component in downtown shouldn't be encouraged. I, for one, agree with Alex Krieger who said, "the folks populating the W hotel are not the ones that will create a vibrant street presence in downtown Dallas."

This Week in Grand Theft Auto: Dallas

No, my car wasn't stolen. It was crushed...or maybe sold. I have no idea, nor do I care. I hold little nostalgic memories of sitting in a gliding shell of death dealing metal. Although the only thing I ever killed with my car was a pretty white bird that cruised right into my car as I had no more room on 183 between me and the concrete barrier in order to avoid it. I felt bad. But, that was also because I was up at 6 am driving to DFW in order to board a plane and fly to some shit hole to offer consulting tips on how to drastically improve said shit hole...advice that would go completely unheeded usually in order to maintain status quo road building projects and urban destruction, nay urban can be interpreted pejoratively...how about civiliation/culture destruction.

But, the story of the day is actually from my morning dog walk in and around downtown Dallas. In the video game Grand Theft Auto, those familiar will recall the sheer amount of innocent bystanders to by flattened by a knock-off car in a getaway whilst evading the police on some sort of caper. When walking by those individuals, beyond just the amount of different people populating the city, one is impressed by the amount of personality (or just context-less sound bites) and the doppler effect you hear as you, the gamer, walks by.

Well, this morning I walked my dogs past a woman who was leaning on a railing along one of the ubiquitous surface parking lots in downtown Dallas. And, I kid you not, she says to nobody but herself, "I am the most hated person to ever walk the earth."

Really? Did she order the extermination of the jews? Did she buy the Orioles and immediately begin to dismantle the perennial world series contender for wash-ups and known 'roid heads? Did she suggest highways on top of buildings and towers in the park? or any person on this list?

...and I didn't even stop to get an autograph. I was too scared she might sink fangs into my neck or kick my puppy.

Dallas Places Two in the Top 12 Neighborhoods in the Country

...for crime.

In the interest of localizing crime statistics, and in this case only violent crime statistics, WalletPop, whatever on Earth that is, has derived a top 25 list for most dangerous neighborhoods, including numbers 9 and 12 going to two adjacent areas of Dallas (so they aren't really two distinct neighborhoods then are they?). Both are immediately Southeast of Fair Park.

Personally, I'm amazed there are no Houston or Los Angeles neighborhoods. I think I have been to about ten or so of these. And, I'm quite confident in saying that the Parramore district of Orlando was easily the least safe I have maybe ever felt in my life. And I was there canvassing the area at 8 am.

Remember this is for violent crime. Remind me some day to write about the story a City official relayed regarding FBI maps/white collar crime/and the most crime ridden area of D/FW. White collar crime sounds so benevolent doesn't it?

Also, not included is the under reporting or "juking" of the stats that some police departments engage in to either a) look like they're doing their job or b) satisfy politicians needs or c) are simply overwhelmed by the entropic forces eating away at society and the cultural blanket hiding "the better angels of our nature."

ht: McCready.

Piling on the Arts District

Truly, my only intent is to improve it and to do so by increasing awareness of the mistakes that have been made. So, with that said, in defense of my critique thus far of the Dallas Arts District, found here and here. Oh, and here and here. Without further ado, here is Alex Marshall in How Cities Work, Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken:

It (ed: San Jose in this context) is an example of what David Barringer, in an article entitled "The New Urban Gamble" (ed: Not as in CNU "New Urban," but more like "New" as in nuevo) in The American Prospect, called "THE CARNIVAL STRATEGY" (my caps).

Cities build a performing arts center, an aquarium, and a sports stadium and hope that the crowds will materialize to fill in the rest of the city. I am extremely dubious about this strategy. Things like art museums and aquariums are great as the capstones to successful places, as amenities and accessories. But trying to make them an economic foundation is to confuse the role of the foundation of a building with that of a decorative window on it.

A museum can be a great reward for a successful region, as can central libraries and other public works. But, even if the crowds appear, they will not replace or even draw the people or businesses that make a center city truly a place.

How many things did he list here that downtown Dallas has: central library, museums, aquarium, sports stadiums, etc. The key here is that American Airlines with as busy as it is, has not saved Victory, or as I like to call it the Potemkin Village. There were just too many mistakes to overcome.

He also goes on to discuss that without successful retail a downtown does not truly function as a center of commerce as it should. It becomes a side act, a novelty. Well, Dallas lost most of its retail despite the Neiman Marcus flagship's stubborness/loyalty.

Retail in still vital downtowns are vestiges, it survived. Dallas is otherwise, and with our knowledge today, retail and commerce follow people. Downtown needs residents and to do so, downtown must be as livable as possible. Things that prevent livability have been discussed ad nauseum on this blog, just do a search.

The other thing preventing livability in downtown AND retail from working is the lack of neighborhood serving transit, ie modern streetcars or trams linking downtown with Oak Cliff as well as near east Dallas, Greenville, and Lakewood. There are healthy neighborhoods there to be served as well as areas in need of revite. New streetcar would mean an incentive for rebuilding bombed out areas such as along Ross and Live Oak, as well as the Zang triangle.

Furthermore, for the stable neighborhoods it means an easy commute into downtown that is potentially preferable, or at least an offer of choice, rather than dealing with traffic and running up to CityPlace or North Park Mall. The key is choice.

Two Quotes for the Day

Anyone that knows me well, knows that I have a schizophrenic streak to my thought patterns which often reveals itself in my daily reading choices. Today, I happened to be walking with two books in hand and bouncing back and forth between them. The first, How Cities Work by Alex Marshall reveals a quote by Lewis Mumford in his 1958 report "The Highway and the City" (emphasis mine):

The purpose of transportation is to bring people and goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within that limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes."

Get that? Transportation only where formalized transportation is needed, minimizing public expense per capita, thus damning federal highway spending that scattered people about the countryside.

Next, from John McMurtry in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism castigating one of my favorite targets, the theocrats of neoclassical economics. I'll paraphrase the preceding few pages:

McMurtry discusses the manner in which rigorous and objective science has overhauled economic theory. Thus, anything that could be perceived as subjective becomes value-less in a construct where everything in the formula must have a value. How does one place a value on clean air or clean water? Do I arrive at a number or does Exxon Mobil? Therefore, anything subjective MUST be externalized and anybody that questions their methods is immediately marginalized as NOT being a rigorous and objective academician.

He concludes:

If value theory is banished from a subject whose every object of study IS a value, then it is disordered at the base of its conceptions.

Therefore, neo-classical economics are fundamentally flawed. I see two ways to excise this cancer stage. One, we arrive at a consensus valuating the invaluable, i.e. clean air, clean water, etc. But, once again, who decides and do we trust them? Do the people in a democratic republic really have the authority the Constitution bestowed upon them? Is consensus possible?

On the other hand, our democratically elected representatives in a market economy DO in fact create the rules of the game. Newsflash: governments create markets and our government creates the rules of the game. Rather than assigning an arbitrary value to such life sustaining (giving?) elements as clean air and clean water, how about we set up the rules of the game to profit those who do the most good and make those who do the most bad or cynically try to do business slightly less bad with a smiley face make that into a failing business model.

Friday Pondering Brought to You By This Morning's Shower

Some say our city, Dallas (or for that matter any sun belt city) just isn't built for any form of transportation other than car travel AND we're SO spread out, no other form makes sense. We're stuck with it, may as well make it work. I see this as a form of reverse chicken and egg.

It's more like all we have to eat is a rotten egg and a chicken infected with bird flu and told to survive.

To quote Mayor Carcetti from the single greatest and most profound television show ever created, "how many bowls of shit do I gotta eat?!"

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Side note for the day...is there a way to keep the homeless from defecating all over the city's sidewalks at night??? My dog decided it would be a good idea to roll in some when I wasn't looking and after a morning spent scrubbing and bathing I still feel like Lady MacBeth.

Not Unlike My Stockholm Syndrome of Cars

A new book, Cul-De-Sac Syndrome.

And excerpt of the excerpt:

The American home became the embodiment of generations of aspirations. First came the land, then came the emblem that you owned and lorded over the landscape—the manor home. In a uniquely American way, homeowners were echoing the class-climbing impulses of their forebears. Cathedral ceilings bespoke of sanctified self-improvement. Bathroom suites implied middle-class barony. Homes got bigger and more expensive because we wanted them to portray nobility. We had made it. We’d achieved the American dream! This was what we had to show for generations of effort. The fact that this striving also became a
mania for investment and speculation is also painfully American.

Gotta Get Back to Consistency

Not much time for now, but I have two or three long blog posts halfway or more complete.

Two blog posts of note:

Allison Arieff at NYT blog on The Future of the Shopping Mall and the increasing irrelevance of ICSC (she was a juror on their future of the mall competition):

Despite near-non-existent consumer spending, the declining popularity of shopping as America’s favorite pastime and the chilling effect foreclosed homes in housing developments are surely having on nearby malls, most entries in the ICSC competition responded less to the future of the shopping mall than to the glory days to which we’ve recently bid adieu. I was struck by how little attention entrants paid to things like sustainable architecture, alternative transit or changing consumer attitudes about consumption. Architectural visions tended toward iconic futurist forms — domes or similarly curvy buildings that felt right in line with World’s Fairs past. Distressing to think that in 2059, we’ll finally get to live as the Jetsons did back in 1962.

/bangs head against desk repeatedly until leaving a blood splattered rorschach looking conspicuously like a Zaha Hadid.

/begins working on a new neato whiz bang design.

Kunstler contemplates what happens to modernism when it is no longer what it claims to be:

I've wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date -- and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.

and finally, also from NYT's series of blogtacularity, is Jalopnik contemplating the Broadway closure and a future with diminished automobility (which really captures what car commercials are and cars should be about):

And you know what? We're OK with it. That may seem anti-auto to some, but frankly, we're sick of cars being ruined by commuters. This desire for independence while commuting has turned cars into something more akin to refrigerators — a commodity. So in a time when once-proud automakers have developed into milquetoast shadows of the icons they once were, we're happy to see commuters forced to look at alternatives to their Camccordibus and taxis. Get off the roads and onto a bus or subway, you McDonald's breakfast sandwich-eating, 7-11 big gulp-drinking cows — they're for enthusiasts. Or, as is the case on this small patch of asphalt in the Big Apple — the lawn chairs.

Times Square Update

At Streetsblog:



Interesting that all it took to transform a tourist trap that locals avoided into a prominent gathering space (and center of gravity that the crossroads of the world was meant to be), was removing the traffic.

It should be difficult to drive (and park!) in cities, particularly the downtown cores.

NYC is generally always ahead of the curve in the States. It will be interesting to see the lag time on this "fashion" trend of people first design and planning.

Quote for the Day

I think I'll try to theme these quotes from now on as "Quotations non-related to urban design, but actually are":

Philosopher William James in 1892: "A time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short."

Flying Fish

Canadian Economist on Food Miles, the oil that subsidizes it, and the outstripping of supply by demand for oil:

NPR: The End of Globalization.

Still, if I'm sitting in a nice restaurant and I'm enjoying a good conversation over a glass of wine, that is not what I am thinking about. And anyway, the shipping news doesn't normally appear next to a menu item. But if that conversation turns to energy and oil prices (and I confess it does fairly regularly), then when I glance at that fish I know I am looking at the past. In the near future there is going to be less salmon on our tables — and probably fewer restaurants to eat in, too. Because the cheap-oil subsidy that makes Norwegian salmon affordable is about to disappear.

The Mathematics of Cities

I need to start doing more research. The Mathematics of Cities...where else, NYT blogs where so much else has come from...

For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations? No. Bigger cities have more gas stations than smaller ones (of course), but not nearly in direct proportion to their size. The number of gas stations grows only in proportion to the 0.77 power of population. The crucial thing is that 0.77 is less than 1. This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

DFW Mapped by Income

And other cities, at Radical Cartography. Pretty cool site. The Dallas map clearly illustrates Leinberger's notion of the "Favored Quarter."

Quote for the Day

“One of the good legacies of Robert Moses is that, because he paved so much, we’re able to reclaim it and reuse it,” she says. “It’s sort of like Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses.”

Housing Bubbles Around the World

Link here. Germany chugging along a-ok.

Speaking of Germany, the best news show on television devoted an entire episode last week to efforts the country has been making including their feed-in or buy back program where the government buys clean energy from the people at a premium rate. The two most significant points here are that clean energy is overtaking auto-manufacturing as the job leader in the country AND this program costs the citizens of Germany the equivalent of two dollars per month. Sign me up.

Other issues addressed in the episode include the Passivhaus in Freiburg and the CarFree district of Vauban in Freiburg. I was so moved by this, I decided to take phone shots of my television screen:

No, I Don't Speak Car

Getting back into the swing of things...

Yesterday on my walk into a work (new work - for those that are unaware, I resigned from RTKL to venture out into the unknown quasi-independent) a parked car, still running with driver aboard appearing to be on the phone, beeped at me. Thinking he couldn't possibly be beeping at me, I glanced around the quaint and quiet uptown Dallas streets, seeing noone of consequence around other than myself that he could possibly be directing his honking towards.

He beeps twice more. I have an expressive face. Car horns have an aggressive and hostile tone to them. Rarely do they sound like Herby the Love Bug's gentle toots. I spin give a glare to suggest, "I don't speak car!" and turn and walk into the office building I am now working in.

With that little anecdote out of the way, have you ever sensed that our bodies are now our brains and our metal contraptions are our appendage-less vessels, and our language has been dumbed down to honks and middle fingers as our cars bump and grind down grey, oily, smokey asphalt?

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Now for today's comparison:

Here is a graph charting freeway lane miles per capita. I don't particularly find the y-axis terribly interesting because that goes without saying. What I see is that Dallas is close to or tied for second with St. Louis in freeway lane miles per capita, both dwarfed by KC.



Next, let's look at what Richard Florida is up to now that he's at The Atlantic Monthly. Well, he's posting fascinating stuff like a mad man, including this related post:

Where College Grads are Heading.

Here is a hint: Not the cities with high freeway lane miles per capita. 1. NYC 2. DC, two cities scoring extremely high in walkability (and stimulus/TARP/lobbyist money). So the question remains, does walkability have any correlation to robust economies and cities with broad ranges of industry? The major economic cities suggests there might be some. Here is my thought: where is the most valuable real estate in the world? Paris, London, NYC, DC, Stroget, Hong Kong, etc. All dense, integrated, and walkable.

As for the rest of the top ten where college grads are heading: Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and San Diego round out the top 10.

Other links o' the day:

MSNBC notes that demographic changes are shifting "growth" from the exurban fringe to back to the core. Or as Herman Daly calls it development RATHER than growth.

What's behind this shift? Empty-nesters don't need the big house and don't want to mow the big lawn. High gas prices are making long commutes less practical. The urban renaissance in big cities ranging from New York to Portland, Ore. — and the revival of charming, vibrant downtowns in small cities like Missoula, Mont. — is making the bedroom suburb and the strip mall seem positively dull.

I disagree. I think the move to the edge was merely a mistake. One accelerated and subsidized by misallocated government spending in the name of "growth". And now we are realizing the error of our ways and the worthlessness of fringe development and the invaluable nature of actual, real authentic places (rather than generica), places with economies stoked by spatial synergies and ease of movement (ie walkability, density, and transit).

The Conservative Case for Mass Transit

Link, by David Schaengold at the Witherspoon Institute. The jab:

It might seem as if nothing could be less important to social conservatives than transportation. The Department of Health and Human Services crafts policies that affect abortion, the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission play crucial roles in determining how prevalent obscenity is in our society, but the Department of Transportation just funds highways, airports, and railroads, or so the usual thinking goes. But decisions about these projects and how to fund them have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for how Americans go about their lives on a day-to-day basis. Transportation decisions have the power to shape how we form communities, families, religious congregations, and even how we start small businesses. Bad transportation decisions can destroy communities, and good transportation decisions can help create them.

The body blow:

Of course, just because there is a historic explanation for why Democrats are “pro-transit” and Republicans are “pro-car” does not mean that these associations make any sense. Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.

A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership.

...and the knockout punch:

We often hear complaints that transit systems do not earn profits. This is true (with a few exceptions), but this does not mean that transit systems are a waste of money. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how a local road never manages to turn a profit?..

Pro-highway, anti-transit, anti-pedestrian policies work against the core beliefs of American conservatives in another and even more important way: they create social environments that are hostile to real community. Once again, the ways in which automobile-oriented development prevents communities from forming are too numerous to list exhaustively. They range from the very obvious to the very subtle.

Lets See if I Can Get My Brain Functioning Again

By reading! Interesting take on the bailouts at Of Two Minds, which is a blog I used to like and had completely forgotten about it until directed to this link:

If Obama had refused to support the bailout, the screams that he was "destroying the foundation of the U.S. economy and our way of life" would have been ceaseless and deafening, for a stunned and stupefied public had failed to process what was actually happening beneath the MSM propaganda about "saving the banking system to save the nation."

Obama can now say, "I did everything you wanted." Is it a carefully craft Secret Plan or merely the fumbling results of a status quo politico? Either way, it's brilliant because it's the only possible pathway to a future not dominated by trickery, fraud, collusion, obscurity, propaganda and the looting of what's left of the U.S. Treasury and economy.

Time for a Short Station Break

Iglesias on Walkable Urbanism

Gaining Momentum. Link here at Think Progress: The Declining Demographics of Suburbia.

Given that in 1950 there were very few existing communities oriented around the goal of drivable suburbanism, and most families had young children at home, and the proportion of families with children at home was on the rise, you can see the logic of the built environment shifting in a suburbanist direction. Now, though, our existing environment has been shaped by decades of suburbanist development and the number of people who fit the suburbanist core demographic is a minority and on the decline. That suggests the need for some rebalancing.

One should also recall that a large proportion of these families with children are quite poor, and auto-dependent lifestyles are very bad for poor people given that cars are expensive.

* In particular, I think walkable urbanism becomes a clearly superior choice for teenagers and their parents.

I think the appropriate terminology is OVERSHOOT. I discuss changing demographics and the inherent preferences of one retiring population bubble and one maturing population bubble here:

Millennials grew up in suburbia; bland environments dependent on others for mobility. They are entering the adulthood seeking lifestyle: vitality, diversity, and community. But, Millennials are not the only ones who will be driving this sea change from suburban to high quality urban environments. Baby Boomers will be retiring by the boat load. Retirement communities in their current form resemble warehouses more than they do the most desirable of retirement “villages”: real communities where retirees can be independent and empowered, such as the Upper East Side and Key West.

Kunster: Today

He can be a bit of a broken record, but perhaps that is what we need b/c it's the only way we can absorb information these days:

So, what people of good intention and progressive predilection want to know is how come Mr. Obama doesn't just lay out the truth, undertake the hard job of cutting the nation's losses, and get on with setting this society on a new course. The truth is that we're comprehensively bankrupt, and no amount of shuffling certificates around will avail to alter that. The bad debt has to be "worked out" -- i.e. written off, subjected to liquidation of remaining assets and collateral, reorganized under the bankruptcy statutes, and put behind us. We have to work very hard to reconfigure the physical arrangement of life in the USA, moving away from the losses of our suburbs, reactivating our towns, downscaling our biggest cities, re-scaling our farms and food production, switching out our Happy Motoring system for public transit and walkable neighborhoods, rebuilding local networks of commerce, and figuring out a way to make a few things of value again.

Quote for the Day

"What he is arguing for is that both in the making of cities and buildings there are thousands of years of continuity and human tradition, and to say we should cast all that aside is wrong. We need to go back and reclaim continuity with our tradition and then interpret that in the light of how economies and technology has changed."

Where o' Where to Put 100-acre MU Overlays

Reader Ben* recently asked "where would you suggest we create those 10 high-density overlays?" in the post The Era of Bling is Coming to a Close, where I wrote:

Here (ed. note: the Sun Belt), we have the most work ahead of us in terms of overall reorganization of both people AND economies. Much of the economic growth was in Real Estate and it played out on the land with exponential quantitative spatial growth vastly outpacing population growth.

If this City is smart they will get on the ball and set up a streamlined zoning, entitlement, and approval process for mixed-use, mid- to high-density development AT LEAST in set areas, such as Leinberger suggesting that Dallas needs ten 100-acre high density overlays. If they set up these overlays now, the planning work can get started and developers will be ready to build in ten months or two years, whenever the lending purse strings loosen again (or if again means never, then we need to find a new way to finance these things).

I responded in the comments as well, but figured I might as well pull that out to its own post:

That's a good question and one that I haven't yet thought about in specifics, only in abstract. This is something I had been planning on doing pro bono and giving to the City...perhaps we can start this by establishing some criteria.

My first go (this will be only for Dallas proper - based on Leinberger's population calcs - which are fairly rudimentary, but nonetheless - b/c DFW could probably absorb in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 of these zones) - perhaps we create a set for Dallas and another for DFW:

In order to arrive at a top ten list of geographic boundaries for approximately 100-acre mixed-use, the following criteria should apply:

1: Geographic Balance - The MU zones should be evenly dispersed North and South.

2: Should ideally be transit focused. If not be at least "transit ready" for future lines as yet unidentified (either DART, TRE, or future modern streetcar lines).

3: Should target currently underperforming and/or underdeveloped sites for greatest impact.

4: Ideally should have an anchor of some sort: i.e. existing employment generator (hospital, etc.), potentially some recent successes or investment (not applicable everywhere), or existing amenities (ie parks, stadiums, malls, etc.) in order to ensure success and recalibrate the jobs/housing balance.

5: Ideally should have some existing contextual fabric or residential stock to tie back into and serve as the hub or center of gravity and services for those lower density neighborhoods (which in some cases would be protected by preservation, in others the character would merely be protected thru density and/or height/FAR limits.

Transit = Healthy

UBC Researchers learn that transit riders are 3 times more likely to meet fitness guidelines.

"The idea of needing to go to the gym to get your daily dose of exercise is a misperception," says Frank, the J. Armand Bombardier Chairholder in Sustainable Transportation and a researcher at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. "These short walks throughout our day are historically how we have gotten our activity. Unfortunately, we've engineered this activity out of our daily lives."

The researchers conclude that making transit incentives more broadly available may produce indirect health benefits by getting people walking, even if it's just in short bouts.

"This should be appealing to policy makers because it's easier to promote transit incentives - such as employer-sponsored passes or discount fares - than to restructure existing neighbourhoods," says Frank.

The research could have major implications for urban planning and public transit development, Lachapelle says.

Thirsty Links

"No more taking off your shoes..."

The President's address on high speed rail today (link to video)

There are those that say this is too small. This is just the first step to a long-term effort.

Good to hear. He also mentions that the first allocation is strictly towards upgrading existing lines.

TreeHugger on Carbon Emissions Do Not Equal Happiness. Apparently, their collapsed economy doesn't have Ireland and Iceland feeling the blues. Perhaps also they don't derive their happiness from a daily stock report as if it were their daily horoscope...ewww 1-star day. Also, I love the contrasting pictures:

Copenhagen:


Dallas. Yay, we're famous!


And lastly, a fascinating map on job losses per county monthly over the last two years, at Slate. Texas is getting off easy thus far. 230,000 jobs lost in LA county alone. How much longer til the full-on backlash against Hollywood extravagance I wonder?

Lastly, on a happier note, WorldChanging on the 20-minute city, using Seattle as a template describing the City where every need is met within a 20-minute walk. Step 1 to a high-quality neighborhood:

When it comes to getting around Ballard, alternative transportation seems to be king. Driving a car to this neighborhood will cost you time and money. Luckily, you don't have to. From downtown Ballard, almost everything you need is a quick hop, skip and jump away.

Taibbi's the Best

I rather like the idea behind this site, testing the biz potential of online journalism-slash-editorialism-debate, strikes me as the next evolution to HuffPuff:

True/Slant

Taibbi: America's Peasant Mentality

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

------

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields.

You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad.

A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses!

If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

Excellent Article on Abolishing Homelessness

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/the-homemakers-1005?article_page=1

Money quotes:

Pathways' Housing First approach has been phenomenally successful. More than 80 percent of those who went into the program have maintained their places for at least three years, compared to fewer than 40 percent in other programs. By way of explanation, Tsemberis invokes Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of human needs," noting that the basics come before things like treatment.

"If you live on the street, safety — where you will sleep — occupies a person's entire psyche," Tsemberis says. "If you're hungry and exhausted, you can't sit still in a 12-step meeting. Once that calms down, once you house people, then they become interested in treatment. It's human nature."

----------------------

Culhane's study, published in 2001, compared the cost of an individual in supportive housing — that is, housing plus oversight and social services — with the cost of someone on the streets. He found that the chronically homeless used an average of $40,000 per year when they lived on the streets. Supportive housing cost about $18,000 a year, and those who had it used about $16,000 less in social services. Thus the net cost of providing the chronically homeless with supportive housing was about $2,000 a year.

Since then, dozens of cost-benefit studies have been done all over the country. They put social costs of life on the streets in a range of $35,000 to $150,000 per year. Supportive housing costs from $13,000 to $25,000 and substantially reduces social service expenses. The studies found that this strategy to address chronic homelessness doesn't just break even; it can produce a huge savings.

Chicken Nuggets

Arianna at HuffPuff: Lot of good news in banking...but the important part to extract and apply outside of banking:

Unlike the big banks, credit unions are not owned by shareholders, who are looking for maximum quarterly profits, but by members, who are looking for stability and service. Since their goal is not to maximize short-term profit, credit unions by and large steered clear of risky subprime loans. As a result, their balance sheets could pass the Geithner stress test just fine.

Critical for a few reasons, 1) to bring into question the legitimacy and/or relevance of the modus operandi of publicly traded companies, 2) in the real estate industry this confirms my opinion to some extent that the scale of individual projects will be much smaller in the architecture and real estate industry based on lending ability of smaller banks (which is good) IF the redevelopment and rebirth of our cities is done as a series of many smaller projects leading to more regionalized, incremental, and if you will, fractal growth. And lastly, 3) how is this idea of long-term interest and cooperation applicable elsewhere?

Here is potentially one answer: Organic, Local Grocery Co-Ops.

"The Era of Bling is Coming to a Close"

From Christian Science Monitor:

Cooke & Co. was the Bear Stearns of its time, a pillar of national finance. If it could fail, anyone could, and the US stock market collapsed that awful autumn. The price of real estate, railroads, and other hard assets crashed, too. Banks fell like wheat before a reaper. Deprived of credit, Main Street commerce suffered. Unemployment reached 25 percent in big cities. The Panic of 1873 eventually led to 18,000 business bankruptcies. National production shrank for six years. Yet a new and stronger US economy emerged from the wreckage.

I have to say though, that I disagree with #10 - The Bust of the Boom Towns. As long as we are accepting "growth" as the axiom our society, economy, and standard of success is measured by, the Boom Towns still have the most work to do. Reason 1, why I am here in Texas.

Yes, they boomed. But that economy of growth was a false one in cities such as DFW, PHX, and Vegas. 99% of what was constructed was worthless. In the cities of the Northeast, not much growth is expected, if at all. What growth will occur will be simply putting people back to work with minor deviations in what they are actually doing.

Here, we have the most work ahead of us in terms of overall reorganization of both people AND economies. Much of the economic growth was in Real Estate and it played out on the land with exponential quantitative spatial growth vastly outpacing population growth.

If this City is smart they will get on the ball and set up a streamlined zoning, entitlement, and approval process for mixed-use, mid- to high-density development AT LEAST in set areas, such as Leinberger suggesting that Dallas needs ten 100-acre high density overlays. If they set up these overlays now, the planning work can get started and developers will be ready to build in ten months or two years, whenever the lending purse strings loosen again (or if again means never, then we need to find a new way to finance these things).

We know the market is there and the demand is there. As I wrote here, Millennials are the largest demographic group (aka "market") in American history and they are redefining the world around them through their shear mass, vitality, and collective directed vigor.

It will be a race for Sun Belt cities to not only be "cool" again to compete for talent in an ultra-competitive and mobile knowledge/creative economy (where real economic growth is created thru startups and innovation), but also in order to be relevant. If not for the Real Estate industry fixing its mistakes, I'm not sure what other markets are out there to pull the Sun Belt cities out of a certain prolonged recession.

Picking Up Steam

...I wonder how long it will take for the rabble to truly be roused and force some change. Mish agrees with me that any bank or entity considered "too big to fail" is absolutely too big to exist. Why? Because it means they are SO big that they can manipulate markets and hell, even governments.

That Goldman, Citigroup, and the now defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman, etc, could ever be in a position to front run trades based on analysis they know they are going to publish, and/or to purposely make recommendations to ignite short squeezes or selloffs based on positions they hold is simply wrong.

Citibank to Investors: We Suggest You Bet Against Us

Please consider the following horrendous advice last week by Citigroup. Flashback March 31, 2009 Citibank to Investors: We Suggest You Bet Against Us.

GOOD Mag on Streets of the Future. And that future is complete.

But, where is the on-street parking? And why the one-way roads? Not to sound like a street-design fundamentalist myself, but the storefront businesses AND the pedestrians need that on-street parking. We also know (via studies + empirical evidence) that one-way roads kill business, not to mention make it difficult to get around in cities.

All roads need to go everywhere...and not everywhere. Everything in moderation, even moderation.

HT: CoolTown Studios.

Something Magical

“There’s something quite magical about watching trams in Barcelona, Strasbourg or Frankfurt glide silently along beds of grass as they do their city circuit. Where possible, this attractive combination of efficient public transport and inspired landscaping should be standard as part of the urban fabric . . .”

A New Renaissance?

Remembering the ethics of the past, two articles of totally different subject material:

First, Frank Rich at the NYT:

Even at the cratered Citigroup, a technical analyst was moved to write a report last month urging his peers to stop living in “denial” and recognize that we are witnessing the end of “25 to 30 years worth of excess.” The “new normal” in lifestyle, wealth creation and profitability of companies, he wrote, “may be a shadow of the past.”

There was a poignant quality to this Citi report, which cited as its mantra the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Its tone somehow reminded me of the stirring speech written by the American playwright Clifford Odets in his classic drama of the Great Depression, “Awake and Sing!” (1935). “Boychick, wake up!” the grandfather Jacob tells his grandson, Ralph, as the battered Berger family disintegrates in the Bronx. “Be something! Make your life something good ... Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.”

When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard, he famously delighted students by signing his autograph on dollar bills that already bore his signature from his Treasury secretary days. How we leave that bankrupt culture behind and get to “something good” will be as much a factor in our recovery from this Depression as the fate of the unemployment rate and the Dow.

TreeHugger on the return of Permaculture in Urban Agriculture and goes philosophical:

"Permaculture is about asking, 'Why am I doing this?'" Read said. "It's not about clever technological solutions for driving, but asking, 'Why am I in this car in the first place?' I constantly end up taking things out of my life that I don't need."

The Battle Against Empiricism

In my CNU-NTX summary of the Duany presentation, I quoted him in reference to Civil Engineers and their quest for the perfect Level of Service A street:

"Under what theology does this work?! Where is the empirical evidence that these street designs make for a better place."

Well, there is a similar battle in the architecture field as well. I thought I might cross-post Michael Mehaffy's email to the Professional Urbanist Listserv, where he significantly expands on my riff against tall buildings (well, not so much against, but more as a voice of moderation to the hyper-density crowd -- I'm merely against them as the ONLY solution) to a broader discussion pointing out the obvious flaws (sometimes fatal) in "green" modernism.

Here he is referencing a paper he submitted to a symposium for classicism and sustainability at Notre Dame, and it is quite good:

• Large smooth surfaces. These expanses do not age well over time; small dents and accumulations of dirt detract significantly from the pristine aesthetic at birth. At worst, such structures can become blighted and obsolete, and may have to be torn down prematurely. At best they require frequent, costly and energy-consuming maintenance. Presented to the public realm, they can be exceedingly anti-urban, and disruptive of the pedestrian realm.

• Long unbroken lines, angles and joints. Again, these do not age well and slight imperfections over time show up disproportionately, requiring excessive maintenance and repair -- or, just as bad, suffer a decline in perceived value and appeal. That is clearly not a desirable occurrence when one is seeking sustainability over time. Another potential problem is that the high typical tolerances can be very expensive to produce accurately. A feature that was originally intended to reduce costs (minimalism) can in fact have the opposite effect.

• Glass curtain walls. Even with the most energy-efficient assemblies, the insulation value of these is a fraction of solid assemblies.

• Large-scale, deep-plan buildings. These limit daylight and natural ventilation, sever connections with the outside, and disrupt urban connectivity.

• Large-scale sculptural objects. One key problem is that such structures are difficult to modify and adapt to new uses. This means that obsolescence is more likely if conditions or fashions change not a very ideal strategy if one is seeking resilience and sustainability.

• Tall buildings. Not exclusively a modernist type, but certainly embraced by modernism, they have a number of serious drawbacks: high exposure of exteriors to sun and wind, high ratio of exteriors to common interior walls, tendency to promote heat island effects (which increases cooling demands), inefficient floorplates due to egress requirements, excessive shading of adjacent buildings, undesirable wind effects at ground, high embodied energy in construction, and expensive, high-energy maintenance. Tall residential buildings have also been criticized on social grounds as forming, in effect, vertical gated communities isolated pods that do little to activate the street or energize the larger urban network. While they can provide helpful density, there are more efficient low-rise forms that can deliver suitable densities too.

• Reinforced concrete structures; steel frame structures. Both concrete and steel have high embodied energy and high associated carbon emissions from manufacture. The more exotic modernist structures very tall buildings, very large cantilevers, complex shell structures and the like have a proportionately high reliance on these high-energy materials.

• Limited morphologies of repetition, abstraction, uniformity, and the large scale. Recent cognitive studies have shown that the minimalist form language of modernism, while of interest to other architects and making for dramatic photos in magazines, can be annoying or even stressful to ordinary people going about their daily activities. More research is needed in this area, but there is enough evidence to warrant a much more precautionary approach.

There is also the inherent problem of a continuous tabula-rasa, experimentalist approach, as a sound basis of producing robust and enduring designs - rather like

And I discussed the following advantageous features of what may be called "the traditional family of forms and types:"

• Exteriors with articulation, detail and ornament. These features can hide dirt and wear, and actually improve in appearance with time. They also seem to make important contributions to pedestrian scale and interest, which is necessary if we want to create a functional pedestrian environment and a healthy public realm.

• Complex relation of interior and exterior. The oft-maligned front porch and picket fence actually play sophisticated roles in creating connective layers of private and public, a kind of membrane system spanning between the innermost private spaces of a building, and the most public realms outside. The same is true for galleries, arcades, stoops, colonnades, balconies and other traditional types.

• Focus of the building on its public realm. Most buildings prior to 1920 paid close attention to the way they addressed the public realm, with legible entries and ornamental details addressing urban space. These strengthened the relation of the building to its urban context, and strengthened the pedestrian realm around the building a critical need for a low-carbon neighborhood.

• Punched windows. As many have noted, such assemblies reduce the amount of glazing and make it easier to achieve an energy-efficient wall assembly.

• Low-energy, locally adaptable materials. Often traditional buildings have used locally available materials that have not required extensive industrial processing. Wood, for example, was relatively easy to work, and served to capture carbon. Even brick was usually quarried from local clay sources, and fired nearby with relatively modest energy requirements. These materials also made repair and modification easy and efficient, resulting in resilient and long-lasting buildings.

• Thermal mass. Many traditional typologies have used relatively thick wall sections, which allowed for efficient moderation of temperatures.

• Biophilic geometries. This fascinating area of recent research seems to show that for optimum health, human beings need to experience the geometries of nature within their built environments on a daily basis. These include the obvious natural elements like plants, sun and fresh air. But they also seem to include geometries that are characteristic of biological structures, including fractal scales, hierarchical groupings, characteristic proportions, roughness and texture, an optimum mix of unity and variety, spatial layering, a sense of prospect and refuge, and related geometries. Intriguingly, many historic buildings demonstrated rich aggregates of these characteristics. There is reason to believe they may have played a role in the care these buildings received, and their durability their sustainability over time.

Pro Sports and Carbon Footprints

This line says it all right here doesn't it?

The energy required to operate a sports venue is fairly minor compared with the energy that fans expend in simply getting to a game...

From Slate.

Now let's compare (I would use some Google Earth mapping, but apparently that program is having a hissy fit today):

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, embedded in the heart of downtown Baltimore near the Inner Harbor, and you can walk to, bus to, or train to...



or...

Shiny, happy Jerry World set in beeeeeyooooteeeful Arlington, Texas, home to the largest city in the country with no, ZERO, mass transit. Good luck hosting the Super Bowl, the NBA all-star game, and the Final Four in coming years while everybody stays in Dallas or Fort Worth without any way for these people to get to the venue.




Now, let's say the average fan is traveling the 20 miles from Dallas to the game, for 8 games a year, but we'll say 9 b/c the Cowboys are good at making it to one playoff game, and seats 80,000 people per game (assuming 80,000 people are willing to travel that far, pay for gas, and whatever Jerry Jones is charging for the upper level seats (cuz you ain't getting the lower level ones my friend). 80,000 people travelling each travelling 20 miles, 9x/year = approximately 720,000 gallons of gas.

I know, I know. Not every single fan will be driving solo, but yet again this is Dallas.

Somebody plz tell me how Arlington, and in turn, Dallas will NOT be laughing stocks like Houston and Jacksonville or Jacksonville again when the Super Bowl comes to town?

If you don't feel like clicking the links, here is the criteria ESPN's sports guy used to describe the ideal super bowl setting:

Does this mean Houston should be hosting a Super Bowl? Of course not. It's ridiculous. There should be five trademarks for every Super Bowl experience. This is not negotiable. Here are the five:

1. Warm weather.
2. Serviceable stadium.
3. A downtown that's easy to get around.
4. Fun things to do at night.
5. A city that gives you that "Wow, what a city!" feeling.

If you're scoring at home, for Arlington that is: yes, presumably, no, no, GAWD no.

Free Beer Friday Happy Hour

Cancelled this week. As I practice my car-free-ness and take the TRE to Fort Worth for a wedding tonight.

Downsizing

TreeHugger: Small Apartments w/ Big Impact.

Based on my Millennial presentation, we've been doing a lot of work developing a prototype for Millennial housing, a generation that can't afford to live in the City but desire to do so. So how do we make it affordable? Well, one way is to shrink the unit size and maximize spatial efficiency. The residential architects have been taking clues/inspiration from Cruise Liners and First class cabins.

TreeHugger here is focused more on specific unit types, whether it be pre-fab or standardized layout for maximum flexibility. My favorite for immediate practicality and use of the swing out screen and murphy bed:




My WTF moment for, sure you devised a foldout living space, but where the hell am I going to put it, how do other units relate to it, where are the utility hookups, and WHY THE EFF IS IT ALL BLOBBY AND SWIRLY?! Give it up already.

Cameron Sinclair Addresses the Issue of the Day

The Architect's Dilemma: Arch of Excess or Arch of Relevance.

It is really no dilemma at all. It is the difference between those that want their name in Architectural Record and those that want to help humanity. Where we have to be careful is that the last depression gave impetus to toss the City Beautiful movement in favor of a Corbusien idealism that had no empirical basis, but merely an idealogical and philosophical one with little to no fundamental relationship to the actual built form and urbanism. They were all one off buildings much like anything Hadid, Koolhaas, or Ramus do today.

To help us out of this depression, we need more Jane Jacobs and little to no Zaha Hadid. (Although one would think an Iraqi woman would understand some measure of community development, the intricacies of fine-grained urbanism in impoverished cities, and perhaps how to do something relevant on a tight budget. But, maybe she is merely the modern day architectural version of Ayn Rand, a pure unmoderated hyper-reaction to her previous environment):

In the circles of the cultural elite I know I'm stepping on very thin ice. Given that she is the first female Pritzker Prize winner I've been told more than once that 'one cannot criticize her'. While Ms. Hadid has certainly made a lasting impact in the architectural discourse, the physical structures created have been on occasion environmentally unsound, exclusive in nature and at times ethically dubious. They fight for attention, piercing the fabric of the city instead of weaving it into a stronger and more interconnected environment.

The argument was never about starchitect vs. non-starchitect but how we adapt and change as a group of professionals that is dedicated to improving the physical environments that we call life. There is no 'architecture with a big A' there is only architecture and how we practice it matters not just for the state of the world but the survival of the practice.

I'm not Alone. Nor a Gay Fish. And Now to Toot my Horn.

Been a few days. I was in my home state landing some Medical District Planning work with an ultra-progressive, informed, and aware facilities planning group for a hospital. It must be my lucky day when I land back in Dallas, fire up the DVR and find that South Park had trashed two of the people in show biz that I find to be the least talented, most overrated hacks/posers: Carlos Mencia and Kanye West...

A Canary in the Coal Mine Update

Some time ago, I posted about Creative Panhandling, as an indicator of some measure of vitality in a City. The theory was that because there were so many people attracted to a place, there would in turn be a number of panhandlers following, much like on a larger scale that retail and service industry (and then jobs) followed residents out of the city into the suburbs, but in a much different spatial pattern than the previous incarnation in the city. Because there were more people asking for money, there was increased competition for the loose change.

At the time of that posting, Downtown Dallas had virtually none of these to speak of. Now, with good weather having returned, over the last two months or so, I am happy to report that I have now counted 4 such creative panhandlers in Downtown. First, a couple where the woman plays the guitar and the guy plays the sax has popped up here and there in downtown. Next, I started seeing a guy out sketching portraits of patrons sitting at bars and cafes. And today, was another man playing a trombone on Main Street.

Walking is Good. So Says the King.

From Peter King's weekly article on the NFL, which bizarrely includes tidbits from his daily personal life that routinely gets skewered by Kissing Suzy Kolber:

Stayed close to home this week. But I'm finding something interesting about city life. (For those who don't know, my wife and I moved to Boston a month ago, and we're still settling in. Enjoying it a lot so far.) From last Monday morning to Sunday night , I drove my car once, two miles to the Home Depot. That's it. I wonder if I need a car. I suppose I'll need one as time goes on, but I miss nothing about driving. Walking is good.

HT: The Daily Sprawl

Hyper-reactionary?

City-Journal has an article up entitled Green Cities, Brown Suburbs with the tagline "To save the planet, build more skyscrapers," by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser who has been cited repeatedly in this blog, most recently here and here, as he and I came to the same conclusion regarding the bailouts. That real growth will come from the bottom and we should be saving our bailouts for real stimulus and that is to stimulate startups and small, more agile businesses, which is where innovation and progress comes from.

Here is what he says regarding how humans should be building:

Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.

Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

However, I will be disagreeing with him here and at the end of the day, it is really a very simple thesis and the issue is one of semantics. We all know density is one way towards sustainability because of shared resources, effective synergies created via spatial relationships, lower per capita carbon footprint, less VMTs and car dependence, etc. The other is total self-sufficiency from a site standpoint, aka the farm that generates all of its own food and energy on-site. This is the least dense option.

If we take the transect for example, if only to establish a gradation in densities from city core to the most rural of land and development we get the following graph:

[click to see it larger - since it posted so small]

But, at the end of the day, skyscrapers are energy and material intensive. Furthermore, they degrade the public realm, the street life and ambience that makes cities. Vancouver has been able to get around this by creating a lower-story base to sit their towers on, but this doesn't change the fact that the buildings are still importing material from wherever and people to occupy those buildings often from the suburb. (Think about how many people commute into lower manhattan from NJ, CT, and Long Island.)

Here is what I said in a previous post:

Here is the problem. This study takes the Amero-centric view that only through tall buildings can one achieve density. Skyscrapers are not a necessity for density. Paris, Florence, Madrid, Rome, Copenhagen, are wonderfully dense. Now, here are the potential CONS of skyscrapers:

1. Even if a platinum-certified tower is constructed, the building is still immensely energy intense in its construction phase.
2. They are materially intense, with materials typically travelling much farther than with low- and mid-rise buildings.
3. Skyscrapers privatize sunlight and views. Then, amazingly when another tower is built next door, the tenants of building 1 flip out that they lost their view...despite doing the exact same thing.
4. Tight-knit, often medieval form urban fabric generates protective microclimate from weather extremes. Skyscrapers often exacerbate the problem with the intensity of the wind shear and down draft created by the building.
5. Skyscrapers adversely affect the street aka the public realm by 1) removing people from the street and putting them in elevators and 2) overpowering the scale of the space created by the buildings.
6. These buildings tend to be glass and steel. Two energy intensive materials, often not created locally. I like the elegance of glass buildings, but then the issue becomes one of active vs. passive heating and cooling. AND, reflective glass is often pretty ugly.
7. COST. They are expensive to build. In summary, I'm not saying that I'm against skyscrapers. I like the pyramidal form of skylines of cities, emblematic of the greater synergies driving up values in the center-city, and thus manifested by taller buildings, aka greater real estate and F.A.R. in those places as a natural result. But, simply calculating that more dense places are greener doesn't say a damn thing and it certainly doesn't necessitate skyscrapers.

Now, think about the most pleasant cities that you have been in (and I'm not talking favorite b/c that brings into play potential for hedonistic behavior, i.e. Vegas), I mean most pleasant. For me (of cities that I have spent a reasonable enough time there), the list includes:

1. Malmo, Sweden - The cleaner, less busy version of Copenhagen.

2. Siena, Italy - need I say more?


3. Zurich, Switzerland - combination of modern/contemporary and traditional/historical.


4. Verona, Italy/Vicenza, Italy (tie) - if only because I confuse my memories of the two like I do with the Italian and Spanish languages.


5. Malaga, Spain. - something about the palm trees and coast line.


The consistency is that these are all medium-sized cities, not so disconnected from nearby nature, nor overwhelmed by cars and/or people, with low to medium sized buildings but still with much higher density than most (all) American cities because of the compact form of development.

In the States, I would say that D.C. would be very high on the list for similar issues, despite being a much larger city. Of the cities the authors cite, most of the residents aren't living in high-rises, they are in the neighborhoods adjacent to the high-rises which house mostly commercial enterprises.

It is possible to build they type of density that Glaeser is looking for in a way that makes for cities more livable than Hong Kong, that are close to nature, close to food production, and don't house people in vertical filing cabinets, so that they are so disconnected from the ground and the street life that makes cities interesting and vibrant.

Plus, we are just too damned poor and in debt to be building high rises all over the place, when we need cost effective solutions and those will be in the form of three- and four-story buildings that frame streets and public places and provide for a flexibility of use that gives the buildings a much longer life than we would typically allow.

Duany, Leppert, The Observer, and Props 1 & 2

Unfair Park on Duany's Monday night presentation at SMU:

You have a pretty low quality of life, given your wealth.

LOLz

From the comments:

Duany also stressed that he supported Mayor Leppert on Prop 2 (I do, too!) but was strangely silent on Prop 1.

If a reader is curious, I would be aligning precisely as this commenter is insinuating Duany was given my thoughts on the Convention Center hotel here and here:

to expand upon Cullen's metaphor, a building is just a building. It's like a postcard. You glance at it and toss it away. Maybe, if it is of unique brilliance, you slap it on the fridge with a corny touristy magnet.

But, actual city building, the arrangement of built form, landscape, public space, streets, and the orchestration of which, when properly done, can become DRAMA; when the whole is greater than the mere sum of parts.

You Talkin' to Me?

Well, this writer from the local Dallas magazine The Advocate interviewed me regarding what to do with a typical Dallas neighborhood center, particularly in this case the Preston-Royal intersection:

In Kennedy’s vision, you won’t need a car because you’ll live in the center or nearby. And if you don’t need a car, the center won’t need as much parking, not only lowering construction costs, but making room for amenities like parks. And if people spend time on the street — walking, window shopping, eating lunch in the park — the center becomes a more desirable place to live.

Hey, that's me! And below is an aerial bird's eye of the site, although I approached the interview as hypothetical as the exercise was:



To clarify, that doesn't mean the car is a thing of the past. What it means is densifying these neighborhood centers that are fast becoming obsolete, improving the experience of the retail and the quality of life for the neighborhoods adjacent that this center now provides all of the life support systems for.

After skimming the article, it doesn't appear that any of my talk of transit made the dialog. The first thing I mentioned in the interview, was that with $100 mill and entitlements to this site, I would take half of the loot and then run a two-mile modern street car along Royal Lane between the tollway and 75/DART red line station at either Walnut Hill or Lovers Lane. Which is sort of a prerequisite before ditching the car entirely, making the entire above statement sound stupid without.

I still prefer what I wrote about it retail and this site here in Rise and Shine Old Retail:

This exact same phenomenon is occurring currently with malls. The biggest and best are densifying with residential and office uses, accessing public transit, and adding amenitized, outdoor public spaces. They are becoming both more people friendly AND more business friendly. Those less fortunate (if you happen to sympathize with the plight of a particular mall) are finding life as something else, if not being scraped altogether.

This "pruning" will leave blighted "gray fields." In Dallas, this pretty much means the retail clusters that are organized on the original 1-mile super-grid, with single family neighborhoods in between will have to find a new manner of existence.

Highlights from 3/31 CNU-NTX Seminar

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to be at the Belo Mansion for the CNU-NTX day-long seminar with speakers including Andres Duany founder of the Congress of New Urbanism, Ellen Dunham-Jones (director of Georgia Tech's architecture program), Bill Lucy (urban economist and UVa planning professor), Shelly Poticha (CEO of Reconnecting America), and David Goldberg (Communications Director for Smart Growth America).

Anyways, here are the highlights from my notes as they affect, refer, or apply to Dallas:

Andres Duany:

"I love Texans. But, I hate Texas cities."

Can't blame him. That's precisely why I moved here, because there is an opportunity/need for improvement. From hearing him discuss this previously, he is referring to the 'can do' attitude of Texans. For better or worse, they/we(?) tend to jump into trends with both feet don't we, i.e. building towers and highway in the name of Corbusien progress and tearing out existing/historic fabric to do so?

"What won't revitalize this city (meaning Dallas)...three Calatrava Bridges."

To his point, the number three is irrelevant. He is echoing things I have said before on this blog (here in The Challenge of Downtown Dallas and also here in ToonTown: Dallas Arts District, that we have to get the livability right before the attempts at Memorability are effective or even broached. Anybody ready to listen to me yet now that I've quoted Andres Duany and Alex Krieger visiting the city to say the same things that I have been?

"Dallas exists b/c of oil. You were lucky. What makes Portland so lucky? The trees!? The weather? Nooo. The opera house? It's not a very good one. They have urbanism. You are going to be losing the talented young people that are choosing urbanism."

I have often said in meetings and otherwise a similar statement (particularly in reference to opportunity areas around the metroplex and TODs). That the first best thing that ever happened to Dallas was striking oil. The next best thing for the real estate of the City was DART. Also, see what I said about Portland's initial efforts in No. 2 in DTD's cavities.

"You have been subsidizing a privilege for those that live outside the city."

[Now paraphrasing] Why build a parking facility for every new building so that patrons can go from their den, to their garage, to their range rover, to the parking garage, to the opera house without ever stepping foot outside.

"Make use of the underutilized parking garage two blocks away."

Amen. I have discussed all the empty parking garages at night that litter this city, here in DTD's Cavities, Get Out the Drill and here in Parking Supply/Demand: The Vicious Circle.

"Take out a lane of traffic, inconvenience them and make the people adapt."

Also, he cited the difference in lane and parking widths between New York and Dallas streets. NYC 10' for travel lanes, 7' for parking. Dallas, 12' and 8' respectively. Let's tighten those streets up and add some more sidewalk space given how tight sidewalks are in both downtown and much of uptown (I'm looking at you McKinney Ave.) See my rant regarding pedestrians vs. automobiles in Hooked on Phonics did not work for me.

Perhaps my favorite line of the day:

"Under what theology does this work?! Where is the empirical evidence that these street designs make for a better place."

Referring to engineering manuals and the goal for level of service "A" streets.

"Retail only works on two-way streets. Use this crisis. Take the money [from Washington], take the time, and retrofit all the streets to two-ways. Otherwise, the only retail that will work on the morning drive streets are donut shops."

See number 3 on my DTD's Cavities post. My quote:

Notice that I didn't say Main Street. They couldn't get away with driving fast on Main Street if they tried. It has on-street parking, is two-way, and is too narrow (oh, and the valets themselves must hang out on them). Exactly the reasons why there is a four-block stretch of Main Street in Downtown that actually works.

His most important point of the day was Dallas's need for a new development code, one that is clear, predictable, and less onerous than the 6-12 month negotiation process that is every PDD. The current code is one that builds suburban-style development because that was the ultimate goal or end-game when it was adopted, which is why every good project has to establish its own planned-development district that amends the development code. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I personally can't wait for the day, where we aren't sitting at a table with lawyers for the duration of the entitlement process going thru every line of a PD amending previous boiler plate, tailoring it to the subtleties of the new site/project.

See the SmartCode. Subsidize the type of high quality development we want by removing that entitlement process without money that we, the city, do not have. Meet the code, start building.

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I will cite additionally in later posts as the information is relevant to the larger point of a particular future post.

Also, kudos to the Dallas Fire Chief for attending. Emergency services demands are also liabilities to urbanism. They have adapted their practices to the current suburban building code and we need them at the table as well b/c well, 1) they're absolutely vital public services and 2) we believe good urbanism is ultimately safer than suburbia as Bill Lucy pointed out yesterday.

Also also, I will be at the ULI event with Chris Leinberger and will update the blog with the high points from that as well.

Latest Case Shiller Indices

From WSJ.

Dallas posts a 5% drop for the year. Some said Dallas was insulated from it and housing prices didn't spike like they did elsewhere. True. But, 5% in any other time would be quite hefty. There was simply too much imagined money floating around.

Hooked on Phonics DID NOT Work for Me

"Learn to read asshole! Learn to read!"

[Red to emphasize anger]

Yes, that was yelled at me last night as I walked my two mutts to the downtown bark park, which is situated cozily under two freeways. An ever present reminder that at any moment a truck could fall off the highway and crush you. [FYI, I'm not making light of this girl's death. Remember my point is the ridiculousness and the corrosive and destructive nature of these freeways. Consider her collateral damage.]



Without further ado, and all due respect to A Tribe Called Quest, here is the scenario. I'm standing at the corner of Jackson and the aptly named Central Expressway intersection as diagrammed below.



Commerce and Jackson form the 'V' around the very unique Dallas Observer HQ. When that one-way couplet got the green light, I as a pedestrian also got the walk light. So I give the dogs the giddy-up and we start crossing. The moment I step foot off the curb, I notice a car (will not disclose make or model so as to avoid stereotypes) turning right from Commerce to Central Expressway.

Call it some form of inherited female intuition from growing up in a household of females or whatever, but I knew this car was going to cause problems even from 100 feet away. But before I even got to the median, a ridiculously inflated three lanes away, the car reached me at the conflict point as the diagram shows. At this point the little pedestrian man-light had flipped to blinking red hand. Still, my right-of-way. But, not in Dallas.

To this driver's credit, I'm quite amazed at how skillfully he maintained the exact speed at which to appear threatening to me and my dogs and to just miss us by a mere inches. So having enough ingrained "Philly" in me, I immediately turn back with nasty glare in tow about to say something myself to the driver clearly at fault...and a douchebag.

But, he beat me to the punch, leading to the aforementioned profanity...with family in his car no less. But I still don't understand what the hell he wanted me to read??? Were their hidden words in the blinking hand, a subliminal message perhaps? Or, I don't know, perhaps the law which states that pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right-of-way. Nonetheless...

At that point, all I could do was defend myself and say I still had the light. Alas, that means nil in Dallas, a world devoted to the car. Right-of-way, schmite of way. This road is made for drivin'. Out my fuckin' way dog walker.

The problem isn't that Dallasites have some preordained divine right to driving, as if all drivers can operate their administers of death as they please. It is that we have designed and built roads that instill this sense of entitlement.

Now in sane, rational world, who does it make more sense to protect via street design? The dog walker living in downtown AND currently walking in downtown TO the designated downtown dog park?! Or some shit head willing to make a point by driving in an aggressive manner and following it up with aggressive personal behavior. I hope your home gets foreclosed.

Now, here is a map of streets that have zero functional use at their current width or configuration strictly as something beyond car movers, aka escape routes. Because as we know public rights-of-way are largely for two purposes. Transportation and public space to address upon. Downtown streets get an A from engineers for level of service. They get an F for doing their job as downtown streets. These essentially mean roads that are currently too-wide (notice Pearl doesn't make the cut), streets that are one-way (retail fails on one-way streets, FACT), and lastly, roads engineered with turning radii designed for high speed movements:




[Not scientific or thorough. Rather reactionary actually.]

Good luck businesses, residents, pedestrians, and developers trying to find good streets to do your business on. Instead, my dogs will do theirs...and I, of course, will clean it up dutifully.