I live in a city where the economy and quality of life could be greatly improved by creating a better downtown and more walkable neighborhoods. So I’m very interested in urbanism.
But I’m not set up, psychologically or intellectually, to say much intelligent about it. I have a terrible sense of direction and space; to quote the great Meldrick Lewis, I couldn’t find my own behind with a map and a three day headstart (yay for GPS). When my urbanist friend shows me a successful public space, I don’t think “this works because of spacing and eyes-on-the-stree”, I think “this reminds me of the opening scene of Dog Day Afternoon” (or whatever).
Urban development is the one topic where I sympathize with libertarians. Rochester has been hurt badly by some big gubmint actions, like the building of the inner loop, and many of the others (fast ferry, High Falls district plan) have been money-wasting flops. Obviously, though, local government has a huge role to play in improving cites, mostly through very non-sexy actions (improving bus service, filling in things like our inner loop) and latching on to ideas like Waterfire…not by dreaming some massive scale “home run” officials can take all the credit for. An Atrios reader writes in to set the record straight on exactly how Waterfire in Providence took off, and just how important it was:
Just to correct the record, there was no official denial of permission for WaterFire when it first happened. In fact, Barnaby Evans was commissioned by the Providence Parks Department to create it. He first presented it to First Night, the New Year’s Eve festival, and with funding from the City, they put on a small version in 1994. It was successful, but there wasn’t any thought of carrying it on. But in June 1996, the piece was revived as part of Providence’s Convergence Sculpture Festival, run to coincide with a sculpture conference at the new convention center. The (de)construction of the river bridges was complete and the new park was finished, and the director of programming in the Parks Dept named Bob Rizzo thought that WaterFire was the way to celebrate. Rizzo is himself a sculptor and was why the conference was in Providence that year….And at that point, the city went to Barnaby and asked him to continue it.
I only offer this account because I think it’s worth pointing out that this very cool and somewhat category-breaking event happened because a Parks Department functionary — a faceless government bureaucrat, some might call him — thought it would be a good idea. Your account makes it sound like the doughty artist prevailed against the imagination-free status quo, but it wasn’t that at all, and creative and interesting people within the government were involved from the beginning, and were the ones who first saw its value to the city.
(Not expecting a million comments on this one, this is just an interesting topic for me, but one I’m not good at writing about.)
Dave Ruddell
Oh man, the ferry. Did anybody think that was going to work? I mean, nobody up here (Toronto) was likely to use it, and I can’t believe there was a huge pent-up demand of Rochesterians (or whatever you call yourselves) looking to visit Toronto.
ornery_curmudgeon
Urban development is the one topic where I sympathize with libertarians.
So liberals are also to blame for poor government development projects.
Is there ANYTHING that liberals can’t be blamed for?
Steve in DC
Local government can be pretty shit as well when it comes to screwing up cities. Transportation is a huge one. Local government protects the rich people in some areas by gumming up public transportation (which is why you’ll never see a Georgetown metro stop) to keep the nasty poor people out of it. There is also the taxi medalion system, where short of ass kissing the political power structure or having straight up cash money you aren’t going to be able to operate a cab.
In order to protect the cab monopolies the local government causes massive problems for businesses that want to provide cheap transportation, often bullying them out of business by passing regulations that make it impossible for them to get started.
It’s also VERY easy to capture the local government. Hence brick and mortar stores savaging food cart owners which also translates into the laws that make it illegal to help the homeless (these laws were later used to slap occupy around). Inane “preserving housing” laws are used to drive up old historical house value and shove people out of their homes or make sure only the “right” people move into an area.
Even good local accomplishments come with a downside. Crack is down, the areas are nicer, we just shoved everybody off out of DC into PG county.
Granted, not all cities are as crazily run as DC, but local governments can be pretty damn silly as well.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@Dave Ruddell:
It was just before I got here that they put it in. Talking about it with local journalists was very interesting. One told me “We dropped the ball on the ferry, so we have to go up their ass on Ren Square (this big bus station thing they were going to do), since it smells like a similar debacle in the making.” I’m almost sure it would have been a similar (probably worse) debacle, so I’m glad the press coverage and local activists stopped it.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@ornery_curmudgeon:
In my city, yes, to some extent. The locally conservatives suck too on this one. Weirdly, I think they both have good intentions on this one.
sparky
i confused. do you want exurban sprawl (the stuff that’s abandoned) and Houston? because the latter is what you get with no zoning, which presumably would be a libertarian ideal, and the former is “the market” at work.
as for bad ideas, interstates were never meant to support urban areas; rather, exactly the opposite.
edit: as for other ideas, some are good some are bad. it seems to me that’s more a function of how well it has been thought out/the forces in favor of it.
the only real question is how should the incentives be tilted? they have been tilted heavily towards suburbia, but that is an unsustainable model. whether they can be readjusted in a socially beneficial fashion is an open question.
maurinsky
I think a lot of times, with transportation projects in particular, people fall into Pauline Kael territory. I don’t use it, so no one does.
We have a busway – a very unpopular busway, I should mention – that just broke ground 2 weeks ago in CT. We got a shitload of federal money for it. On it’s own, it does seem like “hey, why does something so small cost so much to build?” but when you look at it as a piece of the transportation puzzle, it becomes a lot more important.
We don’t have insane levels of traffic in CT, but we also don’t have land to continue to expand the highway. And we want fewer people to be driving their cars, contributing to the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.
Anyway, I know if I had a dedicated busway from my town to Hartford, I would not be driving to work everyday. I have a vision for where they should put the busway should it ever come to my side of the river, and I’d be able to ride my bike or walk to that location (if only I could always have my way).
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@sparky:
I’m in between on this one: “yes” to zoning, “no” to big “urban renewal” projects unless they focus primarily on public transport. There really are a lot of liberals locally who say things like “we have to do something about downtown, so we should support this (crazy boondoggle)”. It doesn’t break down perfectly along ideological lines, but I think the argument against the boondoggle is “that’s a lot of money for something the might not work” or “what matters here is getting small businesses and developers downtown”. Those are kind of libertarian arguments.
The Illogical Planner
Metrosexual Black AbeJ: If you think you really want to get into urban design and all that stuff, I could put together a reading list for you. In no time at all you could be thought of as a contrarian on urban issues by all your friends. (“What do you mean that expanding the street will make traffic worse?”)
Other than Jane Jacobs, start with Kevin Lynch’s Image of The City. It’s from the ’50’s (but not of it), and gives a bunch of terminology that will help with anything else you read, as well as providing good insights on its own.
TIP
maurinsky
There are things that can effect downtown, though, that aren’t transportation related. We had a lot of stupid development in Hartford that ended up with these solid walls of concrete off the sidewalk – you couldn’t even see what was in the building unless you climbed stairs or a ramp. Not the best for driving pedestrian traffic in a retail area. Dedicated pedestrian roads can drive foot traffic, which makes a downtown livelier.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@maurinsky:
Tearing stuff down can be good too.
KG
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ: “the road to hell…” and all that.
Here in California it’s really weird. The most “walkable” city in my experience is Long Beach, which also happens to be one of the older cities (it’s unique to southern California in that it’s the only place I can think of where you have houses, apartments, and businesses (in both traditional commercial buildings and old houses converted to commercial purposes) mixed fairly regularly on major streets). It’s not ideal, but it’s much better than pretty much all of Orange County (where I grew up), in that there are actually neighborhood bars/restaurants/stores that don’t require you to drive 20 minutes to park at a mall. Then again, Long Beach is also a sprawling city and there’s a lot of variety from neighborhood to neighborhood.
I don’t know that you could really design a city like Long Beach today, definitely not in the suburbs. Too much zoning (double edged sword, that) and too many NIMBYs.
FlipYrWhig
Regarding taxis, it seems to me that you’d want to regulate fairly tightly a business based on giving rides to strangers who pay in cash and often come from out of town.
Mnemosyne
@Steve in DC:
Not really, but it’s not like you’ve ever let facts stop you before.
Steve in DC
@ornery_curmudgeon:
It seems more like an attack on urban politicians in general, and a lot of urban centers are a rats nest of flat out corruption, government serving local campaign supporters, tyrants (Bloomberg), or good intentions gone horribly wrong.
The liberarians do have some points when it comes to this sort of mess, it’s not helping anyone. The taxi fiasco is the best one… how do you solve transportation issues? Taxi medalions were intended to limit the amount of cabs and establish some sort of baseline safety. Instead of doing that the major cab companies bought them all up and now they cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to get depending on the city ensuring only the largest cab companies are able to afford them. They are then wield as weapons against start-up van services and other efforts put forth by locals to cut down on traffic and service the community. The cab companies also used them to attack the zipcars and there was a fiasco with the bike services as well. Of course public transportation is also competing for a slice of the pie here as well.
Instead of working to solve things on a car (which can be divided up into cabs, privately owned, zip, and others) vs public (subway and bus) or bike/foot basis what you have is a holy war between all the factions. Who wins out is largely based on who’s the most cozy with the mayor, and often the solution offered isn’t there to “solve” anything but is simply a way to stick it to your competitor.
Or see food “safety” laws. Originally put out to prevent people from selling toxic junk are now used to harass foodcart owners, food co-ops, and other items… all to help the mega grocery chains and restaurant business.
It’s a never ending story of something that was done with the best intentions only to be turned into a weapon against competing business and a way for the local pols to extract money for their campaigns.
I can’t say “both sides do it” here because this major metro area is solidly Democratic.
chopper
well, local gummint is well-known for making planning and zoning decisions at the behest of business instead of any rational plan. while the true libertarian ideal may be that the local government doesn’t even go so far as to create those plans, in reality it ends up letting business cock the whole thing up. pretty soon there’s no town square, just a highway to the walmart supercenter.
new urbanism is great, but it requires a town or city council that first and foremost gives a shit. and any town or city that’s large enough to be worth living in is probably going to be slapped around by the 800 lb gorilla of large retail.
SatanicPanic
This is the problem, right? Everyone wants their name on something and few people want to work on the more basic stuff that effect people every day. Maybe they need to start naming bus lines after pols and local rich people, then we’ll get some good mass transit. I don’t think the libertarian model of just saying, ah to hell with it, is a good idea either.
Mnemosyne
@maurinsky:
There was a LOT of that kind of stuff built in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s — there were a couple of malls where you literally could not enter the building unless you went through the parking garage. And then they wondered why they hardly ever got any shoppers (duh!)
It’s a little bit better now, but we still have a bunch of large malls that are virtually impossible to get to without driving and parking a car.
Steve in DC
@Mnemosyne:
They’ve been cranking out that BS before and it’s still wrong. It keeps coming up locally and keeps getting shot down. And the entire “they have to go under the Potomac” is a bit of a lie, the METRO goes over the Potomac in multiple places.
We had a chance we didn’t want it. One of the reasons people like me moved out of GT and over the river was the transportation issue. It would allievate most of the traffic issues in that area as well, we didn’t want it then, they don’t want it now.
Mnemosyne
@Steve in DC:
Yes, because listeria from a big manufacturer will make you sick, but listeria from an artisan cheesemaker is harmless. Good one.
Sorry, but as someone who had a pet die thanks to contaminated rice gluten from China, I find the argument that we don’t need food regulations anymore to be, frankly, idiotic.
Also, your libertarianism is showing again. You might want to tuck that back in before you try to claim again that you’re oh-so-more-liberal than the rest of us and just love it when the government regulates business.
Omnes Omnibus
@ornery_curmudgeon: Dressage. No one blames liberals for that.
Seriously, poor urban planning makes a mess of downtown areas. Liberals are more likely to attempt urban planning than anyone else; therefore, they are more likely to have a chance to screw it up.
Valdivia
I tend to think the best urban spaces are a synergy of public funding and good local ideas, or projects that originate at the grassroots level. I have good friends who are in this line of work and they all have great respect for the work of urban planners of yesteryear and the creations of spaces of respite in the midst of urban hecticness.
I think an interesting example is the Highline in nyc.
slag
As it’s currently framed, this combination of sentences really makes no sense, DougJ. Have you never seen a money-wasting flop created by a business?
Government is just an organizational model. As is business. Unless you can substantially argue that one organizational model is vastly preferable to another when it comes to urban planning, then you should probably leave organizational models out of the equation altogether.
eemom
One of the greatest intros in rock and roll history.
Mnemosyne
Funny, it seems that there is both a bikesharing service and a Zipcar franchise in DC despite Steve’s claims that the big, bad taxi companies killed them.
But Steve’s not really a “facts” guy anyway.
slag
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m curious what fabulous results arise out of no urban planning whatsoever.
Rob in CT
@maurinsky:
I sure hope the busway works out well. It’s a fairly big-ticket (half a billion $) item.
To me, it’ll be a success if there is a significant uptick in ridership. That will take pressure off of I-84 (which, west of Hartford, is one of the worst-designed stretches of road you’ll ever see).
But I’ll worry that they’ll build this nifty busway and hardly anyone will use it. How many people commute from Hard Hittin’ to Hartford? How many people will drive to New Britain, park, and take the bus from there?
Roger Moore
One of the things that the libertarians get right is that some of the problems are caused by bad zoning regulations. A lot of zoning is set up to prevent exactly the kind of walkable urban environment people are trying to create these days. Things like minimum lot sizes, restrictions on multi-unit dwellings, and enforced separation of residential and commercial districts wind up killing any hope of nice urban areas. If you really want to create those things, the best place to start is by removing existing impediments. You don’t have to go crazy and completely eliminate zoning, but relaxing specific rules that interfere with the kind of urban area you want is a vital start.
chopper
@Steve in DC:
that and the fact that ‘oh, it would have to be too steep’ is based on the assumption that the station has to be really close to the river. it could, you know, move inland a ways. GT is a big enough neighborhood. it goes north quite a distance.
Mnemosyne
@Valdivia:
Fun fact: Edmund Bacon, the legendary city planner for Philadelphia in the 1950s, was Kevin Bacon’s father. From the link:
Omnes Omnibus
@slag: I am not arguing against urban planning.
Svensker
Well, yes, but…
Let’s talk road subsidies and lack of support for mass transit and what that did to cities. And let’s talk subsidies for all the systems needed to build suburbs and what that did to cities.
So, yeah, sure, “urban planning” can be and has been a bust in many cases. But cities have been sabotaged by “free market” subsidies to suburbs.
MattF
One thing to say is that reviving an existing urban neighborhood (‘brownfield’ development) is chancy, difficult, and expensive. And, when it works, you get a neighborhood that’s significantly more expensive to live in than it was before. On balance, it’s worth doing, but one shouldn’t underestimate the cost and the difficulty.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Wait, are you in Rochester MN or NY?
If the latter, please buy me a couple of cheeseburger Garbage Plates and overnight em to me.
Kthxbai.
Valdivia
@Mnemosyne: they are everywhere. I see the BikeShare stands all over town. Zipcar is super popular too.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
NY
Valdivia
@Mnemosyne:
Thank you! I love love that bit of info.
Speaking of famous urban planners: There was a recently published bio of Robert Moses I wanted to read but totally missed. It would be interesting to compare it to the Caro one from the 70s.
Rafer Janders
Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Cairo, Egypt; Manila, the Philippines; Mumbai, India; Mogadishu, Somalia; Mexico City, Mexico; etc.
All interesting places to visit, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.
sharl
There’s apparently a city councilman right there in Rochester who has a gift for urban zoning. It’s best to stay on his good side, though.
Nina
Here in Baltimore we’re pretty proud of our waterfront. It’s made us into a mid-range tourist destination. It was a pretty grim place in the 60s and early 70s, until the late great mayor Shafer put a ton of energy in, pulled some occasionally shady backroom deals, stepped on a bunch of toes, and made a wholesale renovation of the whole downtown area.
Without the museums and the stadiums and the aquarium the waterfront would be just another bit of strip mall with a couple of hotels, but try telling that to a small-government restaurant owner who whines about taxes without thinking about the effort it takes to keep the place clean and lit and well-stocked with tourists.
Redshift
@chopper: Sure it does, but putting it north quite a ways would put it out of the area that people want to go to in Georgetown. That would be fine for residents to go elsewhere, but would do nothing to alleviate the horrendous traffic problems.
slag
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for saying so!
I think liberals tend to put ourselves in lose or draw situations when we uncritically accept the popular standard in which affirmatively doing something makes us a target for criticism while doing nothing incurs no criticism whatsoever. It’s not a model for a successful city/state/country, and it’s not a model for progress.
I realize that you weren’t promoting such a model but were instead just noticing it. But I do wish more liberals would work harder to fight the underlying assumptions of this model on every level.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ:
I miss the original Nick Tahao’s. My first time there was at 2am (I was sober) and got to see drunk college students, prostitutes and some guy trying to sell me stereo equipment out of the trunk of his car.
One one trip, I met Nick (I was in for a Breakfast Plate which I liked better than the “dinner” playtes). It was like having Henny Youngman entertain me over breakfast.
I still have my Nick’s cup and two tshirts.
I always thought it would be the kind of place to help revitalize a downtown area. Yeah, I know it’s on Main St but it’s removed from what I consider “downtown”.
I have a jar of Steve T Hots sauce but have never gotten around to making my own garbage plates. Hmmmmmm.
AndrewH
I think the most important insight for building more livable cities – that will become more widespread in the next decade or so – is that cars and pedestrians/bikes/public transit are engaged in a zero-sum competition. Either you build for cars or you build for peds/bikes/transit, half-measures just leave everyone miserable. Most people pushing walkable urbanism either don’t get this or have to lie and pretend they don’t get it because so much of the public uses cars all the time, and saying “Hey we’re going to make your life more difficult if you drive everywhere” isn’t going to fly, politically. So they engage in a lot of happy talk about making pedestrian or bike facilities better, or improving transit without taking the additional steps of raising parking rates or getting rid of traffic lanes. Someday, though, it will start happening.
Corey
I love how DougJ can’t even make a tiny little gesture towards libertarianism without getting a mountain of shit from BJ commenters. It’s going to be a long few months, I can tell.
Corey
@Mnemosyne: Christ, you’re an idiot.
Calouste
I stopped reading after this. There is never a reason to sympathize with libertarians, and specifically not on urban development, unless you want a Walmart where you now have a historical landmark.
Mnemosyne
@Corey:
Wevs, dude. Do you have an actual point other than attempting to defend a political theory that has proven to be a total bust in the real world? Funny how removing regulations has done jack shit to improve anyone’s lives who’s not actually a bank executive.
Tell you what — when libertarians are able to go out into the desert to an area with no existing infrastructure and build their ideal community rather than trying to leech off of a state with 400 years of existing infrastructure, I’ll take them seriously.
Calouste
@Corey:
Problems keeping your sock puppets straight, Steve?
slag
@Corey: It’s not our fault that your love of the pander overwhelms your logic functions.
Corey
@Mnemosyne: Regulation has harmed and continues to harm efforts to create livable urban spaces. That’s not to say things conservatives like hasn’t harmed those efforts either. That’s DougJ’s point.
Idiot.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Funny, but the fucked up urban renewal that occurred here in the late ’60s and the ’70s is the fault of the local Republicans, from the city council to Gerry Ford, and this plan was Robert Moses’ (himself a Republican) on a small scale.
Our problem now is drawing suburbanites back into the city: They come down for events at the ’90s-built arena (and eat and drink at the bars and restaurants, but attempts at retail have failed), but bitch if they have to park more than a quarter mile away*…But when there’s a county-wide mass transit initiative on the ballot that will help alleviate the parking problems, they vote it down.
*I should point out that there’s plenty of parking, but what they seem to expect is FREE parking.
Moderate Urban Champion
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
And to be able to see the front door of their destination from their vehicle.
negative 1
@Rafer Janders: Don’t forget in this country US Route 1, or whatever your local strip-mall road may be.
Mnemosyne
@Corey:
And the point of most people here is that regulation isn’t the problem, it’s bad regulation. You’re not going to solve the problem of making walkable urban areas by getting rid of all regulations and letting property owners do whatever they feel like doing. You’re going to solve the problem by changing the regulations to make it easier for property owners to do things that will make the area more walkable.
That’s what government is good at doing: giving businesses incentives to behave in particular ways. Having the government step aside and letting property owners do whatever they feel like doing in the name of LIBERTY is fucking stupid.
negative 1
@Corey: Because there isn’t much middle ground for libertarianism in zoning. It’s kind of all or nothing.
The reason for a lot of the criticism is because some of this article is flat-out wrong. I live in RI, and Barnaby’s story is a great one, but large-scale urban planning (Mayor Cianci) did a ton, some of it very illegal, in order to build Waterplace Park. It was nowhere near an organic, libertarian thing. It was a huge public works project, and then he had the mall built in order to have something for Waterplace Park to lead to (also not an organic or free-market thing, but a plan from Cianci). Heck, we just demolished a federal highway in order to clear space on the waterfront, and that wasn’t libertarian at all either.
As far as Waterfire, the City funds it, and if you live here you are very familiar with the annual budget fight to keep it going. So again, not libertarian. There is no middle ground on this. Libertarian in this sense meant not funding this stuff, and hence not having it.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Moderate Urban Champion:
Yeah, that’s about it.
The dominant local cinema chain is thinking about putting a multiplex down by the arena. It would serve the vast majority of the population of the core city, which now has to drive out to the ‘burbs to catch a first-run flick. The suburbanites are freaking out because it might steal some of their parking spaces on Friday and Saturday nights.
chopper
@Redshift:
well the waterfront area is nice but there are a hell of a lot of businesses up north too. It’s grown a lot in the last decade. I’m just saying it aint a desert up there.
katie5
@Steve in DC:
It’s not easily understood how little power urban planners have in local governments. They propose plans about transportation, land use, environmental protection, and economic development and these well-thought out plans are routinely ignored. Primarily because elected officials are captured officials of local monied or populist interests.
Case-in-point: stadiums. There is not a single planning study that shows economic gains for stadiums. Nada. Does that prevent them being built? Nope.
j
In the 1970’s the “BIG THING” was to tear up the streets of all the downtowns and turn them into pseudo suburban shopping malls. All that did was chase traffic away and kill of the remaining businesses. I saw it happen in Lansing, Battle Creek, & Kalamazoo MI, Michigan City IN, and Oak Park IL and even in downtown Chicago. Needless to say, all those grand plans were ripped out after about 10 – 15 years of NO BUSINESS!
Anothre stupid idea that was tried was to ram expressways through the heart of the cities and cut off pedestrian access to the places people wanted to go. Milwaukee never got around to finishing their monstrosity and it just hung there in mid air for over 20 years before they finally tore it down (it was used for a scene in “The Blues Brothers” – when Arte Johnson drives off it and falls to Earth).
San Francisco’s Embarcadero fell down in a quake and was never replaced, and Boston ripped theirs out and replaced it with the “Big Dig”. It is now the Rose Kennedy linear park.
Atrios is right. We have to stop making planning and zoning decisions based solely on the almighty car.
jon
Where urban planners go wrong in this country is they don’t look to what works and what people want. What people are offered is housing ghettos walled and separated from commercial areas or extreme urban apartments without the commercial spaces. What people want for an urban setting is Sesame Street.
Yes, Sesame Street. Commercial spots, stores, family-owned and operated, and with apartments above and below and sometimes at ground level as well. But why can’t that be done? Because urban planning boards won’t let it happen. Why not live above your place of business? Why not live close to work? Why not retire near a small grocer? What happened to neighborhood bars? Nope, can’t have those. Not enough DUIs, apparently. Gotta have bars in faraway places to insist that drinking and driving is the norm (and it is legal, after all: just not beyond a certain limit.) So then we complain that people are fat, so they drive to the gym and complain about adequate parking. Hell, even when people go to the mall to walk around for hours they want the best parking possible.
We’re so stupid, as we insist on parking for businesses rather than let the market close them or let people walk a little. We demand car-dependence, a useless front yard, a suburban model that has made us miserable from isolation and obesity, and we demand the government prop up its stupid model of inflated value for junky construction. And then we wonder why we can’t build a new business with apartments above and below. Because zoning says so, that’s why. Shut up, that’s why.
I want Sesame Street. I want Gordon and that nice gay couple as neighbors. I want Hooper’s store and sidewalks and stoops. I’ll even put up with weirdos.
Mnemosyne
@jon:
It is changing a bit, at least here in California. The big new trend is to build (or refurbish) a shopping mall with upscale apartment/condos above it like they did in Pasadena with Paseo Colorado.
They tried to do a similar thing here in my small city with the Americana, but I could have told them from the start that it was going to fail, at least as residences. You don’t build residences without having the most basic amenities available on-site, ie a grocery store and dry cleaner’s. If you run out of sugar at 7:00 at night in your apartment overlooking the mall, Nordstroms ain’t gonna be able to hook you up.
Roger Moore
@jon:
And the places that do have Sesame Street style development tend to have really high real estate values. I don’t know if that’s the cause or the effect, but they do go together. You’d think people would notice and try to create that kind of development because of what it does to land values, developers for the profits and city officials for the property tax revenue.
ETA: @Mnemosyne:
Wait, wait. The Americana doesn’t have a supermarket? What idiot came up with that plan? I’m not sure that the Gelson’s is the anchor of Paseo Colorado, but it sure does improve the place.
j
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ: I’ve been saying this since the early 1980:
The local city or whatever should buy the abandoned department stores or warehouses, gut them into raw space and sell the raw space to people for a song, including lower tax rates. (For instance, $20 to $30 per sqft. A 1,000 sqft empty space would go for $30,000. Another 25 to 30K will build out a nice 2BR condo unit; and in 5 years – after the tax rebate ends- the unit can be sold for a profit.) The space MUST be built out for living spaces (condos) or live / work spaces. Tax the renovated spaces at a fraction of the going rate for 5 years. This will get people living downtown, which will bring in stores, restaurants, bars etc. and give a boost to the local hardware and lumber stores.
Detroit is doing this, and so far it seems to be succeeding. Just Google “Detroit housing incentives”. They have a bunch of plans for different parts of the city, and different types of housing.
slag
@katie5:
Isn’t this overgeneralizing to the point of irrelevance? So elected officials typically make decisions for money or love. Is there any class of decision-makers who doesn’t do this? And how do you circumvent this problem in a democratic (or, really, any) society?
I’m not sure how much of a coincidence it is that all the urban meccas I can think of are notoriously liberal. And all the sub and exurban hellholes I can think of are notoriously illiberal. It seems to me that one organizing principle may be doing a heck of a lot better job of urban planning over the other. Or maybe liberals are just lucky?
katie5
@j: Planners also have been proposing this since the 80s. Problem is: none of the banks would provide financing; no one would insure the buildings. Easy to build new shopping centers. But what to do about the old ones? Has to be publicly financed.
jon
You have to get people to downtowns/urban areas or else it all fails. And the best way to do that isn’t to have big parking structures but homes. Yes, it’s not for everyone. Some people like a yard and want a big dog and a garden that doesn’t take up their balcony. But some people don’t. But enough about them, since they have plenty to choose from. The urban people who want a small grocer and a coffee shop and a bar? That space is very expensive because there isn’t enough of it. That’s true in Tucson and New York City. But the city planners here in Tucson want to encourage big hotels and work to rebuild a convention center that was built on a neighborhood in an example of “urban renewal” and has been largely a failure ever since. They wanted a stadium, too. I say a stadium with apartments under the wings would be great, but they’d never go for that. Funny thing is, it works at the university.
We love cars to our own detriment. We’re getting a modern streetcar, and it’s called a boondoggle. What’s a real boondoggle? Trying to figure out how our aging population will get around. In Phoenix, all the properties along their streetcar line have gone up in value. During the greatest real-estate declines in recent history in one of the hardest-hit states. Why? People like it. I love cars, too. But we can’t rely on them exclusively. Reading the predictions of some (like the generally cranky James Kunstler), we’re stupid to rely on them even as a third option.
katie5
@slag: Major point is that people often think the urban planners sit in their evil dungeons dreaming up schemes to defy popular sentiment. Not the case (although there’s often good reason to defy public sentiment–e.g., views towards urban parking mentioned above). And, no, elected officials do not have to be captured by special interests. There’s every reason to be cynical about governments at all levels but I’ve seen numerous examples where it’s simply not the case.
Roger Moore
@jon:
You know what else is a boondoggle? Freeway expansion that costs as much per mile and takes as long as building a streetcar. Somehow spending $100 million/mile to add lanes to a freeway is great planning, but spending $100 million/mile to build a streetcar that will take traffic off the freeway is crazy.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I’m guessing it was Rick Caruso, or that at least he signed off on it. No supermarket, just a Rite Aid. You can cross the street to Target and get a few things from the frozen or produce section, but if you want, say, a head of lettuce, you have to trudge over to the Ralphs or Albertsons that’s a half-mile away.
Also, no dry cleaners that I could spot. Having an Apple Store is nice, but it doesn’t do you much good when you need to get your shirts cleaned for work.
j
@katie5: Gee, “since the 80s”.
That was when Saint Ronnie let the Savings & Loans get into speculation and derivatives.
They stopped being Jimmy Stewart’s “Bailey Building & Loan” and turned into Silverado Savings & Loan! Remember them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Bush
BTW, is there ANY “S&L” still in existence?
The Bush family walked away with millions of dollars of TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES.
The taxpayers, of course, got screwed.
I saw St. Ronnie in the Rose Garden signing that piece of crap legislation and the head (CEO) of BofA telling him to “just sign the paper. I’m late for a meeting and you are taking too long.”
Saint Ronnie signed it, but not before saying TO THE CAMERAS (ONLY Canadian TV still has the archives…and Michael Moore) “Gentlemen, uh…uh…I think we hit the jackpot on this one! heh heh.”
It cost the taxpayers trillions, and the Bush family walked awat with billions.
And if it wasn’t for John McCain the “Keating Five” would be known as the Keating 4.
John McCain was dirty from the start.
EIGRP
@Dave Ruddell: I never used it, but I would have if I needed to go to Toronto. I think I’ve been there 3 times in the past 5 years (all after the ferry went belly-up)
Eric
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think there’s one in Paseo Colorado, either, though I don’t go there often enough to check. Not when downtown Sierra Madre is much closer. Sierra Madre has an actual, traditional, functional downtown that is almost free from national chains. It’s also close enough that I can have enough beers that I’m not even close to safe to drive and still feel comfortable walking home. One more advantage to having a walkable city.
chopper
@jon:
we have all that here in new york. you’ll just have to pay out the wazoo for it, or live in a closet. and still pay out the wazoo for it. and get run down by a cab when you’re not looking.
chopper
@katie5:
well, that’s because everyone wants to have a nice house, apart from the neighbors, with a yard in the front and back close to great schools, grocery stores, coffee shops and bars and shopping, with tree-lined streets and a clean, top-notch public transit system, and they want it to cost as much as cheap-ass suburban tract housing.
never underestimate american’s demand for lots of shit for no money at all.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@j:
I’d be surprised if you didn’t know that this happened in Grand Rapids and Muskegon, too, the latter even putting a roof over the street!
But that was Phase 2 in GR. Phase 1turned 4 blocks which were a mixture of government and office buildings along with retail and theaters, and turned it into one large block with new, ugly government buildings (city, county & federal), one bank hq, one regional office for MichCon (gas company) and, later, one building housing mainly law offices…All surrounded by (to borrow from James Kunstler, who was mentioned earlier) moats of concrete and nature band-aids. Yeah, they plopped down a Calder stabile for aesthetics,but the space screams, “GO AWAY!”
HelloRochester
I love reading about Rochester local politics. I am a libtard native to Greece, NY but Democrats in Rochester are guilty of an endless series of epic fails that stem from utopian airy-fairy ideas about downtown redevelopment. The cancer at the core of Rochester is islands of urban blight and concentrated sections of crime caused by loss of good-paying jobs from the area starting about 40 years ago. For some reason the middle class in Rochester is content with good jobs like their parents had at Xerox, BaushandLomb, and Kodak being replaced with everybody working at Paychex. The taxes upstate are ridonculous relative to people’s earning potential which stokes racial animus towards people who live in the blighted areas (which now includes several suburbs) and have given up trying to get off public assistance since there’s little opportunity to get ahead. And the local media market is outsized (a metro area with less than a million people with 24hr news? Really?) which leads to nonstop coverage of every incident in the city which keeps people out in the burbs and away from the downtown. There’s also the Jersey-Shore-style get-drunk-and-fight crowd that pops up at every bar and nightclub in the area (thanks, Gates!) and the semi-annual flashmob riot at Charlotte that keeps people away from going out. And there’s the East Side-West Side divide. Which leaves Rochester festering only as a meds-and-eds town. It’s a shame- beautiful and historic city with an educated population whose kids (like me) have to move away to get a piece of the good life. Well, we also have to get away from the 8 month winter with 10 feet of snow…
sparky
@Metrosexual Black AbeJ: fair enough, though i think those arguments are better styled “pragmatic” than “libertarian”, if only because it seems to me that a libertarian perspective would be to not plan at all.
i do agree that big projects don’t break along ideological lines, but i think that’s due to the power/holdings (land/management/REITs) of the RE sector–thus conservatives can push huge boondoggles if it might benefit them either directly or indirectly just as military contractors push fear.