Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Pedestrians should not have to apologize to drivers for walking in residential areas

A close call this morning. After dropping off my daughter at school, I turned left on the narrow, shoulder-less roads surrounding Pleasant View Elementary and went into a slow-but-scary slide as a man walking his dog appeared dead-center in front of me.

He was screened from my view by a van stopped at the intersection; had I been traveling the tiniest bit faster (I was creeping along due to the ice), my vehicle surely would have, at the very least, made contact with the man and/or his dog. As it was, we stopped with space to spare, but I still jumped out to apologize. The gentleman could not have been more congenial, and actually apologized to me because, he said, "I should learn to walk closer to the edge of the road."

An attitude change is needed in this city. Pedestrians with no safe shoulder or sidewalk on which to walk should not have to apologize for their presence.

Now, imagine if I'd been in the habit of texting while driving, and did so while taking that turn this morning ...

A Driving Problem, Not a Texting Problem?

From: How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic » Blog Archive » A Driving Problem, Not a Texting Problem

I’ve always thought that most people really do not like to drive, or at least drive all that much. Why would they otherwise be so constantly engaged in non-driving activities?

Clive Thompson makes this point in an interesting new column at Wired.

Texting while driving is, in essence, a wake-up call to America. It illustrates our real, and bigger, predicament: The country is currently better suited to cars than to communication. This is completely bonkers.

Thompson has an idea for a technological solution to the problem:

So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

The answer, of course, is public transit. In many parts of the world where texting has become ingrained in daily life — like Japan and Europe — public transit is so plentiful that there hasn’t been a major texting-while-driving crisis. You don’t endanger anyone’s life while quietly tapping out messages during your train ride to work in Tokyo or Berlin.

I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say, for the current crop of young drivers, that texting — staying in electronic touch — is far more important than the act of driving. They also protest that they are uniquely well adapted to “handle” such behavior, overlooking the inconvenient fact that all the major studies of texting/cell-phone distraction have been conducted on college students, not at retirement homes.

On the Road Again: Driving Decline Ends

From THE CITY FIX: On the Road Again: Driving Decline Ends

It’s official – the historic decline in driving we’ve seen for the past two years has ended. From 2007 up to a few months ago, the economic crisis and high gas prices combined to produce some of the largest decreases in driving since the 1970s. We know that recessions lead to reduced driving, but still, these numbers along with the increased transit ridership we saw gave sustainable transportation advocates hope that we were witnessing a paradigm shift. The drop in miles driven even continued as gas prices plummeted in the fall of 2008.

Economic Development: With a budget stretched thin, how about PROCESS incentives?

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

The Franklin Economic Development Commission spent a total of 30 minutes on Monday evening discussing possible incentives to commercial/business development the city. Unfortunately, no one present beside myself had attended the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Development Process Review Committee (the EDC representative to the ad hoc committee, Jim Kerr, was absent), so redundant specific process issues -- already addressed in a detailed plan staff proposal distributed at the Development Process Review Committee meeting -- dominated the early discussion. 

Given a city budget with no room for offering financial subsidies (and the fact that these subsidies tend to bite you back), I proposed taking advantage of the soon-to-be unveiled streamlined development process by offering PROCESS incentives to developers willing to meet certain yet-to-be-defined "Development Targets."

The snarled knot of fishing line that represents our current development process makes it nearly impossible to offer any sort of process relief. In other words -- using yet another metaphor --  if you're facing a giant tangle of logs, removing any one of them arbitrarily can bring the whole mess down. However, once we have an orderly structure, choosing which fees, waiting periods, approvals, etc. to waive or minimize can be done effectively and to the advantage of the developer.

As I noted when Franklin Automotive came to the EDC inquiring about possible incentives (see link for detailed explanation and graphics), there are opportunities early in the development process to improve poor site designs, unimaginative building plans, and to add other proven, market-friendly elements that spur further positive growth in the community. It's becoming clear, after all, that communities which can offer a diverse selection of neighborhoods, stores, businesses and public spaces are best weathering these tough economic times.

I noted in this space how the city's leading developer, Mark Carstensen, remarked that as far as he was concerned, building a Traditional Neighborhood Development-type (TND) subdivision -- the kind that has seen big success in communities across the country -- is impossible in Franklin. In Mequon, however, his company encountered actual incentives to build a TND development, and he reports that everyone was pleased with the end product.

So, I passed out the material below, explaining: We don't talk about process items; there's a committee doing that already (they meet again Thursday night at 5pm; in my chart I "greeked" sample process steps rather than try to attempt to illustrate the actual process). Instead, we leverage the impending improved system by finding a way to assess proposals early so the EDC can act as advocate for certain projects in its advisory capacity to the Common Council.

No one agreed with me. Or disagreed with me - - - My materials (posted below) were not discussed. We adjourned after a total of 59 minutes.

Somewhere, Thomas Edison shook his head in disbelief.

  

 

Download "EDC Development Incentive"

The developer as thwarted hero: Are suburban Unified Development Ordinances preventing sustainable, smart growth development?

"We don't have that opportunity here." What a difference a little city support can make; two streets that are the same age but have totally different characters. ABOVE: A Franklin residential street. BELOW: A Traditional Neighborhood Development-type street in Middleton Hills, WI.

Way back in June of 2007, I wrote a post that featured the pictures above, entitled Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) in Franklin: Who Will Step Up?

I said:

Franklin has room, opportunity and need for a TND development, yet we see bleak subdivision after bleak subdivision go up, accompanied by malformed commercial developments that serve vehicles and shun people.

You can imagine, then, how my ears perked up at the first Mayoral Ad-Hoc Development Process Review Committee meeting this past Thursday, when I heard Franklin developer Mark Carstensen address some of the frustrations he faces in dealing with the city of Franklin's development process.

He began by reminding the assembled that, when asked, Franklin residents regularly cite "rural character" as one of the elements of our city that they find important.

But what do people mean by "rural character" or "rural feel"?

Carstensen: 

Do people really understand what that term means? Versus the suburbs of Milwaukee County; what does it mean? Has it really been defined? Because it can mean a lot of different things; you throw out words that mean a lot of things to different people.

For instance, if I were to take -- and I don’t want to get too long winded here -- but the way things are set up right now...

For instance, we did a development up in Mequon a few years back that entertained the idea of clustered development. So they were rewarding developers to, let’s say that you were out in the areas that were not served by sewer yet, and the zoning would require that you could only have one unit per five acres. What the city did was they provided an avenue for the developers to come in and say, look, let’s say you have a tract of land 40 acres, 80 acres, what have you; the real goal here is to preserve green space, the real goal here is to preserve sensitive areas and so forth. If you show us you can condense the footprints of your lots, what we’ll do then is there’ll be a ratio we’ll give you for density.

Therefor we were conserving more green space -- and everybody wins.

So we did that. I think we had a 40-acre parcel property; by the time it was done, the lots themselves, there were seven lots on that development. I think the lots averaged an acre and a half. And the rest was left green space. Very easy.

That's Mequon. Now the bad news for Franklin. Carstensen continues:

We don’t have that opportunity here. When you go through Franklin and you start adding all the disciplines where you can put retention basins, setback requirements from sensitive areas, landscaping ratios; and if you were to create a map to overlay all of these things, you would see that you’re burning up more land and getting less out of that land because we do have to also take a look at the tax base and revenues of the city. And as Randy [Plan Commissioner Randy Ritter, who has been on the commission for 17 years] is pushing for the "70/30" [the city's stated goal of balancing the tax burden at 70 percent residential, 30 percent commercial]; well, if the UDO [Unified Development Ordinance] is forcing you to use up more land to build less, I think it’s pretty easy to understand that you are going to leave what we would call a lot on the table, and not use your land that you can’t replace in the best possible manner and get the most out of it.

So, if nothing else comes of this effort, you have in the statement above some very clear proclamations from the leading developer in Franklin:

A) The current system simply does not allow him to propose and execute the sorts of forward-looking developments that will prove sustainable and create economic growth in Franklin;

B) Nearby communities (in this case, Mequon) are capable of encouraging (and thereby benefiting from) high quality, high demand, smart-growth, tax-base expanding development;

C) A proven hometown developer sees, through personal experience, the economic upside to these sorts of high quality, smart growth developments -- which yield results consistent with the wishes of current residents and the desires of potential residents and businesses-- but plainly feels there is no effective mechanism in place in Franklin by which he can execute them.

Franklin City Attorney Jesse Wesolowski immediately recognized that Carstensen was talking about Traditional Neighborhood Development -- a community design that has seen success across the country -- and pointed out that the concept has been included the Franklin UDO since 2003.

True enough. However, here is the sum total of the Franklin UDO's language regarding Traditional Neighborhood Development:

Page 3-61
“Part 3: Zoning Districts: District Establishment, Dimensional, and Use Regulations”

Planned Development District: Traditional Neighborhood Development Intent. Proposed developments contemplated by an applicant to include design features described as “Traditional Neighborhood Development” in Wisconsin Statutes 66.1027 (1)(c), as amended, may be considered for approval as a “PDD Planned Development District” under the applicable procedures and standards described under Section 15-90208 of this Ordinance and at locations and with conditions determined appropriate by the Common Council with recommendation from the Plan Commission. The document identified as “A Model Ordinance for Traditional Neighborhood Development” dated April 2001 as published by the University of Wisconsin Extension pursuant to Wisconsin Statutes 66.1027(2), serves as the nonexclusive guidebook to assist in further defining the various aspects and elements of the for of URBAN design, along with such other sources of guidance the Plan Commission and Common Council may choose to consult.

No incentives. No guidance. Frankly, no real interest. (You can download the above-referenced Wisconsin "Model Ordinance for Traditional Neighborhood Development" pdf here.)

If a developer who has been building in Franklin for 30 years (and clearly has the ear of persons at every level of municipal government) is unaware of the very possibility of executing much-needed Traditional Neighborhood Development projects here, does that possibility even exist?

At the November 23rd meeting of the Economic Development Commission, developers representing an expansion proposal by Franklin Automotive appeared before the Commission asking if there might be incentives or subsidies we could provide for their project. I suggested -- since I am largely against financial subsidies -- that their development be given priority and other process/application incentives in return for their re-visioning of their proposed mundane "multi-tenant buildings" as an amenity capable of adding value to the surrounding neighborhood. Unfortunately, all of the "new" EDC members were absent that evening; my proposal aroused no enthusiasm among the long-timers who were present.

I'll try again at tomorrow night's EDC meeting ("Incentives" are again on the agenda) -- after all, I now have the words of Franklin's leading hometown developer to cite. 

More later ...

Download *Dev. Process Review Comm. 2-18-10 Material

The Long Fall of the Mall?

The north side of the "Blues Brothers" Dixie Square Mall on Wednesday, May 2, 2007. (Chicago Tribune photo by John Smierciak / May 2, 2007)

It could survive Jake and Elwood, but not the new economy and changing tastes:

Harvey's abandoned Dixie Square Mall, made famous by a spectacular police chase in the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers," has a new developer hoping to bring thousands of jobs and pump millions of dollars into the shuttered shopping center and surrounding area.

Preliminary plans for the 35-acre site, at 153rd Street and Dixie Highway, as well as surrounding blocks, call for big-box and smaller retail stores and housing over a minimum of five years, said Thomas Planera, chief counsel for Chicago-based developer MG Development South LLC. (Read the rest at: “Blues Brothers” mall in Harvey may get face-lift - chicagotribune.com)

 

The traditional enclosed mall, epitomized in our area by Southridge Mall in Greendale (above; parking lot delineated in yellow), is losing its allure. Indeed, Southridge itself is looking at the first stage of what could be a re-invention of the property as they consider senior housing in a section of its ocean-sized parking lot.

Frankly, either they work quickly to make the retail space there something more akin to the outdoor, faux-downtown Bayshore, or get used to feigning excitement over glow-in-the-dark mini-golf.

Recently announced is an attempt by giant mall operator Simon Properties Growth, Inc. to buy out the troubled General Growth Properties, owner of Mayfair mall. Two giant malls; one owner -- sounds like a reason for possible tenants to look even closer at Bayshore. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The acquisition could raise regulatory flags, with national retailers such as Gap and Limited protesting that putting so many malls under a single owner would hand Simon too much lease-negotiating clout, Stifel Nicolaus analyst David M. Fick said in a research note.

"National tenants tell us that (Simon) already squeezes them more than other landlords, and now they may be faced with doing over 40% of their business at (Simon) properties," Fick wrote.

Or, in markets with a choice, national retailers may simply go with more innovative, downtown-esque retail environments.

It's the long fall of the traditional mall ....

See also: NEWSWEEK - Is the Mall Dead?

"The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls, are the most troubled, the suburban slums."

 

Tomorrow night is the first meeting of the Franklin Mayoral Ad Hoc Development Process Review Committee. It's mission, in short, is to streamline our development and approval process so developers can be more effective. I will attend, record, and post all pertinent documents.

Download Dev proc ad hoc agenda 2-18

Download Dev proc ad hoc resolution

The agenda has no "public comment" item included; I will be curious to see whether this will be a process that genuinely makes possible better development or if it'll simply be a forum for the two developers on the committee to vent their frustration and demand that standards be lowered further; "Get out of my way, I'm trying to turn a quick profit here!"

In a best case scenario where the development process is made more user-friendly, can we begin to expect developments with site plans that are more like the "after" example above, complete with more long term gains for developer and city alike?

Or, how about some "suburban rehab" to correct some of our existing, unsustainable mistakes and spur economic growth, as illustrated below? (Urban Sprawl Repair Kit via Inhabitat):

 

Unfortunately, there is no one on the new Committee who has demonstrated any particular affinity for Smart Growth, sustainable development practices, or any effort to significantly raise the standards to which developers must rise.

For those who think we can afford to just continue sprawling out wherever the developer's dart lands, here's potent food for thought via the New York Times online opinion section:

In the meantime, during these low, ragged years, a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.

Read the rest here: Slumburbia (New York Times)

Friends of Franklin's Parks forming

 

From Don Dorson (who also took the great picture above):

I am pleased to announce the creation of the Friends of Franklin's Parks!

Conceived and sanctioned the City of Franklin Parks Commission, The Friends of Franklin's Parks is an independent volunteer organization dedicated to supporting the parks and other publicly accessible lands located in Franklin. The Friends of Franklin Parks intends to work closely with the Parks Department , the City of Franklin  and other organizations holding publicly accessible lands in Franklin to promote the use of Franklin's wonderful parks and public spaces and by providing volunteers for work on specific or ongoing projects identified by the parks director, staff and/or the parks commission.
 
The first organizational meeting of the Friends of Franklin's Park will be held on February 24th at the Franklin Public Library in the Fadrow room A at 6:30.
 
For more information or to register as a Friend of Franklin's Parks visit our website at: www.friendsoffranklinsparks.webs.com

Braess’s paradox: Close streets to reduce traffic?

Counter-intuitive but effective, it turns out.

How closing streets can actually reduce traffic

As the city of Vancouver prepared to convert a car lane on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bike path last summer, some imagined impending anarchy. At the time, one cabbie, Jatinder Nijjar, predicted, “It is going to be chaos.” In fact, the trial—and the traffic—has run smoothly so far.

Nijjar might have had different expectations had he read “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks,” a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters in August, 2008. The paper’s authors, two Korean physicists and a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, showed that closing certain streets in Boston, London, and New York could actually reduce traffic. This counterintuitive result can be explained by Braess’s paradox, a mathematical concept that describes how, when individual drivers make the decision to take the quickest route, they all try to squeeze onto the path they perceive as being fastest in the short term, and everyone’s commute is longer than it has to be. Providing fewer driving options turns out to mean that commuters spread out their commutes more equitably among the routes available, making the average commute shorter for everyone—not to mention creating a more pleasant civic space.

Read the rest at: The GOOD 100: Fewer Streets - The GOOD 100 - GOOD

Suburbs are built to encourage sloth, and sloth is expensive

ABOVE: "The way home" for students of a Franklin Elementary School.

This weekend my family traveled to Wauwatosa's St. Bernard school for my daughter's latest basketball tournament. St. Bernard is located just up the road from the State Street commercial area, and across the street from a complex containing a coffee shop, ice cream shop, restaurants, etc.

What a pleasure it was to park our family truckster one time and enjoy an afternoon walking from place to place on a brisk, sunny day. We were able to stroll to a nearby cash machine to get money, celebrate the team's effort afterward at the ice cream shop, and grab a coffee before returning to our parked vehicle, feeling invigorated by a pleasant walk and actual social interaction. The streets and sidewalks were bustling with neighbors out enjoying their surroundings, greeting one another en route to this or that errand.

What a contrast to the typical suburban experience that seems to serve sloth and bunker-to-bunker transport above all else. A few weekends back, my daughter and I went out to locate an off-season indoor batting cage so she could get some swings in before try-outs. Our target facility was closed, leaving us with lots of time before showtime for Avatar at Franklin's Showtime Cinema. Could we perhaps drive to the area and park, eat lunch, and spend an hour or so in a nearby coffee shop or book store before the movie? Perhaps even enjoy some spontaneous interaction with fellow Franklinites before or after the film?

Not in Franklin, where, like so many suburbs, "single use/single purpose" is the name of the game; Showtime Cinema is isolated in the middle of a field, with absolutely nothing attached or nearby that would encourage doing two or more things while simply parking once. You drive there to go to a movie. Period. Then you get back in your car and drive somewhere else.

 
ABOVE and BELOW: Corner of Rawson and 76th -- The area in Franklin sometimes referred to as "downtown." Enjoy. Now hurry up and get back in the car; you look suspicious.

 

Think about how absurd it is that, for example, while Sendik's and CVS Pharmacy are located right next to one another, you cannot safely walk between them -- nor are you invited to do so by the car-centric site plan.

Or, given data showing that walkability increases home values, how about encouraging development and construction on the city-owned vacant lot next to the library which would be a terrific place for a coffee shop or other "third place," thereby creating an actual multi-use community-commercial-municipal-recreation-business amenity -- in the heart of what is designated as Franklin's "City Civic Center District" --  that allows people to move from place to place and purpose to purpose on foot?

Nope. The Franklin Economic Development Commission did not spring into action on my suggestion, to say the least. 

Faced with no place in our fair city to merely hang out, my daughter and I drove to Greenfield and spent quality time -- and money --  in Barnes & Noble. We probably walked a total of 100 steps all afternoon; car to door, door to car, car to door, etc. 

In an article entitled "Crimes of the Heart," Newsweek magazine nails the overwhelmingly negative correlation between an arbitrarily "planned" built environment, our levels of health and fitness, and the expense incurred as a result:

Until last year, the residents of Albert Lea, Minn., were no healthier than any other Americans. Then the city became the first American town to sign on to the AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project—the brainchild of writer Dan Buettner, whose 2008 book, The Blue Zones, detailed the health habits of the world's longest-lived people. His goal was to bring the same benefits to middle America—not by forcing people to diet and exercise, but by changing their everyday environments in ways that encourage a healthier lifestyle.

What followed was a sort of townwide makeover. The city laid new sidewalks linking residential areas with schools and shopping centers. It built a recreational path around a lake and dug new plots for community gardens. Restaurants made healthy changes to their menus. Schools banned eating in hallways (reducing the opportunities for kids to munch on snack food) and stopped selling candy for fundraisers. (They sold wreaths instead.) More than 2,600 of the city's 18,000 residents volunteered, too, selecting from more than a dozen heart-healthy measures—for example, ridding their kitchens of supersize dinner plates (which encourage larger portions) and forming "walking schoolbuses" to escort kids to school on foot.

The results were stunning. In six months, participants lost an average of 2.6 pounds and boosted their estimated life expectancy by 3.1 years. Even more impressive, health-care claims for city and school employees fell for the first time in a decade—by 32 percent over 10 months. And benefits didn't accrue solely to volunteers. Thanks to the influence of social networks, says Buettner, "even the curmudgeons who didn't want to be involved ended up modifying their behaviors."

in case you glossed over it, allow me to repeat, with proper emphasis, a startling outcome:

Health-care claims for city and school employees fell for the first time in a decade—by 32 percent over 10 months

That's dollars and cents.

Later in the article comes this suggestion:

Require that sidewalks and bike lanes be part of every federally funded road project.

The government already spends 1 percent of transportation dollars on such projects. It should increase the level to 2 to 3 percent. When sidewalks are built in neighborhoods and downtowns, people start walking. "The big win for city government is that anything built to a walkable scale leases out for three to five times more money, with more tax revenue on less infrastructure," says Dan Burden, executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute. He recommends a "road diet" in which towns eliminate a lane or two of downtown traffic and substitute sidewalks. "When roads slim down, so do people," he says.

See also The Center-less Town Center.