Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Survey says 60% of home builders shifting to pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods

A message to my local officials and planners: Is this evidence enough for you to enact -- and PROMOTE --  Smart Growth and Smartcode principles sooner rather than later?

With an eye toward the future, builders are exploring new strategies to meet buyer demands. Sixty percent said that to stay competitive, they are shifting away from bigger traditional home designs to conservative pedestrian-oriented mixed-use neighborhoods. Another question showed more than 63.1% are re-evaluating their projects, planned pre-recession, from a product/layout/density standpoint.

 

Read the rest at: Citybizlist Baltimore - Business Survey Gauges Real Estate Market in Tri-State, Mid-Atlantic

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Economic Development Commission meeting CANCELLED AGAIN

This is just hard to believe.

Unprecedented tough economic times; vacant commercial properties all over the city; businesses struggling to make a go of it; tax burden shifting to homeowners; school budgets strangled -- and we could not roust a quorum for an Economic Development Commission meeting last night. And that's after cancelling LAST MONTH'S meeting as well!

I'll come right out and say it: Time to disband the EDC.

Suburban Sprawl and the Decline of Social Capital

Could this be one of the reasons why more and more people seem to lack empathy for those who do not share their exact demographic?

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the sprawling suburbs may be exacting a negative effect on the public in ways that were entirely predictable, but rarely discussed by national (and many local) policy leaders. This data raises serious questions about the decline of "social capital," defined in the scholarly arena as the "social connections and the attendant norms and trust" that are vital to community-based living.

Read the rest at: t r u t h o u t | Suburban Sprawl and the Decline of Social Capital

More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

From Planetizen:

A few days ago, I was in a Chicago neighborhood called Lincoln Square, on Lincoln Avenue just south of Lawrence Avenue.  Lincoln Avenue looks like many posh urban neighborhoods- narrow, walkable streets inhabited by gelato-eating, prosperous-looking people.  Even on a weeknight, the shops and streets of Lincoln Square betrayed no evidence of a recession.*

Lincoln intersects with Lawrence Avenue just a block from the core of Lincoln Square.  Lawrence Avenue resembles a suburb more than it resembles Lincoln Square; it is six lanes wide (though unlike in most suburbs, two of them are used for parking), and some shops are behind parking lots.  But Lawrence's retail is far less prosperous than that of Lincoln; a good number of Lawrence's storefronts seemed to be vacant, and others were occupied by dollar stores and other non-carriage trade businesses.**

Both Lincoln Avenue and Lawrence Avenue have the same housing stock and thus the same neighbors, the same city government (and thus the same tax rates and school districts) and the same distance from downtown (about seven miles).  Thus, these two intersecting streets constitute the perfect controlled experiment on the popularity of walkable urbanism.  If people basically liked shopping on car-oriented speedways, Lawrence would have fewer vacant storefronts than Lincoln.  Yet the opposite is true.  It follows that where everything else is equal, shoppers prefer walkable urbanism to car-oriented suburbanism.

At this point, readers may be asking themselves: why, then, do some suburbs continue to prosper?  Because not everything else is equal: an unwalkable suburb may be further away from troubled neighborhoods (usually leading to more prestigous schools and less crime), in a less poverty-packed jurisdiction (thus leading to lower taxes), or have a newer housing stock.  Thus, not every suburb will look as scruffy as Lincoln Square.

But the tale of these two adjacent streets nevertheless tells us something: that city life with walkability is appealing to American consumers, while city life with less walkability is anything but.

*For a few pictures of Lincoln Square, see

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205703.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205709.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205702.html

**Although I took no pictures of Lawrence, you can see the street by going to the 2200-2600 blocks of West Lawrence Avenue on Google Street View.

Michael Lewyn is an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, FL, where he teaches a seminar on sprawl and the law (as well as numerous other courses).

Read the rest at: More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

Guerrilla Pedestrians Paint Crosswalks on Perilous Streets - GOOD Blog

And why not?

Read the rest at: Guerrilla Pedestrians Paint Crosswalks on Perilous Streets - GOOD Blog - GOOD - StumbleUpon

Community program helps spruce up Milwaukee homes

From Milwaukee Magazine's News Buzz blog:

Owners of “middle-market” homes in Milwaukee are benefitting from a new program that connects them with designers and architects, at no cost, as they plan home improvements.

Milwaukee Ald. Michael Murphy, one of the project’s supporters, sees it as a way to encourage entire neighborhoods to spruce up. “Milwaukee has a rich and diverse housing stock, and by encouraging strong design and high quality improvements,” he says, the program can “stimulate greater reinvestment from additional area homeowners as they seek to improve their homes and make them more functional.”

Read the rest at: Milwaukee News Buzz - Milwaukee News and Reports, Local, State, Politics, Blogs, Cartoons » Blog Archive What a lovely charrette!

Strict new rules on resale shops threaten local assets; Goodbye, Half-Price Books?

From the TERRIBLE MUNICIPAL IDEAS Department:

The new code being adopted by cities around the state is based on a state law that already requires pawn shops and businesses that buy metals and jewelry to take and keep information on sellers and items. The code expands the requirements by including businesses that haven't needed to report transactions in the past and by mandating that the businesses install software from the Northeastern Wisconsin Property Reporting System and input seller identification and detailed merchandise descriptions each day. Businesses must photograph sellers and items, and they must keep the items for a set period of time - 10 to 30 days in most cities that have adopted the ordinances - before reselling them. Desch of Half-Price Books said it would be impossible to comply with that provision because of the storage space it would require.

Is this what the new hyper-surveillance state is coming to?

Moms come into New to You Kids in Greenfield every week to sell their babies' outgrown rompers to the small resale shop. But the business says it will have to close if it has to comply with a new city ordinance requiring it to take each mom's picture and send that, along with detailed descriptions of the items she sells, to a police database every day.

The Greenfield ordinance also imposes transaction fees on resale stores that could amount to tens of thousands of dollars annually - a big burden for small retailers.

"It's horrendous. This will put us out of business if we have to adhere to it," said New to You Kids owner Robert Reinhardt.

Half-Price Books, a national resale chain that has a store a few doors down from Reinhardt's in the Greenfield Fashion Center, will consider getting out of its lease, district manager Joe Desch said.

Half-Price also is thinking about filing a lawsuit against Greenfield on First Amendment grounds, because the new ordinance, which takes effect next summer, will require the bookstore to send police a daily list of customers who sell books to them, with identification and titles sold.

But Greenfield Police Detective Chuck Fletcher has news for resale operators who think they can escape the reporting requirements by moving to another town: There soon may to no place to run, no place to hide.

"You may be able to jump over to Greendale or West Allis, but guess what," said Fletcher, noting that with more cities adopting stricter ordinances, retailers may have trouble finding a place without restrictions.

 

Read the rest at: Greenfield and other cities impose strict new rules on resale shops - JSOnline