Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The tide is turning: Franklin takes a positive step toward community-building

Item G.6 on this past Tuesday's Common Council agenda reads innocently enough:

Reconstruction of S. 51st Street from W. Drexel Avenue to W. Puetz Road - 60 percent plan review and policy decision relative to additional funding in addition to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) funding.

This issue was this: The stretch of 51st Street in front of Franklin High School is due for repaving. Despite its heavy use - and single entry-point to the school -  it has been without non-vehicular features (pedestrian and bike access) for as long as the high school has been there (approximately 1964). To simply re-do it as it is would be a lipstick-on-a-pig project, to be sure.

How did we get to this point? You may remember that, during the misguided "widen 51st Street" debacle, certain council members made a point of repeatedly saying that Franklin had "pretty much zero chance" of getting stimulus - aka American Reinvestment and Recovery Act  -  funds (city engineer Jack Bennett: "A chance in a million"; alderman Steve Taylor: "No chance in hell"; alderman Steve Olson: "We will not receive any federal dollars" ), therefor it was senseless to sweat the details.

At that juncture, the list considered for submission for the "no chance in hell" stimulus grant looked like this:

a) W. Puetz Road (S. Street to St. Martins Road)
b) S. Street (Puetz Road to Drexel Avenue)
c) S. 51st Street (North of Rawson Avenue to College Avenue in Greendale; the potential widened road)
d) Additional Project

These projects were chosen without public input based on what the city had in its medium range plans. The 51st Street item was particularly troubling in that it proposed a by-default widening the road; city administrators can deny it all they want, but the only plan filed at that point was indeed a default widening plan.

I addressed these auto-centric proposals in a post entitled "Common Council Tonight: Slouch toward mediocrity or reach for excellence?", which includes some background on how the projects were chosen.

I addressed the council on March 17th, saying in part:

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding should not be used to expand a system of roads that do not provide safe travel for people who are walking or bicycling. Too many Franklin streets are designed wide and fast, without sufficient sidewalks, crosswalks or bicycle lanes.

We, in fact, CREATE traffic with huge roads and no alternative.

Now we have an opportunity for a new approach. there's not a lot of time.

We currently have little or no consideration given for the safety of older people, children, or people with disabilities.

These incomplete streets are dangerous and create barriers for people to get to jobs, school, the doctor, and fully participate in civic life....

...

... I fear that Franklin seems content to ignore opportunities to increase connectivity and instead continues to encourage volume and throughput.

I have a list of almost 600 Wisconsin bicycle and pedestrian projects funded or co-funded by the federal government from 1993 to 2007. Franklin does not appear once.

We're going to have to address this.

As for 51st street: There are clear and ready-to-implement street schemes that can be deployed there to make it a neighborhood amenity and increase commercial foot traffic.

So let’s get on that.

I was far from the only one to speak out. The council heard from many, many residents who sounded a common theme: Why always automatically widen roads? Why can't we walk or bike anywhere in this city? Why no connectivity? Don't we care about the safety of children and the elderly?

It was a watershed moment made possible by the revelation that Franklin's stimulus requests threatened to be "business as usual" - auto-centric, and connectivity-be-damned. Responsive to the enormous amount of public input received, Mayor Taylor submitted a veto aimed at A) dismantling the poorly birthed project list and, B) constructing instead a list that addresses resident's concerns about safety, walkability, and accessibility.

Not everyone thought there was particular value in the discussion prompted by the aborted stimulus application items. Alderman Steve Olson - who repeatedly mentioned his own "lack of memory" at Tuesday's meeting, by the way - said the following months ago at the March 31st meeting:

The reality is, is - and I'm going to say it - this meeting tonight is a monumental waste of time. This common council and you all have had your time wasted for the last three weeks. We will not receive any federal dollars. We do not qualify for federal dollars based on the criteria that now comes before us. So this action item, whether the mayor's veto is withheld or overridden is meaningless, just as my colleagues have said.

The discussion that we're about to have is again a waste of time because we're not going to get federal dollars. We don't qualify. So, for my part I apologize that you're here. I'm glad that you're here; it's good to have people at common council meetings - you know, frankly, I get a little tired of seeing nobody here, so I'm glad you're here. But I think there are better things you could be doing with your time than worrying about a four-lane road that's just not going to happen.

Fortunately, my district's alderman, Kristen Wilhelm, and Mayor Taylor disagreed with Olson ("we will not receive any federal dollars") and made sure public input was gathered and weighed prior to our application for funds. The discussions and meetings for which alderman Olson had such little regard resulted in the decision that the stimulus application would concentrate on 51st Street in front of the high school. Furthermore, we were able to learn the following: Listening sessions - more "monumental wastes of time"? - reiterated and made clear that neighbors are very, very concerned with making that stretch of 51st in front of the high school, at long last, safe and accessible for non-vehicular traffic. That message was delivered without ambiguity.

Surprise: Franklin was granted a $1.5 million stimulus grant for 51st Street reconstruction.

Another surprise: Turns out City Engineer Jack Bennett submitted Franklin's stimulus funding request with plans and budgeting that DID NOT include the bike and pedestrian paths that all parties assumed were part of any plan for the street. In other words, the default plan (no paths) would go into effect if additional city funding could not be appended to the project to supplement the $1.5 million stimulus grant. With the grant, the city's expense to re-do the road with paths would still be cheaper than doing a road without paths minus the grant. Still, money's tight, right?

Long story short: On Tuesday night, this city took a huge step toward becoming a much more sustainable, attractive, and desirable community by altering the project slightly (putting off reconstructing the intersection, for instance) and preserving the pedestrian/bike paths that the community expects. A decision made for the citizens and not just their cars.

Aldermen Wilhelm, Solomon, and Skowronski voted for the re-budgeting and preservation of the paths plan; Alderman Olson voted against; Aldermen Sohns and Taylor were not present.

It's one small portion of the city, but a good, positive policy step; the people have been heard. Taken in combination with possible action by the Trails Committee regarding a Safe Routes to School program and its attention to 51st Street directly north of the intersection in question, Franklin is making strides toward improving its character and desirability by becoming more than simply a collection of subdivisions.

More later ....

Is Franklin ready for Safe Routes to School?

Rabbit path: The current walking/biking route from the Hillendale subdivision to Pleasant View Elementary

Last night the Franklin Trails Committee, of which I am a member, met for the second time since its formation. It's mission is to address the creation of a pedestrian and bike path or trail on or near 51st street between Rawson and Drexel, while also discussing citywide non-vehicular connectivity.

The very first hurdle the Committee - and, by extension, the city of Franklin - needs to overcome is the outdated idea of bike and walking paths as purely recreational. Alderman Tim Solomon, a fellow member of the Trails Committee and also on the Parks Commission, seems especially prone to seeing non-vehicular trails as frivolous park-type amenities rather than vital elements of infrastructure. After all, up until now the city's trails have been under the direction of the Parks Commission, and our street system is notoriously unfriendly (read: deadly) to pedestrians and bikes.

After Alderman Solomon traced on a map a winding, Parks-proposed trail that eventually empties out onto 27th street, I was emphatic about defining the difference between UTILITY trails - which I believe the Trails Committee is charged with creating - and pure RECREATIONAL trails, which, while of great interest to me personally, do nothing whatsoever to facilitate the kind of connectivity in the city that will in turn encourage economic development. The trail Solomon traced described a potentially wonderful, winding course though fields and woodlands, but ultimately led from nowhere to nowhere - - another path where we need to build a parking lot next to it, perhaps?

I'd brought to the meeting a fairly voluminous amount of information on the state and federal Safe Routes to School program and associated grants. It's been clear for some time now that the area surrounding Pleasant View Elementary, which is a few hundred yards from 51st street, is woefully ill-equipped for accommodating non-vehicular traffic of kids and their parents who live mere blocks away (the entire city of Franklin is, of course, declared an unusually hazardous transportation area by the County Sheriff). Solving the 51st street conundrum and adding simple trails through currently unused land south of the school as well as improving crossings to the north on Rawson will make it possible for children in the subdivisions surrounding Pleasant View to choose to walk or bike to school and add connectivity to commercial sites on Rawson that could do with some foot traffic.

(Think this is an easy problem to tackle? Readers of this blog are aware of the torturous hand-wringing over whether to connect east toward 51st street or, inexplicably, send traffic through Hillendale subdivision.)

It turns out that the city has grant money available to build a sidewalk on the east side of 51st street from Drexel to Claire Meadows - - which seems fairly useless until you consider extending a path east from the West Evergreen stub-road through the vacant land south of Pleasant View.

Safe Routes to School offers fairly substantial grant dollars, but in order to have a chance at getting those funds the community - especially school officials - need to commit to a SRTS program that offers resources on everything from polling parents on their attitudes regarding walking or biking to suggesting sign placement and speed-abatement enforcement options.

So, in order to capture grant funds to help pay for improvements, Job One is to get the school administration on board with the Safe Routes to School program. Cross your fingers.

(See also Franklin Today.)

Conservatives and Mass Transit: All Aboard? -- Politics Daily

One of the prime examples of an area of public policy where conservative dogma seems contrary to conservative ideology:

Effete liberals love mass transit and red-blooded American conservatives disdain it, right? That's the stereotype, all right. Libs love their commuter trains, while we conservatives dig our pickup trucks. There's surely something to those images, but a new book titled, "Moving Minds; Conservatives and Public Transportation," seeks to lead some 21st century conservatives to rethink their view of riding the subway. 

This debate comes at a time when conservatives stand accused of failing to embrace new ideas (in fact, the authors would argue this is really the renewing of an old idea, but you get the point.) Clearly, a conservative arguing in favor of mass transit dispels the notion that conservatives aren't receptive to exploring new solutions to the nation's ongoing problems. Both sides are guilty of taking stances on issues -- and sticking with them -- regardless of the emergence of new facts or changing priorities. It's all too uncommon to find an adherent of one political philosophy championing an issue generally identified as "belonging" to the other team. For this reason, if nothing else, the authors of this book deserve attention, even praise.

Read the rest at: Conservatives and Mass Transit: All Aboard? -- Politics Daily

James Howard Kunstler: The "suburban project" and Ralph Kramden's apartment

The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in “The Honeymooners” TV show.

James Howard Kunstler in Ruinous Debt to Create Futureless Suburbia - Contrarian Stock Market Investing News:

Institutionalizing sprawl and looking past existing infrastructure

Shoppes at Wyndham Village: Fill vacant space or BUILD MORE?

So, the Sentry grocery store at the corner of Rawson and 76th has announced that it will close by the end of October. The store was superfluous (throw a rock in Franklin and you'll hit a Pick n Save; I have three to choose from in proximity to my house), but the property will be a blight as long as it stands vacant. Across the street from that soon-to-be-empty building are a vacant coffee shop and vacant martini bar. The Shoppes at Wyndham Village outbuildings are largely vacant as well.

Meanwhile, at the Economic Development Commission meeting last night, I suggested that we focus at least part of our efforts on nurturing small, local businesses to fill some of these vacancies and encourage rehabs and retrofits. A fellow (and long-serving) commissioner responded to my suggestion by gravely reminding all assembled  that "our mission is development of tracts of land to attract business."

Really?

I will argue in a series of subsequent posts (and at the next EDC meeting) that our mission must be much, much broader than that. Stay tuned.

Social media and local government culture

From http://www.governingpeople.com/Home/: Social media and local government culture:

One of the new slides in this deck asks the question “Should local gov be like Apple or Google?”.

When I road tested this question on Twitter, I got a range of responses, some being quite clear cut, others wondering what the hell I was on about. One was particularly clever.

Here’s what I meant.

Apple are closed, switched off from the conversations about them. They keep their customers at a distance and go to remarkable lengths to prevent users from giving them ideas. As far as Apple are concerned, they know all the answers.

Apple’s products are also damn expensive. They charge as much as the market can bear – and sometimes more. So how come they are so popular?

It comes down to the user experience. It’s so awesome, that people like me will put up with all sorted of crap to be able to keep using it. So, an organisation can still succeed, even if it is closed in its culture, if the product is good enough. I think it would be difficult to argue that any level of government’s user experience is up to the same level as Apple’s right now…

Google, on the other hand, take a far more open culture. They have loads of blogs, just about one for every service they operate. They have forums for users to help one another, and to get help from support. An awful lot of Google’s technology is open source, and they run platforms for others to host and share their code, as well.

Google’s pricing model is different to Apple’s, too. Instead of charging as much as the market can bear, Google charges as little as it can bear, as Jeff Jarvis explains in What Would Google Do? Google wants as many people to use its products as possible, because that makes them work better, so they make them free, or as close to free as they can. Google is more a platform, or a network, than just a company that sells stuff.

Transit key to attracting creative talent here - JSOnline

I can tell you this: Transit is a distinct NON-ISSUE for Franklin's Economic Development Commission. My attempts to discuss our city's approach to impending RTA actions - - planning now to accommodate and benefit from proposed Madison-Milwaukee-Racine-Chicago train service, for instance - - have been met with shrugs.

Transit key to attracting creative talent here - JSOnline.

Possible roundabouts cause concern near Lambeau Field - because drunk drivers have trouble with roundabouts

You can't make this stuff up.

Proposed roundabouts near Lambeau Field raise concerns - JSOnline.

ALL Philly libraries set to close October 2nd

Yup - all of them. as reported at Philly.com:

Closure notices are going up at physical libraries and recreation centers throughout the day. The facilities would be closed Oct. 2 if budget relief from the state doesn't come through.

More at: PhillyBurbs.com:  Action needed NOW to keep Philly libraries open:

Missing the President's education address: Another blow to the concept of community

Yesterday the President of the United States gave a speech which he hoped would inspire the youth of America to seize their educational opportunities and aim high.

And who better to look to as an example? You could do much, much worse than to emulate the work ethic and accomplishments of Barack Obama. To have a person of his accomplishment speak to our nation’s youth as a group is precisely the sort of event that has the power to change lives for the better.

How wonderful to have as our president man with the background to credibly say the following:

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school.

There is no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny.

You make your own future.

That is powerful stuff to hear as a child, especially in the company of your peers - - as a community. It is deeply meaningful to look around yourself and see others like yourself absorbing the same advice from the man holding our nation's highest office.

For schools that took advantage of the opportunity, it was a great success.

Unfortunately, my children did not get to see the president's address at their school and share an uplifting community moment. Insane as it may seem (and it will certainly be labeled thus when recalled in future history texts), school officials in many districts were bullied by parents who take seriously the paycheck demagoguery of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

They feared "indoctrination." Parents actually threatened to keep their kids at home if their school showed a speech about the importance of working hard at school.

They feared the idea of the president of the United States addressing the nation's children on the subject of doing well in school?

Par for the course, I'm afraid, in the ongoing disintegration of the concept of community in the post-Proposition 13, partisan-above-all world.

Could it be that the drumbeat of fear-mongering against a message extolling the importance of education and personal responsibility is rooted in the rising spirit of naked self-interest encouraged by the rantings of radio wingnuts? Combine the ongoing marginalization of school district funding as a result of "taxpayer revolts," haphazardly applied TIF districts that rob the educational coffers while enriching corporate swells, and paid-for-their-ideology conservatives who libel and smear school officials and without bothering to attend the meetings they describe, and you get a pretty "low achievement" atmosphere.

To be more specific about the instance above: Wisconsin state senator Mary Lazich's aide, Kevin Fischer, recently called Franklin School District business manager "a true crook" and "shyster" in a posting on his blog that discusses the local tax levy (a blog which is hosted by the parent company of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Fischer, who aspires to talk radio as a fill-in for WISN right wing talker Mark Belling, also has names for the citizens who bothered to attend the school board meeting and voted for an increase in the tax levy: "mindless robots"; "blind sheep, like lemmings"; and "the 25 potted plants at the annual meeting." He then tastefully invoked forced sodomy ("...we’re bending over quite a bit. Please tax us some more.")

Not exactly an education booster, but a true suburbanite in his fixated self-interest. I have no idea if Fischer attended or graduated from college (it took me months just to get him and the editor at FranklinNow to finally admit on his blog he is a paid aide to a Republican state senator), but I do know that Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck do not have a single college degree among them: Limbaugh lasted a year in college and dropped out; Hannity dropped out of two universities; Beck was provided a special nontraditional program at Yale, where he took a single theology course and dropped out.

What does education -- and public investment in education -- mean to the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck?

For that matter, what use do they have for communities, where people can share ideas without resorting to the FOX playsheet?

Consider as well the bar-lowering knee-slapper George W. Bush trotted out regularly while president:

"To the 'C' students, I say: You, too, can be President of the United States."

And, at the Naval Academy:

The thing McCain loved about the Naval Academy was he got to study all the time. (Laughter.) He and I both showed that if you -- people with C averages can succeed. (Laughter.) Welcome.

This works if your father and grandfather "encourage" their political and business associates to rescue you regularly, of course; you tend not to "fail upward" without that safety net. That's a different kind of community -- one that not all of us have access to. And it's not an attitude I want my kids to adopt.

Given an opportunity to harness the inspirational story of our president and infuse a pro-education, pro-achievement ethos at the community level, we dropped the ball. "Watch him at home if you'd like," many were advised.

Not a proud moment for America - - but a quintessentially suburban moment, I submit.