Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Builders know: For suburbia to survive and thrive, higher density, connectivity and placemaking are vital

Aware of the crushing costs of continued sprawl, the ’burbs are embracing slightly higher density and giving rise to a new generation of urban villages and mini cities.

At last night's Trails Committee meeting, we began the process of putting in place a Complete Streets policy for Franklin, Wisconsin. In summary, Complete Streets are an effort -- adopted via resolution, policy, and ordinance in cities across the country -- to build road networks that are safer, more livable, and welcoming to everyone.

You will be reading a lot about Complete Streets in this space in the days and weeks ahead. Make no mistake: Complete Streets is first and foremost an economic development tool, as it is more important than ever to extract maximum value from our build environment.

This article from BUILDER MAGAZINE embraces the suburban context, but recognizes as well the economic importance of creating a connected community:

At the same time, schools aren’t the only draw luring die-hard urbanites to the suburbs. As one-time bedroom communities begin to sprout higher-density housing options (rental apartments, condos, lofts, and the like) around transit stops and mixed-use town squares, they’re beginning to feel more like urban villages themselves—places that have appeal for singles, empty-nesters, and DINKs [Dual Income, No Kids] just as much as families. This increasingly multi-nodal landscape, notes Joel Kotkin, a Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, marks the beginnings of what may be best described as “smart sprawl.”

That also means "retrofitting", when possible, existing structures:

Whereas the old suburban growth model was dead set on expansion in the manner of the Oklahoma Land Rush, new approaches are much more focused on redeveloping tired properties with strategic densification. “The truth is we’re not as built-out as we think we are,” Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor of architecture and urban planning at Georgia Institute of Technology, and co-author of the book, Retrofitting Suburbia, noted at a recent Urban Land Institute symposium on smart growth. The imperative now is to use land resources more economically.

Read the rest at: Beyond (and Above) Sprawl - Land, Attached Development, Infill Development - Builder Magazine

Do We Need Public Libraries? (Enjoy your "Tax Freeze": Part 2)

My post entitled "Enjoy your 'Tax Freeze': Part 1 - A Country Without Libraries" elicited a couple of comments from two local tax freeze advocates (they won't mind me characterizing them that way, I'm sure). Their point seemed to be; "Get into the 21st century - - we have the internet and Kindles now!" I was reminded by both commentors that Ben Franklin would have really dug the Kindle - - after all, he was an inventor.

They miss the point.

To define a library by the technology that delivers words and information is erroneous -- as erroneous as stating (rather elliptically)  "Libraries in schools are already being reduced by digital media. That's the demand."

Libraries (and, more dangerously, LIBRARIANS) in schools are NOT being reduced by digital media. They are being reduced by school boards and school budgets that are defining libraries as little more than "warehouses of bound matter." Schools that have cut librarians in favor of part-time "media specialists" suffer the consequences; I see my own children having to turn to me to learn basic research.

From a 1998 American Prospect article called “Will Libraries Survive?” by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg

In 1998, a Commerce Department study followed that 62 million people are using the Internet, and other estimates put the figure still higher. Most of these… are people who already use the public library less often than their parents did for purposes of obtaining recreational and instructive reading. Now they no longer need to rely on the library even for the sorts of information they can't easily get on National Public Radio or at Barnes & Noble… they may still want to have a library around as an information source of last resort, but they have a number of more convenient options to exhaust before they are driven to use it.

So, in 2011, the library should be dead or dying. But that's not what's happening, for instance, in Chicago. From the book Better Together: Restoring the American Community:

In little more than a decade, Chicago has built 32 neighborhood branch libraries and renovated nine others. the downtown Harold Washington Library Center, opened in 1991, is one of the largest public library buildings in the world. Its green metal roof with huge gargoyle like owls, their wings extravagantly unfurled, make it in unmistakable landmark. 14 more new branches are scheduled to open by 2005. More to the point, the libraries are humming with activity.

In other words, proper attention to public library facilities will make those facilities integral to the community—more than worth the investment made. In an hours-old news clip, you see Illinois continue that commitment:

Sixteen Illinois public libraries will receive construction grants to help pay for essential upgrades planned for this summer.

The grants will go toward projects such as handicapped accessibility, heating, ventilating and air conditioning units, building additions and renovation. Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White says many public libraries lack the funds to perform these improvements without grant money.

And why? These urban and suburban libraries provide huge quality-of-life benefits. Irregardless of whether information is delivered via bound matter or iPad, or Kindle, or microfiche, or computer monitor, etc.

So - a commentor says "literature, research, and study are all evolving."

True. So...?

Innovative libraries aren't content serving as one-way conduits of information; they want to foster dialogue and exchange with their users. What does that have to do with whether words appear on paper of an illuminated screen?

As further expressed in the book Better Together: A library is no longer a passive repository of books and information or an outpost of culture, quiet, and a calm in a noisy world. The library of today is—should be—an active and responsive part of the community and an agent of change. In addition, the Internet, which was supposed to wipe out its reason for existence,  is very often cited as one of the things that brings people to the library.

This may come as a surprise to some of our more sheltered subdivision dwellers, but there is a “digital divide” in this country. Believe it or not, there are people who live within blocks of you who do not have access to the Internet, a computer, and certainly not a Kindle. For them, the library provides a window into a world of information we take for granted in our suburban enclaves. And now that the digital divide extends into our suburban enclaves, library access is more important than ever for people seeking employment, information, networking tools, etc.

There are also people who are new to the world of computers and the Internet. Late bloomers. For them, the Franklin public library provides very inexpensive computer classes. At five dollars per class, they are eminently affordable; at the same time, their immense popularity has created a not insignificant chunk of income for the library, which helps perpetuate these services.

Here in Franklin, our library stands as the only non-retail “third place” in existence. That is, the library is the only place you can go with no barrier to entry; a place where you may meet or happen upon virtually anyone.

What is a “third place”? Ray Oldenburg describes  it as a place that is neither work nor home, a place where people can spend time together. The café, the public, the neighborhood tavern, the old-fashioned drugstore with soda fountain are some of the examples he uses. A good third place makes few demands on the people who gather there, beyond requiring them to observe some basic local rules (for instance, that individuals, and especially newcomers, will not dominate the conversation; or that Illinois natives will assert their Bears fandom in moderation while in Wisconsin borders). A third place is a neutral ground where people from different walks of life in the community can meet and get to know one another, having in common perhaps only their desire to frequent this particular place. (More about "third places" here.)

Think of some examples of "third places" in Franklin. It's a very, very short list.

The replacement of local shops by chain stores and implementation of single-use zoning that puts housing, workplaces, and retail establishments in segregated areas have effectively eliminated the “corner drugstores” and the coffee shops where people met one another and found out what was going on in town and in the neighborhood. Television keeps us at home in the evening, when in the past we would've sought one another's company in a third place. The authors of the blog comments which I am addressing here have first-hand knowledge of the political and ideological polarization that is threatening us locally. I attribute a great deal of the blame for the lack of community in suburbs like Franklin to the simple fact that our built environment has made it impossible for those serendipitous chance encounters between persons who have ideological differences that lead to constructive debate and collegial jousting. Instead, we are treated to “bloggers” and anonymous commenters who insult one another's ideas—and assault one another personally—in away they never would if they had actual, real-world interaction with persons outside of their ideological spectrum.

Look at the crowds at Starbucks and other cafés. They attest to the continuing need that people feel for third places. However, those third places have a barrier to entry; that being the fact that you are ostensibly there to purchase three-dollar coffee and maybe a muffin. If you bring a backpack full of notebooks and pencils to Starbucks and simply loiter, you are not living up to your side of the bargain. The demographic is narrowed thusly.

Yes, Benjamin Franklin would have loved the Kindle. But he would be horrified to learn that citizens of his beloved republic are, in the dawning of the 21st century, cocooning themselves in rec rooms and pulling up their McMansion drawbridges against interaction with other people and other ideas. He would be sickened to hear that we are now celebrating "tax freezes" at the expense of those social institutions that have helped us grow as a country over previous generations; the institutions built by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to serve us and that were paid for by their taxes, though they knew they would see no personal, immediate benefit.

Can you even imagine that forward-looking ethic today?

Our tax rate is at its lowest in four generations, and yet we whine about contributing to educate our children, plow our roads, keep our infrastructure together, and provide community amenities. Where we used to invest in future generations, we now look to secure our own purses, tomorrow be damned.

Still, one cannot deny that Ben Franklin would have loved the Kindle...

Retrofitting suburbia: the state of the art

On June 1st, I'll be at the Congress for the New Urbanism 19 in Madison, Wisconsin attending, on behalf of the city of Franklin, an in-depth “202” session that will feature a discussion of innovative sprawl retrofit solutions by Dan Slone, June Williamson, and Galina Tachieva. Their published works include Retrofitting Suburbia, the Sprawl Repair Manual, and A Legal Guide to Urban and Sustainable Development.

They will present key urban design principles, prototypical techniques, in-depth case studies, and regulatory frameworks for implementation, followed by discussion of the frontiers of innovation for suburban retrofits.

Today’s American suburbs have an overabundance of everything — infrastructure, national chains, big boxes, fast-food drive-throughs — but when overabundance starts to fail, high quantity becomes a liability. Re-using and adapting the existing suburban types to incubate new possibilities will help gradually complete the rest of sprawl’s incomplete fabric and make it more livable and sustainable in the long run.

Read the rest at: Retrofitting suburbia: the state of the art | New Urban Network

 

Witold Rybczynski: McMansions dead at last? The kind of houses we'll build in the future

If you live in Franklin, the photo below is familiar. However, these crapulent cardboard constructions may be on their way out sooner rather than later -- the question is, will local plan commissions and developers rise to the opportunity and prepare for the next wave?

There is some evidence that urban townhomes and infill housing are more popular, as rising gas prices increase the cost of commuting. Higher energy costs also affect heating and air conditioning, which may have the effect of discouraging homebuyers from purchasing large houses with soaring entryways and expansive family rooms. While the evidence is fragmentary—the current reduction in average new house sizes has more to do with the preponderance of first-time buyers than an overall shift in demand—it is clear that the long recessionary cold-shower will dampen the exuberance that characterized the boom years of 2000 to 2005. That will mean smaller houses closer together on smaller lots in inner suburbs, fewer McMansions, and fewer planned communities in the distant hinterland. An alternative scenario is that American optimism will prevail and it will be business as usual, as happened during the boom of the 1950s following the Great Depression, or during the period following the Energy Crisis of 1973, when car buyers, after a brief flirtation with Japanese compact cars, embraced minivans and SUVs. But I wouldn't count on it.

Read the rest at: McMansions dead at last? The kind of houses we'll build in the future. - By Witold Rybczynski - Slate Magazine

In Wisconsin, killing the economy today and into the future: "Technical schools say they're in a vise grip" - JSOnline

How do you kill a state's vitality and economy? Put your boot on the neck of its educational infrastructure.

If and when Wisconsin Governor Walker's budget is passed -- corporate tax breaks or not -- businesses will trip over themselves abandoning a state that does not bother to develop a valuable workforce. Vocational schools provide opportunities for a wide array of potential taxpayers, and creates a crucial labor/creative resource for business and industry.

Wisconsin is about to shutter its windows and go dark....

State funding for Wisconsin's 16 technical colleges would drop to a dollar level not seen since the late 1980s, despite enrollment growth of 40% over the last decade, if cuts in Gov. Scott Walker's proposed budget ultimately gain approval, college officials said last week.

That could lead to longer waiting lists for classes, more limited access to courses and programs, and ultimately, challenges for Wisconsin manufacturers, health care providers and other employers looking for skilled workers as the state's economy struggles to recover, officials said.

"We had to turn away a lot of students last year because we had filled classes," said Lee Rasch, president of Western Technical College in La Crosse. "We easily turned away a couple thousand students. The jobs are here, but we don't have the funding to increase capacity. If the goal (stated by Walker) is to create 250,000 jobs, these are the kinds of jobs we need."

Read the rest at: Technical schools say they're in a vise grip - JSOnline

 

See also The Death of the Covenant:

Radomski says what the state would lose is a unified effort to promote college planning in the state. Most states, he says, have now implemented some kind of “pledge” program for students exchanging state assistance for meeting some academic standard.

Suburban Renewal: Key to economic recovery

[Map Sources: Map by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Data from Christopher Leinberger.]

Renewing our suburbs is part and parcel of broader economic recovery. The very act of restoring them—of retrofitting them for the new ways of living and working that our emerging new economic order requires–will help bring back prosperity overall.

- Richard Florida

Some selected excerpts from the article that I would surely bring up at an Economic Development Commission Meeting --- if we bothered to have economic Development Commission meetings: 

• MCMANSIONS ARE OUT: According to an eye-opening 2009 survey commissioned by Buildermagazine, home buyers are no longer willing to drive to the furthest edges of developments to buy the biggest house they can afford. In fact those are precisely the kinds of homes that are not selling.  Real estate development expert Arthur C. Nelson predicts that we will have a surplus of as many as 22 million large-lot homes by the year 2025.
  
  
• COMMUNITY IS IN: Today’s buyers—surprising numbers of them single women— are looking for smaller houses closer-in, with access to parks and cultural amenities. There is a rapidly growing market for super-energy efficient homes under 1,300 square feet – quite a departure from the 5,000-6,000 square foot McMansions of just a few years past. “We are entering a new era of home building, where buyers look for spiritual satisfaction rather than material gain,” the Builder study concludes. Not the kind of language we’re used to hearing from the construction industry.
  
  
• WALKABILITY = HIGHER HOME VALUES: Walkable suburbs are some of America’s best places to live; they provide a model for renewal for their sprawling, spread-out siblings. Relatively dense commercial districts, with shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, as well as a wide variety of housing types, have always been a feature of the older suburbs that grew up along the streetcar lines of big metro areas.... These are the places where Americans are clamoring to live, where housing prices have held up even in the face of one of the greatest real estate collapses in modern memory, as Leinberger documents in his book, The Option of Urbanism. The desire for walkability can be measured in dollars and cents. Houses in walkable neighborhoods command higher prices than houses in more distant, less dense locations. A recent study by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities analyzed the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 major metros. In 12 out of 15 of them, walkability commanded a premium—sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in places like the D.C. suburbs.

• WALKABILITY = ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT SUCCESS: We found that metros with walkable suburbs had greater economic output, higher incomes, and higher housing prices; higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the creative class; higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech industries and employees; not to mention higher levels of happiness.
  
  
• MALLS ARE ZOMBIES: A 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that one in five malls were dead or dying – 7 percent were effectively dead and another 12 percent were vulnerable and likely to fail in the near future. But these troubled malls have become the sites of a wave of renewal. Outside of St. Paul, the parking lot that surrounded a dead shopping center built on land fill was turned back into wetlands—which in turn attracted new “lakefront” townhome development. In Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a dead mall on a single 103-acre superblock is being transformed into Belmar—22 urban blocks with parks, bus lines, restaurants, stores, and 1,300 new households—the downtown that Lakewood never had. Eight of the 13 regional malls in the Denver area are now planning or have completed makeovers. 

Longer, unedited version of Mr. Florida's column in the 10/9/10 Wall Street Journal:

Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.

What a dramatic shift. Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the locus of the American Dream. More than their sprawling, large-lot homes and big wide lawns, their shopping malls, industrial parks, and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output.  A good many of them formed into Edge Cities—satellite centers where people could live, work, and shop without ever having to set foot in the center city.

With millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure, our suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle have become talent magnets at the same time, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young-families, and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner city neighborhoods are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities, according to a Brookings study. And suburban poverty populations are growing at five times the rate of those in cities.

......

Perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner, Va., the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, it boasts 25 million square feet of office space and four million square feet of retail space. Decades ago developers hailed it as the wave of the future—one of hundreds of new satellite centers that would render our old downtown commercial centers obsolete. But Tysons Corner has lately been losing out. Its perpetual traffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused home-buyers to choose other places. Some companies that were headquartered there have even moved back into the District of Columbia.

Now developers and landowners are seeking to make it more walkable, with a more integrated mix of uses. In June, the county's Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan that would transform Tysons Corner into a "24-hour urban center where people live, work and play." Its hallmarks will be green construction, access to public transportation and abundant public amenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that sounds very much like a real city.

There are countless other opportunities for reclamation, all across America, as Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson document in their 2008 book, "Retrofitting Suburbia." Under-used golf courses can be transformed into parks and nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscaped and developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Developers can cut streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses and add restaurants, stores and public spaces.

Historically, America's economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns—economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. The rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was based on the transition to an urban-industrial economy organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. Today the challenge is to remake our suburbs, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities and, in doing so, to make them engines of innovation and productivity. 

Read the rest at: Creative Class » Blog Archive » Suburban Renewal - Creative Class

Reduce sprawl to attack three threats

Cogent thoughts by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, city planners and co-authors of "The Smart Growth Manual" (2010) as well as "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream" (2000), just re-released on its 10th anniversary.

The issue is not new for urban planners. We have been talking about it for 30 years, first as an aesthetic problem and then as a social concern: children and the elderly lacking independence, overburdened soccer moms and dads, massive income-based segregation and all that time wasted in traffic.

But the debate has changed now that sprawl has been identified as a contributor to some major challenges to our well-being: oil dependency, climate change and skyrocketing health-care costs. These crises have causes beyond sprawl, but sprawl may be the only one they all share.

Read the rest at: Andres Duany and Jeff Speck - Plan to reduce sprawl will boost health, environment

 

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

Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities

Walkable community advice from Roger K. Lewis, a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland:

How can we encourage and enable more walking? What will motivate people to change long-standing perceptions and deeply engrained behavior? We must plan and develop -- or redevelop -- metropolitan environments so walking becomes safe, comfortable, enjoyable and stimulating. This requires satisfying several design criteria:

-- Street patterns must be easily navigable and latticelike, with blocks that are not too big and intersections that are not too far apart. Streets must be continuous and interconnected, providing motorists and pedestrians with more than one path for traveling to a destination.

-- Public streets must be artfully proportioned. Widths of sidewalks, planting strips, cart ways and medians are critical, as are the heights and setbacks of buildings flanking streets. Well-configured street spaces balance a sense of architectural definition and enclosure with desirable exposure to sky, sunlight, air movement and views.

-- To make walking truly pleasurable, streetscape quality and amenity are important. A thoughtful mix of shade trees and vegetation beautifies streetscapes and makes them ecologically greener. Good lighting and signage, convenient street furniture and attractive paving materials enhance a streetscape experience visually and functionally.

-- It must be safe to walk, day or night. In addition to good lighting and durable walkway paving that doesn't trap high heels, streets need well-marked crosswalks and synchronized traffic-control signals. Police or other public safety officials should be seen regularly patrolling streets.

-- Buildings facing public streets need lots of windows, entrance doorways and storefronts. These benefit merchants looking for customers and pedestrians looking for merchandise. Because there is safety in numbers, streets lined by eateries with outdoor seating are even safer, not to mention livelier. People will walk along such streets because walking is delightful.

Read the rest at: Roger K. Lewis - Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities

“Leave Your Car in the Garage” as sell copy for real estate

The trend toward walkability as a real estate selling point is noted at How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic 

Trawling through some real estate brokerage sites, typically in fairly dense small towns and pre-war suburbs, a refrain keeps catching my eye: “Leave your car in the garage.” The listing will then note the proximity to trains, schools, etc. I’m not sure who first came up with this rallying cry — and based on what I’ve seen in some of these towns (pedestrians being mostly people moving to and from their cars) I wonder if it might be more real-estate bluster than anything else — i.e., the potential of walking is there, as is the potential for the great room to be great and the massive chef’s kitchen to produce fare worthy of Grant Achatz, but in the end this potential gives way to some real or imagined vehicular reality (I need to get groceries, it’s just easier). But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a real estate ad that promised: “Take your car out of the garage, often!”

Read the rest at: How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic » Blog Archive » “Leave Your Car in the Garage”