Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Smart Growth principles vs. the rigorously mundane in Franklin

At the Economic Development Commission Meeting on November 23rd (the one where we were introduced to the mind-boggling concept of the Aerotropolis), Franklin Automotive presented a site expansion proposal for their location on Ryan Road. They also brought a laundry list of potential incentives for the ECD to consider, everything from "waive Plan Commission fees" to having the city provide the driveway approach and culvert.

Do I even have to show the architectural elevations to confirm your fear of another suburban McBuilding? Behold "Multi-Tenant Building #3," potential one-story home to dental offices and maybe a chiropractor or two:

 

Site plan? Again, typical building-behind-parking-moat, with no pedestrian considerations. 

None of the Commissioners present for the meeting (there were four absentees) were keen on providing incentives for the project, mainly because they feared setting a precedent for other proposals. After all, why provide breaks for one project and not another?

Why not, indeed ...

While the Franklin Automotive site (yellow box below) faces "Death Race 2000" Ryan Road, it is surrounded to the north and west by subdivisions. The current proposal provides absolutely nothing in terms of amenities for the surrounding residential population, who could easily access the site by foot and bike. 

I suggested the following: Why not reward and/or incentivise the sorts of Smart Growth principals that Franklin's Comprehensive Master Plan supposedly embraces?

For example: We are presented here with a pretty rigorously mundane proposal that offers little more than possible property tax income in its current configuration. Andy's service center on Rawson and 51st already has vacant space exactly like this; so does Shoppes at Wyndham Village. Do we need another one-story, by-the-numbers, moated-by-asphalt professional building?

On the other hand, what if the proposal was reconfigured to serve the surrounding neighborhood rather than simply act as an offramp from the Ryan Road speedway?

What if  "Multi-Tenant Building #3" were built right up to 31st street, with parking behind the building so pedestrians could stroll to and from the location?

How about a multistory building that can host a neighborhood ice cream shop, coffee shop, or even a deli?

And how about a break for locally-owned businesses who might lease space there? (Why the emphasis on local business? For every dollar spent at a local business, 45 cents is reinvested locally. That same dollar spent at a corporate chain reinvests 15 cents locally. Locally-owned businesses generate as much as two to three times the local economic activity as do chains. [PDF link to one example study])

While not the ideal spot (a location near the library would be best), here's a place for a co-working facility that could serve the business travelers staying at nearby Staybridge Suites (a hotel which is itself the recipient of a city grant).

And, while these business travelers are at it, they can leave some out-of-town money at whatever locally-owned food and beverage establishments take advantage of local-ownership lease incentives. (And, surely the management at Staybridge Suites - which is located right below the "G" in "Google" on the map above -  would like to offer its guests nearby amenities beyond the On the Border gentleman's club and the Buckhorn tavern.)

How about a LEED building certification?

So, Mr. Developer: You've shown us the "default" proposal, and, frankly, you are welcome to roll the dice on another mundane professional building with no municipal incentives.

HOWEVER, reconfigure your project using some or all of the quantifiable, economy- and community-boosting ideas above, and why shouldn't the city of Franklin find ways to grease the rails for a "seed" development that will encourage more of the same Smart Growth thinking?

Unfortunately, my expression of the ideas above at the EDC meeting was met with confused stares at best, and at least a couple sets of rolling eyes - par for the course at a meeting where we were pedantically told "Business will tell you where it wants to go."

Glutton for punishment that I am, I will present the above to the EDC at our next meeting as an agenda item.

In the meantime: While the building pictured below is not appropriate for the Franklin Automotive site, the ideas presented in its accompanying post at CoolTown Studios - which, eerily, I only read after writing my post above, while searching for a "co-working building" image to illustrate this entry - are almost entirely applicable to our situation in Franklin.

From Cooltown Studios:

The motivating factor behind writing entries for this blog is that I get to work directly with progressive creatives and developers to crowdsource these concepts into built reality.

So, considering the state of the economy, what are creatives’ solution in how the development of a building can become a symbol for economic growth? The following framework of a building will soon be crowdsourced in Washington DC as an answer:

- Local, independent businesses on the ground floor. Not only do local businesses have four times the economic impact over nationals, but the entrepreneurs who run them are a key source for job growth. The ideal business in this building would be a third place restaurant/cafe/coffeehouse/lounge.

- Coworking on the second floor. Once again, support the entrepreneurs, the future Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Debbi Fields… providing an attainably-priced (can’t emphasize that enough) open plan shared workplace for them to work among other entrepreneurs, inspiring, motivating and supporting one another. This is the backbone of any strong economy. The third place below serves as a great casual meeting spot both during and after work, sourcing the next great napkin ideas for business (ie the ideas for Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Wall-E were generated at such a venue).

- Mini-condos on the upper floors. These are pretty much the same sized units in most of the world, except in the U.S. we’ve become accustomed to living in spaces larger than we really need, or can afford, as the housing crisis showed. The American Dream is no longer the McMansion. 380 s.f. one-bedrooms, even 250 s.f. efficiencies are selling out rapidly in San Francisco and Seattle, and are a sign of things to come.

- Limited parking. Creatives are increasingly preferring a car-free lifestyle. Add in the real possibility that GM could be bought out by China, and one realizes that the auto industry is no longer be the heart of the U.S. economy, and its culture will follow. Oil was never central to our local economy, but has been devastatingly costly to maintain. The proposed building will look to eliminate as many parking spaces as possible, where current laws require one to two spaces per unit.

- Green. This has become a no brainer for creatives. The building will be as green as its future buyers can afford, continuing to support the growing green and renewable energy economy.

- Increased disposable income. Much smaller units can realistically save a few hundred thousand dollars in many cities, and that’s no exaggeration. The second highest cost is automobile ownership. Imagine if that money can be invested in fulfilling the true American Dream of starting your own business instead. That is more of an economy multiplier than the home building industry, and more sustainable as well.

METROBURBIA, USA: Community-building and "Intersubjectivity"

Asphalt, concrete, parked cars, and -- benches notwithstanding - - no life.

From the excellent METROBURBIA, USA, by Paul K. Knox:

The basis of both individual lifeworlds and the collective structure of feeling is intersubjectivity: shared meanings that are derived from the lived experience of everyday practice. An important part of the basis for intersubjectivity is the routinization of individual and social practice in time and space. A positive and distinctive sense of place stems in large part from routine encounters and shared experiences that make for intersubjectivity. This requires plenty of opportunities for informal, casual meetings and gossip; friendly bars and pubs and a variety of settings in which to purchase and/or consume food; street markets; a variety of comfortable places to sit, wait, and people-watch; a sense of ease with changing seasons; and, above all, a sense of belonging, affection, hospitality, vitality, and historical and cultural continuity: not the attributes that anyone associates with American suburbia.

A Small Business Bailout--Maybe

From Entrepreneur Magazine:

For small-business owners who have run into financial trouble, a new Small Business Administration loan program offers relief. But the America's Recovery Capital (ARC) loan will only help businesses that meet certain strict criteria.

ARC was funded with $225 million to provide five-year, zero-interest loans of up to $35,000 per qualified business. To qualify, businesses must demonstrate that sales are down, expenses are up or they are having trouble paying current loans or suppliers. Owners also must provide two years of cash-flow projections and explain their game plan for returning to profitability.

The program is not for new startups--to qualify, you must have been in business at least two years, and profitable for at least one of the past two years.

The SBA is working on building support from banks, which get just 2 percent interest over prime and can't charge a fee. Many national banks that make other SBA loans declined to participate. After a slow first month with just $16.4 million in loans approved by mid-July, $96.5 million in ARC loans had been made by early October. The program runs until September, or until funds are exhausted.

Working with a participating community bank where you already do business is helpful, says Neal Gordon, principal at the loan-intermediary firm Business Borrowers Alliance. That worked for Jim Brunberg, owner of recording studio Mississippi Studios in Portland, Ore., which needed help paying a loan for an ill-timed expansion. Brunberg worked with Albina Community Bank in Portland, where Mississippi has accounts, and said his ARC loan process was a breeze.

Not so for Auburn, Ala.-based decor-store owners Ingrid and Frank Brown, who sought an ARC loan from a national bank in June after sales sank 30 percent. Ingrid Brown says the bank was making ARC loans mostly to existing loan customers and turned the pair down. They reapplied and were approved for only $13,300. They passed on it to apply to a community bank where their businesses, The Villager and Auburn Art.com, have accounts. They got $15,000 of the $45,000 they wanted.

"We still need money to buy merchandise for the holidays," she says.

In the same issue, From Entrepreneur Magazine identifies LOCAL BUSINESS as the 5th ranked hot trend for 2010:

Demand is exploding for locally grown and made products--which means more support for mom-and-pop stores. The dividend: For every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $68 comes back to the community. Only $43 recirculates from national chain stores.

The "buy local" ethos has its roots in the farmers markets movement: There are almost 5,000 farmers markets across the country, the result of more than 5 percent annual growth for the past five years, according to the Department of Agriculture. Nearly 60 percent of consumers say they try to shop at a farmers market. Wal-Mart and Safeway recently added "Locally Grown" sections to their produce departments, and the USDA launched a "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" marketing campaign.Programs that promote community shopping, like Buy Local Orlando, are also popping up all over the country. About 40,000 Orlando shoppers have participated since May. "We like to appear that we're not just consuming for the sake of consuming," says Don Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University. "It makes us feel good to show that we're socially conscious." --K.O.

Read the rest at: A Small Business Bailout--Maybe and 2010 Trends

Alex Marshall: "Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country."

"Downtown" Franklin, Wisconsin.

An excerpt from HOW CITIES WORK: SUBURBS, SPRAWL, AND THE ROADS NOT TAKEN by Alex Marshall. See if you agree (more excerpts here):

Coming Home

It's a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We've been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It's a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It's not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It's the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community "naturally," it's my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It's been the home of my family on my father's side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives--second cousins once removed and so forth--do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, "They still have cousins." Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my "natural" community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper's circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press--all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don't miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society--political, social, economic, and others--and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship--politics.

Building on good bones vs. making room for a drive-thru

The Former Herda's True Value Hardware Store in St. Martins

With last week's Economic Development Commission meeting canceled due to lack of a quorum (mass illness), I was able to attend and listen in on an organizational meeting of a group called Franklin Citizens for Community Development (formerly known as "Franklin First"), a project organized by blogger Greg Kowalski and James Mullarkey (a Franklin Community Development Authority Commissioner). I wanted to get a sense of their intent.

I listened as they discussed possible mission statements. At first, I heard a lot of "we need a water park," "we need a performing arts center," "why aren't we Mequon?" "high-end amenities!" etc.

I brought with me a picture of the empty hardware store down in St. Martins, which is a beautiful building, and reminded them that the city has some good "bones" to build on; their organization would do well, in other words, to exploit current assets before crying out for more new construction. This seemed to be enthusiastically received.

I also introduced the term "sustainable" to their discussion. One look at the city's budget will tell you that the current way of doing things is not going to work for much longer. Perhaps Citizens for Community Development could use their energy and voices to promote the small steps that are needed in order to create a more economically vibrant city. For instance, promoting small businesses in town is an excellent way to enrich the local economy: For every dollar spent at a local business, 45% is reinvested locally. Spent a dollar at a corporate chain and a mere 15% is reinvested locally.

(We will hopefully be talking more, by the way, about the building above on this blog in the near future.)

Meanwhile, Kowalski's Franklin Today blog reports a rumor that the now-vacant Sentry store on 76th and Rawson may be purchased by neighboring Walgreens, and - amazingly - razed to make room for a drive-thru window.

That's right: Torn down for a drive-thru window.

The bar is once again lowered.

The library discovers Facebook

If you're on Facebook, please become a fan of the Franklin Public Library, our community's most vital - and, arguably, only - public space. It's an easy way to keep up with programs and services offered at the library, a great city resource that we cannot take for granted.

Wondering why we don't bother building community amenities anymore?

I'm long overdue in noting the unfortunate end of the Franklin Cultural Center board's efforts to fund and build an arts center here. The organization was chaired by Don Dorson (read his letter after the jump). So much for local community amenities.

I also just started reading a newly published book called THE CUL-DE-SAC SYNDROME: TURNING AROUND THE UNSUSTAINABLE AMERICAN DREAM. And there's Franklin - a favorite for authors and journalists needing an object lesson in sprawl economics -  on page 53:

High-growth areas nearly always translate into higher property taxes. One study in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the tax burden is among the highest in the United States, showed that while the county's population grew 12 percent from 1990 to 1996, total property taxes soared 3.57 times faster than the population. Part of the reason is that developers rarely pay the long-term costs of building communities. Impact fees are often minimal.

Once subdivisions are built, builders are off the hook to fund schools parks, roads, and other infrastructure. In fact, the disparity between what a single-family home costs taxpayers and what developers pay is huge. In Franklin, Wisconsin, just south of Milwaukee, each new home cost taxpayers more than $10,000 for schools and services in 1992 (it was considerably more by 2008). The developer's contribution: $813 per home. Impact fees vary from locale to locale, but they never cover the full cost of development.

Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen

This is a concept being talked about at dense urban levels - but what about suburban strip malls? Can it be possible to convert dead or dying strip malls into community-building assets?

"It's very clear to me that the rules have changed and that it's very possible for somebody who has a really good idea to create an audience that can sustain that idea if it’s really well branded and really cunningly conceived," says Sherman. "But developers, for the most part, are not those types of people. They're in a different silo."

From: Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen:

Strip malls probably don’t fit into the definition of progressive urbanism for most people, but maybe they should. Well, maybe after a little organizational tweaking.

The small retail centers are ubiquitous in American cities, with their generic shops selling donuts or beer, offering dry cleaning or key-cutting. They're a part of many neighborhoods, but not necessarily an essential part. They bring goods and services to the area, but are ultimately of the greatest benefit to their owners – off somewhere cashing monthly rent checks from the moms and pops running the little businesses within. That model can change, according to Ava Bromberg. She's a PhD student in UCLA's School of Public Affairs who is developing a new vision for small retail centers that would transform them into engines of social and economic capital at the neighborhood level.

"It's part mall, part business incubator, part cultural hub," says Bromberg. The idea is to overlay a distributed ownership model on the typical strip mall that enables the value created by this commercial real estate to cycle back and benefit the neighborhood it serves. Consumers are also business owners, property shareholders, and decisionmakers. In this model, the building goes from being a cash cow for one owner to being a bank for the community, into which investments can be made and from which public benefits can be funded.

But it's also about activating disused retail space for more than retail. Bromberg wants the spaces to partner with local institutions like hospitals and universities to create learning environments and job training opportunities on-site. The idea is to retool the existing neighborhood infrastructure to serve unmet needs within the community.

Read the rest at Planetizen.

Panera Bread succeeds by creating faux-"third places" in the suburbs

In the absence of true public spaces and third places in modern suburbs, Panera Bread finds an opportunity. Bring your laptop.

Mention Panera Bread and fans are as likely to praise the free Wi-Fi as they are to gush about the Asiago cheese bagels. And that, execs at the $2.6 billion restaurant chain say, is the point. While its competitors scale back on upscale ingredients, trim portion sizes, and create value menus, Panera is selling fresh food and warm bread at full price, and encouraging customers to linger. That recipe is succeeding.

Read the rest at: Rising Dough: Why Panera Bread Is on a Roll | Fast Company.

In hard economic times, Libraries become important community resource for computers and internet

From Checking out what's next - JSOnline.:

The national library study, funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found local libraries to be important technology centers for people needing computers with Internet access as well as training and job search resources.

According to the study:

• 90% of public libraries provide technology training, such as how to seek jobs online.
• 71% - and 79% of rural libraries - say they're the only place in their communities for free computer and Internet access.
• 66% of libraries rank services for job seekers as a top online feature they offer, up from 44% in 2007.

From a member of the Franklin "community," posting on another blog:

"USE YOUR PC'S AT HOME. If you don't have one, don't expect to leech off of the taxpayers."

Meanwhile, Racine libraries see their hours and budget cut further - even while circulation is up.