Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Franklin council delays action on Meijer proposal - JSOnline

Above: A Meijer community meeting in Franklin.

Here's an article that oversimplifies a more complex issue. As a member of Franklin's Economic Development Committee and Plan Commission, I can tell you that there are, actually, myriad issues that have NOT been dealt with relating to DNR permits (Meijer subverted the process a bit when they went to a DNR pre-plan meeting with a full plan) and the DOT's fairly tone-deaf road requirements. Homeowners who live nearby are in for quite a change.

Meijer has proposed a take-it-or-leave-it 24-hour big box with an ocean of new impervious surface. The DNR requires that a site plan be submitted that does not impinge upon the floodways and wetlands to the extent that the current plan does; Meijer is then charged with proving that the improved site plan is impossible.

Meijer has not submitted that plan or its reasons for not creating a more location-sensitive site plan; the DNR has made it clear that the burden of proof resides with Meijer. The Franklin Plan Commission voted on the site plan and other accommodations for Meijer WITHOUT access to the alternate site plan (I was the lone "no" vote on the Commission).

Communities get the development they deserve. Big box stores of this size demand a large market share and will drain that market share from surrounding businesses (the Franklin Pick and Save Center on 76th Street is already for sale; they know which way the wind blows). A store like Meijer is certainly welcome, but they should develop the property with sensitivity to the community, surrounding neighborhoods, and local long-term economy. The answer is there, but Meijer has not presented any alternatives.

Read the rest at: Franklin council delays action on Meijer proposal - JSOnline

The more they see, the less they like: 10 reasons why opposition to the House transportation bill is growing

Ten reasons opposition to the House transportation bill is growing

1. Ends three decades of dedicated federal funding for public transportation.
2. Cuts overall transportation funding for nearly every state and relies on risky and speculative funding sources.
3. Takes away local control, planning authority and resources.
4. Ends the “Safe Routes to School” program and other dedicated funding to make streets safer for walking and bicycling.
5. Eliminates the bridge repair program and offloads responsibility for thousands of deficient bridges to local governments.
6. Allows transportation money in a pollution-control fund to be used on new roadways for solo drivers.
7. Requires more bureaucracy at transit agencies.
8. Bets big on little-known “State Infrastructure Banks.”
9. Undermines basic safeguards to protect human health and the environment, and to give citizens a voice in the project review process.
10. Abandons any true “national” interest in transportation.

Read the rest at: Transportation For America » The more they see, the less they like: 10 reasons why opposition to the House transportation bill is growing

10 years later, the sad lesson of the Segway: The suburbs killed your rocket-pack

“Instead of becoming the next Bill Gates or Henry Ford, Kamen might find himself ending up like another great American inventor, Preston Tucker, who in the 1940s built the Tucker, a car too far ahead of its time.”

I think the explanation is far simpler. The Segway revealed what we in the suburbs are getting to know more and more: You cannot walk or bike from any place of significance to any other place of significance in most modern areas of human habitation.

In a world largely created for cars, a conveyance like the Segway is nothing but a toy.

Ten years on, and I've neither ridden one nor seen one at use "in the wild" by anyone other than a mall cop or city tourist.

 

Read the rest at: » A Segway anniversary JIMROMENESKO.COM

Another community taken for a ride by Wal-Mart, part 2: Adding insult to (uninsured) injury

South Milwaukee, look what YOU -- and the State of Wisconsin's Medicaid program --  just bought:

After trying to mollify its critics in recent years by offering better health care benefits to its employees, Wal-Mart is substantially rolling back coverage for part-time workers and significantly raising premiums for many full-time staff.

Oh, and Wisconsin's clueless governor is trying to CUT Medicare as we speak. The perfect storm.

Honestly, South Milwaukee - you didn't see this coming?

Read the rest at: Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits - NYTimes.com

Another community taken for a ride by Wal-Mart

Is the death-spiral of the Middle Class still mysterious to people when municipalities PAY to have cash-larded retailers come in to help shutter any and all local businesses?

Wal-Mart throttles South Milwaukee:

The city will spend $800,000 to clean up environmental contamination on the city-owned parcel. The city also will spend up to $1 million on cleanup work on an adjacent 6.5-acre parcel owned by an investment group, led by Briohn Building Corp., that Gatlin is buying.

The city's project costs could total $3.05 million. That amount includes $1.75 million previously spent to acquire and do earlier demolition and cleanup work on its 3.5-acre parcel, minus $500,000 Gatlin will pay South Milwaukee to buy that land.

The Walmart will generate $276,000 in estimated annual property taxes, which will be used to pay off the city's costs, including interest. Once that debt is paid off, the property taxes go to the city, its school district and other local governments.

Do the math. So much for sustainable communities.

Very, very sad.

Enjoy your "Tax Freeze": Part 1 - A Country Without Libraries

What does a "property tax freeze" get you, besides votes? Well, if you actually follow through and spare the average suburban home owner a tax hike that approximates the cost of a single night out in a restaurant, you can begin to kiss public amenities like libraries goodbye:

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak.“The greatest nation on earth,” as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

Onward toward total isolation and homogeneity. On the plus side, you saved $120 this year!

Read the rest at: A Country Without Libraries by Charles Simic | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

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.

Shoppes of Wyndham Village, in Franklin, faces foreclosure - JSOnline

Well. Maybe we saw this coming.

The Shoppes of Wyndham Village, a Franklin shopping center anchored by a Pick 'n Save supermarket and a Target store, is facing a foreclosure suit.

SBI General Portfolio Owner LLC's suit, filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, names shopping center owner Wyndham Village Retail LLC and developer Mark Carstensen as defendants. A receiver has been appointed to operate the property, according to online court records.

I haven't been able to review the court file yet. Reporter Sean Ryan's story in the Milwaukee Business Journal says Wyndham Village Retail defaulted on a $19 million loan.

Carstensen didn't return a phone message seeking comment.

Wyndham Village, at the southeast corner of Highway 100 and Drexel Ave., saw its Sendik's supermarket anchor close in July 2009, about a year after it opened. A Pick 'n Save opened in the former Sendik's space in November 2009.

The 248,076-square-foot Wyndham Village has around 22,200 square feet availabe for lease, according to property listing service Loopnet.com, along with undeveloped land.

The shopping center was opposed by nearby residents who wanted more upscale retailers, and by other critics who said its design was a missed opportunity to create a pedestrian-friendly development.

Last year, in a separate suit, a vacant parcel planned for expansion of another Franklin retail center, Fountains of Franklin, went into foreclosure. However, that action didn't involve the existing Fountains of Franklin, which is anchored by a separately owned Sendik's Food Market, at 5200 W. Rawson Ave.

More later, obviously.

Read the rest at: Shoppes of Wyndham Village, in Franklin, faces foreclosure - JSOnline

Rural post offices put on notice in face of DIY digital age

My local Post Office seems to be hanging on by a thread. We get our mail at about 4:30pm most days, and the handy-dandy auto-postage machine has been taken out of the our location in favor of a more prestigious P.O.

Of course, the Franklin Post Office is located, like everything else here, near NOTHING. Losing traffic to the Post Office would be meaningless to local commerce.

However...

The prospect of losing a post office is alarming people in small towns everywhere. The post office gives area residents a reason to come to town — and patronize other businesses there — and provides a service they count on and believe their government owes them.

(Via USATODAY.com)

The planner's dream gone wrong: The New Provincials

Coming off of a bit of a work-enforced break from blogging, I stumbled upon a new resource out of  Chicago. It's hard to argue with the title of Jason Tinkey's blog -- The Planner's Dream Gone Wrong -- and, given the epic Packers-Bears struggle scheduled for this coming Sunday, it's as good a time as any to engage a flatlander in a friendly manner before kickoff.

Jason discusses American provincialism in this particular blog entry, quoting Barcelona Deputy Mayor Jordi William Carnes making the observation that "America is important to the rest of world, but spends too much time looking inward."

This is true all the way down to the neighborhood level -- or even single household level, frankly -- but Jason chooses to concentrate of the narrow field of view espoused by new Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as he reinvents Wisconsin as The Weak Link: 

This provincial attitude reared its tiny head again this past week, when Wisconsin Governor Scott K. Walker (that "K" is crucial to avoid denigrating the proper Scott Walker) slammed Illinois for it's tax hike and invited businesses to relocate to his state. As James Warren wrote, this shows a lack of a broader vision on Walker's part. He's playing for votes within his own little fiefdom, seemingly oblivious to the fact that if Chicago's economy were to fail, Wisconsin's would go down right beside it. As much as I love our neighbors to the north, Milwaukee does not have the transportation infrastructure necessary to link it to a global marketplace. This is the same guy, mind you, who basically ran for office on his opposition to high-speed rail, which would be one of the best possible assets in building a regional economy.

So allow me to state for the record my philosophy of how the future is aligned: neighborhood - city - region - planet. Note that "county", "state" and "nation" do not exist. These are eighteenth-century constructs that serve little useful purpose in a connected, digital global economy. The hard question is asking what it will take to achieve this in these "United" States. No politician has ever voted themselves out of a job, and yet a thorough realignment of local and federal governance is necessary. Industrialized Europe had to be more or less leveled in World War II for the stakeholders to recognize the value of cross-border cooperation and a free exchange of people and ideas. I certainly hope we don't need such a serious jolt.

Wisconsin and Illinois, despite their football-based loathing, have too many issues which demand cooperation. And you can add Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario to that mix, as well. In coming decades, stewardship of the Great Lakes will become crucial to the region and to the world. Transportation linkages already radiate from Chicago like an octopus, in a common region with common concerns, these absolutely must be brought up to speed with the rest of the developed world. There is really no other option.

Read the rest at: the planner's dream gone wrong: The New Provincials