Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Redefining Home in a Depressed Market - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

Curtains at last for McMansions?

How has the collapse of the housing market changed people's attitudes toward homeownership and their expectations for how they will live? Is the yearning for a McMansion on the edge of a corn field really dead?

In his column on Monday, David Brooks said that when the economy tanked, the "great age of headroom" -- supersized houses being the main example -- came to an end. "The oversized now looks slightly ridiculous," he writes, and "social norms have since changed."

Some urban planners and housing market analysts say that demographic trends back up that thesis: the housing landscape that emerges from the recession, they say, will be driven not only by older empty nesters who don't like to drive at night anymore but also by Generation Y, the millennials who grew up in supersized houses in far-flung suburbs and who want to live differently, at least as long as they are childless. But historians and other experts on sprawl are not so sure.

What will the housing landscape be, if and when the market recovers from the recession? What should government's role be in promoting where and how Americans live?

 

Read the debate at: Redefining Home in a Depressed Market - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

• Downsize and Retrofit

   Ellen Dunham-Jones andJune Williamson, architecture professors

• No Suburban Morality Tale

   Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Reform Before New Building

  Edward Glaeser, economist, Harvard

• A Radical Re-alignment

   Laurie Volk andTodd Zimmerman, housing market analysts

• Preventing Future Busts

   Gregory K. Ingram, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

 

The Political Environment: High-Speed Rail Is A National Economic Development Plan

As Wisconsin's new Governor-elect works to pull the coffin-lid shut on Wisconsin's middle class and fully enable corporate socialism, here's another excellent reality-based post by James Rowen on the importance of Wisconsin's participation in regional and national economic development:

Lost in the rhetoric and misstatements about the Madison-Milwaukee train is that it is a segment of a network of trains connecting Chicago and the Twin Cities, and eventually a portion of a truly national rail system.

It makes no sense to excise Wisconsin from the line. Check out this map of the Midwest plan, and remember that it will connect to routes service other regions, too.

It will make the state an inaccessible economic backwater.

Short-to-medium length trips are not always available by air; often airports are distant from central business districts or other job centers, and last-minute air travel can be pricey.

And many people - - the elderly, the young - - do not drive, do not own a car or have access to one. Rail opponents, often suburbanites, need to realize that not everyone has a minivan.

The rail system is intended to fill in these gaps, providing connections among businesses, universities and tourist destinations not easily served by aviation.

Trains also offer a working environment not replicable inside a car.

Modern trains are fast, wi-fi-equipped, comfortable and imminently practical.

A new national rail network makes an infrastructure investment that fills a need, puts people to work and was to be made available in Wisconsin at no construction cost, and an annual operating charge statewide of about $60,000 a month.  A bargain, as I said a few days ago.

As the scribe Wisconsin State Journal philosopher scribe used to say, "What could be more fairer?"

Read the rest at: The Political Environment: High-Speed Rail Is A National Economic Development Plan

Apple invests in public transit - with impressive, stylish results

From Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC:

It cost around four million dollars to refurbish the station.  If you’re thinking that there’s no way the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority could afford that, you are right:  it was funded with private money, by the Apple corporation, in conjunction with the company’s construction of a new retail store on adjacent property.

Mike Cassidy wrote in The San Jose Mercury News:

“This is not a company that leaves much to chance and there was no way the sales gurus in Cupertino were going to let a dungeon-like transit stop present the first impression of their sleek and glassy store.

“Remember, Apple sells an experience as much as it sells products.

"’The public might not think of it this way, but the retail experience doesn't start exactly in your store. It starts when they approach your store,’ says Kirthi Kalyanam, a professor with the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.”

Apple also built the plaza in between the North/Clybourn transit station and its new store, which opened in late October.

 

Read the rest at: Apple invests in public transit - with impressive, stylish results | Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

Changing Travel Demands: Implications for Planning | Planetizen

The graph above shows the most recent USDOT vehicle-travel data covering the last 25 years. Although vehicle-miles of travel (VMT) grew steadily during most of the twentieth century, in recent years the growth rate stopped and even declined a little. It is now about 10% below where it would have been had past trends continued.

Yet another argument against business-as-usual (read: ASPHALT as usual):

The Twentieth Century was the period of automobile ascendency, during which personal motor vehicles grew from virtually nothing to becoming the dominant travel mode in most developed countries. During this period it made sense to invest in automobile-oriented infrastructure: paved roads, highways and parking facilities. However, demographic and economic trends are changing travel demands. Aging population, rising fuel prices, increasing urbanization, increasing traffic congestion, improvements in alternative modes, changing consumer preferences, and increased health and environmental concerns are all reducing demand for automobile travel and increasing demands for travel by other modes. Although automobile travel will not disappear, it will not grow as it did in the past, and in many developed countries motor vehicle travel will be flat or negative in the future.

Read the rest at: Changing Travel Demands: Implications for Planning | Planetizen

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

More bike riders create "safety in numbers"

Another non-intuitive fact about non-vehicular travel and safety:

As ridership goes up, crash rates stay flat. It's happening in Portland (see page 11 of this report[PDF]). It's happening in New York City.

The phenomenon, dubbed "safety in numbers," was first identified in 2003, in an academic paper by public health researcher Peter Jacobsen [PDF]. After being asked by officials in Pasadena, Calif., if their city "was a dangerous place to bicycle," Jacobsen began looking at crash data from various communities where bicycle ridership had fluctuated over time.

What he found surprised him: The number of crashes involving bikes correlated with the number of riders in a community. As ridership fluctuated, so did the crash rate. More riders, fewer crashes; fewer riders, more crashes.

Read the rest at: TheWashCycle: Still more evidence of the network effect in bicycle safety

Aerial Footage: Portrait of a Housing Bust | The Big Picture

Fantastic set of aerial photos from Google Images (by way of Boston.com’s Big Picture), showing Florida’s developmental disaster.

The images of half finished (and barely started) developments are strangely beautiful, with a geometric symmetry that belies the state of human misery these developments represent: Lost deposits, bankruptcy, misallocated capital.

Read the rest at: Aerial Footage: Portrait of a Housing Bust | The Big Picture

Downtown malls - becoming oxymoronic?

The company that owns the financially troubled Shops of Grand Avenue in downtown Milwaukee will be sold at a public auction later this month.

The notice says ownership interests in Grand Avenue City Mall LLC, which owns the Shops of Grand Avenue, will be the subject of an Oct. 26 public auction. It will be conducted at the offices of Arnold & Porter, a New York law firm.

A sign that enclosed, climate-controlled shopping malls do not fare well against downtown streets and shops? One would hope.

Read the rest at: Financially troubled Grand Avenue mall to be sold at auction - JSOnline

The end of a grand old building

Say what you will about progress, the need to expand, etc. - - St. Paul's Church on 51st Street will be missed as a local landmark. Structures with character are few and far between in the suburbs.

I took this picture last night; it's gone now.

Study links sprawl to obesity; light rail to the rescue - NYTimes.com

On the plus side: you'll never wear out a pair of shoes in a post-WWII suburb:

Car-loving Charlotte, N.C., home to strip malls and suburban sprawl, did everything right when putting in place its new light-rail transit system called the Lynx in 2007. The result: a ridership that doubled predictions, and an unexpected public health study that may be the first in proving that the built environment causes obesity.

Riding the rails can leave users an average of 6.5 pounds lighter than others, and 81 percent less likely to become obese over time, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Before this study, it was difficult to say for certain whether the features of the built environment, such as sprawl and miles of roadway, are directly responsible for obesity and related illness such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

....

In its first year, at the peak of the gasoline price rise, Charlotte's Lynx saw about 18,100 riders, which was double the number expected, said Robert Stokes, researcher at University of Pennsylvania's department of culture and communication, and co-author of the study. The numbers have maintained. The city did all the right things when putting in place the light-rail system, Stokes said. It chose to put the line close to places where people lived, which increases ridership, according to studies. The corridor stretches 9.6 miles and has 15 stops.

Charlotte also changed its zoning laws to allow development closer to rail stations, and a greater concentration of units. It was a policy change, said Stokes. Since World War II, zoning laws in the nation promoted a separation between commercial, residential and recreational land use in the built environment, leading to more sedentary lifestyles. About half of all Americans do not get enough physical activity to promote health, and about 25 percent do not get any exercise at all, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 statistics.

Read the rest at: Study Links Sprawl, Obesity - NYTimes.com