Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The Business Journal of Milwaukee reports Madison-Milwaukee high-speed rail project on fast track

Came across the headline above after posting this. Still, will that be enough to get my city's administration to take notice?

Read the rest at: High-speed rail project on fast track - The Business Journal of Milwaukee

Suburban conservatives and transit: Getting over the hump

Having tried to bring up transit issues on the Franklin Economic Development Commission - and having been met with snorts of derision at best - I fear my city is woefully unprepared to demonstrate to companies who might consider relocating here that we are capable of leveraging the planned Minneapolis-Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago corridor.

I'm putting together a short "wake-up" presentation for an upcoming EDC meeting, which I'm sure will once again be met with rolling eyes. Perhaps this book will help.

Factoring ‘Walkability’ Into Home Values

The New York Times highlights increased home values in cities where people can walk from place to place:

Real estate agents often chant the mantra “location, location, location,” which essentially means “find a home in a well-kept neighborhood with good schools and a low crime rate.”

Some may cite a fourth factor, “walkability,” a concept supported by self-styled “new urbanists” who advocate denser cities designed for the pedestrian and mass transit as much as for the car. In their ideal neighborhood, you could walk to a bookstore and then to an ice cream shop, and your children could walk to school, probably unescorted. (It sounds like so many movie depictions of America in the 1950s.)

They argue that walkability lowers crime — that good people on the streets drive away the bad guys — and that it generally improves life and sharply raises home values. Whether it helps homes retain their value when the market slumps, however, seems a harder question to answer.

A study published in August by C.E.O.’s for Cities, a group of urban redevelopment advocates, found that in many ways, the street corner beats the cul de sac. It looked at the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 markets to estimate how much value was associated with something called the Walk Score. Using a 100-point scale, this score rates the number of destinations, including libraries, parks and coffee shops, within walking distance of a home.

The scores for America’s 40 largest cities can be found at Walkscore.com by typing in an address. For instance, the White House scores a near-perfect 97: a “walker’s paradise,” the Web site says. Another famous home, the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, rates a 25. (You can get lost in Walkscore.com for hours; the “Brady Bunch” house, the exemplar of 1970s suburban life, scores an above-average 75.)

The study found that houses with above-average Walk Scores commanded a premium. It was as much as $30,000 in cities like Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Sacramento and San Francisco, wrote Joe Cortright, the study’s author and an economist at Impresa, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore.

Read the rest at: Everybody’s Business - Factoring ‘Walkability’ Into Home Values - NYTimes.com

CNU's Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

From the Congress for the New Urbanism website:

The rollout of Congress' latest stimulus bill has been all about "Jobs for Main Street." That's a great message, argues CNU President John Norquist in a timely op-ed in the Hartford Courant, except for one problem. When it comes to the jobs bill's largest expenditure — $27.5 million for highways and roads — Main Streets are largely missing. Writes Norquist:

The $27.5 billion isn't targeted to rebuild streets at the heart of older cities and towns, the cherished settings for Memorial Day parades and holiday light displays. No, the money will primarily go to projects that government knows best — the expansion of wide, motor-vehicle-only highways that go hand-in-hand with energy-wasting sprawl. This follows the earlier stimulus bill that favored massive highway projects, including a batch of expensive "highways to nowhere" that an examination by the Infrastructurist website concluded "make no sense."

The new bill does reserve $8.4 billion for transit and $800 million for Amtrak. But just when U.S. real estate markets are turning to Main Street and traditional neighborhood design, Congress throws $27.5 billion at the infrastructure — road widening — that supports sprawl.

Whether the setting is small towns like Guilford, older suburbs like West Hartford or bigger cities like New Haven, the traditional Main Street in Connecticut and other states is proving to be a model around which to build livable and energy-efficient communities. A report by economist Joseph Cortright for CEOs for Cities is the latest to find homes within walking distance of shops, schools and other amenities commanding significantly higher prices than sprawl counterparts.

And in the world of commercial real estate, the hot trend — named by Time Magazine as one of "ten ideas changing the world" — is "retrofitting suburbia" with walkable, mixed-use development. None other than Tyson's Corner, Va., the largest sprawl commercial complex in the country, is due for a multibillion-dollar urban makeover complete with traditional main streets.

The article goes on to extol the benefits of reinvesting in main streets and neighboring networks of walkable transit-served streets — benefits that include saving households hundreds of dollars monthly on transportation costs, promoting physical activity and reducing obesity, curbing greenhouse gases, and supporting more diverse economies. The research behind these conclusions is impressive and will be explored in greater depth at CNU 18  in Atlanta, "New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places" which is being oraganized in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Writes Norquist:

Evidence shows these networks save money — and they save lives. Research by engineering professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado-Denver reveals that traffic injury and fatality rates are three times higher in California cities with sprawling streets than in those with compact, connected networks.

Brookings-backed research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology shows that highway-served sprawling areas in region after region have the highest household transportation costs and highest per-capita carbon emissions. Each months, residents of walkable, transit-served neighborhoods save hundreds of dollars in average transportation costs.

Read the rest at: Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

Guess what? Walkable neighborhoods INCREASE home values

This was an excellent presentation to come across as I prepare for tonight's Franklin Trails Committee meeting. This is one of the reasons I try to get the Economic Development Commission involved in creating USEFUL trails rather than simply recreational paths.

From Kaid Benfield's blog:

Home values in walkable neighborhoods are measurably higher than those that are not, even when other relevant factors are controlled in the analysis.

Below is an illuminating slide show on the subject that was presented by economist Joe Cortright at a transportation colloquium recently hosted by the Congress for the New Urbanism in Portland.  Some key points from the presentation:

• “Walkability” is not just about sidewalks.  Are there places you can walk to?
• Examining data from 98,000 home sales in 15 metropolitan areas, and controlling for other relevant factors, each increase of one point on Walk Score’s walkability scale raises home values by $700 to $3000.
• In Charlotte, the increase in value was $1,986 for each Walk Score point.
• Improving walkability raises home values by $10-30,000.
• Because mixed-use development produces big gains in walkability, the findings are evidence of a strong market for mixed-use neighborhoods.

I have to admit that the slide show was a little clunky on my computer (and there is no narration), but it is manageably short (24 slides) and well illustrated.  Enjoy:

Walking the Walk: How Walkability Increases Home Prices in U.S. Cities

View more documents from Congress for the New Urbanism.

Passenger rail needs to pay for itself? Take off the transportation blinders

From Dave Zweifel of Madison's Capital Times: Plain Talk: Take off the transportation blinders

It’s long been a myth that the streets, highways and bridges that accommodate our love affair with the automobile are all paid for by highway taxes.

Far from it. Just check your local city and county budgets and see how much general purpose tax revenue is siphoned into street repair every year. Property taxes help fund a lot of those orange trucks you always see on the roads.

Or how about the $8 billion that the Bush administration funneled into the highway trust fund in 2008 and the $7 billion that the Obama administration ponied up in 2009 because the gas tax money is falling short? And that’s not counting the $3 billion of taxpayers’ funds that went into the “cash for clunkers” automobile fix or the $81 billion in federal aid to GM and Chrysler.

So it’s always with some amusement that I hear politicians insist that — come hell or high water — passenger rail improvements need to pay for themselves. They’re demanding from rail what they don’t demand from every other mode of transportation, airlines included.

It’s a primary reason that America’s public transportation systems lags the rest of the developed world’s.

There was reason to rejoice earlier this year when President Obama announced that $8 billion of the country’s massive stimulus program would go to help build “high-speed” rail projects, which, hopefully, will include a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison segment that has been on the drawing boards for years now.

But even our high-speed projects are laughable when compared to those that exist elsewhere. Japan is running its “bullet” trains at 188 miles an hour. France’s new high-speed railroad runs at 125 mph. Israel’s new Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem line is upgrading to 120 miles an hour. China, which recently committed a trillion dollars to develop fast trains, plans on running them at 235 miles an hour.

Should the “high-speed” train between here and Chicago ever come to fruition, it will probably run at 79 miles an hour initially, but could be upgraded eventually to 110 mph. That’s because our rail infrastructure is designed mainly to handle freight trains, which operate at much lower speeds and don’t need the tighter standards and banked corners that faster trains need.

Ironically, our passenger trains in 2009 are slower than they were in the 1940s. According to Woodrow Wilson Center fellow Mark Reutter, “streamliners” such as the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Denver Zephyr and Hiawatha routinely topped 90 to 100 miles an hour between stops. And that was with the old steam locomotives.

“While the rest of the world has advanced, America’s passenger rail has stalled, if not reversed direction,” he says.

Most of Amtrak’s routes today are lucky if they average 50 miles an hour. Even the acclaimed Acela Express along the East Coast, the nation’s supposed answer to the bullet trains, averages only 67 mph along much of its route, even though it can hit 150 miles an hour on some short stretches of improved track.

This should be a national embarrassment, yet there are strong special interests in the country that fight passenger rail development, fiercely protecting transportation funding for more and wider roads that serve only to promote yet more automobile traffic.

If we’re ever going to develop a balanced transportation system in the United States, we need to take the blinders off. Rail, for all the efficiencies it represents, needs to get the monetary assistance that other modes of transit routinely receive. Once the infrastructure is brought up to snuff, then passenger rail can actually work to pay for itself.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

[email protected]

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.

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

Movie theaters in corn fields and empty grocery store shells: Time for a more proactive Economic Development Council?

This is a four year-old picture, but nothing has changed. Located across from the Northwestern Mutual campus on 27th and Drexel; 1.200 employees headquartered across the street(!) couldn't keep a restaurant in business here.

Communities can be shaped by choice, or they can be shaped by chance. We can keep on accepting the kind of communities we get, or we can start creating the kind of communities we want.

— Richard Moe, National Trust for Historic Preservation

After enduring fairly alarming comments by fellow commissioners at Thursday's meeting, I'm compelled to prepare a presentation for the next gathering of the Economic Development Commission on how principles of Smart Growth drive economic development and sustainability.

Our discussion -- held with three members absent -- regarded possible incentives for developers wanting to build in Franklin. I am generally against subsidies; however, I brought up the idea of offering certain incentives in exchange for "placemaking" considerations by a potential builder or developer. Locating in the City Civic Center district, for instance, rather than out on the outskirts of town; adding neighborhood-access amenities; creating an innovative site plan; revitalizing an empty property; etc.

More than one of my fellow commissioners disagreed out of hand, riffing on the "Business will tell you where it wants to go" mantra. In other words, Let the chips fall where they may; let developers build where and how they see fit.

And how's that worked for us so far?

Well, Franklin's unofficial motto remains "there's no 'there' there." So much for a "sense of place."

The city budget shortfall, strained by the demands of sprawled infrastructure, requires service cut after service cut - including possible public safety cutbacks.

We have a newish movie theater complex built out in the middle of a cornfield in proximity to... nothing. Go catch a flick - then get back in your car.

The city is dotted with roads that end with no rhyme or reason. "We're waiting for a developer to eventually ..."

We've allowed a regionally-owned grocer (Wyndham Village Sendik's) to be driven out of business in under a year.

There is no "support local businesses" initiative in place.

The former Sentry grocery store, a huge building, is vacant. Walgreens next door is threatening to tear it down to facilitate a drive-thru window.

Children who live less than the length of a football field away from Pleasant View Elementary have to take a bus to a building they can see from their back yard. The school is nearly 50 years old, and the problem has yet to be solved.

Franklin is home to a single coffee shop, Moondance (with great food, by the way), which is unfortunately located on 27th street rather than "inside" the city.

Franklin's single "inside the city" local coffee shop and meeting space, 5-Star, remains vacant next to an also-vacant martini bar in a brand new building.

The "City Civic Center" is devoid of any manner of "third place" development that would augment and invigorate the Public Library and/or spur further investment there. (I had to actually debate my fellow commissioners in order to simply pass a motion, at the mayor's request, recommending that the city consider a vacant site next to the library for a coffee shop/co-working facility concept I'd advocated. Even though the concept originated in the EDC (via me), there was still one "nay" vote and an attempt by a commissioner to add a superfluous "spend no money on this" amendment to a mere recommendation to the council motion!)

And on and on ...

The simple truth regarding "business will tell you where it wants to go" is that any land a developer happens to own or have access to is always the best place to build, as far as the developer is concerned (see Shoppes at Wyndham Village). The developer then hires a site consultant to work backwards from the fait accompli. 

That's why we have a movie theater in the middle of a corn field, and why we had two Sendik's grocery stores within spitting distance of each other.

And why, in Franklin, we have none of the multi-use public space amenities and "third places" that are on the wish lists of home buyers and businesses looking to take root.

In their well-regarded book on local economic development, Planning Local Economic Development: Theory and Practice, authors Edward Blakely and Ted Bradshaw note that “industry and business regard livability as an important locational factor.” and that local governments need to “identify their quality of life attributes, build on them and effectively promote them to the business community.” *

That means "incentivising" developers to think outside their strip-mall comfort zone (again, see Shoppes at Wyndham Village) so they'll work with the city to create inspiring, interconnected places and spaces that will, in turn, attract further investment. That's how you strengthen the tax base and lower your citizens' property taxes.

The current economy places great value, for instance, on proximity and clustering. Placing jobs, homes, shops and recreation in walkable proximity increases business opportunities, helps create a much-needed sense of place, and can attract talented workers.*

Failing to invest in acknowledged quality of life attributes like walkability and placemaking can have dire consequences for a local, state or regional economy. In 2003, for example, the Brookings Institution found that Pennsylvania’s land development practices -- which, like Franklin's, had the effect of decentralizing growth and ignoring community-building -- contributed to the state’s loss of young people and its subsequent job and wage stagnation.*

The laissez-faire approach has been tried, and it failed. Time to be proactive.

* [See http://www.iedconline.org/ for the report, Economic Development and Smart Growth]

Rise of the Aerotropolis?

This past Thursday's Economic Development Commission meeting - a fairly frustrating experience; more on that later - featured a presentation by Tom Rave, executive Director of Gateway Milwaukee, on the AEROTROPOLIS concept. As the topic wasn't included on our agenda (i.e. we could do no advance research), I was taken by surprise as I heard described what is essentially a giant FedEx-based city plan that radiates outward from the airport.

John Kasarda [creator of the "aerotropolis" concept] obviously sees the aerotropolis as key to America's competitive agility, and a critical one at that. Implicit in his thinking is a coming world of exponential population increase and cutthroat competition for resources and profits. His vision may evoke everything Americans find terrifying about globalization--a civilization cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones--but if you grant Kasarda's seemingly implacable logic, you have to ask: How willing or able are we to adapt?

Aerotropolis?

Read the rest at: Rise of the Aerotropolis | Fast Company