Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Strict new rules on resale shops threaten local assets; Goodbye, Half-Price Books?

From the TERRIBLE MUNICIPAL IDEAS Department:

The new code being adopted by cities around the state is based on a state law that already requires pawn shops and businesses that buy metals and jewelry to take and keep information on sellers and items. The code expands the requirements by including businesses that haven't needed to report transactions in the past and by mandating that the businesses install software from the Northeastern Wisconsin Property Reporting System and input seller identification and detailed merchandise descriptions each day. Businesses must photograph sellers and items, and they must keep the items for a set period of time - 10 to 30 days in most cities that have adopted the ordinances - before reselling them. Desch of Half-Price Books said it would be impossible to comply with that provision because of the storage space it would require.

Is this what the new hyper-surveillance state is coming to?

Moms come into New to You Kids in Greenfield every week to sell their babies' outgrown rompers to the small resale shop. But the business says it will have to close if it has to comply with a new city ordinance requiring it to take each mom's picture and send that, along with detailed descriptions of the items she sells, to a police database every day.

The Greenfield ordinance also imposes transaction fees on resale stores that could amount to tens of thousands of dollars annually - a big burden for small retailers.

"It's horrendous. This will put us out of business if we have to adhere to it," said New to You Kids owner Robert Reinhardt.

Half-Price Books, a national resale chain that has a store a few doors down from Reinhardt's in the Greenfield Fashion Center, will consider getting out of its lease, district manager Joe Desch said.

Half-Price also is thinking about filing a lawsuit against Greenfield on First Amendment grounds, because the new ordinance, which takes effect next summer, will require the bookstore to send police a daily list of customers who sell books to them, with identification and titles sold.

But Greenfield Police Detective Chuck Fletcher has news for resale operators who think they can escape the reporting requirements by moving to another town: There soon may to no place to run, no place to hide.

"You may be able to jump over to Greendale or West Allis, but guess what," said Fletcher, noting that with more cities adopting stricter ordinances, retailers may have trouble finding a place without restrictions.

 

Read the rest at: Greenfield and other cities impose strict new rules on resale shops - JSOnline

The Pestilential Summer of 2010: Request for water damage reports in Franklin

After facing yet another Biblical-level rain event, many Franklin resisents are dealing with wet basements and other damage (I got nailed pretty bad in 2008, but was spared this time around).

The city is working to gather information on where damage occurred. Here's a note from 3rd District alderman Kristen Wilhelm:

REQUEST FOR WATER DAMAGE INFORMATION

The Fire Chief has made note in an email of a few of the damaged areas he has been made aware of. I have heard from some of you. However, I am looking for a more accurate assessment of water damage in the 3rd District so I can pass this information along to him. 

If you live in the area bounded by 27th, Drexel, 51st and College and had water damage from the July 22nd rainfall, please send me an email with your home address and the extent of the damage.

Example: 1234 W. Waterway (water in basement).

Also, you may want to report damage on the County’s Emergency Management hotline by calling 211. This information is used to assess damage and aid to the area.

If you require a reply, please be patient as I have received many calls and emails in the past few weeks.

Please forward this to your neighbors that may not be on this email list. Those outside the 3rd District that requested to be on my email list may want to contact their individual alderman.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.


Kristen Wilhelm
3rd District Alderman
City of Franklin

An inviting streetscape emerges on 51st Street: A return to human scale threatened by an off-site landlord?

ABOVE: Work being done on 51st Street

Even in roughed-out form, one can appreciate the improvement occurring along Franklin's 51st Street between Drexel and Puetz. Engineers have preserved many of the trees fronting homes along the street, and soon residents will be treated to a wonderful and useful walkway as well as increased curb appeal for their property.This is going to be a much, much more inviting space than the cracked asphalt should that it replaces.

And that's not to mention that, for the first time since it was built decades ago, Franklin High School students will have access to a sidewalk in front of their school.

Soon, the walkway will continue north of Drexel for approximately 1/3 mile, built with a Community Development Block Grant. It'll provide a way for the senior residents at Clair Meadows to stroll outside their current "boundaries," and eventually will connect to the retail area on Rawson. Eventually 51st Street -- the only north-south connection for a mile in either direction -- will at long last stop acting as a speedway and instead function as an attractive conveyance for cars and pedestrians.

A space like the one above looks so inviting because, unlike most of the suburban built environment, it's designed to human scale and creates a sense of spacial enclosure in a suburban context.

Human scale and spacial enclosure is why, for instance, we feel comfortable on foot in a city setting like the one below:

...And why we feel anything but comfortable attempting to set foot outside our vehicles in a space like the one below:

Hard as it may be to believe, many refer to the area pictured above as my city's "downtown." Yet there are simple streetscape solutions that work in a suburban context that would transform this bleak area. It can be as simple as putting the parking in back of the buildings (see below):

Tonight I'll be attending the Franklin Common Council meeting to speak during citizen's comment period is support of the 51st Street sidewalk.

Why do I have to hire a babysitter and attend this meeting? Because, believe it or not, there is a gentleman -- a landlord who owns an apartment complex on the corner of Drexel and 51st (but does not LIVE there, of course) -- who is against providing safe mobility for those in our community who do not have access to a vehicle. And he took the time to get signatures from the homeowners living on 51st Street.

You can imagine how those little "sign my petition" encounters went. "Do you know what the city is trying to do to your property...?" 

I doubt he brought up the fact that walkable communities experience experience increased property values, and that walkways actually slow down speeding traffic on overdesigned arterials like 51st Street. He probably didn't talk about new freedom of movement that will be afforded to elderly residents of the Clair Meadows senior apartments. I'm certain he didn't broach the subject of the sidewalk as safe conveyance for students and parents at Pleasant View Elementary and Franklin High School.

And, most importantly, I'm sure this landlord didn't mention that there are members of the Franklin Common Council who want nothing better than to put a lane of additional traffic in their front yard by widening 51st Street.

Doubt it? Read the ready-to-go plan here:  Download 51st street widening.

Because, you see, no one walks and we need more room for cars -- and those cars gotta move fast.

The landlord's beef, evidently, is he'll be damned if he'll be responsible for shoveling snow for "other people" (hard not to imagine  this guy twirling a waxed handlebar mustache, ala a silent movie villain).

Please consider attending tonight at 6:30, City Hall, to voice your support for a small but very important step toward making our community safer for young and old, more attractive to new residents and property tax-lowering commercial investment, and, above all, something better than a drive-thru suburb.

RETROFITTING SUBURBIA: "The next 50 years' big sustainable design project"

RETROFITTING SUBURBIA author Ellen Dunham-Jones on "the next 50 years' big sustainable design project": 

   

The Search for Community One Sleepover at a Time? | Planetizen

From a review for the book IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY ONE SLEEPOVER AT A TIME:

What was most interesting to me was that almost all of the neighbors on Lovenheim’s street had an intense need to be part of a community and a social network, but they didn’t have the facilities to achieve it. One neighbor observed that public spaces have largely been privatized into commercial spaces. Think about the coffee shop, king Starbucks, bookstores. These are little self-contained units with a small entry fee.  Another neighbor contrasted American neighborhoods to African tribal villages whose homes are traditionally organized around acentral space out of a primal need for survival. She observed that American neighborhoods are designed for privacy to fuel the prevailing ideology that we can survive alone. And then she suggests the antidote to this landscape of isolation…parks! Brilliant.

Read the rest at: The Search for Community One Sleepover at a Time? | Planetizen

Frank Gruber: What To Do With the Suburbs?

From the Huffington Post:

The issues facing 21st century planners will be how to deal with population growth while avoiding more sprawl at the edges, and how to prevent more decades marked by (i) disinvestment in cities and older suburbs and (ii) isolation of the disadvantaged (who may well include a huge mass of elderly Baby Boomers). The consensus among planners is that to solve these problems there need to be strategies for allowing and encouraging existing suburbs to evolve into denser versions of themselves, with more of the good qualities of cities and towns.

One problem with this is that the zoning in suburbs is rigid and politically difficult to change. The culture celebrating the single-family house is so strong that people don't like to convert their single-family neighborhoods into something else, even as demographics change. For instance, in November 2009 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a guidebook called "Essential Smart Growth Fixes for Urban and Suburban Zoning Codes", with suggestions based on a panel the E.P.A. had convened in 2008. But nearly all of the suggested fixes would only affect the zoning on un-built land or in commercial zones -- the book has no concrete suggestions about what to do with existing single-family home districts.

This political reality puts the densification focus on existing commercial zones, such as malls or office parks or, where they exist, in the vestigial centers of small towns that existed prior to being engulfed by sprawl.

Two current strategies to do this are "de-malling", i.e., turning existing (often enclosed) malls into "town centers" by opening them up and adding housing and/or offices, and creating the equivalent of high-density urban downtown job centers in the suburbs, ideally connected to the regional center (the historic downtown) by rapid transit.

 

Read the rest at: Frank Gruber: What To Do With the Suburbs?

The parking mess at the local Little League Complex is as eloquent a visual aid as you'll ever need for the tragic comedy that is suburban "planning"

When you can't walk or bike to a community's Little League Complex because the roads leading to it and bordering the complex are typical suburban speedways with no provision for walkers or bikers, what do you get?

Repeated pandemonium and rising frustration. 125 players on six diamonds means 125 cars, minimum. Now add the incoming cars for subsequent games, and you get pandemonium squared.

Parking lot culture replaces what used to be a valuable community gathering point.

Poverty moves to the suburbs | Milwaukee News Buzz

And you were worried about the ash borer ...

Across the country, poverty is moving to the suburbs. Once affluent areas are finding it difficult to cope. Many blame the economic downturn, but most of the rise in poverty predates 2008. In both Madison and Milwaukee, the number of suburbanites living in poverty grew about 50 percent between 2000 and 2008 – twice the national average.

The percentage of people living in poverty in Milwaukee suburbs grew from 3.6 percent in 2000 to almost 5 percent in 2008, according to a study of suburban poverty released by the Brookings Institution earlier this year. In Madison’s suburbs, the rate is worse. There, it climbed from 4.8 percent in 2000 to 6.6 percent in 2008.

Read the rest at: Poverty moves to the suburbs | Milwaukee News Buzz

Fighting a culture of inaction: Voting against... CONSIDERATION of a development?

If you wonder why certain things don't move forward in Franklin, perhaps the following will give you a taste of the sort of attitude that creates municipal inertia.

An interesting sequence of events at last night's Economic Development Commission meeting. With just enough members present to create a quorum, we addressed the following agenda item:

Presentation by Hitters Baseball Academy concerning plans for a new baseball facility located on South 27th Street near County Line Road

The pitch was straightforward enough: Hitters Baseball Academy, currently operating in Racine, sees an opportunity to create a year-round, indoor/outdoor baseball facility on what is now a soybean field on the edge of town. An 80,000 square foot building would be built on the land along with four full-sized turf baseball fields (turf ballfields remain green year-round). The owners of the land are ready to fully finance the project; they could break ground tomorrow. They are asking for no financial support or incentives from the city.

When presented to the Common Council, there was evidently a hang-up with "27th Street Corridor design standards" -- not very relevant, as the complex would be set far back from 27th Street (one might conjecture that restaurants and even hotels might locate on 27th street to support the baseball facility, and they would have to conform to the design standard).

Hitter's has a business plan that includes past performance. They've grown steadily in their Racine location, and have consistently brought in traveling teams and visitor traffic that rent rooms and use restaurants. Franklin would be home to an attraction that would fuel surrounding commercial development.

No-brainer: Whether or not you think Hitter's is right for the area, let's take a close look at this possibility, right?

Wrong.

One particular EDC Commissioner said the following:

"Just to remind the commissioners, about a year and a half ago we set forth direction for the southeastern quadrant of the city to be high-value business development, and this is one of the parcels that is recommended as part of the Comprehensive Master Plan that is going on. The dollars-per-acre that we would yield in high-value business development would be different from this; totally different concept."

Then:

"If we're looking to build tax base in the city of Franklin, this will not build the type of tax base that this portion of the city was talking about doing a year and half ago."

Valid points.

However, further questioning of the Hitters rep revealed a very, very significant factor: The landowners would lease the land and buildings to Hitters Baseball Academy. If another Northwestern Mutual or Wheaton Medical Center were to express interest in the land -- of course, creating a greater payoff for the owners of the land and higher dollars-per-acre value for the city  --the baseball faculty would vacate. They could roll up the fields in a weekend, evidently.

Furthermore (the substance of my comments at the meeting): Any economic development assumptions made a year and a half ago (or, indeed, six months ago!) are, frankly, worthless today. I've said it before: The road that got you here won't get you there. We either remain flexible and creative, constantly re-assessing conditions and outdated notions, or stand like a jilted groom at the altar, waiting in vain for the sort of early-90s style development that is now past history.

EDC Chairman Skowronski said it best: "A bird in the hand...".

The EDC is an advisory body; we can only recommend action to the Common Council. So the motion was made that the EDC recommend to the Common Council that they investigate the potential of the project. 

Read that again: The EDC voted on nothing more than whether to recommend further study of the project in light of changing economic conditions and the unique parameters of the project.

The motion does not say, "Yep  - BUILD IT!" It says, "Let's look into this - we're not necessarily for or against it, but it may have potential."

Let the record show that every commissioner voted "aye," except for the commissioner I quoted at length above, who voted "no".

He left before I could ask him, with all due respect, exactly what he was voting against.

Public Hearing Scheduled on S. 76th Reconstruction Project

The price you pay.

Having just pledged a half million dollars to help build a highway interchange in a neighboring community, odds are the city of Franklin will plead poverty and elect to create another speedway with little or no provision for pedestrians and bikes; that sort of thing is expensive, you know.

The Franklin Little League complex is on 76th Street. Not that it matters, of course, in a city that builds for cars, not for people.

There is a hearing on the project from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Franklin Law Center on Loomis Road. There are four options that are being considered. The options include: a four-lane highway with no median and no sidewalks, a four-lane highway with no median and a sidewalk, a four-lane highway with an 18-foot-wide median and no sidewalks and a four-lane highway with an 18-foot-wide median with a sidewalk.

If the City of Franklin cannot reach a decision by June 15, Milwaukee County will move forward with plans to construct a four-lane highway without a median or sidewalks in 2012.

Public Hearing Scheduled On S. 76th Reconstruction Project - Milwaukee News Story - WISN Milwaukee.