Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

From Planetizen:

A few days ago, I was in a Chicago neighborhood called Lincoln Square, on Lincoln Avenue just south of Lawrence Avenue.  Lincoln Avenue looks like many posh urban neighborhoods- narrow, walkable streets inhabited by gelato-eating, prosperous-looking people.  Even on a weeknight, the shops and streets of Lincoln Square betrayed no evidence of a recession.*

Lincoln intersects with Lawrence Avenue just a block from the core of Lincoln Square.  Lawrence Avenue resembles a suburb more than it resembles Lincoln Square; it is six lanes wide (though unlike in most suburbs, two of them are used for parking), and some shops are behind parking lots.  But Lawrence's retail is far less prosperous than that of Lincoln; a good number of Lawrence's storefronts seemed to be vacant, and others were occupied by dollar stores and other non-carriage trade businesses.**

Both Lincoln Avenue and Lawrence Avenue have the same housing stock and thus the same neighbors, the same city government (and thus the same tax rates and school districts) and the same distance from downtown (about seven miles).  Thus, these two intersecting streets constitute the perfect controlled experiment on the popularity of walkable urbanism.  If people basically liked shopping on car-oriented speedways, Lawrence would have fewer vacant storefronts than Lincoln.  Yet the opposite is true.  It follows that where everything else is equal, shoppers prefer walkable urbanism to car-oriented suburbanism.

At this point, readers may be asking themselves: why, then, do some suburbs continue to prosper?  Because not everything else is equal: an unwalkable suburb may be further away from troubled neighborhoods (usually leading to more prestigous schools and less crime), in a less poverty-packed jurisdiction (thus leading to lower taxes), or have a newer housing stock.  Thus, not every suburb will look as scruffy as Lincoln Square.

But the tale of these two adjacent streets nevertheless tells us something: that city life with walkability is appealing to American consumers, while city life with less walkability is anything but.

*For a few pictures of Lincoln Square, see

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205703.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205709.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205702.html

**Although I took no pictures of Lawrence, you can see the street by going to the 2200-2600 blocks of West Lawrence Avenue on Google Street View.

Michael Lewyn is an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, FL, where he teaches a seminar on sprawl and the law (as well as numerous other courses).

Read the rest at: More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

"Baby boomers are coming of empty-nest retirement age, and at the same time their children are buying their first homes, and neither group wants large lots in remote places where little is going on."

Another reason a viable trail and sidewalk system is INFRASTRUCTURE, and not merely "parks and recreation."

Today's home buyers aren't just looking for good schools and low crime rates when they evaluate a neighborhood, many brokers say. They're paying much more attention to what they can walk to.

"Everyone wants to know now how close they are to stores," says Linda Duggan, an owner of The Duggan Group real-estate agency. She recently had clients who, given a choice between a house in Danville, Calif., and another that was bigger, newer, $300,000 cheaper—and 20 minutes farther from town—chose the first one. Earlier this year Scott Newman, of Newman Realty in Chicago, started highlighting how close his listings are to amenities. The number of amenities in walking distance can vary sharply from block to block, he adds.

"For a lot of Americans, the whole problem of traffic congestion and having to drive everywhere to do almost anything has made other choices more attractive," says Kaid Benfield, director of the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council's Smart Growth Program. Urban planners say it's also a matter of demographics: Baby boomers are coming of empty-nest retirement age, and at the same time their children are buying their first homes, and neither group wants large lots in remote places where little is going on. Fear about future oil prices is also increasing the attractiveness of walkable neighborhoods. 

Read the rest at: A Walker's Guide to Home Buying - WSJ.com

Smart Growth in 30 seconds

 

Big Box reuse in Milwaukee: Old Menard's converted to indoor bike park

Big Box reuse in Milwaukee:

Trek Bicycle Corp. didn’t just give Ray Petro a little boost to ensure he would be able to open a Ray’s Indoor MTB Park for riders in Milwaukee. The Waterloo-based company bought Ray’s business.

That was the news in a release sent out promoting the expected opening of a Ray’s in a shuttered Menard’s store at 8365 N. 76th St. in November.

Read the rest at: Trek buys Ray's Indoor MTB Park - ensures expansion in Milwaukee - JSOnline

"To stay competitive, suburbs need to create walkable urban places with a critical mass of activity"

ABOVE: Enjoying an evening in Sierra Madre, California

Many suburbs like Franklin, with committees and commissions populated by folks who settled here back when most of their neighbors were farmers and open fields, have a hard time with this concept.

Good center cities need not only retail and housing but offices as well, to make these places come alive day and night. On the commercial corridors, revitalization efforts should focus on the key intersections, where the shops and restaurants already want to go. People go where they will see other people.

"People go where they will see other people." The opposite of the "I moved here to get away from people" paradigm of the early far-flung suburbs -- but not mutually exclusive. Large suburbs can create central civic centers while maintaining sparse subdivisions, and people will self-select newer dense neighborhoods.

I'm quoting from a white paper entitled "The New Urban Workplace" by Rod Stevens of Spinnaker Strategies. The white paper describes the exodus of corporate headquarters from suburbs to downtown:

Talented young workers increasingly pick the city first and the job second.

The make-or-break for both companies and cities is their ability to draw college-educated workers who have come of age since the turn of the millennium. This is a generation that has grown up with more choice than ever before, that has learned to mix and match not only the clothing it buys, but its work and leisure time as well. Flexibility and convenience drive their lives. Many start the workday in mid-morning, break for a workout or a meal out with friends, and then go back to the office for more work far into the evening. The office of the future may look a whole lot more like the neighborhood coffee house.

Milwaukee Magazine's Newsbuzz site reports that the growing popularity of downtown is measureable:

In 2000, following the completion of the last U.S. Census, the Brookings Institution studied American downtowns and pegged Milwaukee as one of five (and the only one in the Midwest) with a residential population “on the edge of takeoff.” A couple years prior, in response to a Brookings survey, Milwaukee leaders guessed Downtown’s population would grow to 13,500 by 2010.

It’s beaten that mark, according to a report released earlier this year by Milwaukee’s Downtown Business Improvement District. Downtown population estimates prepared by a GIS consultant say about 15,000 people live in Milwaukee’s Downtown, more than Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Memphis or Nashville.

Good news for fans of wine, beer, and fresh air

Local business THREE CELLARS had their plans for an outdoor Wine and Beer garden APPROVED last night by the Plan Commission. 

Perhaps a step toward making the old strip mall on 76th and Rawson a more pleasant place to visit.

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?

Real Estate’s Next Big Thing: Walkable Communities

 
ABOVE: Get back in the car. FOR GOD'S SAKE, GET BACK IN THE CAR!

Why work to "rehabilitate" car-centric suburbs like mine? Because property values go UP in walkable communities.

To be a savvy investor in US real estate these days, you need to look beyond the business news headlines and target human-scale developments that will grow because of long-term demographic trends.

Human-scale homes and communities feature amenities that you can walk, bike, or take public transit to without getting in a car. I live in such a development in Grayslake, Illinois, where I can walk or ride to Starbucks, the supermarket, bank, dry cleaner, library, and hardware store. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else right now.

via www.minyanville.com

The Long Fall of the Mall?

The north side of the "Blues Brothers" Dixie Square Mall on Wednesday, May 2, 2007. (Chicago Tribune photo by John Smierciak / May 2, 2007)

It could survive Jake and Elwood, but not the new economy and changing tastes:

Harvey's abandoned Dixie Square Mall, made famous by a spectacular police chase in the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers," has a new developer hoping to bring thousands of jobs and pump millions of dollars into the shuttered shopping center and surrounding area.

Preliminary plans for the 35-acre site, at 153rd Street and Dixie Highway, as well as surrounding blocks, call for big-box and smaller retail stores and housing over a minimum of five years, said Thomas Planera, chief counsel for Chicago-based developer MG Development South LLC. (Read the rest at: “Blues Brothers” mall in Harvey may get face-lift - chicagotribune.com)

 

The traditional enclosed mall, epitomized in our area by Southridge Mall in Greendale (above; parking lot delineated in yellow), is losing its allure. Indeed, Southridge itself is looking at the first stage of what could be a re-invention of the property as they consider senior housing in a section of its ocean-sized parking lot.

Frankly, either they work quickly to make the retail space there something more akin to the outdoor, faux-downtown Bayshore, or get used to feigning excitement over glow-in-the-dark mini-golf.

Recently announced is an attempt by giant mall operator Simon Properties Growth, Inc. to buy out the troubled General Growth Properties, owner of Mayfair mall. Two giant malls; one owner -- sounds like a reason for possible tenants to look even closer at Bayshore. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The acquisition could raise regulatory flags, with national retailers such as Gap and Limited protesting that putting so many malls under a single owner would hand Simon too much lease-negotiating clout, Stifel Nicolaus analyst David M. Fick said in a research note.

"National tenants tell us that (Simon) already squeezes them more than other landlords, and now they may be faced with doing over 40% of their business at (Simon) properties," Fick wrote.

Or, in markets with a choice, national retailers may simply go with more innovative, downtown-esque retail environments.

It's the long fall of the traditional mall ....

See also: NEWSWEEK - Is the Mall Dead?

"The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls, are the most troubled, the suburban slums."

 

Tomorrow night is the first meeting of the Franklin Mayoral Ad Hoc Development Process Review Committee. It's mission, in short, is to streamline our development and approval process so developers can be more effective. I will attend, record, and post all pertinent documents.

Download Dev proc ad hoc agenda 2-18

Download Dev proc ad hoc resolution

The agenda has no "public comment" item included; I will be curious to see whether this will be a process that genuinely makes possible better development or if it'll simply be a forum for the two developers on the committee to vent their frustration and demand that standards be lowered further; "Get out of my way, I'm trying to turn a quick profit here!"

In a best case scenario where the development process is made more user-friendly, can we begin to expect developments with site plans that are more like the "after" example above, complete with more long term gains for developer and city alike?

Or, how about some "suburban rehab" to correct some of our existing, unsustainable mistakes and spur economic growth, as illustrated below? (Urban Sprawl Repair Kit via Inhabitat):

 

Unfortunately, there is no one on the new Committee who has demonstrated any particular affinity for Smart Growth, sustainable development practices, or any effort to significantly raise the standards to which developers must rise.

For those who think we can afford to just continue sprawling out wherever the developer's dart lands, here's potent food for thought via the New York Times online opinion section:

In the meantime, during these low, ragged years, a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.

Read the rest here: Slumburbia (New York Times)