Slightly Slack
01 October 2007
On indefinite hiatus
What few regular readers I do have may have noticed a severe dropoff in the frequency of posts on Slightly Slack. School, music, and a considerably more vibrant social life have eaten into the time I would previously have spent on ranting and raving.
As such, I'm putting the blog on hiatus. I will leave existing posts up for the perusal of anyone who cares. You can still see me sling invective and diatribe on the comment threads at Curbed LA and other Los Angeles urban planning blogs, and I plan to keep well-honed my ability to cram a substantial argument into the 150-word limit dictated by the format of a letter to the LAT. ¶ 2:01 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
As such, I'm putting the blog on hiatus. I will leave existing posts up for the perusal of anyone who cares. You can still see me sling invective and diatribe on the comment threads at Curbed LA and other Los Angeles urban planning blogs, and I plan to keep well-honed my ability to cram a substantial argument into the 150-word limit dictated by the format of a letter to the LAT. ¶ 2:01 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
08 September 2007
Vanilla Turning Grey
It's not much of a stretch to say that the prevailing assumption in urban planning practice since WWII has been that no adult would ever make any economically meaningful trip by any mode except the automobile. Sure, places like Irvine and Mission Viejo might have extensive networks of jogging/biking paths, but those don't actually go to any retail or employment destinations. For the most part, in any area subdivided after 1940 or so under the best-practices guidelines of the Federal Housing Administration, modernist planners' obsessions with functional separation and the elimination of through vehicle traffic have resulted in a nation of cul-de-sac subdivisions and "pods" of commercial development.
What happens to residents of these autopias, however, when they can no longer drive safely? As has been widely reported in the past year or so, most recently in tomorrow's fall issue of the New York Times' quarterly real estate magazine Key, Americans are retiring in their homes. 89% of over-50 respondents to an AARP survey indicate that they don't want to move after they retire. Since most Americans live in places that assume automobility, this means that they're eventually going to be dependent on someone else to give them a ride once they get too old to drive safely. What happens to those who don't have adult children who live nearby?
What's even worse is that places specifically intended for the "active elderly"--i.e., those not yet ready for assisted living, let alone a nursing home--are usually even worse settings for them. A couple years back, I attended a seminar by University of Arizona geography professor Sandra Rosenbloom, who studies urban planning issues concerning senior citizens. She pointed out that almost none of the 55-and-over subdivisions in greater Phoenix and Tucson are within half a mile of a bus stop (and that's a long-ass walk even for a healthy 18-year-old in the heat of an Arizona summer); the same could be said for grocery stores and pharmacies. Worse, most such "age-restricted developments" don't even offer shuttle buses for their residents, meaning that non-driving residents of Sun City and the like are completely dependent on younger residents to chauffeur them around.
I'm seriously unsure of the policy solution to this problem, or if there even needs to be one at all. The Haussmann in me says "bulldoze it all and start over," but that approach might be slightly, y'know, problematic. Paratransit is the current approach, but its subsidy requirements make suburban heavy rail lines look like models of parsimony. Perhaps local governments could start hiring civic errand-runners for their town's elderly populations. Or, perhaps our society could evolve along Asian lines and assign children the burden of taking care of elderly parents--but don't bet on that.
The sad thing is that this situation is mostly the result of bad planning. What I wonder is why nobody back in the '30s, when planners were dreaming up today's automobile-oriented reality, ever thought about what might happen to those who could no longer drive. Perhaps it was that most people in those days died before they got too old to fail a driving test. ¶ 2:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
What happens to residents of these autopias, however, when they can no longer drive safely? As has been widely reported in the past year or so, most recently in tomorrow's fall issue of the New York Times' quarterly real estate magazine Key, Americans are retiring in their homes. 89% of over-50 respondents to an AARP survey indicate that they don't want to move after they retire. Since most Americans live in places that assume automobility, this means that they're eventually going to be dependent on someone else to give them a ride once they get too old to drive safely. What happens to those who don't have adult children who live nearby?
What's even worse is that places specifically intended for the "active elderly"--i.e., those not yet ready for assisted living, let alone a nursing home--are usually even worse settings for them. A couple years back, I attended a seminar by University of Arizona geography professor Sandra Rosenbloom, who studies urban planning issues concerning senior citizens. She pointed out that almost none of the 55-and-over subdivisions in greater Phoenix and Tucson are within half a mile of a bus stop (and that's a long-ass walk even for a healthy 18-year-old in the heat of an Arizona summer); the same could be said for grocery stores and pharmacies. Worse, most such "age-restricted developments" don't even offer shuttle buses for their residents, meaning that non-driving residents of Sun City and the like are completely dependent on younger residents to chauffeur them around.
I'm seriously unsure of the policy solution to this problem, or if there even needs to be one at all. The Haussmann in me says "bulldoze it all and start over," but that approach might be slightly, y'know, problematic. Paratransit is the current approach, but its subsidy requirements make suburban heavy rail lines look like models of parsimony. Perhaps local governments could start hiring civic errand-runners for their town's elderly populations. Or, perhaps our society could evolve along Asian lines and assign children the burden of taking care of elderly parents--but don't bet on that.
The sad thing is that this situation is mostly the result of bad planning. What I wonder is why nobody back in the '30s, when planners were dreaming up today's automobile-oriented reality, ever thought about what might happen to those who could no longer drive. Perhaps it was that most people in those days died before they got too old to fail a driving test. ¶ 2:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
10 August 2007
Urbanization Without "Manhattanization": Chicago
Diversey Avenue between Kedzie and California, Logan Square, Chicago
Last month, while I was in Chicago for a conference, I took an afternoon off to walk around and take pictures of my brother's neighborhood, Logan Square. You can read the Wikipedia entry if you want more specific information on the neighborhood's history, but it suffices to say that it's an excellently preserved example of the sort of medium-density, working-/middle-class neighborhoods that were built across much of Chicago in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Pedestrian- and transit-oriented, these areas have also adapted reasonably well to the automobile.
Despite their seeming remoteness from the contemporary Los Angeles experience, neighborhoods like this are especially relevant in the densifying Los Angeles of today. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that every time a developer proposes building something taller than two stories in Los Angeles, some HOA gadfly or pundit will scream "Manhattanization!" Like a denser Longwood Highlands, Logan Square stands as a reproach to this Manichaean view of urban development.
Francisco Street between Schubert Avenue and Logan Boulevard
Diversey Avenue
Chicago is a city of two-/three-/four-flats and bungalows. Built on relatively narrow lots--25' by 100' is typical--these typically offer small backyards and a rear garage (although conversion of rear yards into parking areas is common).
The advent of gas heat and electric refrigeration also has enabled the conversion of cellars into additional dwelling units. Such auxiliary units, when properly built and maintained, can make homeownership more affordable by providing a source of income to offset mortgage costs.
Richmond Street-Francisco Avenue alley, between Schubert and Logan
Any visit to a residential neighborhood in Chicago has to include a look at its alleys. From both an aesthetic and a practical perspective, the abandonment of the alley in the 1930s was a significant mistake in planning and development practice. On two-way residential streets, alleys make garbage collection easier by cutting the number of passes a garbage truck needs to make from two per block--one for each side of the street--to one. Second, alleys provide a place for utility poles, one of the great aesthetic scourges of Los Angeles, to run. Finally, they allow the provision of more curb parking: remember that every curb cut represents at least one less parking space. (Even in exclusively single-family neighborhoods, largely alley-less San Francisco suffers from a horrendous parking shortage because of this.)
Even in urban designs that abandoned the traditional grid, the notion of separating pedestrian and automobile access to property remained. Clarence Stein, designer of Radburn, New Jersey--widely considered the first suburb designed with the automobile in mind--made sure to incorporate separate pedestrian and "service" facilities into every residential street. The Village Green apartment complex near Baldwin Hills, the model for many post-WWII apartment complexes, offers a similar arrangement. This is expensive, though; unsurprisingly, the front-facing garage--which reaches its apotheosis with the snout house and the Garage Mahal--has become the standard form of development. Such a form factor can work well in low-density Midwestern and Southern suburbs, but in the dense housing tracts of contemporary California and the inland West (Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc.), the effect is one of endless driveways and garage doors.
The old Milwaukee Avenue elevated rail line, now known as the CTA Blue Line O'Hare Branch, has two stops here in Logan Square--one underground at the square itself, and one above-ground at California Avenue. Many of the stations on the CTA rail system incorporate parking areas, bus stops, and/or taxi stands into their design--important features that many of Los Angeles' rail stops lack.
When it's running properly, the Blue Line can get you from O'Hare to the Loop in 35 minutes. Unfortunately, longstanding neglect has led to cracked rails in the 35-year-old subway portions of the Blue Line (as well as the WWII-vintage State Street Subway portion of the Red Line), leading to "slow zones" and single-track reductions that have made what was once a 30-minute door-to-door commute for my brother into a frustrating hour. (He's thrown in the towel and is now forking over $90/week in parking fees to drive to work.) CTA has promised that all of the track repairs on the Blue Line will be done by January 2008, which isn't a minute too soon. There's no way in hell Chicago's getting the Olympics with its transit system in such appalling shape.
The boulevard system is one of Chicago's great urban design achievements. Consciously modeled on Haussmann's Parisian boulevards, Chicago's boulevards are double boulevards with undivided four-lane center sections and with medians wide enough that older children could probably play football in them. I find this to be superior to the design of Los Angeles boulevards like San Vicente, Venice, and Crenshaw--which are, admittedly, just conversions of former Red Car or Yellow Car right-of-way.
For the most part, pre-WWII real estate developers were mere subdividers: they would provide roads and utilities hookups, but the buyer was responsible for building the house. (Even Olmsted Brothers-planned Leimert Park was built on this model.) In Chicago, many homeowners would buy the lot next door--probably, in many cases, to prevent it from being developed, since the city's minimal side setback requirements would make construction next door rather irritating. As one can see above, different folks put their side yards to different uses. These are privately owned, but imagine if neighborhoods in Los Angeles had access to such pockets of land as parks or community gardens.
Diversey Avenue just west of California Avenue; I-90/94 overpass visible at right
California Avenue between Diversey and Schubert
What eventually became known as the Kennedy Expressway (I-90/94) came through Logan Square in the late '50s, with an interchange near the intersection of Diversey and California Avenues. The Kennedy largely follows the existing Chicago & Northwestern Railroad right-of-way, so it didn't split a thriving neighborhood in the same way as, say, the Santa Monica Freeway or the Cross Bronx Expressway. Still, while being right off an Interstate is great if you're in the formula retail business and need lots of land for parking, it kinda kills land values for other uses. ¶ 4:36 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Diversey Avenue between Kedzie and California, Logan Square, Chicago
Last month, while I was in Chicago for a conference, I took an afternoon off to walk around and take pictures of my brother's neighborhood, Logan Square. You can read the Wikipedia entry if you want more specific information on the neighborhood's history, but it suffices to say that it's an excellently preserved example of the sort of medium-density, working-/middle-class neighborhoods that were built across much of Chicago in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Pedestrian- and transit-oriented, these areas have also adapted reasonably well to the automobile.
Despite their seeming remoteness from the contemporary Los Angeles experience, neighborhoods like this are especially relevant in the densifying Los Angeles of today. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that every time a developer proposes building something taller than two stories in Los Angeles, some HOA gadfly or pundit will scream "Manhattanization!" Like a denser Longwood Highlands, Logan Square stands as a reproach to this Manichaean view of urban development.
Francisco Street between Schubert Avenue and Logan Boulevard
Diversey Avenue
Chicago is a city of two-/three-/four-flats and bungalows. Built on relatively narrow lots--25' by 100' is typical--these typically offer small backyards and a rear garage (although conversion of rear yards into parking areas is common).
The advent of gas heat and electric refrigeration also has enabled the conversion of cellars into additional dwelling units. Such auxiliary units, when properly built and maintained, can make homeownership more affordable by providing a source of income to offset mortgage costs.
Richmond Street-Francisco Avenue alley, between Schubert and Logan
Any visit to a residential neighborhood in Chicago has to include a look at its alleys. From both an aesthetic and a practical perspective, the abandonment of the alley in the 1930s was a significant mistake in planning and development practice. On two-way residential streets, alleys make garbage collection easier by cutting the number of passes a garbage truck needs to make from two per block--one for each side of the street--to one. Second, alleys provide a place for utility poles, one of the great aesthetic scourges of Los Angeles, to run. Finally, they allow the provision of more curb parking: remember that every curb cut represents at least one less parking space. (Even in exclusively single-family neighborhoods, largely alley-less San Francisco suffers from a horrendous parking shortage because of this.)
Even in urban designs that abandoned the traditional grid, the notion of separating pedestrian and automobile access to property remained. Clarence Stein, designer of Radburn, New Jersey--widely considered the first suburb designed with the automobile in mind--made sure to incorporate separate pedestrian and "service" facilities into every residential street. The Village Green apartment complex near Baldwin Hills, the model for many post-WWII apartment complexes, offers a similar arrangement. This is expensive, though; unsurprisingly, the front-facing garage--which reaches its apotheosis with the snout house and the Garage Mahal--has become the standard form of development. Such a form factor can work well in low-density Midwestern and Southern suburbs, but in the dense housing tracts of contemporary California and the inland West (Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc.), the effect is one of endless driveways and garage doors.
The old Milwaukee Avenue elevated rail line, now known as the CTA Blue Line O'Hare Branch, has two stops here in Logan Square--one underground at the square itself, and one above-ground at California Avenue. Many of the stations on the CTA rail system incorporate parking areas, bus stops, and/or taxi stands into their design--important features that many of Los Angeles' rail stops lack.
When it's running properly, the Blue Line can get you from O'Hare to the Loop in 35 minutes. Unfortunately, longstanding neglect has led to cracked rails in the 35-year-old subway portions of the Blue Line (as well as the WWII-vintage State Street Subway portion of the Red Line), leading to "slow zones" and single-track reductions that have made what was once a 30-minute door-to-door commute for my brother into a frustrating hour. (He's thrown in the towel and is now forking over $90/week in parking fees to drive to work.) CTA has promised that all of the track repairs on the Blue Line will be done by January 2008, which isn't a minute too soon. There's no way in hell Chicago's getting the Olympics with its transit system in such appalling shape.
The boulevard system is one of Chicago's great urban design achievements. Consciously modeled on Haussmann's Parisian boulevards, Chicago's boulevards are double boulevards with undivided four-lane center sections and with medians wide enough that older children could probably play football in them. I find this to be superior to the design of Los Angeles boulevards like San Vicente, Venice, and Crenshaw--which are, admittedly, just conversions of former Red Car or Yellow Car right-of-way.
For the most part, pre-WWII real estate developers were mere subdividers: they would provide roads and utilities hookups, but the buyer was responsible for building the house. (Even Olmsted Brothers-planned Leimert Park was built on this model.) In Chicago, many homeowners would buy the lot next door--probably, in many cases, to prevent it from being developed, since the city's minimal side setback requirements would make construction next door rather irritating. As one can see above, different folks put their side yards to different uses. These are privately owned, but imagine if neighborhoods in Los Angeles had access to such pockets of land as parks or community gardens.
Diversey Avenue just west of California Avenue; I-90/94 overpass visible at right
California Avenue between Diversey and Schubert
What eventually became known as the Kennedy Expressway (I-90/94) came through Logan Square in the late '50s, with an interchange near the intersection of Diversey and California Avenues. The Kennedy largely follows the existing Chicago & Northwestern Railroad right-of-way, so it didn't split a thriving neighborhood in the same way as, say, the Santa Monica Freeway or the Cross Bronx Expressway. Still, while being right off an Interstate is great if you're in the formula retail business and need lots of land for parking, it kinda kills land values for other uses. ¶ 4:36 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
26 July 2007
A proposal for Venice Pinkberry opponents
As those of you in greater Los Angeles may have heard, the Pinkberry that recently opened on Abbot Kinney Boulevard (Rodeo Drive for Nader voters) in Venice has Venetians up in arms. Many residents of Venice and proprietors of businesses on the boulevard cherish the fact that until now, no retail establishment or restaurant on Abbot Kinney has opened there while having another location elsewhere. The fear of the locals is that more landlords will bring in chains, which collect more rent. More chains will then reduce the uniqueness that brings visitors to Abbot Kinney, causing incumbent businesses to lose customers and eventually go under.
The proposed solution is a city ordinance that would ban "formula retail" on Abbot Kinney. This would be a more stringent version of restrictions recently passed by voters in San Francisco. Being of a slightly libertarian bent, I naturally view such regulation with a critical eye. An analysis of who wins and who loses from such an action is in order.
The financial benefits of not having chains on Abbot Kinney accrue primarily to incumbent businesses in the area. Venetians and "friends of Venice" who value the uniqueness of Abbot Kinney Boulevard also derive psychological benefit from this. The costs of the ban accrue to landlords, who lose the ability to charge the higher rents that generally only chains can provide.
Basic regulatory economics teaches that the gains from any change in policy--whether a tightening or a relaxation of regulation on economic activity--need to exceed the costs. Doing so enables the winners to compensate the losers for their losses while having some "profit" left over.
Now, clearly the incumbent businesses on Abbot Kinney are not gaining more from it being chain-free than landlords are losing in foregone rents. Were this otherwise, there wouldn't be a controversy in the first place. So, if this is a useful regulation, the psychological/aesthetic benefits accruing to Venetians need to be fairly large. How large, though?
One way to find out is to ask opponents of formula retail to put their money where their mouths are. Why don't they start up a charitable fund that pays landlords on Abbot Kinney the difference between what a one-off/"unique" business can pay in rent and what a chain could pay? If the fund gets big enough, it could even buy up storefronts outright and lease them at cost. Hell, I'd even throw in a few bucks, because if I want chain retail I can ride my bike down to Marina del Rey.
Lovers of a chain-free Abbot Kinney, do you value the boulevard's uniqueness enough to open your wallets? By running to the City Council instead, you're effectively demanding that somebody else pay the cost for you to live in an Adbusters utopia. ¶ 12:54 AM 6 Comments Links to this post
The proposed solution is a city ordinance that would ban "formula retail" on Abbot Kinney. This would be a more stringent version of restrictions recently passed by voters in San Francisco. Being of a slightly libertarian bent, I naturally view such regulation with a critical eye. An analysis of who wins and who loses from such an action is in order.
The financial benefits of not having chains on Abbot Kinney accrue primarily to incumbent businesses in the area. Venetians and "friends of Venice" who value the uniqueness of Abbot Kinney Boulevard also derive psychological benefit from this. The costs of the ban accrue to landlords, who lose the ability to charge the higher rents that generally only chains can provide.
Basic regulatory economics teaches that the gains from any change in policy--whether a tightening or a relaxation of regulation on economic activity--need to exceed the costs. Doing so enables the winners to compensate the losers for their losses while having some "profit" left over.
Now, clearly the incumbent businesses on Abbot Kinney are not gaining more from it being chain-free than landlords are losing in foregone rents. Were this otherwise, there wouldn't be a controversy in the first place. So, if this is a useful regulation, the psychological/aesthetic benefits accruing to Venetians need to be fairly large. How large, though?
One way to find out is to ask opponents of formula retail to put their money where their mouths are. Why don't they start up a charitable fund that pays landlords on Abbot Kinney the difference between what a one-off/"unique" business can pay in rent and what a chain could pay? If the fund gets big enough, it could even buy up storefronts outright and lease them at cost. Hell, I'd even throw in a few bucks, because if I want chain retail I can ride my bike down to Marina del Rey.
Lovers of a chain-free Abbot Kinney, do you value the boulevard's uniqueness enough to open your wallets? By running to the City Council instead, you're effectively demanding that somebody else pay the cost for you to live in an Adbusters utopia. ¶ 12:54 AM 6 Comments Links to this post
14 July 2007
Continuing technical difficulties
Great, just great. Now the hard drive died on my laptop. Considering that it's actually five years old, handed down from my mom when she got her nifty HP Pavilion, I shouldn't be surprised. Still, I'm rather annoyed. I obviously have computer and internet access via my dad's machine, thankfully.
The likelihood of new content before the 20th, when I return to Los Angeles, is low. Sorry.
Gratuitous Mimi pic:
The likelihood of new content before the 20th, when I return to Los Angeles, is low. Sorry.
Gratuitous Mimi pic:
07 July 2007
Chicago and the (lonesome, crowded) West
Shamelessly stolen from William Sunna, a PhD candidate in computer science at UIC.
I'm crashing at my brother's place in Logan Square, on the Northwest Side of Chicago, while I attend this weekend's Transportation Research Board summer conference and geek out over congestion pricing and combined transportation/land use planning. I have spent some time walking around the neighborhood and would not at all mind living here once I got used to the awful humidity and if I could easily commute to work. Despite having grown up near Joliet, life in Palms and Mar Vista--where 80% of the year it never goes below 55 at night nor above 70 in the day--has made me a very soft man. Luckily, my brother's circa-1910 brick two-flat has been renovated with central air conditioning.
Being in Chicago, of course, brings to mind one of the definitive works of the regional science literature: William Cronon's 1991 Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. In an early chapter--I believe it's the third--Cronon details the tightly intertwined relationship between the development of Chicago and of the rural Midwest. In short, each made the other possible. The canals and rail lines feeding into Chicago made huge portions of Midwestern farmland commercially viable by providing cheap transportation of agricultural produce to a huge, highly liquid market that fed directly into the ports of the East, and ultimately to Europe. Meanwhile, the rail lines that moved grain to Chicago brought merchandise--paid for by the earnings from the sale of all that corn or wheat--back to the farms, which made rural living a whole hell of a lot more comfortable. At least in an American context, one of the implications to be drawn from this is that our cherished national archetype, the yeoman farmer beloved by Jefferson, wasn't quite as ruggedly self-sufficient as our collective mythos would have us believe.
How does this relate to urban planning, which is this blog's primary concern? Consider a theme on which I often touch in comments on Curbed, and about which that damn Cudahy post I've been meaning to finish will concern itself: namely, the desire of many Americans to live a rural/"small-town" lifestyle while enjoying the economic benefits of being in an urbanized area. Just as homesteaders wanted furnishing and clothing that they didn't have to make themselves but wanted to stay on their 160-acre farms, we want to live in big houses on big lots so we don't have to see our neighbors but still be fifteen minutes' drive from a Costco and an hour from a job that pays six figures. The latest part of the country to deal with these contradictory preferences is the Hill Country of central Texas. It seems that folks who moved to the Hill Country to be near Austin and/or San Antonio, but not too near, are getting annoyed that many others are getting the same idea.
What we have here is a prime example of a game of (failed) coordination. Each household that moves to a just-far-enough-away area like the Texas Hill Country is optimizing its location according to its own preferences, but its optimization algorithm fails to take into account the many, many others who share those preferences. The result is a continuing game of outward movement.
The Chicago Tribune recently did a series on generational out-migration in Chicagoland, tracking families as they moved steadily outward from the city. The common theme expressed by many interviewees was, "It was getting too crowded for me, so I had to move on." This was possible for many years in Chicagoland because the region has almost no geographic constraints save Lake Michigan, but is becoming increasingly problematic from a transportation standpoint. Fuel taxes don't go nearly as far as they did in the heyday of road-building in the '60s--the Transportation Research Board's figure is a two-thirds dropoff in purchasing power--meaning that congestion on the urban fringe is a far bigger problem now than it was in previous generations of suburbanization. The typical new method of suburban road finance, the sales tax levy, lacks the reasonably tight nexus between road usage and road construction that characterized the old fuel tax "benefits regime." (Not that the fuel tax system was particularly fair: the taxes of drivers in urban cores and inner suburbs went to the construction of freeways and interchanges that principally benefited those on the urban fringe and often required the destruction of vast swaths of the inner city.) Without a new transportation financing regime, one that will probably involve electronic tolling of some sort, suburban traffic congestion is only going to get worse and worse.
*(Pretentious indie rock snobs, if they know album covers, should be able to figure out why I picked the title I did.) ¶ 10:59 PM 4 Comments Links to this post
Shamelessly stolen from William Sunna, a PhD candidate in computer science at UIC.
I'm crashing at my brother's place in Logan Square, on the Northwest Side of Chicago, while I attend this weekend's Transportation Research Board summer conference and geek out over congestion pricing and combined transportation/land use planning. I have spent some time walking around the neighborhood and would not at all mind living here once I got used to the awful humidity and if I could easily commute to work. Despite having grown up near Joliet, life in Palms and Mar Vista--where 80% of the year it never goes below 55 at night nor above 70 in the day--has made me a very soft man. Luckily, my brother's circa-1910 brick two-flat has been renovated with central air conditioning.
Being in Chicago, of course, brings to mind one of the definitive works of the regional science literature: William Cronon's 1991 Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. In an early chapter--I believe it's the third--Cronon details the tightly intertwined relationship between the development of Chicago and of the rural Midwest. In short, each made the other possible. The canals and rail lines feeding into Chicago made huge portions of Midwestern farmland commercially viable by providing cheap transportation of agricultural produce to a huge, highly liquid market that fed directly into the ports of the East, and ultimately to Europe. Meanwhile, the rail lines that moved grain to Chicago brought merchandise--paid for by the earnings from the sale of all that corn or wheat--back to the farms, which made rural living a whole hell of a lot more comfortable. At least in an American context, one of the implications to be drawn from this is that our cherished national archetype, the yeoman farmer beloved by Jefferson, wasn't quite as ruggedly self-sufficient as our collective mythos would have us believe.
How does this relate to urban planning, which is this blog's primary concern? Consider a theme on which I often touch in comments on Curbed, and about which that damn Cudahy post I've been meaning to finish will concern itself: namely, the desire of many Americans to live a rural/"small-town" lifestyle while enjoying the economic benefits of being in an urbanized area. Just as homesteaders wanted furnishing and clothing that they didn't have to make themselves but wanted to stay on their 160-acre farms, we want to live in big houses on big lots so we don't have to see our neighbors but still be fifteen minutes' drive from a Costco and an hour from a job that pays six figures. The latest part of the country to deal with these contradictory preferences is the Hill Country of central Texas. It seems that folks who moved to the Hill Country to be near Austin and/or San Antonio, but not too near, are getting annoyed that many others are getting the same idea.
What we have here is a prime example of a game of (failed) coordination. Each household that moves to a just-far-enough-away area like the Texas Hill Country is optimizing its location according to its own preferences, but its optimization algorithm fails to take into account the many, many others who share those preferences. The result is a continuing game of outward movement.
The Chicago Tribune recently did a series on generational out-migration in Chicagoland, tracking families as they moved steadily outward from the city. The common theme expressed by many interviewees was, "It was getting too crowded for me, so I had to move on." This was possible for many years in Chicagoland because the region has almost no geographic constraints save Lake Michigan, but is becoming increasingly problematic from a transportation standpoint. Fuel taxes don't go nearly as far as they did in the heyday of road-building in the '60s--the Transportation Research Board's figure is a two-thirds dropoff in purchasing power--meaning that congestion on the urban fringe is a far bigger problem now than it was in previous generations of suburbanization. The typical new method of suburban road finance, the sales tax levy, lacks the reasonably tight nexus between road usage and road construction that characterized the old fuel tax "benefits regime." (Not that the fuel tax system was particularly fair: the taxes of drivers in urban cores and inner suburbs went to the construction of freeways and interchanges that principally benefited those on the urban fringe and often required the destruction of vast swaths of the inner city.) Without a new transportation financing regime, one that will probably involve electronic tolling of some sort, suburban traffic congestion is only going to get worse and worse.
*(Pretentious indie rock snobs, if they know album covers, should be able to figure out why I picked the title I did.) ¶ 10:59 PM 4 Comments Links to this post
30 June 2007
The failures of transit-oriented development
Today's LAT article about the limited use of transit by residents of all the shiny new condos and apartments being built above or adjacent to Metro Rail stations is a useful reminder that TOD is not a magic bullet. Of course, the really useful information is pretty much buried in the article:
The lesson here is important: transit investments need to connect population density to activity centers, and the areas around stations need to be reasonably pedestrian-friendly. Lack of the former characterizes the Green and Gold Lines, while lack of the latter characterizes the Green Line and the Harbor Transitway.
Also, the strategy of building rail lines first and then waiting for development to provide density nearby simply isn't going to work in this day and age, at least not in Los Angeles. New market-rate development in Southern California is affordable only to the income brackets least likely to use transit. This casts serious doubt on the viability of the Gold Line Foothill Extension--especially relative to its principal competitor for MTA capital funds, Phase II of the Expo Line. I continue to believe that MTA would have done better to have turned over/sold to Metrolink/SCRRA the old BNSF right-of-way it bought for the Gold Line, and instead spent San Gabriel Valley-area capital funds on building HOT lanes. ¶ 2:30 PM 3 Comments Links to this post
To make matters worse, almost all of the transit-oriented construction that has so far been approved in the L.A. area is for housing rather than job centers or the village-style shopping areas that planners had originally envisioned...
...Residents were more likely to use transit only if it took less time than driving, if they could walk to their destinations from the transit stop when they arrived, if they had flexible work hours and if they had limited access to a car. [Emphasis mine]
The lesson here is important: transit investments need to connect population density to activity centers, and the areas around stations need to be reasonably pedestrian-friendly. Lack of the former characterizes the Green and Gold Lines, while lack of the latter characterizes the Green Line and the Harbor Transitway.
Also, the strategy of building rail lines first and then waiting for development to provide density nearby simply isn't going to work in this day and age, at least not in Los Angeles. New market-rate development in Southern California is affordable only to the income brackets least likely to use transit. This casts serious doubt on the viability of the Gold Line Foothill Extension--especially relative to its principal competitor for MTA capital funds, Phase II of the Expo Line. I continue to believe that MTA would have done better to have turned over/sold to Metrolink/SCRRA the old BNSF right-of-way it bought for the Gold Line, and instead spent San Gabriel Valley-area capital funds on building HOT lanes. ¶ 2:30 PM 3 Comments Links to this post
21 June 2007
w00tsauce!
My old hard drive is intact. I'm still gonna do an OS reinstall and everything, but I have all my old stuff.
Pertinent to this blog, this means that the several hundred pictures mentioned earlier this week are not lost. New content coming soon! ¶ 7:25 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Pertinent to this blog, this means that the several hundred pictures mentioned earlier this week are not lost. New content coming soon! ¶ 7:25 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
19 June 2007
Oh dammit.
The hard drive, or at least the C partition, on my desktop PC crashed. Among other things, several hundred photographs that I'd taken in preparation for another post bit the dust.
Don't expect much content here for a while--not that I have a reader base demanding constant updates, anyway. ¶ 2:19 PM 4 Comments Links to this post
Don't expect much content here for a while--not that I have a reader base demanding constant updates, anyway. ¶ 2:19 PM 4 Comments Links to this post
18 June 2007
Layout update
I lost my blogroll in the process (oh, how foolish of me), but I'll add it back in soon enough. This is a much better-looking layout, though, because it allows me to have much bigger images in the text.
EDIT, 22 June: You're going to want to have your screen resolution at 1280x1024 or higher for this to render completely properly. I realize that this kinda shafts the laptop users, but whatever. ¶ 1:45 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
EDIT, 22 June: You're going to want to have your screen resolution at 1280x1024 or higher for this to render completely properly. I realize that this kinda shafts the laptop users, but whatever. ¶ 1:45 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
