Across the Great Divide

Bailing Out Sprawl: When Helping Hurts.

The Strib asks today,"Was cash for clunkers a clunker?" Apparently the pickup crowd was a major beneficiary of the trade-in program designed to help out car companies and put more fuel efficient vehicles on the road. Ford F-150 drivers in particular tended by a wide margin to buy another F-150.

This reminded me of another questioned posed by Streetsblog San Francisco — "Has the government been bailing out sprawl?" (h/t Jon Commers)

Unintended consequences from good intentions abound in the bailout biz, but once things start to go south, there are also perils in failing to act.

Smart growth advocates have long pointed out the costs of continuing to encourage and even subsidize urban sprawl. The post cogently presents some of the other bad consequences of the housing bubble that only became apparent after it burst. And it has suggestions for smarter policy.

I found myself copying too many sections of the piece to include here, so this is just a taste:

[R]ising housing demand led to construction on the urban fringe. It also led to higher prices in center cities, which pushed many low- and middle-income families to move to places with cheaper housing markets, which increased demand for homes on the fringe and led to even more construction. Rising demand for exurban living led to construction of exurban housing, and rising demand for urban living led to construction of exurban housing.

Another way to say this is that center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the owner's mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart, wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess inventory and rock bottom prices will attract low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some, and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

[...]

In short, the government isn't just subsidizing sprawl. It's subsidizing the deterioration of sprawling areas.

Once government acts, it's impossible to measure the price of inaction. We can't know if the economy would've gone into a death spiral if lawmakers had stood on the sidelines rooting for the free market to perform the rescue operation.

Critics of government intervention won't have to directly face the question: "what if we'd done nothing?" Instead, they can gather political ammunition without ever having stood in the line of fire.

Meanwhile, those who believe intervention averted disaster should consider the sort of consequences now manifest in the housing market.

One Reason the Novel is Going Slowly.

Somehow, doing research on rural mail delivery in Colorado, I stumbled across this photo of downtown Minneapolis, 1905, and ended up wandering around for hours in the turn-of-the-century Gateway District.  It's worth going to the site where I found it to view the wonderfully detailed original.

The corner in the foreground is South Fourth Street and Second Avenue. The first of three buildings facing Second is a mixed use three-story with tenant laundry on the roof, housing a seller of Gluek's Beer, a pool room and possibly a grocery (another photo I've seen advertised a laundry at the second awning). The Northern Hotel is in the middle and the famed Metropolitan Building dominates the shot.

In the large-format version, you can see how trolleys, horse-drawn wagons and bikes are the main conveyances, though there may be one motor car parked on Fourth. In the lower left, an awning marks a hay store — or maybe that's just the name of the proprietor.

The last building along far end of Fourth is the Wyman Building, which still stands, and I can pick out a few other existing buildings in the Warehouse District, including the Jackson Building and the Colonial Warehouse (home of the city's horse drawn trolley system and site of a recent PARKing Day encampment), with its tall, pale smokestack visible abover the Metropolitan Building.

In Twin Cities Then and Now, Larry Millett wrote about this area:

Like other old sections of American downtowns, the Gateway was a place of magnificent detail, as cluttered and inviting as a Victorian parlor. The buildings visible here [a closer-in, lower view of the same main block], including the Metropolitan bristle with all manner of parapets, cornices, finials, chimneys, fire escapes, towers, domes, and other assorted protrusions [...] It is not a beautiful scene, but this little piece of Minneapolis looks wonderefully appealing, a place where a stroller would never lack entertainment for the eyes.

All of this was erased during the early 1960's urban renewal. But there are few strollers to delight nowadays. It was replaced by a landscape than requires no comment.

Redevelopment Battleground Looks Different Today.

This account of small businesses trying to survive anticipated construction of the Central Corridor Light Rail route reminded me of a story I wrote 35 years ago — and what has happened since.

I was freelancing for the Minneapolis Star and for Preview magazine, the Minnesota Public Radio program guide that has long since morphed into "region's most widely circulated lifestyle magazine, catering to a well-educated, affluent audience." 

Preview then was edited by writers like Patricia Hampl and covered Minnesota through a very different lens. It published arts and literary reporting, but also my account of the New Ulm anti-draft march and another cover story about urban renewal on the fringes of downtown Minneapolis.

[Photo: Washington Avenue between Marquette and Second Avenues. These buildings were replaced by the unremarkable 100 Washington Square, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center. From John McNab's photostream]  

It was titled: "Development or Destruction?"

By this time, the early 1970s, most of the city's Washington Avenue skid row had been eradicated, though not much of the promised new development had yet materialized.

The Minneapolis Tribune editorialized at the time: "The ugliness of blight is ... disappearing and a new beauty and orderliness replace it." But a local architect said that it was "the most inexcusable act of civic vandalism in the history of Minneapolis."

In fact, some of the land that went from flophouse to parking lot is still used for parking cars. A few of the remaining flop houses found new, trendy life, while others are in different states of productive use.

The north end of town was being remade for insurance companies and other corporate titans. A beautiful new Federal Reserve Bank building went up, only to be replaced by a more workable building on the site of the former train station.

Southwest near Loring Park, where my domestic partner and I lived in those days, the affordable apartments and small businesses were just starting to be exposed to gentrification. New landlords were buying the four-story apartment buildings, buffing them up, and charging much higher rents than we were used to paying. Those higher rents pushed us into home ownership, which turned out to be a good deal.

The city's lead development person at the time told us, when we asked him about what would happen to the area's poor people, "they just go somewhere else." And indeed they did.

For small businesses, though, relocation is another matter.

I interviewed some business owners whose buildings in the neighborhood were going under the wrecking ball. A used bookstore owner had been moved to his current location after the city demolished his previous building, to which he'd moved after losing his original storefront. It turns out used book businesses were a reliable barometer of real estate that was underutilized, since they had very low sales per square foot.

His reactions to moving a fourth time were mixed. He thought the city would help him find a new location again and provide assistance to pack and move two floors of books. But the stock of suitable space in the city was going away. He was tired of moving, and each new location had added to his costs and reduced his foot traffic.

He moved to a much smaller location and, before too many years passed, closed down his shop.

Another retailer who sold unpainted furniture was suspicious of the city and opposed to the redevelopment, but eventually found a new storefront in the neighborhood. After operating there for two decades or more, it eventually moved to St. Louis Park and closed in 2004. 

The University Avenue businesses face different development pressures from the light rail, since the surrounding real estate is not nearly as valuable as land next to the core downtowns. But small service businesses that rely on repeat customers are rightly concerned about how changes may affect them, and they are righteously angry that the needs of larger, non-taxpaying institutions are getting more attention.

Some of their businesses will die — either killed outright by construction, or more likely, by the combination of change and the owner's lack of skills or capital to adapt.

As I look back at the redevelopment that came into my old neighborhood, I see some fears were unrealized, while others were legitimate. Al Franken and other millionaires live where the bookstore once stood, but a fair amount of what we fought to save is still there. I can still see all three of the buildings where we once lived. One of the teachers at the shelter lives in a building next door, so I suspect the rents are still relatively affordable.

Though I miss parts of the old city and am repulsed by some of its replacement, I can't definitely say the old stuff was better than what we have now. Today is different, and that's the way life is.

The old days just go somewhere else.

University and Fairview: Where a Grand Boulevard Died.

Discussions about the Central Corridor Light Rail Line often fasten on what it will do to the sidewalks, street life and small businesses that currently hang on by a thread along University Avenue. 

The plan does little to beautify the street, and some locals take that as a lack of respect for their community. In fact, it may just be a lack of public will to fund anything but the basics. 

Ten days ago, I took a ride along parts of the avenue to look at what is there now. Some of these pictures are from a similar trip last year. [Click to enlarge.]

In particular, I wanted to take a closer look at Dickerman Park, perhaps the strangest and most neglected park in the Twin Cities. Its fate illustrates that vision can sometimes get ahead of will; and private generosity can be wasted just as easily as public spending.

In the third photo, I'm standing at one end of the park, looking east down its length, which runs along University between Fairview and Aldine. 

The park was dedicated to the city in 1909 by the Griggs, Cooper & Company and Dickerman Investment for “park and parkway purposes”. However, since that time the property has been little used in the traditional sense of a park. Currently, the land is maintained by adjacent property owners and parking lots have been built on a portion of the park. To most, the land appears to be private property.

The Dickerman brothers' donation was not supplemented by city dollars or other private gifts, and the vision of University Avenue as a great boulevard expired right there. A few years ago, the neighborhood got behind a design effort to reclaim the park, it hasn't gotten much beyond the visionary stage, either.

Ironically, across Fairview is an abandoned eatery built in a converted service station. A mural depicts the former streetcar that stopped at this corner and served the historic Rondo neighborhood, which was taken in the late 1960's for construction of I-94. In its parking lot were the remains of some sort of picnic. No litter, just a swahili alphabet book and a foil tray of brats that still looked fresh enough to eat.

Just up the street is the headquarters for the Central Corridor project office. Around the corner from the mural was the former Fresh Anointing International Church, now ABC Mental Health. 

My photos don't show street life, because there wasn't any.

If I must draw a point from all this, it would be: We have roughly used this street and this intersection for generations. A rail line might not mean salvation, but I don't think it can hurt.

"Smart Growth" Needs Brown as Well as Green.

Industry’s low rents mean that industrial enterprise will never qualify as what people in the real estate  business call, in a cunning turn of phrase, a property’s “highest and best use,” meaning whatever yields the most profit.

It follows that if urban industry is to survive, not to say thrive, it needs protection from market forces. What it gets from smart growth—where it generally appears as a form of blight, when it appears at all—is greater exposure, leading to a vicious cycle: treating industry as a relic justifies the conversion of industrial land to other uses, thereby further weakening the possibility of industrial revitalization. And like farmland, once lost, industrial land is gone forever. 

— Zelda Bronstein, in Dissent, "Industry and the Smart City" [PDF]

h/t Hal Davis

Denny Hecker Truck Gardens?

Just discovered this post was gobbled before it made it to the blog. Too busy to reconstruct my part of it, but here's the quote from Bill Lindeke that prompted some musings about adaptive reuse of our dying malls, foreclosed subdivisions and abandoned car dealerships.

Suburban growth seems like a terribly wasteful way to operate a national economy. Much of the time, it means constructing brand new homes, shopping centers, schools, and sewers at the outskirts of town while simultaneously depopulating and tearing down homes, shopping centers, and schools in the middle of the city or in the first-ring suburbs. The network of real estate developers, banks, home construction firms, food corporations, big boxes, and auto dealers line US freeways in an endless loop of new construction and obsolescence, peddling giant homes and an endless stream of shiny products that nobody really needs... Is this really all we have to offer? Shouldn't there be another way to make money? Isn't new retail development just vulturing away the old retail development? Does economic growth have to come at the expense of our cities?

And here's another good read, about Surprise, Arizona, and how it illustrates how the housing boom went so wrong.

Generally, people move to a community for a specific reason -- jobs, climate, scenery -- creating a demand for housing. If the demand exceeds supply, then prices go up, and someone builds new houses to meet the need. Something else seemed to be happening on the fringes of Phoenix. Instead of being lured by jobs or amenities, people came in large part because houses were relatively cheap. "Phoenix and Las Vegas became the ultimate suburbs of Southern California," says Christopher B. Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he studies urban planning. "They became the place for folks in California who could no longer afford the late 20th century American dream."

Just because a place is relatively cheap doesn't make housing affordable, however. That brings us back to the Guerros. They wanted a nicer house than they could afford, so their lender offered a solution: An adjustable-rate mortgage. Their monthly payments were $2,700. Of course, the bank would jack up their rates after two years, but it didn't matter. With home values climbing steadily, they could refinance before the rate reset, pull out enough cash to buy a jetski or a new car, and keep their mortgage payments in check. In other words, the banks were creating affordable housing where it didn't really exist; with easy and tricky loans, they were creating purchasing power, or demand. Tens of thousands of such loans were issued in Arizona, and the major homebuilders even got into the game, offering financing in a manner more often associated with car manufacturers.

This artificially inflated demand did the trick. In just five years, Surprise gained another 50,000 people, and added more than 7,000 homes in 2005 alone. Maricopa County -- which contains the bulk of the greater Phoenix metro area -- grew faster than anywhere else in the country, and the Phoenix area issued more than 62,000 residential building permits. The economy responded: In 2006, Arizona's gross domestic product grew by 6.7 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for the nation as a whole. The construction industry provided 9 percent of all non-farm jobs in Arizona, making it by far the biggest employer in the state. Those jobs drew more people, who took out more loans to buy more houses, creating more demand … you get the picture.

Housing prices soared -- nearly doubling, on average, over two years -- to create almost instant wealth. Speculation was so rampant that it threw population estimates for a loop. Last year, with the bust in full swing, state and local officials discovered that their method of counting people -- by starting with 2000 census numbers and then estimating population using the number of houses built and sold -- didn't work. They had assumed an occupancy rate of 98 to 99 percent, when in fact at least one of every 10 new homes was sitting empty, even before the bust. A lot of people were making a lot of money. A lot of people would lose money, too.

Breaking Camp.

The concrete form at left was support for a trestle that once crossed Plymouth Avenue near the Mississippi. It lifts the ground well above the street grade where a wedge of isolated greenery grew in the semi-abandoned industrial landscape. A perfect place for a camp, close to town and the scrap yards, and out of sight.

Now, though, a new building is rising on the long-empty lot to the west. The unseen oasis is now a too-visible neighbor. So sleeping bags, blankets, shelter and clothing have been swept down to the sidewalk.

Across the city, a new light rail line is being planned to run through a faded neighborhood. New development, better services and more employment are promised (or at least dangled before the current residents).

In the long run, it may be so. But the blankets on the sidewalk and the underwear on the road sign are a reminder that, even with the best intentions, better is never better for everyone.

Carless in America.

This is apparently a big national walk-or-bike-to-work-church-school-bars-and-ballgames week. Tomorrow is the bike day.

Here in Minneapolis, I can ride the bike I'm already riding to my volunteer gig on Thursday, then park it in a "bike corral" a block away and receive $5 off on a ticket to the Twins game I'm already planning to attend. I don't think scalpers are in on the deal, though, and I hate it when you ride your bike places and then can't find a parking place...

I'm all for events that are fun and encourage people to experience life on the other side of a car window [all photos here are from the Fruita Fat Tire Festival "Clunker Crit"]. Getting back on bike, even for a few summer days, will raise their awareness when they get back behind the wheel. But like bring-a-can-of-pork-and-beans-for-admission rock concerts and this-time-you-be-the-designated-driver Saturday nights, they won't undo habits designed into our culture and our cities.

The New York Times asks some urbanists whether going car-free is a realistic goal. Their answers embrace urban density, design, transit, household economics, energy, appropriate car use, connectivity and putting some there there for walkers and bikers.

The Uptown Urbanist writes about how difficult it is to change car-centrism, breaking down the contradictions in the Calhoun Area's Master Plan, which envisions a "great urban neighborhood" where "people could live without a car." It also proposes residential development that provides for twice the parking required by the city of Minneapolis.

[W]ho are these car-dependent people expected to move into these new lifestyle units? Presumably the biggest draw about living in the heart of Uptown, especially in a higher density development, would be the ability to live life without a car. These people, even more so than most CARAG residents, would be the least likely to need space to park multiple cars.

This year, I'm seeing many more of those upright city bikes out for a spin. (I even tried one last year, momentarily seduced by a design that looked cool but produced a soft and sluggish ride.)

Maybe some of these riders will keep at it, but I suspect many more of these entry-level bikes are destined for garage sales after the riders discover a) They don't lose weight peddling two miles at 6 miles an hour; b) aggressive drivers don't like them any more than people in spandex; and c) it hurts bad when you fall and don't wear a helmet.

The cities are getting better for bikes, and I wish the newbies (not nOObs) well. But I'm not parking in the bike corral.

Beyond the Dinkydome.

Despite all my years in Minneapolis, curiosity about public spaces and trips past the Dinkydome by foot, bike and car, I've never set foot inside.

Twin City Sidewalks explains why I shouldn't let that bother me.

[Photo via Dinkytown, Minneapolis]

Greenway Safety is About More Than Enforcement.

The Star Tribune editorial, "Don't let thugs derail bike trail use," is right in spirit. But in response to a rash of muggings along the popular central bikeway, it makes an array of suggestions — better lighting, increased police presence, night-vision security cameras, citizen bike patrols and avoiding riding alone — that miss a larger point about safe infrastructure and its use by the public.

Safety strategies that rely on counter-measures and modified user behavior represent a design failure. And a purely engineering- or cost-driven approach to infrastructure almost guarantees we will end up with issues later.

The editorial notes that "portions of the greenway and Hiawatha trails are more dangerous because of the surrounding geography and inadequate lighting."

Another way of putting it would be: The danger comes from treating commuting purely as a problem of moving most efficiently from point-to-point. The trail fails to recognize its true connections to the surrounding city.

The trails are more dangerous because they were built like roadways and rail lines — for specialized vehicle use through a featureless trench or concrete wasteland — rather than as human-scaled outdoor passageways that naturally connect people and destinations. This problem "geography" along Hiawatha was created decades ago by scrubbing the landscape of trees, residences and commercial buildings so it could be remade as a transportation corridor. Then the entire area was neglected until recently.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Midtown Greenway and use it at all times and seasons. The designers and community advocates who championed the trail were well aware of its challenges, and they incorporated features to mitigate problems with the location. It will only get better as more community connections are made and more people discover it.

But here's what real safety looks like along a bike trail or city street.

We can design our infrastructure like parking ramps and equip them with cameras, emergency phones and occasional patrols. Or we can emulate our parks and most beloved commercial streets — places that encourage a mix of activities and promote gathering, visibility and access year-round.

Reaching our destination safely and efficiently is indeed important, but we ignore the quality of the journey at our peril.

– Crossposted at Growth and Justice Blog