REWIND: Good points aplenty ... "The big urban mistake: Building for tourism vs. livability."

Social media at Strong Towns reposted this link today. It appeared previously in this space in May 26, 2017. It has long been my viewpoint that grassroots "economic development" officials (municipal officials, non-profit organizations, business owners and other stakeholders) should use points like these as the basis for their discussions. Do they? Beats me, but I think we can all see how much Greg Fischer's "Bourbonism" has been worth in the year 2020. 

THE BIG URBAN MISTAKE: BUILDING FOR TOURISM VS. LIVABILITY, by Arian Horbovetz (The Urban Phoenix)

... I’m painting with a bit of a broad brush, but essentially what so many cities are currently experiencing is the dilemma of whether to invest in large urban draws that will bring outside money in, or invest in a growing and changing downtown residential population that yearns for investments in keeping them there. To put it simply, do cities invest in big projects that create an entertaining space that grows tourism, or do they invest in the people that have already taken a risk by moving back into their long-dormant downtowns?

LEAP

City leaders, this one’s for you. You can either cater to your new residents by going into the downtown apartment buildings and listening to real people, or you can hop on the big ticket project train en route to a revolving door downtown. You can either build for livability or build for fleeting, often overrated promises of tourism revenue. You can facilitate local small business and community development, or you can create a short-lived wow-factor by opening the floodgates to developers and business interests who take money out of our communities. You can empower and invest in your new downtown residents and let THEM be the ambassadors for our growing urban paradises, or you can ignore them and build casinos and other flashy complexes that cater to the outsider and likely line the pockets of someone beyond the boundaries of the community.

The choice, as always, is yours to make. Choose to invest in your residents and local business owners… the people that invested first… tourism, development and financial success will likely follow. Empower your people, honor the risk they took by taking one yourself, and like happy employees of a strong company, they will take care of everything else.

The Way I Feel About You: "In praise of streetcar suburbs."

Two photos from 13th Street in New Albany, just around the corner from our house.

Those parallel lines follow 13th Street north to Spring, then take a long westward curve. As a side note, with each passing day, I detest automobile supremacy more and more.

In Praise of Streetcar Suburbs, Defined and Illustrated, by Pete Saunders (The Corner Side Yard)

... Personally I love streetcar suburbs because they often have a mixed use character that places built after them lack. There's also often a community or neighborhood connectivity within them that I find appealing; many streetcar suburb communities are full of proud, organized and vocal residents who advocate strongly on behalf of their community's values. But I find three reasons that highlight why the streetcar suburb was -- and is -- a superior development type, and why it will make a comeback as American suburbs mature.

They are adaptable.
Streetcar suburbs were often built along grid networks, but not exclusively so; variations in block sizes and topographical adjustments can create differences in them. Streetcar suburbs were built and designed with streetcar systems in mind, but they generally have been able to succeed far longer than the streetcars themselves.

They are efficient.
Streetcar suburbs can accommodate a broad range of residential types and sizes, from large-lot single-family homes to midrise and high-rise multifamily developments. This is largely due to the kind of street networks given to them by the initial streetcars that created them. Another key efficiency: streetcar suburbs are well-suited to the "missing middle" of multifamily residential development, the townhouses, duplexes and small (2-12 units) multifamily buildings that create housing diversity and improve housing affordability.

They are inherently multi-modal.
As perhaps the original transit oriented development type, they are quite able to accommodate public transit; it's in their DNA. However, even if streetcar networks never come back, they usually have transit supportive densities that make other modes, like buses or bikes, quite useful.

The pros and the cons of public space, when the inside goes outside.

We're a few months into it, with time to see how the urban outdoor experiments have worked. Most of the evidence is supportive of further adaptive reuse. O'Sullivan has the good and the bad.

What Happens to Public Space When Everything Moves Outside, by Feargus O'Sullivan (Bloomberg CityLab)

As restaurants and bars dramatically expand their outdoor seating, questions are emerging about who gets to occupy the streets.

In this pandemic recovery period, city streets are starting to look a little different. To create room for social distancing, restaurant, bar and café tables are spilling out into the street. In some cases, this means more businesses adopt a Parisian sidewalk café model. In other cities, this design skips right past the sidewalks, which need all the room they can get for socially distanced pedestrians. Instead, tables occupy parking spots and vehicle lanes, and in some cases parks or public squares. This new way of organizing street space has already been rolled out in many cities, including Vilnius, Lithuania; central Paris; the old city of Barcelona and Boston’s North End. It’s in the process of being introduced in a host of other cities across the world this month as some urban centers tentatively emerge from lockdown ...

"There’s more to (Charles) Marohn’s idiosyncratic 'Strong Towns approach' than municipal finance."

This is a good summary of the Strong Towns philosophy as interpreted from a conservative perspective. As Charles Marohn has toured the country promoting his book, he seems to be in position to be questioned from "both" sides (liberal and conservative), which might be the best indication yet that he's on to something.

Is American Sprawl Already Bankrupt?, by Addison Del Mastro (The American Conservative)

On tour, the 'Strong Towns approach' weathers some criticism and provokes plenty of thought.

GREENBELT, Md.—As urbanist and activist Charles Marohn spoke here last month, expounding on the “spooky wisdom” in his Strong Towns book, the setting itself made for an interesting coincidence.

Marohn addressed a mostly older crowd in Old Greenbelt’s community center, an impressive art deco building that dates to the city’s founding under a landmark New Deal program. Greenbelt was an early planned community and a public works project, so it’s an interesting place to talk about Marohn’s advocacy of incremental development, and humanity’s coevolution with the traditional city. As such projects go Greenbelt has been quite successful, though it struggles with a once-shiny, now-degraded stretch of sprawl along its major thoroughfare, sometimes dubbed “New Greenbelt.”

Perhaps it is fitting that Greenbelt was platted and built during the Depression, however, because it is the post-Depression era—not the later post-war era—that Marohn identifies as the point when we abandoned the traditional, time-honed approach to building our places. And when it comes to the poster child of urban failure, Detroit, he notes that there is at least one area of agreement: “Detroit is some very different place from anywhere in North America,” he says to laughs. Detroit, however, weathered the Depression better than most American cities, and so, mistaking correlation for causation—and no doubt with encouragement from Detroit’s primary industry—virtually all urban and suburban development henceforth copied the Motor City’s sprawling, automobile-dependent pattern (which, ironically, was itself adopted after the core city was already affluent and famous).

Marohn’s core contention is that, at a high level, that development pattern was itself what bankrupted Detroit and intensified its poverty and decline. Furthermore, because nearly every post-Depression place is built on the Detroit blueprint, America writ large can look forward in 20 or 30 years to the same fate. It’s quite a claim, but it’s based on what appear to be hard and inarguable numbers. We’ve simply built too much stuff per person, far more than tax revenues or even reasonable debt loads can ever maintain. It doesn’t help that we build so much at once—entire neighborhoods built to a “finished state”—so that the cost of maintenance all comes due at once in a tidal wave of decline.

There’s more to Marohn’s idiosyncratic “Strong Towns approach” than municipal finance, however. There’s a fascinating mediation on the traditional city as a sort of complex, adaptive organism that has co-evolved with human civilization; an emergent system with its own rules, not a fragile monoculture. There is deep, time-honed, iterative wisdom embedded in the physical forms of places as built until the 1930s. Every pre-Depression city in the world “charted the same iterative course,” starting with a dirt street and some wooden shacks, and ending, if it got that far, in magnificent architecture and bustling, well-paved thoroughfares. These cities were not created, you might say; they evolved. To Marohn, building a mature city, all at once and to a finished state, is something like trying to turn a bud into a flower. There is something about the architecture of human society that militates against it. “Why is it like this?” Marohn asks. “I don’t know. It’s complex and it’s spooky” ...

Making this place walkable will require understanding concepts as well as exercising the ballot.

We care about walking because it is the most natural, cheapest, energy efficient, space efficient, and accessible way to get around. Cities are the colonies of humans, so we should build them for humans, because what else would we build them for?

Campaign finance, perhaps?

It seems to be the Deaf Gahan way, seeing as money is the only thing he understands amid an ongoing, raging personality disorder.

Meanwhile, who better than a serious accident/wrongful death attorney to provide a working definition of a pedestrian?

A pedestrian is a person on foot or using a conveyance propelled by human power (skates, skateboard) other than a bicycle. Pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, and highway construction workers are known as pedestrians. Pedestrians also include disabled persons who may be using powered devices like self-propelled wheelchairs, tricycles, or quadricycles.

Today is Matt Brewer's funeral. We still don't know the outcome of the investigation into how a driver killed Matt on Monday evening, although we know quite well that city government will seek to deflect responsibility, refuse to discuss the matter publicly, and in all likelihood blame the victim, if implicitly.

It is repugnant behavior, but then again, so are they. As noted on Thursday, we're obliged never to forget Matt, who was a lovely human being, and to remember him in part by working toward rebuilding this car-centric city into a safe, walkable place, whether our craven local officials are willing to extend themselves or not.

To me, either they cooperate in making this city safe for pedestrians, or we vote them into oblivion. In the months to come, let's get straight to it.

What Makes A Place Walkable, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

 ... To measure if a trip is walkable, there are four factors we should consider: safety, distance, convenience, and comfort.

Safety
Having to walk alongside 45 mile per hour traffic, cross a multi-lane highway without crosswalks, or cross over a slip lane while drivers have a green light giving them the right to fly through—these things are outright unsafe. You do not want to risk your life with every trip. For walking to be safe, either all the motorized traffic around you should be going at a safe speed (25 miles per hour or less) or you should be segregated from it (protected or buffered sidewalks, or walking routes that can avoid walking alongside high speed traffic altogether).

Distance
Your destination must be no more than a reasonable distance away—about a mile (around a 20 minute walk) is the upper limit for most people. The area within a reasonable walk is referred to as your walkshed. If you live in Harlem and work in Tribeca, both in Manhattan, you would not likely walk your 7.5 mile commute everyday despite it being a pretty straight walk with sidewalks and thorough "Complete Neighborhoods" the entire way.

Convenience
Walking must be a convenient way to get around—which relates to the distance of the walk, but also that other modes are inconvenient enough that it outweighs the inconvenience of walking. Do you have to pay for parking? Do you have to waste 10 minutes fiddling around with a parking garage two blocks away from where you are trying to go? Does traffic move at a crawl? Is your destination so close that it will actually take longer to drive there?

Comfort
I listed comfort last, because I have seen many places where people walk because walking is the most convenient way to get around, despite narrow sidewalks (thanks to on-street parking on streets that are too narrow to support it), trees and poles blocking the sidewalk, pavement in very bad shape, etc. However, comfort is important in encouraging us to walk. Factors that add to walking comfort include well-lit streets at night, a street layout that does not make pedestrians feel like second class citizens (by allocating pedestrians no accommodations), building fronts that face the street, and no large blank walls (when you have variety and granularity, your brain gets rewarded by seeing progress as you exert energy, making walking feel less exhausting). Comfort is rated lower than safety, distance, or convenience because we should not fall into the trap of thinking people will walk if we just give them wide sidewalks and pretty landscaping. If there is nothing within walking distance worth walking to, what's the point?

Good points aplenty: "The big urban mistake: Building for tourism vs. livability."

Team Gahan and Develop New Albany should be locked into a room together.

That'd be enough in itself, but they shouldn't be allowed to come out.

Okay, at least not until each one of them has read this article and are compelled to comment publicly.

As we know, they're unlikely to read this or any other essay, so sound off, fellow dissidents. How is Dear Leader doing according to the criteria herein? I'm sure the upper echelons at Flaherty and Collins have a point of view.

Public housing residents likely do, too. Thanks for the link, MW.

THE BIG URBAN MISTAKE: BUILDING FOR TOURISM VS. LIVABILITY, by Arian Horbovetz (The Urban Phoenix)

... I’m painting with a bit of a broad brush, but essentially what so many cities are currently experiencing is the dilemma of whether to invest in large urban draws that will bring outside money in, or invest in a growing and changing downtown residential population that yearns for investments in keeping them there. To put it simply, do cities invest in big projects that create an entertaining space that grows tourism, or do they invest in the people that have already taken a risk by moving back into their long-dormant downtowns?

LEAP

City leaders, this one’s for you. You can either cater to your new residents by going into the downtown apartment buildings and listening to real people, or you can hop on the big ticket project train en route to a revolving door downtown. You can either build for livability or build for fleeting, often overrated promises of tourism revenue. You can facilitate local small business and community development, or you can create a short-lived wow-factor by opening the floodgates to developers and business interests who take money out of our communities. You can empower and invest in your new downtown residents and let THEM be the ambassadors for our growing urban paradises, or you can ignore them and build casinos and other flashy complexes that cater to the outsider and likely line the pockets of someone beyond the boundaries of the community.

The choice, as always, is yours to make. Choose to invest in your residents and local business owners… the people that invested first… tourism, development and financial success will likely follow. Empower your people, honor the risk they took by taking one yourself, and like happy employees of a strong company, they will take care of everything else.

Shared points of value: "Taking Sides? With Walkability, There’s No Need."

Given our own perennially miserable Rosenbargerian experience locally, it's an almost revolutionary idea.

To get walkable places, advocates of good urbanism have to answer “What’s the value to me?” for both developers and the public.

The author's three-part format identifies the topic and provides points of value for developers and the public alike.

Walkability
Quality Building Fabric
Open Space and Trails
Frontages
Variety of Housing Types

It is clear and concise, and accordingly, there's almost no chance Deaf Gahan can hear it.

Taking Sides? With Walkability, There’s No Need, by Arti Harchekar (Opticos Design)

As advocates of walkable, livable places, we’ve been involved in urban design discussions around the country and worldwide, observing, learning and understanding firsthand the key steps to successfully creating walkable places—and supporting existing ones.

Form-Based Coding is a key tool to unlocking walkability, but we’ve found simply having empathy for all parties at the table can be paramount. While almost always interested in building the long-term value of a community, administrative staff may be facing certain political pressures in the present. At the other end of the room, developers are often focused more on a near-term gain than long-term assets. Working through design alternatives that positively impact both of these interests can be challenging.

A rule of thumb? To get walkable places, advocates of good urbanism have to answer “What’s the value to me?” for both developers and the public. Here are some of the top discussion points we’ve seen gain traction with both “sides” of the urban design discussion.

Walkability

What Is It? Having amenities and jobs close to housing; building activity geared to the public realm; a physical environment that’s nice to be in, not just pass through

Developer Value: Walkability adds long-term value by catering to the 50% of the population that considers being able to walk to daily goods and services a high priority. Near-term value is gained through narrower streets in well-connected networks by generating better access to the lot and adjacent lots, reducing traffic speeds, reducing stormwater runoff and reducing cost for construction and maintenance. Reductions in traffic speed can potentially increase adjacent residential property values. Long-term value is gained through the ability of such a network to be able to adapt more easily to unexpected market shifts.

Public Value: An interconnected network of streets with pedestrian-oriented characteristics adds long-term value by creating a better balance of land uses and economic generators. Narrower streets in well-connected networks decrease accident rates, facilitate mobility choice, and enable the reduction of vehicular miles traveled.

What they're saying: As the GOP candidate for county commissioner, Billy Stewart just surprised the Hell right out of me.

In the race for Floyd County Commissioner (District 3, but we all vote) there'll be four candidates.

One of them is perennial contestant Tom Lenfert, who is running as an independent. At the moment, he has no identifiable web presence, and even if a web site materializes, it isn't likely to matter very much.

Previously, I've told you who I'm voting for in the battle to replace the incumbent Republican, Steve Bush.

I'll be voting for Dennis O. Roudenbush, the independent candidate for Floyd County 3rd District Commissioner.

Given the national mood, perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that while both independent candidates for commissioner seem willing to be known as such, I can find no record of affiliation on the web pages of either mainstream political party nominee.

One of them is Josh Williams, who is a Democrat. The other is Billy Stewart, a Republican. As soon as Williams posts something of substance, I'll try to afford him equal time. In the meantime, I saw something interesting on Stewart's Facebook page.

The text:

Floyd County will be receiving $136 million from the sale of Floyd Memorial Hospital.

Currently there are several plans being considered on how to spend and invest these monies. One proposal is to share some of the money with other local governments.

I'm in favor for the proposal to share some of the money with other local governments.

Under this proposal $20 million would be set aside for projects in the City of New Albany, $1 million for Georgetown and $250 thousand for Greenville.

This would not be direct payments to other local governments but a commitment to spend money on local projects that would benefit those communities.

Let me know your opinion on this proposal as it is your money we are talking about spending.

Are these "plans being considered" originating with Republicans or Democrats? It simply isn't normal for Republicans on the Hill to be this benevolent. As a helpful hint to Stewart and anyone else considering a CARE package of this magnitude, please consider bypassing the current occupant. We really don't need another water slide for the dog park.

Shifting to Stewart's web site, we find another indication that he's not reading from the usual county political script: Future Growth/Urban Sprawl.

As New Albany is the largest and best-equipped community for commercial growth, the County should be working with the City to help develop these areas. Whether it’s shopping and dining or industrial activities, New Albany has the pieces in place to grow wisely. New Albany success is also the County's.

Commercial growth has a very limited place in the county. Ten years ago, I moved my family to Floyd County. My wife and I wanted to live in an area that had good schools, a welcoming community and an environment conducive to raising children. We found that and much more in Floyd County. While growth can be good by bringing jobs and much needed taxes to the county, urban sprawl is not. We must strive to preserve these basic traits that make Floyd County such a wonderful place to live.

I'm a bit dizzy. There's a Republican from Georgetown advocating density for the city and an end to urban sprawl?

And he'd like to make $20 million available for the city's use?

Admittedly, I'm intrigued. Think about these two words, which Stewart might consider defining more specifically:

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. 

"What we have to address now is making livable, healthy, safe, and sustainable cities," (Jan) Gehl says.

Photo credit. 

Go to the article for the details. As always, the point isn't so much that New Albany should embrace outright such ideas from the realm of larger cities. Rather, it's that until we begin thinking these thoughts, we'll be unable to borrow from these ideas and adapt them to make a great, smaller city.

5 Rules For Designing Great Cities, From Denmark's Star Urbanist, by Diana Budds (Fast Company)

Danish architect and urbanist Jan Gehl has spent decades making sure cities work for people, not the other way around. Here's how.

... "What we have to address now is making livable, healthy, safe, and sustainable cities," Gehl says. It's a topic he's written about in his books Cities for People and Life Between Buildings, and spoken about in The Human Scale, a documentary about his life's work. His research and theories have inspired a generation of planners and urbanists who are intent on reclaiming cities for people. On the heels of a recent lecture he gave at the Van Alen Institute in New York, we asked him about the most pressing urbanism problems of today and what he thinks the path forward should be.

1. STOP BUILDING "ARCHITECTURE FOR CHEAP GASOLINE."
2. MAKE PUBLIC LIFE THE DRIVER FOR URBAN DESIGN.
3. DESIGN FOR MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCES.
4. MAKE TRANSPORTATION MORE EQUITABLE.
5. BAN CARS.

"A recent Newsweek article on urbanism is chock-full of nonsense."

You can't reinforce this point often enough: A "free" market has not determined our development patterns. 

The Media Attacks Urbanism: A recent Newsweek article on urbanism is chock-full of nonsense, by Michael Lewyn (Planetizen)

... But where the article errs is in treating this as an immutable fact of life, rather than as something caused by a wide range of government policies. For the past 60 or 70 years, government at all levels has made suburban life easy and urban life hard: by building highways to facilitate suburban commuting, by insuring mortgages in suburbs but not in cities, and by moving urban schoolchildren around in the name of racial balance while tolerating overwhelmingly-white suburban public schools.

And because our zoning system gives neighbors of a development disproportionate weight in determining what gets built and how much, it is easier to build new housing in exurbia (where the only neighbors are trees and wildlife who don’t know how to pack a zoning board meeting) than in urban areas full of easy-to-outrage neighbors. As a result, some cities don't have enough housing to go around, forcing middle-class households into suburbia.

Of course, large chunks of the Newsweek article are less about logic than about emotionally loaded language designed to inflame ...