North Coast Online

Why This Runs Counter To All The Theories

The Instapundit theorizes on downtown Knoxville's comeback.

JAMES LILEKS ON DOWNTOWN BEAUTIFICATION: "If you’ve ever visited one of those sad deindustrialized cities with a moribund core, you know how they tried to bring the downtown back: banners and trees. If not trees, then flower baskets hanging from ornamental light fixtures. But certainly banners. If you hang something from every block that says History District or Pennsylvania’s Culture: On the Grow or Home of the 2003 Upper West New York Jazz Festival people will come back."

He's right that that doesn't work.  But downtown Knoxville has gotten better -- the Insta-Daughter and I had lunch downtown on Market Square today (her idea) -- and it was a bustling scene. Knoxville tried the trees, banners, brick-paved sidewalk stuff. But what mostly worked was businesses starting on their own, and people moving downtown. There's now a booming downtown scene, but it's pretty much happened spontaneously, not because of the city's various development schemes, which have been going on since Nixon was President. But one thing has made a difference: Parking! It's easy and cheap to park, and that's key.

It happened spontaneously and there's lots of cheap, easy parking?  The planning class will not be pleased.

 

Be Aware, Be Very Aware

The Anti-Planner alerts us to an upcoming tsunami of pro-planning propaganda.

               

On November 8, the American Planning Association celebrates World Town Planning Day. So it seems appropriate to celebrate Anti-Town Planning Week on the antipodes of November 8, namely the week that contains May 8.

During that week, the Antiplanner will review a number of city and town planning disasters that haven’t previously been mentioned in this blog. If you have any suggestions about what plans the Antiplanner could or should review, please feel free to let me know in the comments here or by sending me an email. It would be helpful if the plans are available on line.

Even as you read this post, Buffalo's pro-government planning enthusiasts are writing and revising the op-eds that will mark May 2007.  Check back here (often) to maintain your sanity.

 

The Plan, Boss, The Plan

Can you really plan a city of 50,000 from scratch?  They're trying in California: Playing SimCity for Real.

Downtown

San Jose and Las Vegas have been trying to reinvigorate their downtowns for decades -- with little success.

Despite its anemic condition, most visitors to San Jose at least know where downtown is. That is not the case in Las Vegas. The historical centre, with its string of small casinos and its neon cowboy, once seemed glitzy. It is now a shadow of the Las Vegas Strip, which has grown dementedly since the late 1980s, building ever larger, more exuberant hotels. Despite offering better odds than their competitors, the downtown casinos took in $630m last year, compared with $6.7 billion on the Strip. And they are the brightest spots in the area. Beside them lie cheap motels, shuttered shops and bail bondsmen.

Local boosters now hope that high-rise apartments will bring life and money downtown. Perhaps, but not soon. A wobbly property market has shaken out several projects. The scale of development at present—120 condominiums built, with another 2,748 under construction or taking reservations—is small stuff in a metropolitan area that added more than 70,000 residents a year in the 1990s, most of them in the suburbs.

Out of desperation, Las Vegas has resorted to the sort of downtown development Buffalo has depended on for years -- the government.

The only reliable way to bring people downtown is to force them. Las Vegas has put federal, county and city courts a few blocks to the south of the original Glitter Gulch, together with a jail. As a result, local offices are filled with lawyers. [Ed., Sound familiar?] San Jose's council has moved downtown into a glass tower designed by Richard Meier. The building is striking, especially as it sits in a fundamentally low-rise area. A city official who needs spare parts for his car need walk only one block.

I don't know that the article proves anything other than that modern cities perhaps don't require a busy central business district anymore.   I'm pleased that ours is showing signs of renewal, but I can't really think how that will improve the area's overall health.  But please, if you're interested in such, read the whole thing.

Why Some Prosper

Why do some cities prosper while others wither away?  Some of it's certainly due to taxes and the local business climate, but there are other forces at work, too.

At least part of the answer stems from their underlying cultures. In his "Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia" (1979), E. Digby Baltzell argued that Boston Brahmins, with their belief in authority and leadership, embraced a sense of responsibility for civic life, while Philadelphia Gentlemen, with their inward but judgmental Quaker ways were deeply unconcerned about their city's welfare. Over the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, they abdicated their role in government and watched indifferently as Philadelphia became, by the 1960s, the worst run city in the nation. The Brahmins might have been intolerant and unpleasant while the Philadelphians were open and charming, but the Brahmins cared about their city--and so, subsequently, did the Irish politicians with whom they warred and the Italians who replaced the Irish.

Such cultural analysis--long out of fashion as too soft (as as opposed to econometrics) or too racist (who is to say that one culture is better than another?)--is due for a comeback. It starts to explain, in a way that mere fiscal analysis does not, why Miami has become the gateway to Latin America, why Los Angeles rules the Pacific Rim and why Chicago controls the Midwest. And it helps us to understand how New York City moved in 30 years from the humiliation of near bankruptcy to being the dominant city on earth.

Please, read the whole thing.

Killing With Kindness

The rebuilding of Main Street has caused a lot of pain in the University District -- which is supposed to benefit from it it.

It has been three years since the city began its largest and one of its most expensive highway reconstruction jobs on Main Street in University Heights, a stretch of road in North Buffalo that sees 26,000 cars daily.

When the Heights part of it is finished this summer, few disagree it will be time and money well spent. But for the residents who have seen business drop and quality of life decline, the end can't come soon enough.

"It has been significant, highly significant," said Jon Welch, owner of Talking Leaves bookstore. "It's been rough on most of us. I don't think there isn't anyone who hasn't been impacted."

University Heights was already a struggling neighborhood before the reconstruction began.  The loss of the bulk of UB's student housing to Amherst combined with a drop in the drinking age which cut local bar patronage and the general flight of Buffalo's middle class to the suburbs (Charlotte's) were already resulting in the district's worsening outlook.

Throw in a three year construction project and you might just duplicate in University Heights the destruction of downtown during the last major Main Street reconstruction -- the building of the subway.  In addition to reining in New York State's government, someone should lasso the engineers in the DOT who design these projects.

They look lovely on paper but they have the potential to destroy the cities they're designed to help.

Who Owns Jane Jacobs

That an unrepentant right-winger, such as I, would embrace the writings of Jane Jacobs should settle the matter. But many on the left wish dearly to claim her ideas on urban affairs as their own.  And while it would be foolish to think she was a conservative (she did move her family to Canada to spare her sons the Viet Nam draft,) there's nothing in her writings on cities that could be interpreted as approving the left's big-government ideas either.

City Comforts Blog addresses the issue.

Overall a pretty good radio discussion on Jane Jacobs at Christopher Lydon's Open Source Radio. Some of the guests — especially anthropology prof Neil Smith — had a distinct anti-market bias, which was a big weakness, especially as Smith in particular seemed quite ill-informed. For example, he suggested that our urban problems must be laid at the feet of the real estate industry and that housing should be produced by non-market entities, such as "tenant cooperatives."

There are two problems:

1. Non-market entities can and do already take part in the housing market.
2. I defy a group of non-specialists to produce even a single-family house in today's extraordinarily complex regulatory environment.

What some left-wingers don't quite get is that housing is expensive because it is valued. The builder's profit margin is not the difference between a cheap housing market and an expensive one. It is expensive to build, period. Moreover, windfall profits in extremely tight markets are not the creation of the real estate industry but of society at large and of regulation in particular, regulation initially forced on government by liberal neighborhoods. At least that's the story from Seattle.

Oh well, it was still a good show and it was public radio, so what does one expect but a liberal bias? And the show did bolster my point that now that Jacobs is dead, we will see ferocious battles to capture her memory for one or another perspective, which I guess should act as a tribute to her importance. I urge Lydon to follow-up with more shows on Jacobs' legacy in particular and on the built environment in general.

Indeed. And no right-wing ideologue he.

 

Overall a pretty good radio discussion on Jane Jacobs at Christopher Lydon's Open Source Radio. Some of the guests — especially anthropology prof Neil Smith — had a distinct anti-market bias, which was a big weakness, especially as Smith in particular seemed quite ill-informed. For example, he suggested that our urban problems must be laid at the feet of the real estate industry and that housing should be produced by non-market entities, such as "tenant cooperatives."

There are two problems:

1. Non-market entities can and do already take part in the housing market.
2. I defy a group of non-specialists to produce even a single-family house in today's extraordinarily complex regulatory environment.

What some left-wingers don't quite get is that housing is expensive because it is valued. The builder's profit margin is not the difference between a cheap housing market and an expensive one. It is expensive to build, period. Moreover, windfall profits in extremely tight markets are not the creation of the real estate industry but of society at large and of regulation in particular, regulation initially forced on government by liberal neighborhoods. At least that's the story from Seattle.

Oh well, it was still a good show and it was public radio, so what does one expect but a liberal bias? And the show did bolster my point that now that Jacobs is dead, we will see ferocious battles to capture her memory for one or another perspective, which I guess should act as a tribute to her importance. I urge Lydon to follow-up with more shows on Jacobs' legacy in particular and on the built environment in general.

 

A Strong Downtown Doesn't Necessarily Stop "Sprawl"

City Comforts Blog hits on a "truth."

Downtown development does not necessarily reduce suburban "sprawl."  In fact, the two may feed off each other.

Larger buildings with more people & activity in them will (if the street-level is designed correctly -- that's the key) make downtown Seattle more interesting, comfortable etc and will enhance the entire region's overall attractiveness. A truly urban and urbane CBD will increase Seattle's global prominence. It will draw yet more business and people to our region, thus increasing demand for new space of all types in every part of the region.

(And I am not even going to get in this post to the fact that the CBD housing market and the suburban one are very different and serve a different part of the human life-cycle. With rare exceptions, there is no substitution of downtown condo for detached dwelling i.e. the idea of  "family-friendly" housing downtown in a chimera.)

(Mind, I am not aware enough of the specifics of the zoning changes to be for or against them. In general I share the City's goals; I am all for more development downtown, though I think the impact fee aspect is typical cheapskate Seattle ""Who me? Someone else should pay." Subsiding affordable housing is a good idea? Yes.Then why should buyers of high-density housing — arguably doing the right thing from an environmental perspective — have the burden placed on them? Typical sanctimonious Seattle BS: find the nearest target of opportunity and exploit it. If subsidizing housing for defenseless populations — not "affordable" — is a good idea then all of us should take part in funding the subsidy.)

But it is the connection between downtown development and growth elsewhere which is the fallacy. It's dream world to believe that in any but the most marginal & remote way new construction downtown will lessen demand for new construction in other areas of the region, especially when it comes to housing nuclear families. It's good to have a vibrant downtown for many reasons but the major one is simply to have a vibrant downtown.

There is too much pool-playing, looking for caroms and ricochets, and "gaming" going-on. Just do the things you want because in themselves they are beneficial — here a walkable, cheerful, comfortable CBD — and not because of some second, third, and fourth level impacts which you hope to instigate by clever finagling. In this case, as I say, making the core neighborhood of the region — Seattle's CBD — more interesting makes the region more interesting and thus actually promotes development everywhere. Ironic. Some would say a "damned if you do or don't" situation. There is truth to that if you don't like growth. It's Annoying. Frustrating. But it's the way real estate works. Good planning provides (or should) a "context of certainty" within which people can make large investment decisions. "Really good planning" actually makes an area more desirable and hence promotes growth. Ironic indeed. (Btw, I am not suggesting that Seattle has had, though with some notable exceptions, such really good planning.)

Good insight.  Jane Jacobs might be proud of him.  The one does not preclude the other.

Smart Growth and Stupid Tactics

Oregon is looked to as the future for "smart-growth" advocates.  Portland was the first large city in the US to define a city boundary beyond which development could not take place.  And Portland's example has become the rallying call of advocates across the country to duplicate its efforts.

But Oregon's policies have not been as popular at home as they are in other parts of the country.  In 2004, Oregonians approved a ballot measure that would have required the government to compensate landowners for the loss of property value when the government decided it had found a "higher" public use and wished to restrict the owner's options.

The voters' decision was voided in court and has been appealed.  The appeal won.

Oregon's ballot measure, which passed with a mere 61% of the vote, required authorities to either compensate landowners for any reduction in the value of their property, or exempt them from the regulations. This was the second time voters had passed the measure, the first version having been tossed out on a technicality by the state's notoriously liberal Supreme Court.

This time, however, the state's highest court surprised everyone by declaring that its only job was to examine whether the measure contravened the state constitution (it clearly did not), and that whether the measure is "wise or foolish, farsighted or blind, is beyond this court's purview." What brought about this healthy new respect for democracy isn't clear, although it could be the court is weary of intervening on behalf of every advocacy group that loses an initiative vote.

In any case, the decision is especially timely as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court's egregious Kelo decision of last year. Other states are crafting versions of Oregon's law, and a few, such as Wisconsin, had put legislative efforts on hold pending the outcome of Oregon's litigation. This week's victory may well inspire more Americans to continue defending that most basic of Constitutional rights: owning property.

"Smart" growth may indeed be "smart."  But smart smart-growthers might begin to think that the "smart" way to achieve their goals might be to "attract" people to their point of view rather than forcing it through legislation or judicial fiat.

Adaptive Re-Use

Yesterday Smart City discussed the problem facing many cities of finding a use for sports stadiums that no longer have a team.  This was likened to the situation many smaller towns have when left with vacant big-box stores.

It's ironic in a way that in Buffalo we're turning an empty hockey arena into a big box.  It occurs to me that those small towns with empty K-Marts might think about turning them into, well, hockey arenas.