Kaid Benfield's Blog: Environmental Justice

America’s poorest and wealthiest big cities

2008-09-16T14:06:07Z

Andrew Macurak has a good post on the National Housing Institute's Rooflines blog about the latest census rankings of poor and wealthy cities:

"The U.S. Census Bureau recently released Income, Earnings, and Poverty Data from the 2007 American Community Survey, and with it announced a new class of America's poorest big cities: Toledo, Memphis, Newark, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami, Cleveland, and Detroit.

"Compare this with its ranking of America's wealthiest locales: Plano, San Jose, Anchorage, San Francisco, San Diego, Virginia Beach, Seattle, Anaheim, Riverside, and Honolulu.

"The factors behind these rankings may seem obvious. The wealthier cities are newer and farther west; the poorer cities are older and primarily located in the Rust Belt. The disabled and those unable to afford private transportation might have difficulty navigating Anaheim or Riverside, and a plane ticket to Hawaii can be out-of-reach for even middle-class Americans."

Another way of looking at it is that, while both sets of locations have sprawl, it's worse in the wealthy ones.

Macurak points out that there is also a related but more subtle factor affecting the rankings, though, having to do with how jurisdictions draw their municipal boundaries:

"It's well-established that the poor both gravitate toward and are frequently unable to relocate from center cities due to the myriad factors that perpetuate residential segregation. It's also well-established that many wealthy folks tend to locate on the ever-expanding suburban fringe. And in Pittsburgh's case, the actual municipal boundaries of the City of Pittsburgh largely include only the center city-less than 8 percent of the surrounding urban county's land area, and somewhere around 25 percent of the county's population. Compare this to San Diego, which occupies more than half of San Diego County's land area and holds almost 39 percent of its population.

"Simply put, more residents of far-flung, affluent areas live within the actual municipal boundary of the City of San Diego than the City of Pittsburgh, because the City of San Diego has a wider, more inclusive boundary."

Macurak believes that the rankings of counties give a more accurate picture of the distribution of wealth, with the suburban counties in metro New York, DC, and San Francisco showing as the wealthiest and counties in the deep South and border areas as the poorest.

Read the entire interesting post here.

An open letter to the next president on sustainable development (part 2) (reposted)

2008-09-09T13:31:07Z

Now that the nation's two major political parties have, for better or worse, formally nominated their candidates for president and vice president of the United States, I am reposting these two entries, with some minor updating. They were originally posted on August 12 and 13, when half my readership was on vacation anyway. ;) Please feel free to enrich the discussion with comments.

Dear Mr. President-elect*:

As I was saying last time, America is entering a period of unprecedented growth and building that will challenge us as a people. To maximize the quality of life for all Americans in a climate of growing demands for limited financial and environmental resources, we will need the best of American skill and ingenuity, and we will need enlightened and dedicated leadership from our highest-ranking officials.

An agenda for sustainable development

To that end, I propose that your administration take the initiative to shape a national agenda for sustainable development. Although this has never been done before, the time has come when we can no longer afford to be merely reactive to the problems that come with unplanned growth.

If you are like most CEOs, I know you don't have time to read something lengthy, so I am going to be brief. We can help you with the details later. To get to it, I urge that you build a more detailed plan around four basic goals for sustainable development:

Help states and communities reinvest in our cities and in our older towns and suburbs. Nothing you can do for helping people while you help the environment will be more important. Many of us in the land-use field would be honored to work with your staff to create programs and incentives for redevelopment, with guidelines to make sure that building is inclusive, mixed-income, walkable, and transit-accessible. Give priority to vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed properties, and to locations close to public transit stations.

Building (and rebuilding) where we already have infrastructure rejuvenates communities, displaces sprawl, shortens car trips, and makes efficient public transportation more feasible. It is simply the best way to conserve financial and environmental resources while reducing the amount of development we are spreading across the rural landscape. It is also a great way to bring services and opportunity to long-neglected populations. Look at Dudley Street in Boston, Old North in St. Louis, and the rebuilding of North Charleston (SC) for great examples of the kind of community involvement and reinvestment that can make our cities great again, if we can provide the right kind of help.

Build a world-class public transportation system. Just as we built a world-class Interstate Highway System beginning in the 1950s, today we need to marshal our national resources to build a state-of-the-art system of public mass transportation that reduces pollution while strengthening our communities and efficiently taking Americans where we need to go. More of us are turning to public transit now than at any time in the last 50 years, and ridership is soaring, but systems are straining to meet the demand.

Serving the new, more populous America will be a much more demanding task than we have had before, and we will need more efficient ways of getting around than we have today. Today, extensive availability of transportation services coupled with compact development patterns enable Europeans to take public transportation to work four times more frequently than Americans. Only 41 percent of trips in Amsterdam are made by car.
While matching that level of performance may take time, especially outside of our very largest US cities, there is no reason why a world-class system of attractive, comfortable, frequent, coordinated and convenient buses, streetcars and subways cannot become the mode of choice for many more Americans.

Make basic green building mandatory. Given advances in building materials and systems technology in recent years, it is no longer as burdensome as it once was to incorporate basic low-carbon and resource-conserving features into new homes, office buildings, schools and other structures. Yet the results in improved environmental performance can be dramatic. To reduce carbon emissions and resource waste, every new building in the United States should meet basic green standards such as those promulgated by the United States Green Building Council. This can be accomplished by tying state and local standards to federal infrastructure dollars; and we can use public loans to finance any additional costs associated with the green technology, since increased energy and water efficiency pays for itself over the long run.

Help our metropolitan regions plan for growth instead of just responding to it. Our overwhelming multiplicity of local jurisdictions and municipalities – greater Chicago had over 250 of them by one recent count – creates competition and inconsistency that practically guarantee chaos in our transportation patterns and blights on our landscape. This needs to change.

Metropolitan planning organizations are already in place in most regions, and some have done outstanding work. But there is not nearly enough good planning to meet our challenges, and much of the best of it is only advisory. We need to strengthen our MPOs with a set of performance goals and strong achievement incentives to help their regions accommodate growth while reducing automobile dependence and per-capita carbon emissions, reducing per-capita infrastructure spending, maintaining housing affordability, and conserving our watersheds, forests and farms beyond the suburban fringe. We also need to provide assistance to regions and communities for updating outmoded zoning regulations, whose emphasis on uniformity and single-use districts too often stands in the way of innovative practices.
Where we have implemented great planning, it has produced great results. Portland substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions and automobile use per resident between 1990 and 2005 while increasing transit usage 75% and tripling bicycling, even though emissions and driving in other cities soared. Arlington, Virginia nearly quadrupled housing and office growth along a major subway line while maintaining lovely neighborhoods of single-family homes nearby and experiencing only negligible increases in automobile traffic. Across the border, the province of Ontario is implementing a terrific plan that will allow greater Toronto to grow by nearly 3 million residents in 30 years, through walkable, transit-supported neighborhoods, while preserving a 2-million acre greenbelt just outside the developed area. Let's help our metro regions replicate these successes all across the country.

We all know that we must reduce our nation’s carbon emissions (38 percent from buildings; 32 percent and the fastest growing portion from transportation), and also that we must absorb the impacts of our expanding population in a much more sustainable way than we have in the past. But we can do it, using the best of American business and know-how working under supportive policies. Imagine a country of walkable neighborhoods, shorter commutes, transportation choices, healthy homes, less time stuck in traffic, and more disposable income, complemented by a beautiful landscape of working forests, productive farms, and conserved environmental lands. It is what my friend John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee, calls “the convenient remedy to the inconvenient truth,” and it is within our reach with vision and leadership.

A lot of us are hoping, Mr. President-elect*, that you will supply that vision and leadership.

Offered with great respect for your office,

Kaid

____________________

*(whoever you turn out to be)

An abridged version of these comments is scheduled to run in Shelterforce magazine.

Reminder to readers: Comments on the substance are always fair game, but we cannot accept comments on candidates or the election. Thanks.

An open letter to the next president on sustainable development (part 1) (reposted)

2008-09-08T14:01:12Z

Now that the two major political parties have, for better or worse, formally nominated their candidates for president and vice president of the United States, I am reposting these two entries, with some minor updating. They were originally published on August 12 and 13, when half my readers were on vacation anyway. ;) Please do feel free to enrich the discussion with comments.

Dear Mr. President-elect*:

As you may know, America is entering a period of rapid growth that will have a profound effect on our national well-being. As a result, you and your administration will have an unprecedented challenge, but also an unprecedented opportunity to help states, cities and towns shape our communities to maximize quality of life for all while conserving environmental and economic resources.

Unprecedented growth

In particular, by 2030 we will have a population increase of 70 million new Americans, accompanied by employment growth of 40 million new jobs, both compared to 2005. We will also experience an amazing expansion of our built environment, to the tune of 50 million new and replacement homes and 78 billion square feet of offices, shops, schools, and other nonresidential space, along with potentially massive amounts of transportation and municipal infrastructure required to serve it.

Our nation has never faced this amount of growth before in so short a time. How we respond (and, not to put pressure on you, but also how you respond) will determine whether our great nation can maintain an equitable and prosperous society, and whether we can secure a sustainable, healthy environmental future for our children and grandchildren.

The sustainability imperative

We must not allow growth to occur in the same way as in latter half of the 20th century. Suburban sprawl has forced citizens and businesses alike to drive ever-longer distances to get to work, to serve customers, to go to school, and to pursue shopping and recreation. At the same time, because of chaotic, wasteful development patterns, meaningful alternatives to driving have become unavailable for most Americans. The results include astounding growth in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, excessive energy use, air and water pollution, and needless consumption of natural ecosystems and farmland.

Tragically, the results also include a range of serious social problems, particularly for urban populations left behind as growth and investment fled to outer suburbs built on what was once forest or farmland.

Moreover, all this has also been hurting our economy. Traffic congestion due to automobile dependence and inefficient travel patterns wastes some $78 billion per year in lost productivity and wasted fuel. Rising per-unit infrastructure costs in spread-out subdivisions waste municipal resources. At home, transportation is now second only to housing in claiming over 20 percent of an average household’s budget, and over 40 percent of the average budget for those of lower income. These numbers are only going up with rising fuel prices. We are already seeing the tip of the iceberg of serious economic consequences in the form of precipitous drops in home values and rampant home foreclosures in our suburbs, and stress on family budgets because of the rise in the costs of gasoline and energy.

Impacts on global competitiveness

This is hurting us not just at home, but also in the global marketplace, as US businesses are plagued with inefficiencies not felt so severely by our international competitors. At the end of the last century, Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy found that, on average, residents of American cities consume four times as much gasoline per capita as residents of European cities, and nine times as much as residents of Asian cities. This is due in no small part to automobile use per capita in the US that is 2.41 times that of Europe even though economic productivity per capita was only 0.85 that of Europe. America spends 24 percent more of its gross economic product on trips to work than does Europe.

We can fix this

The good news, Mr. President-elect*, is that we can avoid an exacerbation of these consequences and even reverse damaging trends if we get ahead of these problems and shape our new growth efficiently and equitably. But the signs are clear that, if we do not, the strain on our national well-being and economy will be immense; we will remain dependent on large quantities of imported oil in perpetuity; and our government will only continue to disappoint the overwhelming majority of Americans (not to mention residents of nations elsewhere who look to the US for leadership) who hope that under your administration we can once again become environmental leaders.

I have taken the liberty of preparing a few ideas that I hope you and your staff can think about as you work your way through these challenges and opportunities. Please look for them in my next letter.

Offered with great respect for your office,

Kaid

______________________________

*(whoever you turn out to be)

An abridged version of these comments will appear in a forthcoming issue of Shelterforce magazine.

Reminder to readers: Comments on the substance are always fair game, but we cannot accept comments on the election or candidates. Thanks.

As we consider Gustav, award-winning Katrina documentary enters national distribution

2008-09-02T12:53:48Z

Fortunately, Hurricane Gustav has not turned out to be another Katrina, as major storms go, but it appears mild only by comparison. Hundreds of thousands are without power; evacuated citizens are getting by in shelters; the sewers in New Orleans are nonfunctional this morning; and it will be days before people can return to their neighborhoods. There is a series of additional storms lining up to wreak havoc in the Caribbean and southeastern US.

By coincidence, I had already written this post a couple of weeks ago while beginning a vacation and had scheduled it in advance to run this week, before I knew we had reason to worry about yet another Gulf Coast hurricane. Now, of course, it seems especially timely.

Salon has a good story up on Trouble the Water, the stellar award-winning documentary on Hurricane Katrina from the point of view of two 9th-Ward survivors, one of whom made some home video during the storm. It is great, great stuff.

My own review of the film is here. I saw an extended clip at a conference in February and blogged about it, after which I received a call from one of the film's directors, Tia Lessin. Later, Tia was kind enough to invite me to a screening of the whole movie, which is really one of the best documentaries I've seen, in part because of the streetwise charisma of the two main characters, and of course because of its message, more implied than expounded.

The film just began a commercial run in New York and Los Angeles, and will be making its commercial theatre debut in DC at the E Street Cinema on Friday, September 26, for one week only. Wherever you are, watch for it and go see it. Here's a 2-minute trailer:

The response to Gustav has, of course, been much better than that to Katrina. Lessons appear to have been learned. Salon also has another good story up this morning tying the two storms together and discussing the lingering cynicism felt by some New Orleans residents about government response.

Update 11.28am:

I arrived at work this morning to 326 email messages after my time out of the office. One of them, though, was from Trouble the Water's producers, who as of last Friday add the following:

"After we screened "Trouble the Water" for delegates and lawmakers at the Democratic National Convention this week, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu tearfully embraced Kimberly and Scott and declared that all Americans should see the film.
"In this week's Time Magazine, Richard Corliss called "Trouble the Water" "an endlessly moving, artlessly magnificent tribute to people the government didn't think worth saving." The Wall Street Journal called the film "a deeply moving story of resilience and redemption."
"After opening to sold out theaters last weekend in New York, "Trouble the Water" extends its run in New York and Los Angeles and expands to Atlanta, Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Traverse City, Michigan. Next weekend, the film opens in San Francisco and the Bay Area . . ."

An open letter to the next president on sustainable development (part 2)

2008-08-13T13:57:03Z

Dear Mr. President-elect*:

An agenda for sustainable development

Help states and communities reinvest in our cities and in our older towns and suburbs. Nothing you can do for helping people while you help the environment will be more important. Many of us in the land-use field would be honored to work with your staff to create programs and incentives for redevelopment, with guidelines to make sure that building is inclusive, mixed-income, walkable, and transit-accessible. Give priority to vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed properties, and to locations close to public transit stations.

Building (and rebuilding) where we already have infrastructure rejuvenates communities, displaces sprawl, shortens car trips, and makes efficient public transportation more feasible. It is simply the best way to conserve financial and environmental resources while reducing the amount of development we are spreading across the rural landscape. It is also a great way to bring services and opportunity to long-neglected populations. Look at Dudley Street in Boston, Old North in St. Louis, and the rebuilding of North Charleston (SC) for great examples of the kind of community involvement and reinvestment that can make our cities great again, if we can provide the right kind of help.

Initiate strong programs for growth planning and performance achievement at the metropolitan scale. Our overwhelming multiplicity of local jurisdictions and municipalities – greater Chicago had over 250 of them by one recent count – creates competition and inconsistency that practically guarantee chaos in our transportation patterns and blights on our landscape. This needs to change.

Metropolitan planning organizations are already in place in most regions, and some have done outstanding work. But much of their best work is only advisory. We need to strengthen our MPOs with a set of performance goals and strong achievement incentives to help their regions accommodate growth while reducing automobile dependence and per-capita carbon emissions, reducing per-capita infrastructure spending, maintaining housing affordability, and conserving our watersheds, forests and farms beyond the suburban fringe. We also need to provide assistance to regions and communities for updating outmoded zoning regulations, whose emphasis on uniformity and single-use districts too often stands in the way of innovative practices.
Where we have implemented great planning, it has produced great results. Portland substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions and automobile use per resident between 1990 and 2005 while increasing transit usage 75% and tripling bicycling, even though emissions and driving in other cities soared. Arlington, Virginia nearly quadrupled housing and office space growth along a subway line while maintaining lovely neighborhoods single-family homes nearby and experiencing only negligible increases in automobile traffic. Across the border, the province of Ontario is implementing a terrific plan that will allow greater Toronto to grow by nearly 3 million residents in 30 years, through walkable, transit-supported neighborhoods, while preserving a 2-million acre greenbelt just outside the developed area. Let's develop initiatives that help our metro regions replicate these successes.

Build a world-class public transportation system. Just as we built a world-class Interstate Highway System beginning in the 1950s, today we need to marshal our national resources to build a state-of-the-art system of public mass transportation that reduces pollution while strengthening our communities and efficiently taking people where we need to go. More Americans are turning to public transit now than at any time in the last 50 years, and ridership is soaring, but systems are straining to meet the demand.

Serving the new, more populous America will be a much more demanding task than we have had before, and we will need more efficient ways of getting around than we have today. Today, extensive availability of transportation services coupled with compact development patterns enable Europeans to take public transportation to work four times more frequently than Americans. Only 41 percent of tips in Amsterdam are made by car.
While matching that level of performance may take time, especially outside of our very largest US cities, there is no reason why a world-class system of attractive, comfortable, frequent, coordinated and convenient buses, streetcars and subways cannot become the mode of choice for many more Americans.

Make basic green building mandatory. Given advances in building materials and systems technology in recent years, it is no longer as burdensome as it once was to incorporate basic low-carbon and resource-conserving features into new homes, office buildings, schools and other structures. Yet the results in improved environmental performance can be dramatic. To reduce carbon emissions and resource waste, every new building in the United States should meet basic green standards such as those promulgated by the United States Green Building Council. We can use public loans to finance any additional costs associated with the green technology, since increased energy and water efficiency pays for itself over the long run.

A lot of us are hoping, Mr. President-elect*, that you will supply that vision and leadership.

Offered with great respect for your office,

Kaid

____________________

*(whoever you turn out to be)

Reminder to readers: Comments on the substance are always fair game, but we cannot accept comments on candidates or the election. Thanks.

An open letter to the next president on sustainable development (part 1)

2008-08-12T13:35:28Z

Dear Mr. President-elect*:

Unprecedented growth

The sustainability imperative

Impacts on global competitiveness

This is hurting us not just at home, but also in the global marketplace, as US businesses are plagued with inefficiencies not felt so severely by our international competitors. At the end of the last century, Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy found that, on average, residents of American cities were consuming four times as much gasoline per capita as residents of European cities, and nine times as much as residents of Asian cities. This was due in no small part to automobile use per capita in the US that was 2.41 times that of Europe even though economic productivity per capita was only 0.85 that of Europe. America spends 24 percent more of its gross economic product on trips to work than does Europe.

We can fix this

Offered with great respect for your office,

Kaid

______________________________

*(whoever you turn out to be)

Reminder to readers: Comments on the substance are always fair game, but we cannot accept comments on the election or candidates. Thanks.

Of the community, by the community, and for the community: the rebirth of Old North Saint Louis

2008-06-14T23:51:39Z

Every now and then I run across a story that is so good, that feels so right, that I thank my lucky stars for the freedom NRDC gave me to evolve my career into working for better, more sustainable communities. This is such a story, and it reveals an historic, diverse, inclusive neighborhood that is reclaiming its identity, restoring its infrastructure, empowering its residents, and securing its future. The community wins, and so does the environment, because the Old North neighborhood in Saint Louis is the very antithesis of sprawl.

Here are some images depicting the building stock in Old North before restoration and what one of the revitalized blocks looks like now:

I learned about Old North from John Burse, an architect with the Mackey Mitchell firm in Saint Louis, which features sustainable design in its practice. After we met briefly at the AIA annual meeting in Boston last month, John got in touch and told me about how neighborhood revitalization in Old North is contributing overall to a better regional environment through reestablishing density in a disinvested area and combining a traditional walkable community, affordability and historic preservation. The three projects in the neighborhood that John has been involved with represent a combined $52 million effort over the course of the last 8 years.

As John reports, “If you consider that Old North, once a neighborhood of 40,000, dropped to a low point of about 2,000, these projects represent a considerable shot in the arm. The work we have undertaken is geared towards making this place ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable.” Applause, please.

On the left below is the location of Old North, as its name suggests just north of downtown. (Man, the Mississippi looks brown in that image from Google Earth.) On the right is a tiny image (click on either image for a larger one) of the site plan for what will become one of the community’s new focal points, Crown Square:

According to Sean Thomas of the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, the Crown Square project involves the redevelopment of 27 vacant and deteriorated buildings, including several on blocks adjacent to the former pedestrian mall featured on the site plan. The red and blue colored buildings on the site plan are all historic rehabs, the colors denoting primarily commercial (red) or primarily residential (blue). Sean reports that most of the buildings include a mix of uses, with residential upstairs and commercial/retail space on the street level.

One of the great success stories of smart growth over the last decade has been the revitalization of older inner city neighborhoods. But one of the risks is gentrification; if the redevelopment is not done with great care, the community’s longtime residents can be priced out as real estate values go up. This won’t be the case in Old North, because much of the community’s planning has been shaped by the residents themselves, working with the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance. Affordability and diversity are hallmarks of the neighborhood’s restoration.

The community’s web site has a short history. Here is a bit of it:

“The Old North St. Louis neighborhood was first developed in 1816 . . .In the latter part of the nineteenth century, large numbers of Polish immigrants settled in the near north side, including present day Old North St. Louis. Old North St. Louis also has an Afro-American population dating back long before the Civil War period . . .
“More recently, immigrant arrivals to the area came in the 1930's, during and after the Depression. Many current residents can trace their origins back to small farm communities in Southeast Missouri, Arkansas, and other states in the south. At this point, the neighborhood was crowded and thriving. Factories, shops, and homes were interspersed, in the classic "walking city" pattern. Some small businesses have a long history in the neighborhood. The North 14th Street Shopping District, the center of the area's commercial activity, has a Businessman's Association dating back to 1902. Stores, like Crown Candy Kitchen and Marx Hardware, are family owned and operated for more than three generations.
“The period after the Second World War ushered in another turning point for the neighborhood. The country was pursuing a life of prosperity, one sign of which was a house in the suburbs. Federal policy, private lending policy, and housing developments provided an incentive to build new homes rather than stabilize older neighborhoods. Many residents moved to the suburbs, encouraged by new housing development and highspeed expressways . . . With the elimination of federal [anti-poverty] funding in the 1970's, the pace of housing demolition increased, but little new housing was built, resulting in declines in both the population and housing stock.”

The history is too rich to recount it all here, but a confluence of circumstances, including the formation of the neighborhood-based Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, enlightened community development leadership, and determined residents, have turned things around dramatically. (In some ways, the Old North story is reminiscent of the recovery of Dudley Street in Boston). The Restoration Group, in particular, has initiated home-building and rehab partnerships; works to save historic properties; coordinates beautification work; and sponsors pot-luck suppers, a street festival, an annual home tour, and much more. The neighborhood even has a history trail and a poetry trail ("Word Up"!).

Do visit the neighborhood’s web site and blog, and also take a peek at the Crown Village development’s site for a close-up look at part of the work and one of the community’s emerging home developments.

The success of places like Old North and Dudley Street, and some of the good community development work of enlightened architecture and development practitioners like David Dixon and Jonathan Rose, makes me think I should write my next book about these great stories. And, as a matter of fact, I am thinking of doing just that.

Affordable housing without the stigma: it's all in the detail

2008-05-28T00:30:49Z

I know it may shock readers to learn this, but I am not a regular reader of the Financial Times. I do kind of like its flesh-colored visual tone, though, and my first-language reading options have been limited while in Germany and the Czech Republic.

All this is a rather indirect way of introducing the subject at hand (sorry, Ian), which is that the FT has run a very good story ("All in the detail: Thoughtfully designed affordable housing can help remedy social problems," by Mark Ellwood) on how good design can help make affordable housing fit into a neighborhood so that both its residents and neighbors regard it with more pride and care. Having grown up in an era when it seemed like any sort of subsidized housing was designed to be as dreary as possible, I love it that good people are putting thought into this subject and creating great projects.

This is part of what the HOPE VI program, which I cited in an earlier post, is about, of course. It is also a subject dear to my heart, since I was born into postwar public housing in Hickory, North Carolina, where I lived with my parents until they could afford something a little better some years down the line.

Ellwood's article in the FT cites a number of champions of the concept, including Brad Pitt, Habitat for Humanity, and especially Ray Gindroz, professor emeritus of architecture at Yale and new chair of CNU:

[Gindroz] started his firm during the civil rights movement and from the outset has focused on how social problems can be solved – or at least, eased – through architecture.
He believes any house that looks or feels like a low-cost afterthought will be treated that way by its residents. “Every neighbourhood in the world has a set of physical as well as social characteristics and our approach is to create dwellings which are consistent with their surroundings,” he explains.
One experience in particular helped Gindroz refine his design theories – a public housing do-over in Norfolk, Virginia. The city’s renovation budget had been approved and standard plans to replace windows and kitchens readied; then Ray was brought in to reimagine the project. “We met extensively with the residents and they identified the particular elements of a ‘regular neighbourhood’ – and they did call it that – which they didn’t have.”
For example, there were no chitchat-ready porches; the red brick everywhere was utilitarian and lacked finishing white trim; and without ornament of any kind, homes more resembled barracks than residences.
“They didn’t have fences to define the backyards and there was no way of protecting their front lawns from gangs that tramped over them. And the police chief told us the best security is a front garden with flowers in it: it’s a [psychological] signal to the drug gangs that this is not an easy place to do business,” Gindroz explains. “All that was needed was a little white fence at the corner of each garden.”
What’s more, when Gindroz and his team retro-fitted porches on to the Norfolk houses, they decided to use neo-classical columns made from wood instead of cheap industrial siding.
“It was to the absolute horror of the maintenance crews of the housing authority,” he chuckles. “But it turned out that they have been carefully maintained by the residents because they have become objects of pride, a touch that makes the area feel like ‘a regular neighbourhood’.”

Read the whole article here. You can also watch a short video of Ray talking about the importance of this issue, climate change, and other matters in which CNU plans to be engaged.

There are reasons that range beyond the environmental to support activities like these. This is about community, and building an inclusive society. But this is also environmental: We need cities to be strong, safe, and comfortable for all, in order to overcome the myriad environmental problems posed by unchecked sprawl. Affordable housing is a big part of the solution and must continue to be a big part of the smart growth agenda. We are quite literally all in this together. And I love it that thoughtful people like Ray Gindroz are on the job.

Great work from Boston-based smart growth architects

2008-05-15T16:59:30Z

My friend David Dixon, and his Boston-based architecture firm, Goody Clancy, has been doing some fabulous smart growth work, and I’m here to give them a well-deserved pat on the back for it.

I mention this because I’m off to Boston myself to speak at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects. (I’m somewhat relieved, actually, that they didn’t strip my credentials after my blog post of a couple of weeks ago. But seeing as how I’m participating in a session with David, a real star in the AIA, I figure I’m safe.)

Let me cite just three examples of this firm’s great work:

To begin, it’s really exciting to come across a vision as well-conceived as Goody Clancy’s plan for transit-oriented development around stops on the proposed new Fairmount/Indigo rail line running south of Boston. The plan envisions four new stations serving low-income neighborhoods, dramatically increasing the corridor’s current level of public transportation service.

The result, if the authorities approve, will be a smart-growth corridor with urban villages clustered around the new stops, affordable housing in compact development at the stations, mixed-use development, better access to jobs along the route and in central Boston, and a green corridor with improved access to parks, playgrounds and the Neponset River. Goody Clancy also has advised neighborhood groups on working collaboratively with the local authority and on a strategic approach to obtaining funding from the state legislature.

The Fairmount/Indigo vision has won a Charter Award from CNU and an Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design from the AIA.

Second, the firm has developed a plan to guide development for the historic Blackstone River Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. As part of a study of the Blackstone National Heritage Corridor, Goody Clancy developed a strategy that takes advantage of the Valley’s assets to tell the story of the birth of the American industrial revolution, to preserve and enhance Valley communities, to balance conservation and growth while promoting recovery of the river, and to stimulate new economic opportunity.

The Blackstone plan’s preparation involved a high degree of public participation to build political support among twenty communities and two states. Background work included identifying the natural features and landscape values of the corridor, recommending strategies for their protection, restoration, and management, and providing a framework for local and regional decisions in land use planning and development.

Finally, and moving out of New England and into the Midwest, Goody Clancy developed a revised master plan for Riverview, a mixed-income, mixed-use HOPE VI development in Cleveland. HOPE VI is a terrific (if chronically underfunded) federal program that provides assistance for for replacing stressed below-market housing with new designs that are integrated into their communities rather than isolated from them as much affordable housing has been in this country. In the case of Riverview, the money was available, but community opposition and feasibility issues related to earlier redevelopment proposals had blocked the housing authority from using its HOPE VI grant. The continued presence of 501 units of low-income elderly housing on the site also overwhelmed efforts to create a true, mixed-income community.

Early in the process, Goody Clancy led an intensive multi-day charrette to formulate a new vision, which drew representatives from federal and local government, current and past public housing residents, local neighborhood residents, open space and park advocates, a local community development corporation, and developers. This charrette initiated an extensive community outreach program that included public meetings, an advisory committee, and regular newsletters. The ultimate result was widespread support for the new plan from the surrounding communities and public housing residents.

The Riverview master plan, now in implementation, provides for the development of 573 units of mixed-income housing and retail on a twenty-acre site with substantial riverfront park space. The plan won another Charter Award from CNU and an urban design award from the Boston Society of Architects.

More on Goody Clancy’s planning and urban design work on their website. If I’m going to be on a panel with these guys, my presentation had better be good. Back to work on it.

Five more green apples for NYC

2008-05-01T17:00:12Z

Last week my longtime NRDC colleague Eric Goldstein posted a blog entry highlighting five laudable environmental sites (green apples) and five awful ones (bad apples). Eric got it right as usual. I am particularly a fan of his because, like me, he loves cities and, besides, he is one of a very small handful of people who were already on the NRDC staff when I first joined 27 (!) years ago.

One of Eric’s green apples is the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center, which I mentioned here in my last post as one of the AIA’s “ten greenest” award winners for 2008. It’s one of the good ones, by the way.

But in this post I’d like to offer a slightly (though not entirely) different perspective and cite some additional examples that I think New Yorkers may too easily take for granted as part of their environmental bounty:

Walkable neighborhoods

A lot of places don’t have them at all. New York has them in abundance, from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper West Side to Rockefeller Center to the most celebrated of them all, Greenwich Village, not counting the hundreds I either don't know or don't have space to mention. Living in a “24-hour” environment where jobs, homes, shops, schools, and other everyday conveniences are so close at hand saves time, promotes public health by encouraging walking, reduces carbon and other emissions that would otherwise come from driving, and fosters a sense of community. New York is one of the most walkable cities in the world. Take note of the fact that most Americans have to drive 20+ miles per day just to accomplish the tasks of normal living, and celebrate the difference in New York.

Awesome affordable green development

Two such walkable neighborhoods being constructed near each other in the South Bronx deserve special mention. (Others, too, I’m sure, but these are the two I’m most familiar with.) First, pictured on the left, is Melrose Commons. The pictured bit of green housing is part of a redevelopment plan constructed by the community residents themselves -- approximately 6,000 people, primarily of African American and Latino descent, with a median family income of less than $12,000 a year. Troubled by an initial proposal that would have squeezed many of them out, they organized and took control of the situation, working to promote development that “would be sustainable, would complement the existing infrastructure and the regional location, and would provide for future growth and evolution.”

Today, the plan includes: 2000 diverse housing units that are using green technology, preserving the historical richness of the community, and providing affordable options for residents of different ages and incomes; community open space that is visible from the sidewalk and linked to schools and community gardens; "greening" of industrial areas with recreational space development; business development that will employ community members in such enterprises as an after school center, health care services and recycling projects. They are also developing a town center for education and cultural uses, including the return to community use of a former YWCA building. Melrose Commons is participating in the LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot project, and they sure look deserving to me.

Second, in the same area of the Bronx, is Via Verde, an award-winning project designed to serve a mix of incomes through a variety of unit types, including rental, co-op, and live/work town homes. Via Verde’s form is inspired by the integration of garden and city: the connected rooftops of low-rise town homes, a mid-rise duplex building, and an 18-story tower will be used to harvest rainwater, grow fruits and vegetables, to exercise, and to relax. Additional biophilic elements connecting people to nature will include private backyard gardens, semi-private courtyards, and public learning and gardening space to provide a range of outdoor experiences.

The project, being developed by a partnership that includes my sustainability brother-in-arms, Jonathan Rose, is being designed to exceed LEED Gold standards for environmentally responsible and energy efficient design. Passive, low-tech strategies include cross ventilation in all apartments, solar shading, and aforementioned green roofs to provide insulation and control storm water. The project also incorporates high-efficiency mechanical systems, energy-conserving appliances, and renewable energy strategies, including solar voltaic canopies. In addition, smart material choices, including non-toxic paints and rapidly renewable wood products, will improve the air quality for residents and conserve natural resources. Where were these projects on the AIA’s “ten greenest” list?

Bryant Park

I really hope New Yorkers don’t take this one for granted. A shameful embarrassment in the heart of Midtown for much of the last century, this is now a treasure. To say it had fallen into hard times is an understatement. As one observer put it, “the grim joke among New Yorkers was that the police only went into the park after someone was murdered to identify the victim.” In the late 1980s, though, the welfare of the park was handed to a private entity, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. After a massive effort, today the eight-acre urban oasis hosts a football-field-sized lawn, twin promenades featuring the same species of trees as the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, six flower beds planted seasonally with 100 species of woody shrubs and herbaceous perennials and 20,000 bulbs, a carousel, a boule board, chess tables, the Bryant Park Grill, free wireless access, and 2,000 moveable chairs for pausing to take in the sights. It is an astounding success and is enjoyed by thousands of visitors every day.

World-class public transportation

This one is a no-brainer. New Yorkers can not only walk, they can ride. New York’s subway system is used by over 600,000 riders per day. It is one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world, with 468 passenger stations, 656 miles of “revenue track,” and a total of 842 miles, including non-revenue track, according to Wikipedia. The subway is also notable for being among the few rapid transit systems in the world to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This, of course, is in addition to the extensive regional rail service, and more buses and bus lines than one can count. In most US communities, the share of trips taken by public transportation is under three percent. Think about it.

Really small environmental footprint

Yes, you read that heading correctly. All this adds up to what is unquestionably the most resource-efficient and low-polluting city in the country, when those measures are considered on a per capita basis. As David Owen wrote in his thoughtful article “Green Manhattan,” originally published in the New Yorker, “if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.” (No word on where the current residents of New England, Delaware, and New Jersey might go.) Metropolitan Phoenix, which has a population roughly twice that of Manhattan, occupies more than 200 times as much land.

Owens continues, “eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.”

So what’s my point, anyway?

New York certainly has its share of problems, environmental and otherwise. I am extremely glad that some of my colleagues, including Eric, are working on them and solving them. But it also has some amazing environmental qualities, particularly for the US, that are not just particular spots like Queens Botanical Garden or Bryant Park, but systems producing environmental benefits. We don’t think to single them out because they are such an inherent part of the city’s fabric. But they deserve some apples, too. Don’t take them for granted, New Yorkers.

Greening LA

2008-04-01T03:18:09Z

I'm so looking forward to reading Occidental College prof Robert Gottlieb's latest book, Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (MIT Press, 2007). It promises as much cultural as environmental enlightenment, examining, as the publisher puts it, "how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city." How can one make sense of a place that is such an icon of all things unnatural? The reports are that Gottlieb rises to the challenge.

Personally, I fell in love with LA the moment I stepped foot there, first as a 10-year-old whose parents allowed me to go alone on an overnight flight to meet my older brother, who was already married and living there. Freeways, Disneyland, the ocean, movie sets, what's not to like for a young kid from North Carolina?

Years later, I started going fairly regularly on work trips and learned a lot more about what the place held in store for an adult, especially one with a keen interest in music. I had a couple of good mentors showing me where to hang out and such and, man, the weather was always incredible.

I have a feeling that Gottlieb's book contains some adult doses of reality to go with those idealistic notions, and so it should. But there is still a bit of the dreamer inhabiting his chosen narrative, about citizens coming together to reimagine the LA river as an urban natural resource, to close the Pasadena Freeway for a day of cycling, to make useful social context of the powerful forces of immigration and globalization that are profoundly shaping the US's second-largest city. Those, say the reviewers, are the three large themes that the author uses to tell his story.

Reading about someone making thematic sense of the superficially disjointed metropolis puts me in mind of a much older book that is one of my all-time favorites, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, by Reyner Banham (UC Press, 2001 edition). Originally published in 1971, Banham's work and I found each other before I had any interest in the environment or cities in a professional or even aspirational sense, but I was already a young architecture buff and wannabe-Angeleno. The book looks at the LA of an earlier generation than that of Gottlieb, and it is the work of someone more observer than reformer. But what a gifted observer:

"Los Angeles looks naturally to the Sunset, which can be stunningly handsome, and named one of its great boulevards after that favourite evening view. But if the eye follows the sun, westward migration cannot. The Pacific beaches are where young men stop going West, where the great waves of agrarian migration from Europe and the Middle West broke in a surf of fulfilled and frustrated hopes. The strength and nature of this westward flow need to be understood; it underlies the differences between Los Angeles and its sister-metropolis to the north . . ."

Banham's themes are the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills, and how each shaped the built environment and culture of LA. As one reviewer put it, "Banham discovered new ways of seeing and writing about cities . . . His was an architecture in place; he wrote a new kind of urban history." And he also made reading about it a heck of a lot of fun.

Highly recommended. And, as you open the book, cue up your iPod to "The Promised Land" by the immortal Chuck Berry:

Los Angeles give me Norfolk, Virginia,
TIdewater 4-10-0-9
Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'
And the poor boy's on the line

If you can keep your foot still while listening to that song, you really need some time off. Till next time.

Beneath the Roses – unsentimental small-town America

2008-03-10T18:41:08Z

Ron Thomas, former director of the once-great Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, gets credit for alerting me to a riveting new book of photography, Beneath the Roses, by Gregory Crewdson. As Esquire puts it in a highly adjectival review:

Cinematically lit. Dirty. Godforsaken. Unexplained. Careful. Quiet, even. Lonely. Really, really lonely. Where’s Waldo-esque. Damp. Heartbreaking. Haunted. Profane.

These visions of small-town America tell a different story of abandonment from that of Katrina, but the survivors in Crewdson’s work have something in common with the subjects of my previous post, Kim and Scott Roberts in New Orleans: their world has been forgotten, too.

The reviewers say it better than I can, so do read one. But Crewdson, the anti-Rockwell, owes something to that American icon, and to Edward Hopper, too. His work seems equal parts found and staged, and highly deliberate. It’s designed to make us think, and it certainly succeeds in my case.

Trouble the Water – a note from NOLA

2008-03-10T04:20:26Z

Trouble the Water is the name of a new documentary film about the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. At this point, I bet I’ve seen a half-dozen such films, but this one is the best.

What sets it apart is that it tells the story from the inside out, and from the point of view of a single remarkable couple, Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, who were stuck in their home Ninth Ward during the storm, hanging on to rowboats and rooftops and trying to help their neighbors, while recording on a home camcorder that Kim had bought on the street for $20 just days before. Their video and as-it-happened narration was edited and supplemented by that of veteran documentary filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, whose own concept for a Katrina documentary had fallen through and who happened to meet the Robertses via a chance encounter at a shelter in middle Louisiana after the storm. Lessin and Deal were the right people at the right time, and filmed Kim and Scott’s return to their home.

I was lucky enough to see an extended clip of Trouble the Water last week while in New Orleans for Regional Equity ’08, a conference that tied together issues of social equity and land use (among others). One of the conference’s plenary sessions featured the film, with appearances by Kim and Scott, Tia and Carl, and noted actor/activist Danny Glover, who is producing the work. Do watch the short video that weaves some of the film’s scenes with perspective added by its principals, and you’ll see what I mean.

Adding an amazingly upbeat note to their story of survival, Kim actually gave birth to a daughter during the Sundance Film Festival, where Trouble the Water won the Grand Jury Prize as best documentary. Deal hurried her and Scott from the festival to a hospital in a snowstorm!

Kim Roberts is also a musician who performs under the name Black Kold Medina, and you can listen to clips of her work here. The lady’s got talent.

The recovery of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still has a long way to go, with extraordinary challenges remaining, but I for one am encouraged by the fact that at least they have some of the best planning minds in the country on the job. Go here to read about some of the planning effort.

Coal miner’s granddaughter

2008-02-24T22:14:34Z

While perusing the latest issue of the excellent and soon-to-be-lamented music magazine No Depression, I came across an eloquent review of Kathy Mattea’s forthcoming album, Coal.

Mattea, of course, is the husky-voiced and melodic folk-country artist who has won numerous Grammys and whose wonderful 1986 album Walk the Way the Wind Blows has been played, oh, 40 times or so in my abode. Wonderful, wonderful collection of songs penned by the likes of Nanci Griffith and Rodney Crowell, and about as good as it gets for the genre.

Coal, the new collection, is all about the culture of coal the mineral, and mining, in Mattea’s home state of West Virginia. My colleague Rob Perks was all over the environmental and social issues of mining country in his blog entry last week, so I won’t try to repeat any of that here. But, for a different sort of introduction to those issues, go to Mattea’s website, where you can listen to a thoughtful interview (with in-studio music! click on "Coal" at the top of the site) that was first aired on Public Radio International, and just listen. Mattea’s roots in that culture (two grandfathers who worked in the mines, a mom who worked for the union) are deep indeed.

As a onetime musician myself, I am tempted to go off on so many tangents here that we might never get back to the subject at hand. But I will say that the album – which apparently won’t be released until April – will contain some of the best songs of some terrific songwriters, including DC’s Hazel Dickens, whom I used to see all the time on the #36 bus to Georgetown when I lived on that route; Billy Edd Wheeler, whose songs were some of the first I ever taught myself as a teenager and who lives in my native Buncombe County, North Carolina; and the immortal Merle Travis. There are samples on Mattea’s website where, of course, you can pre-order the album.

I wish I could link Grant Alden's review of the collection in No Depression, but it isn’t online. It is almost poetic in places: If you live in or drive through the Appalachian coal country of West Virginia or Kentucky, a fine gray grit will cover your car. It will shade your house . . . [Mattea] is someone with whom you might have a long conversation, no matter who you are, and both of you would learn something.

I’m generally not a fan of political music, since it tends to be un-nuanced and not as good as I wish at being, well, either political or musical. But I have so many connections to this album that I can’t ignore it.

So check out the music online, and if you’re a music fan pick up a copy of No Depression on the news stand. (The March-April issue also contains features on two of Canada's finest, producer extraordinaire Daniel Lanois and singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards.) You won’t be able to buy the magazine much longer, unfortunately. The issue after this one will be the last in print, although they vow to keep the website going.

I know, this post didn't have much to do with smart growth, did it? What, you thought I was a single-issue kind of guy? And, anyway, figuring out ways to cultivate and maintain a healthy economy and community (and, by the way, generating electricity) while developing and conserving the landscape is a huge part of sustainability. Coal puts all of those in bold relief. Back on topic in a more mainstream way next time.