Kaid Benfield's Blog: Green Enterprise

Will these talented partners make the definitive revitalization movie?

2010-05-13T13:30:25Z

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Washington, DC benefit party for the documentary-in-progress, The Rebirth of Over-the-Rhine. The film is about the restoration of the historic Cincinnati neighborhood of the same name, and the event was hosted by the film’s co-producer Joe Brinker, whom I’ve gotten to know a bit over the last year. Joe asked me to say a few words about the neighborhood’s potential, which is immense, and I was honored to be able to do so.

Over-the-Rhine was named by the German immigrants who settled it a century and a half ago. Like other inner-city neighborhoods, it suffered serious disinvestment and decline over the past several decades, and acquired a terrible reputation for drugs and crime as a result. But, as I wrote here last year, the neighborhood is replete with assets to build upon. Its walkability, historic character (the largest collection of 19th-century Italianate architecture in America), near-perfect location next to Cincinnati’s downtown, and opportunity to apply green technology combine to give it the potential to become one of the best-performing neighborhoods in the country from an environmental standpoint. In addition, while the community's abundance of vacant properties is hardly an asset, it should mean that the restoration can occur without displacing current residents.

It was fun to meet Joe’s very talented partners in the effort, co-producer Steve Dorst and director Melissa Godoy. I also got to hear a pretty good DC band, Suspicious Package, drink some wine, and eat a couple of Cincinnati hot dogs. But the best part of the evening was listening to Joe, Melissa and Steve talk about the film, and seeing a 14-minute clip of their work. This movie has a chance to be very good, and to tell a story that, although unique to Cincinnati’s character and history, is also representative of the comebacks of similarly situated districts in cities across the country (Saint Louis, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Denver and Boston, for example).

I won’t repeat all the things I wrote about the neighborhood last year, but I will quote a passage from the movie's website, written by Joe and quite clearly speaking from the heart:

“In Over-the-Rhine, my roots go back a century. Henry Schmidt, my great-great uncle, like so many other German immigrants, started my family’s Cincinnati story there in the late 1800s (and was soon joined by my grandfather and great uncle). He became a successful masonry contractor, with enough money to build his own house in what is now Norwood. He and his wife were childless, so they sent word back to the village of Klosterholte, Germany for their niece—my grandmother, Elizabeth Schmidt—to come care for them in their old age. Elizabeth married and had three children—one of whom is my father.

“As I grew up in Cincinnati, my first memories of Over-the-Rhine were in the 1970s. I remember the beauty and the decay, the boarded-up facades and the rich smells of Findlay Market. For me, the neighborhood embodied the most authentic strains of Cincinnati culture, from old-world traditions and architecture to African-American sounds and tastes. As I grew older, walking through Over-the-Rhine increasingly left me with feelings of melancholy and loss. It was a bittersweet feeling – one of the most remarkable and unique places in my city, a neighborhood that truly makes Cincinnati both historic and contemporary, was avoided by most and forgotten by many . . .

“But have you walked Over-the-Rhine’s streets lately? There’s a buzz, an energy: improved safety and security, renovated Italianate facades, new construction, new people, and new businesses. There is a widespread optimism and intent that I have never sensed before.

“Yet change often brings challenges and fear. Long-time residents of the neighborhood worry that they do not fit into plans for a new Over-the-Rhine. And the efforts of others who have committed decades to helping the neighborhood wonder if their contributions and experiences will be taken into account . . . Each of these groups has its own distinct vision of the future, yet all want to see a better Over-the-Rhine. Can they work together to achieve a common success?”

The clip that we saw focused on only a small part of this very rich story, but the three partners have over 200 hours of material awaiting editing, and they are still shooting. This is a big undertaking and, while perhaps a labor of love in many respects, a labor nonetheless. Joe and Steve have demanding and impressive day jobs and Melissa, whose portfolo is also impressive, doesn’t have unlimited time or resources to donate to the project, either. There is no big studio backing them. Thus the fundraiser last week, and more to come, I’m sure (one can also donate through the film's web site).

But what a worthy cause. I’m pulling for them, and I’m pulling for the neighborhood, too.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Walkability 101-B, or why it's good to be connected

2010-05-11T14:11:46Z

The degree to which our streets connect with each other has a major impact on how our communities feel and function, and a major effect also on their walkability. Generally speaking, the more connections (more frequent intersections, smaller block sizes) the better for making travel routes more efficient and attractive. This allows the substitution of walking or bicycling for some trips that in a disconnected neighborhood would be made by car, and it also shortens driving distances, reducing emissions in the process. Being connected is a good thing when it comes to neighborhoods.

I’ve written about this subject before, and so has my colleague Rachel Sohmer. I am returning to it now because David Roberts of Grist has written one of the best lay person’s explanations I have seen of how connectivity can work to improve a community, using his own neighborhood in Seattle as an example.

Look at the maps above. The one on the left shows David’s house in relation to existing neighborhood streets and a couple of parks. The one on the right shows the circuitous route (indicated in orange) he must take to get to the park at the southern end of the neighborhood. The park isn’t that far away as the crow flies (does Seattle have crows?), but it might as well be. The same map also shows (in blue) how the route could be shortened and made more direct if the neighborhood streets were better connected.

David explains the result:

“The seemingly small difference between the blue and orange routes is enough to make a fairly large difference is our daily life: we just don't go to the park much, and thus don't interact with the other [neighborhood residents] who spend time there . . .

“The map doesn't show it well, but see that spur of Dayton Ave N that juts off 138th? The houses on that little cul de sac are within a stone's throw of my place. There may be all sorts of groovy people living there, but we'll never know, because to get there we have to go north to 143rd, west to Greenwood, south to 138th, and east to Dayton. Suffice to say: we wouldn't do that unless we already knew someone there, and we'd never meet anyone there unless we did it. So we don't.”

In the next two maps, David shows how he might redesign the street pattern if he could (his post is amusingly subtitled “wherein I play God”) and, in the map on the right, how he might improve the two parks in his neighborhood as well, by creating park buffers around the reservoir and the lake. It’s really a great post, with better and more complete explanations than I am giving you here, and I urge you to read it.

In addition to David's article, Ania Wieckowski reports in the Harvard Business Review on research by Dr. Lawrence Frank at the University of British Columbia confirming that connected streets reduce driving. Residents in metro Seattle areas with the most interconnected streets were found to travel 26% fewer vehicle miles than those in areas with many cul-de-sacs. Wieckowski also notes that recent studies show that as a neighborhood’s overall walkability increases, so does the amount of walking and biking—while, per capita, air pollution and body mass index decrease.

Even though some people think disconnected, cul-de-sac street patterns are safer, research shows that belief to be misplaced. If well designed, connected streets can in fact be safer than cul-de-sacs. Reporting on the same research by Frank, Melissa Lafsky adds in The Infrastructurist, "the theory behind cul-de-sacs was that they lessened traffic, since they change the primary function of local streets — rather than offering a way to get anywhere, now they simply provide access to private residences. The problem is that this design inherently encourages car use, even for the shortest trips." Moreover, emergency response times are shorter in connected neighborhoods with more direct routes if your community needs a fire truck, police car, or ambulance, which I hope it doesn’t.

It’s difficult to go back and repair planning mistakes that we made a long time ago, but we can certainly learn from experience and do a better job as we plan newer neighborhoods. And there are things we can do to repair existing places, too, by starting modestly with foot paths, for example. Many thanks to David for reminding us why.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Interested in how to think about city parks? Get this book

2010-05-07T13:32:44Z

Peter Harnik knows more about city parks than anyone else I know. And he has now put much of what he knows into a handy new book, Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities (Island Press, 2010). I was using it as a reference literally within minutes of receiving my copy and, if you are interested in the topic, you’ll find lots in it to draw from as well.

By coincidence, a few days before the book came out, I called Peter, who heads the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land. I was working on a presentation featuring a neighborhood that has seen a spectacular amount of recent densification but, as far as I can tell, precious little in the way of new parks to serve the additional population. I was interested in whether there was a rule of thumb among park planners for how much park land should be provided to serve a given number of people.

I spent the next several days in email and telephone conversation with Peter and his TPL colleague Ben Welle being gently told that I had asked a question they would prefer not to answer. It was a bit frustrating for me, but now that I have read Peter’s book I understand his point: he believes that formulaic approaches to thinking about parks do more harm than good, and the first half of the book is devoted to how such theoretical approaches fail in real-world situations.

Along the way, Peter teaches the reader what one should consider in order to construct and manage a successful city park system: that different kinds of parks serve different functions; that different kinds of populations look to parks for different services; that parks and neighborhoods need each other to be successful; that parks in the suburbs may be created through conservation of existing undeveloped land, but most parks in cities need to be developed (New York’s Central Park may look like it was conserved, but in fact it was carefully planned and created).

Peter argues that each situation requires a planning “process rather than a standard” to address park needs and how to meet them. The elements of a good process include taking stock of current conditions, involving the public, assessing costs and benefits, a budget and timeline, an implementation assessment, and so on. Quantitative data are relevant (e.g., population density is the single most important factor in assessing park needs; spending per capita is more revealing than acreage per capita) but never dispositive.

The second part of Urban Green comprises chapters describing 15 ways of finding park space in the city. They range from buying park land outright to incorporating it into redevelopment schemes to making innovative use of rooftops, schoolyards, reservoirs and even cemeteries. I don’t agree with all of them, necessarily (I’m not ready for someone to play Frisbee on my loved ones’ graves, but maybe that’s just me), but all have been put into place in one location or another, often very successfully. The point, I think, is that to restore our cities by bringing population back, we need to think about ways of providing them with parks, and we will need to think creatively to do so. Peter is a master at doing just that and, if it’s been tried somewhere, he can probably tell you how it worked out and why.

The book doesn’t back down from a number of hard insights, such as the fears that many citizens have about parks and urban spaces, that parks can undermine needed urban density as well as complement it, and that some people now use their own yards for functions that used to be supplied by parks, weakening support for parks in some places. For the most part, there are answers and approaches to these issues, and Peter illustrates them with examples.

If there’s a second edition sometime down the line, I would like to see more photos, drawings, and maps. There is a small middle section containing a few, and presumably there would have been more but for cost. But parks make great visuals, images give meaning to words, and the concepts introduced in the chapters would be better explicated if images were placed along with corresponding text. The terrific “one principle and one illustration on each page” approach of the recently published Smart Growth Manual is one that I hope more writers in our field will emulate. I was also a bit surprised not to see mention of Savannah’s wonderful city squares – or Bloomsbury’s in London – as examples that our cities would do well to copy (of course London also has a spectacular network of large city parks, too, also not mentioned). Maybe it is because so much of my recent work has been at the neighborhood scale that these are the parks that interest me the most, but I would have liked to see more specific reference to them.

I learned a lot from Urban Green, and I expect to continue to use the book as a reference – the chapters are logically arranged, there’s a good index and excellent bibliography, and Peter is a very good and thoughtful writer. And, above all, this is a tremendously important subject: cities and smart growth cannot succeed without the integration of nature and civic spaces.

Indeed, my own life would have turned out vastly different had there not been public tennis courts near my house when I was growing up, and as an adult I want no part of a city where I am unable to find a green place to relax, especially within walking distance. Urban Green tells us how to make it happen.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

The best infomercial for smart growth you are likely to see

2010-05-06T13:34:32Z

For some time, I have been intrigued by Atlanta as a city that contains both some of America's worst-case, most godawful sprawl and some of its most encouraging examples of smart growth. On the sprawl side, the grasp of metro Atlanta grew from 130 square miles in 1950 to an astonishing 8000+ square miles today. Urbanist Chris Leinberger has called it the fastest-expanding human settlement in human history. The average employee in the region drives 66 miles per day. Atlanta is chaos writ very large.

But, on the smart growth side, I hardly ever give a presentation in which I don't show images and data for the city's spectacular brownfield redevelopment Atlantic Station, the highly innovative Atlanta Beltline transit and parks project that will spur revitalization in long-neglected neighborhoods, or the city's wonderful new urban village Glenwood Park - or all three of them. They are some of the country's very best ambassadors for smart growth.

This short video shows us Atlanta in all its chaos and glory, along with some very eloquent spokespeople on these subjects, and I'm not saying that just because some of them are my friends. It ultimately focuses on Glenwood Park, exactly the kind of walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled revitalization that provides an antidote to sprawl. Developer Charles Brewer is particularly eloquent when he describes how much of what he wanted to do there had actually become illegal under today's zoning regulations, even though the design was basically following time-honored, traditional neighborhood design.

The video was a little slow to load the first time I watched it, but it's worth it. Enjoy, and spread the word:

Sprawlanta is the first installment of a six-part video series called American Makeover. It has won an award from the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Brightening the city’s (and NRDC’s) streetscape

2010-05-05T13:27:33Z

Speaking of giving to the street, that’s exactly what DC’s New York Avenue Sculpture Project is doing, right under my office window, in the median of the street where NRDC’s Washington offices are located. The project comprises, for now, four large-scale and somewhat whimsical sculptures by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, along with some nice landscaping. The works will remain installed at least until the winter, and possibly again next spring, after which they will be replaced by works of another artist.

The exhibit is being curated by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, with whom NRDC shares the block. At one end is a basketball player sporting number 23, perfect for my love of hoops. Some say that, given the number, it is meant to represent Michael Jordan, but I’m going with LeBron (or, heck, even Shelden Williams). There is also a multi-headed “Serpent Tree,” “Three Graces,” and someone standing on a dolphin. The pieces are colorful and fun, best experienced on foot while passing by. They make our block more inviting and walkable, and I love them.

Not everyone does, apparently. Writing in The Washington Post, critic Blake Gopnik dismissed the pieces as “Plop Art,” and even threw in the culture snob’s tired intimation that Washington isn’t New York when it comes to this sort of thing. Art should be “substantial,” he asserts, not merely amusing (or, to use Steve Mouzon’s vocabulary, “delightful”). Me, I think the guy must be in need of a significant other, or at least a sense of humor. Speaking of which, renowned sculptors Claes Oldenburg, Duane Hanson, Joan Miro, and J. Seward Johnson – or their ghosts – would like to say hi.

“Bringing NMWA out into the street of our community has been a dream of the museum . . . We are confident that as the first and only major sculpture boulevard in the nation’s capital, the New York Avenue Sculpture Project will bring a new liveliness to our neighborhood,” said museum Director Susan Fisher Sterling in a press release.

The release continues:

“The artist whose work was selected to inaugurate this new public art exhibition program is the self-taught French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. Her nine to 15-foot high whimsical, visually playful and colorful works celebrate women, children, heroes, cultural diversity and love. The works represent major themes within Saint Phalle’s career, including the Nanas, Black Heroes, Animals and Totem. The works were selected in consultation with the Niki Charitable Art Trust and federal and local agencies.”

This can be a city where people take themselves very seriously, and if the NMWA, the Downtown Business Improvement District, and the city, all partners in the venture, want to make a dent in that posture, I say thank you, thank you. Eventually the project hopes to extend the sculpture for several more blocks up to Mount Vernon Square and the Convention Center to our northeast.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Giving to the street (for walkability & sustainability)

2010-05-04T13:32:18Z

Our streets (including sidewalks, street trees, fixtures and so forth) are our most important public spaces. Whether we experience them on foot, driving along, or simply through a window, streets form the places where we most often experience that elusive thing we call “community.” They are where the private realm (our houses, yards, offices, shops, churches, etc.) meets the outside world. How they look and function is of tremendous importance to how we feel about the places we live, work and visit.

Architect Steve Mouzon, who has a new book coming out, also has a recent post on his terrific blog, The Original Green, about some simple ways that our buildings and their occupants can enhance the streets on which they reside. These range from refreshing the street with a fountain (or a café), to sheltering it with an awning (or, I might add, a tree), to simply providing delight with beautiful flowers.

Steve believes, with reason, that creating better streetscapes, even one house or shop at a time, encourages walking:

“There is no greater expression of neighborliness than showing kindness to someone you may never know. We can give gifts to strangers in person, of course, but our buildings can do it, too. Imagine what your neighborhood would be like if every home and shop gave a gift to the street! Wouldn’t it encourage you to walk more, where you could savor those gifts, rather than just zipping by in a car? And as we’ve discussed here on numerous occasions, encouraging walkability is one of the most important things you can do to make your neighborhood healthier and more sustainable.”

One of the things I love about Steve’s writing is that he is unafraid to speak from and to the heart, and in such a positive way. We need more of that.

I think the lack of nourishing interaction with the street is part of what was bugging me last week about some of AIA’s ‘green’ award winners, particularly 355 11th Street and Manitoba Hydro Place, which to me add only a very cold and unwelcoming kind of beauty to their surroundings.

Other types of gifts that Steve (whom I cited in my post a few months back about urbanist bloggers who make me think) believes our buildings can provide to their streets include information, entertainment, directional reference points, places to rest, and memorials. He’s a terrific photographer and provides an image to illustrate each, including one taken “in front of the New Old Inn across from the River Windrush in Bourton-On-The-Water” (which, as I’m sure many of you know, is not far from Upper and Lower Slaughter). Read his post here.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

What will become of Pass Christian? The impact of the oil spill on community

2010-05-03T13:30:53Z

“You’ve probably had your last really good Pass Christian oyster for a while,” Captain Louis Skrmetta of Ship Island Excursions told the (South Mississippi) SunHerald. “We’re looking at financial ruin from this. We’ve pretty much realized that it is over for us for this summer, maybe even next year; who knows.”

Pass Christian, a town of a few thousand on Mississippi’s Gulf coast, east of New Orleans and west of Biloxi, is struggling for survival again. Home to the South’s first yacht club and one of the Gulf Coast’s best historic districts, as well as the hometown of ABC News anchor Robin Roberts, the Pass has seen hard times before, and all too recently. But the waters of the Gulf are its lifeblood, the basis of its seafood industry and its tourism, and all that is now very much in jeopardy because of the giant puddle of sticky ooze that is making its way to the shore, wiping out whatever life is in its path. The town’s official web site describes the community's past challenges in an optimistic light:

“Pass Christian, the birthplace of yachting in the south, has long been known as a resort style village where cool sea breezes mingle with the fragrant scents of Magnolias and Pine trees. Ancient moss-draped Live Oaks cast their shadows along scenic drive and afford rest and relaxation to the passing traveler. Pass Christian was struck by two of the strongest Hurricanes to ever hit the United States, Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We are much like the Ancient Oaks that have witnessed the history of this wonderful sea side village. We are still here, enjoying the view of the Mississippi Sound, the gentle breezes, enjoying a bowl of gumbo with friends, and sharing our history.

“Come visit our village, taste some of the best oysters ever pulled from the sea or buy shrimp fresh from one of the shrimp boats docked in the harbor, see historic homes that rival Charleston and learn of two ladies, Camille and Katrina who blew through leaving high water marks and memories.”

Pass Christian’s Wikipedia entry reports that, of its approximately 8000 homes at the time, “all but 500 were damaged or destroyed” by Katrina in 2005. The hurricane totally destroyed the public library and the nearby city hall. “In early 2007, although rebuilding was underway in much of the city, a large portion of empty, deserted homes and other structures remain.” You know how, when we discuss the impacts of Katrina on New Orleans, we stress that it was not the direct effect of the hurricane that devastated the city but the failure of the levees and subsequent flooding? That’s because the Mississippi coast took the direct hit.

Perhaps it is telling that the web site of the Pass Christian Historical Society has not been updated since 2005. The images accompanying this post speak more eloquently than words can. But the Pass has been on the rebound, however slowly.

This is in part because Pass Christian was a focus of the post-Katrina Mississippi Renewal Forum to which so many new urbanist architects and planners donated their time and expertise. Working around the clock with local officials and other volunteers, the teams crafted foundations for first-class recovery plans for the built environment, stressing traditional forms that respected and built upon the community’s historic character. There is a terrific and highly recommended 42-page summary of recommendations comprising concepts for a new city hall, walkable streets, a pattern of green spaces, respect for nature, transit routes and more. The Renewal Forum’s plans for Pass Christian could, if implemented, do for that community what the justly lauded Sustainable Comprehensive Plan is doing for post-tornado Greensburg, Kansas.

The plans were embraced by the locals, culminating most notably in the adoption of a new, form-based zoning code in 2008 that would enable exactly the kind of rebuilding that the town needed and still needs.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the plans for Pass Christian was a concept for the rebuilding of the town’s severely damaged Walmart with an innovative, pedestrian-friendly design that maintained all of the store’s square footage, needed parking and functionality while allowing it to serve as an anchor of a mixed-use development. These drawings show the damaged store redesigned as a mixed-use walkable block, wrapped with a combination of smaller boutique stores. Note how the presence of trees changes the parking lot, which would be moved to the rear:

There was considerable optimism around this concept, coming precisely at a time when the retailing giant was stressing sustainability and community in its image advertising and big-picture thinking. The prospect of an urbanist Walmart in Pass Christian was hailed in USA Today, and the company agreed to participate in a local planning charrette, touting examples of other locations where it was building more urban facilities.

Talk about wishful thinking. In the end, the company built its usual sprawling SuperCenter, a one-story "landscraper" with a giant parking lot, as unwelcoming to pedestrians and as alien to local character as ever.

The collapse of the talks with Walmart illustrates how fragile even the best concepts for sustainable planning and rebuilding can be, especially in the face of desperation (the city authorities quickly gave an exemption from its new zoning code to accommodate the retailer). Now, as the massive oil spill approaches the coast, all the hard work of thoughtful restoration planning is in peril. How can businesses find money for sustainability when they can’t find customers? How can the town address gaps in its street grid or construct new green squares when the community’s very reasons for existence are in jeopardy? Right now survival comes first, and who can blame them? One can recover from a 1969 hurricane over time, if the next disaster doesn't occur until Katrina 36 years later. But a major economic disaster on top of a recession just five years after a major natural disaster? That's different.

“I’m not so much worried about when [the spill] will get here but instead more about how long it will be here,” commercial fisherman Captain Tom Becker told Bobby Cleveland of the (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger. “I’ve pretty much blown off this season, and now I’m worried about future seasons. There’s a lot of us in the same boat — charter fishermen, commercial fishermen and essentially everybody on the Gulf Coast since the water is so much a part of our economy.”

Writing in the SunHerald, Robin Fitzgerald reports that attorneys representing the owner of a Pass Christian seafood company have filed a class-action lawsuit naming Cameron International Corporation, BP, Transocean, Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. as defendants. The suit represents all Mississippians who live, work in or derive an income from the coastal zone who may sustain loss or damage that would not have occurred "had the defendants exercised the high degree of care imposed on them.”

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Flip This Town! Wauconda, Washington sold on eBay

2010-04-30T13:34:09Z

Daphne Fletcher recently put the town of Wauconda, Washington – zip code 98859, about three hours northwest of Spokane and close to the Canadian border -- up for sale on eBay, asking price $359,000. She got $1000 over the asking price. The happy buyers-to-be are Maddie and Neal Love of Bothell, Washington, who are currently awaiting closing on their new town.

Here’s what they are about to own, according to the web site of the Wauconda Store Café and Ale Saloon:

Wauconda General Store ESTABLISHED 1898
Gas Station brand new in 2006
60 Seat Bar/Restaurant...The Wauconda Café & Spaghetti Saloon
U.S. Post Office Zip Code 98859 Wauconda, WA w/20 year lease
4 Bedroom House makes a great Bed and Breakfast
100 yr old Homestead Log Cabin converted to Garage/Workshop
4 Fenced Acre Farm with Creek, Barn, and Outbuildings

Sure looks like a diversity of uses in close proximity to me. But, wait, it gets better. Debbie Dragon, writing in American Consumer News, summarized the eBay listing’s recount of the town’s financial situation:

“Other than the post office, all other businesses have been taken over by the owner. They can be leased again or owner-run, depending on what the new owner decides. All businesses were successful with good earnings. The property is not in foreclosure. Businesses were recently leased for about $3,000 per month. Property is located on busy State highway 20 with 10,000 cars per day traveling in the summer. The area is located in a recreation area near lakes, fishing, snowmobiling, skiing, hiking, gold mining, hunting. Gold has been found in the creek on the property. Omak, Washington is located 40 minutes away and has a movie theater, Home Depot and Walmart.”

Gold! Fletcher bought the property in 2007 for $180,810, and calculates that, considering investments she has made in the property since then and transactional costs, she’ll clear about $40,000. She told Erik Lacitis of the Seattle Times that around 100 families live within ten miles of the old mining town, which a century ago reportedly contained 335 residents, three hotels, a store, boardinghouse and four saloons. But even given its more humble modern incarnation, Fletcher wasn’t up to running a mountain hospitality site indefinitely: "What do you do when 50 motorcycles show up all at once and order food?" Fletcher told Lacitis. "People were very patient, but ... "

At one point Fletcher listed the town with an agent for over a million dollars. When the price came down below $500,000 the Loves, who are Harley riders and have been familiar with Wauconda for some time, were interested, but not that interested. When the price came down to its selling price, they jumped. Their story, and Fletcher’s, are recounted in Lacitis’s article.

There is a good summary of the town’s history and nearby attractions here, and a fabulous photo gallery and video on the Wauconda Store’s site.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

LEED for Neighborhood Development formally launches to promote smart, sustainable land use

2010-04-29T13:34:48Z

The country’s first comprehensive system for defining, measuring, and certifying smart growth is now fully open for business.

Today, the three founding partners of LEED for Neighborhood Development – NRDC, the Congress for the New Urbanism, and the US Green Building Council – are announcing the national launch of the program at simultaneous events in metropolitan Washington, DC and Chicago. We are being joined by the US Environmental Protection Agency, LEED-ND’s first financial supporter, and Smart Growth America, NRDC’s coalition partner and longtime collaborator.

Previously, LEED-ND had been operating only as a pilot program, and was not accepting new registrations of projects for evaluation and certification. Over 200 projects across the country and internationally have been participating in the pilot, and 68 had been certified as of March 1.

In our press release and at the DC-area event, I emphasize that fifty percent of the buildings we will have on the ground in 25 years have not yet been built, providing us with both a major challenge to sustainability and a major opportunity to get it right for both people and the environment. We also know from research that where we build is even more important to the environment than what we build.

It is my view that, while we in the environmental movement have always been good at identifying problems – including the havoc wreaked by sprawl – we have not always been equally adept at identifying pragmatic solutions. For land use, LEED-ND is a major step forward in closing that gap, articulating the kind of development that reduces global warming emissions, land consumption, traffic, resource waste and pollution while enhancing livability. The system is built around three major categories of standards: regional location and linkages, neighborhood pattern and design, and green infrastructure and buildings.

It is emblematic of our goals that, for the DC area event, we are announcing the launch of the system at Twinbrook Station, a gold-certified, smart, walkable development (in progress) being built around a Metro rail transit station in the midst of what has long been some of our region’s worst sprawl, the notorious Rockville Pike corridor in suburban Maryland, northwest of Washington. (The Chicago event is being held at Block 37, a mixed-use project under construction in Chicago’s downtown.)

My friend John Norquist, president and CEO of CNU, says in our joint release, “LEED for Neighborhood Development contains the components for compact and complete neighborhoods. With walkable streets, appropriately-scaled schools, and a mix of amenities close by, residents can lower their environmental impact while improving their quality of life.”

LEED-ND has progressed from being just an idea in 2002 to becoming a concept, a draft set of standards, more drafts (I lost count of how many), a pilot program, and now a full-scale program in 2010. It is not perfect – how could it be? – but it is designed to be updated and improved as we gain experience. We learned a lot in the pilot program, and the fully revised standards are, in my opinion, much better. To say that a lot of hard work on the part of staff and volunteers went into making it all happen would be a serious understatement.

“Sustainable communities are prosperous communities for the occupants and businesses that inhabit them,” according to Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair of the US Green Building Council. “LEED for Neighborhood Development projects are strategically located in or surrounding metropolitan areas – often times revitalizing brownfields, infill or other underutilized spaces, opening new revenue streams, creating jobs opportunities and helping to drive the local, state and national economies.”

Thank you, John, and thank you, Rick. I can’t possibly mention everyone who deserves a pat on the back for this, and they are all friends at this point, so I really don’t want to leave anyone out. You know who you are.

Our hope is that LEED-ND will prove to be an asset for development projects that meet the standards, separating the worthy from the pretenders and giving the worthy a stamp of approval that can help their case as they make their way through the local entitlement process. We also hope it will help local environmentalists and citizens’ groups evaluate development proposals, and that it will provide templates for governments at all levels to borrow from as they upgrade their policies to support sustainable, green neighborhoods.

You can get an overview and updates on the site of the US Green Building Council, where you can also download the system's standards.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

I wish AIA didn’t define ‘green’ so narrowly

2010-04-28T13:34:04Z

The American Institute of Architects has announced its top ten green projects for 2010. Sponsored by AIA’s Committee on the Environment, the award winners are each worthy of citation for excellence in internal design, in most cases reducing their environmental impacts significantly below those of similarly located but conventional buildings while also serving as teaching exemplars. So far, so good.

But what they don’t do – or, if they do, it is generally accidental – is help shape the form of their communities in a way that further reduces impacts below those addressed by the buildings themselves. I’ve questioned AIA before on this count. We know from research that where we put a building can have a bigger impact on the environment than how we design it, through transportation emissions and the impacts related to associated neighborhood infrastructure. Even the ‘greenest’ building (judged internally) will hurt more than help the environment if it is placed in sprawl or an otherwise unwalkable location.

In other words, my view is that sustainable architecture is only worthy of the name if it is in the right places, and includes design that respects and enhances the community around it, including neighborhood walkability. I would expect the most award-worthy green architecture also to include great public spaces, be placed on well-connected and pedestrian-friendly streets, include superior public transportation connections, attain densities that support efficient use of land, and contain mixed uses in multi-building projects. The best LEED-ND projects – such as Vancouver Olympic Village or Station Park Green, for example – do all of this, and they are designed by architects, as are the buildings within them. (Watch this space tomorrow for an announcement on LEED-ND, by the way.)

But AIA chooses instead to focus on the buildings themselves (and, to an extent, their lots). That only gets you so far.

This year’s winners include the following:

A strikingly contemporary approach to historic district architecture in San Francisco, which looks stunning as sculpture but appears to front onto a parking lot and presents a mostly blank wall to the visitor;
A low-rise trophy building that has been certified LEED-platinum within a university in Saudi Arabia;
One of Brad Pitt’s Ninth Ward houses that without question addresses worthy goals but dwarfs its traditional neighbors and, to me, looks on the outside like nothing so much as small-scale ‘starchitecture’ with some NOLA ornamentation slapped on;
The sprawling City of Watsonville Water Resources Center;
A contemporary mixed-use tower in Portland, with windmills on top;
The very remotely located Omega Center for Sustainable Living (Walk Score: eight out of 100) near Rhinebeck, New York;
Kroon Hall, which houses the Yale School of Forestry;
Another contemporary tower, housing the main energy utility for the province of Manitoba;
An elementary school campus in suburban Manassas Park, Virginia;
The Homer Science and Student Life Center at Sacred Heart School in Atherton, California;

I want to stress that I am not arguing that these are bad projects. I like some of them quite a bit, and I'll concede that a concept like the Omega Center has attributes that would be harder to realize in a city neighborhood. But fully six of the ten are institutional buildings; only one is residential; the architectural style consists only of degrees of contemporary, though Kroon Hall to its credit has significant neo-traditional elevations (a brownfield redevelopment, Kroon Hall may also be my favorite).

While some of the winners do appear likely to be in walkable, transit-served urban environments, that does not seem remotely to have been a criterion in AIA’s awards selection. In fact, the words ‘transit,’ ‘transportation,’ ‘sidewalk,’ and ‘neighborhood’ do not appear once in AIA’s descriptions of the ten winners. ‘Transit’ does appear in the general introduction, but it does not appear significant enough to be a descriptor of any of the individual honorees; ‘community’ appears only twice, once in the context of Sacred Heart School’s ‘learning community,’ and once in a vague allusion to attributes of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Are not these things part of what determines whether our built environment is truly green?

I suppose AIA might argue that the jury was only interested in evaluating what the architects influenced, and the surrounding contexts were beyond their control. But architects influence neighborhood-scaled projects as much as institutional ones, and some rise greatly to the challenges of fitting into an urban setting in a way that faciliates public life and community sustainability, not just building sustainability, while respecting the neighborhood. Given that these are the projects that perform the best environmentally, they deserve to be highlighted every bit as much as the ones that were selected, and I can make a strong case that they are even more worthy.

I know that there are leaders in AIA who get it. Vivian Loftness (a past chair of the committee on the environment), David Dixon, and Bill Roschen have all held prominent positions in the organization and have all championed the consideration of community context in defining what is ‘green’ about architecture. The Institute maintains a Communities by Design staff that does great work assisting these values. (I try not to read too much into the fact that the CxD team’s advisory committee, which included yours truly, was abolished, but the fact is there.) I don’t know where the smart growth movement would be without architects; they have been our friends and mentors from the beginning.

So I don’t quite get why so few of these award winners are exemplars not only of great building and on-site design but also of urbanity, walkability, location efficiency and community enhancement.

You may visit a gallery of the winners on the Fast Company site.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

LA’s Eco-Village: a venture in intentional community and sustainability

2010-04-27T13:33:16Z

Los Angeles’s Eco-Village is a two-block, 11-acre community dedicated to intentional, ‘whole-systems’ sustainable living in the heart of the city. Its area eccompasses about 500 residents in the city’s East Hollywood and Koreatown special planning districts.

From what one can see on the web, it’s quite a place, and about as far from stereotypical Los Angeles as one can get. (Of course, real LA isn’t all that close to stereotypical LA, either.) Many residents do not own cars (and receive a discount on rent for their choice), but the community does own live chickens. A good deal of space is devoted to bicycle parking. There is a lot of communal living, including potluck dinners, meetings, workshops on permaculture approaches to sustainable urban living, and work parties. The Eco-Villagers even held a retreat to create a shared vision that, according to one of its many overlapping web sites (main site here), is still in progress. There appears to be a strong anti-consumptive vibe, and nature gets a place of honor in the community’s courtyards, gardens, streets and, for that matter, hallways.

The Village registered for the LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot program, and has articlulated a series of neighborhood planning goals:

Restoring the neighborhood’s long-forgotten but once-popular hot springs, the Bimini Baths;
Building workforce housing (“targeted to LA [public school] teachers and staff who want to live more cooperatively and car free”) above the restored Baths;
Establishing small green businesses and community services along one of the neighborhood’s commercial streets;
A demonstration of geothermal district heating;
Demonstration of a “biological living machine or eco machine that serves as a further educational facility--both beautiful and functional--to clean water for local re-use and/or clean hot waters and return to the aquifer.”

The Eco-Village was established in 1993 by the Cooperative Resources and Services Project, itself founded by Village resident and, one might say, 'godmother' Lois Arkin. CRSP’s web site explains:

“CRSP is a public-benefit non-profit established to provide educational resources for small cooperatives. The CRSP office and library have been located in the Bimini and White House Place neighborhood since 1980. The transit-rich area [note: its Walk Score is 95] is close to a Metro Redline Station, only three miles west of downtown. The two-blocks in Mid-Wilshire/Koreatown are home to a multi-ethnic working class community of about five hundred people.

“After the Civil Unrest of April, 1992, CRSP decided to put its resources to work in its own problematical neighborhood in a way that could benefit the city at large and started the Los Angeles Eco-Village demonstration project.

“CRSP currently owns the two buildings where the LA Eco-Village is located and provides funds for their basic rehabilitation and ecological retrofitting. This is done trough the Ecological Revolving Loan Fund (ELF).

“CRSP applies a whole-systems approach to community development, integrating the social, economic and physical aspects of neighborhood life to demonstrate a healthy urban community. Their plan includes converting housing from rental to permanently affordable cooperative ownership. CRSP intends for its efforts to reduce the burdens of government, while increasing local self-reliance in the areas of livelihood, food production, energy, water, transportation, recreation, waste processing and education.”

You have to wish such idealism well, I think.

While laudable, this sort of arrangement probably isn’t for everyone. To me, there seems to be a sort of early-70s, almost rural vibe to the photographs and video, with the chickens running around, shrubbery that looks like it hasn’t been trimmed since, well, ever, what appear to be stains (from water damage?) on some of the walls and so forth. If I were a neighbor, I would probably be on their case to tidy up a bit. (And it reminds me that my own early-70s neighbors were very tolerant.) But I suspect Arkin wouldn’t have it any other way, and neither would her fellow Villagers.

I’m also reminded of a small condo building I lived in back in the early 1980s. One of my fellow owner-residents was a Russian expatriate writer. When we tried to recruit him for the condo board, his eyes twinkled a bit and he said, roughly translated, “Hey, I didn’t escape one communist system just to join another. Have fun.”

I bet the Eco-Villagers do have a lot of fun. Here’s a video on the project recently produced by Streetfilms:

There are a number of other videos on the community, including this one. Arkin has written a good summary of the Village’s history here, and you can visit the project's main blog here.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Housing market strengthens for smart growth: dramatic new data from the DC area

2010-04-26T13:32:14Z

The housing market is trending ever more dramatically toward smart growth. A look at recent home sales data in the Washington, DC metro area shows how.

In particular, the May 2010 issue of Washingtonian magazine focuses heavily on the region's real estate. It contains a list of the 100 “golden zip codes” in the greater DC area that command the highest prices in home sales, indicating which have gone up or down recently in median sales price and by how much. I separated out a subset comprising two groups: those where median prices declined 25 percent or more during the last three years, and those where prices have gone up by any amount in the same three years.

I then indicated these areas on a Google Earth image of the region, marking the zip codes with 25% or more declines with red arrows, those showing increases with green house symbols. For orientatation, the area shaded in blue in the center of the map is the central city of Washington, DC. The area in dark blue along the right (eastern) edge of the map is the Chesapeake Bay. The blue river running south from DC is the Potomac.

The results display dramatically, as you can see. The images above and just below are identical, except that the one below also shows jurisdictional boundaries. You can see the outline of the city of Baltimore in the northeast corner of the map.

Basically, the only parts of the database that gained in value were in the central city of Washington and the close-in suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, and Silver Spring, all nonsprawling and served by Metro rail transit. The one semi-outlier to the west of the city that showed a gain is Tysons Corner, Virginia, whose market has likely been influenced by a highly publicized urban makeover oriented around stations on a new Metro line, now under construction. It gained in value by 0.1 percent. The far western reaches of the region, which have experienced the most new sprawl development in the last decade, have suffered the most declines.

That close-in locations are favored by the market is not news, of course. On a per-square-foot basis, central locations are traditionally more prized by homebuyers. What is news is the movement in the market that is making the relative desirability of central locations, and the relative decline of the value of sprawl, much more pronounced.

The biggest gainer in the database was DC's Tenleytown/Palisades zip code 20016 (above left, sample Walk Score: 80), at 29 percent. Tied for the biggest loser at -44 percent were zip codes 20112 (sample Walk Score: 8) near Manassas, Virginia, to the city’s far southwest, and 20769 (above right, sample Walk Score: 11) near Glenn Dale, Maryland, to the northeast. Though Glenn Dale is somewhat closer to DC, both are sprawling, automobile-dependent areas. The two images just above are shown at the same scale.

Because I focused on the extremes of the market, my regional images do not contain markers for in-between places such as Crownsville, Maryland (-20 %); DC’s Shaw (-7%); Mount Vernon, Virginia (-12%); or Fairfax 22031, Virginia (-7%). In addition, the magazine's database eliminated entirely any zip codes with fewer than 50 home sales in the past year.

The new map is consistent with one I built about a year ago (above), showing only county-level data and only one year’s worth of price change data (for 2008).

We’ve seen similar evidence of market changes all across the country, but in this area it really could not be more clear that the market is moving strongly toward the same locations that the environment favors. Those who continue to believe in sprawl (including leapfrog "urbanism” on rural land) are destined to keep losing money.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

How immigrants are revitalizing America’s fading suburbs

2010-04-23T13:30:56Z

The Urbanophile, Aaron Renn, has an interesting new post about how American suburbs, particularly inner-ring suburbs, are being revitalized by immigrant populations. His focus is on his home region of Indianapolis, but the photos he presents and the stories he recounts could just as easily be set in Wheaton, Rockville or Annandale near my own home turf of Washington, DC.

Aaron’s photo-essay suggests that, although the types of suburban retrofits urged by new urbanist thinkers such as June Williamson, Ellen Dunham-Jones and Galina Tahchieva would in many cases be appropriately holistic and elegant, they are also hard to establish and fund. As a result, what is happening in many vulnerable suburban communities, instead, is a sort of organic economic revitalization driven by immigrant communities, establishing new, often thriving small businesses (as well as residential communities) within the existing suburban fabric.

Aaron explains:

“Indianapolis was traditionally one of America’s least diverse cities, featuring only the classic black-white split. But it has seen a large influx of immigrants in the last decade. Its metro foreign born population is only 5.19%, which is small, but the Indianapolis Star reported last year that this represented a 70% population increase since 2000. Unlike some towns which have seen immigration driven almost entirely from Mexico, Indianapolis has seen a very diverse set of immigrants, that come from all over the globe, including 26,000 Asians and 10,500 Africans. The Indian population has doubled to 6,000, the Pakistani and Nigerian populations have tripled to 1,000 each. There are 5,600 Chinese and 1,500 Burmese. These aren’t huge numbers today, but given the network effects of international immigration and the lead time to build a large community (remember the example of the large community from Tala, Mexico, which has its roots in the 1970s), this represents a potential future tsunami of immigration, provided the economy stays strong, the local climate welcoming, and a bit of pro-active marketing takes place. Again, I’m sure we’d see similar diversity of immigrants in other cities, ranging from Detroit’s Arab community to Bosnians in St. Louis to Somalis in Columbus, Ohio.

“The most diverse area in Indianapolis is Pike Township on the northwest side. Though technically part of the city today, it is originally an inner ring suburban area. Its schools have children from 63 different countries speaking 74 different languages. The Lafayette Square area on the southeast boundary of Pike Township is a classic struggling inner ring commercial zone, complete with a dying mall.

“Yet the presence of all of those immigrants has led to a spontaneous renewal of parts of this struggling area in the form of businesses catering to local ethnic populations . . .”

This definitely rings true for the DC area, and I can’t help but wonder how many other regions it also fairly characterizes. To the extent it does, I think an immigrant-driven resurgence may represent the latest flowering of a longstanding American tradition, one that is really at the heart of our country’s identity and of the American Dream, using enterprise to make a better life and community here.

I can’t say that it is a tradition that was close to me in my formative years. I did grow up in a community that was religiously diverse for a southern town: although raised as a Protestant, I went to a Catholic grade school, my mother worked for a Jewish-owned company, and my high school friends were very mixed. I’m also part Cherokee and have always been proud of it. And, of course, we had the usual black/white racial divide that unfortunately was typical of much of America at the time. But we had very little of the ethnic diversity or identity that friends who grew up in, say, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia or the Southwest had. My forebears were just too far removed from their ancestry to identify as anything but American and Southern.

So the wave of immigration that many of our communities have experienced in the last couple of decades, and the multi-cultural mix that has come with it, are somewhat new from my perspective. But my sense is that it is working out for America, much more than not. And one of the ways is the regeneration of what might otherwise be seriously fading suburban communities.

True, the presence of new populations in a relatively unchanged suburban land use pattern leaves lots of environmental problems still to be addressed. But economic revitalization could prove to be a precursor to the changes needed for sustainability. Read Aaron’s entire article and photos here.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Chicago's spiffy new bike station

2010-04-21T13:31:11Z

Thanks to Streetfilms and the National Association of City Transportation Officials, here is a neat video on a great new facility in Chicago's Millennium Park. It provides all sorts of services to bike commuters, other cyclists, and tourists. I really like it:

Thanks to Ben Welle for first posting this on his City Parks Blog.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

For walkability and community, put the building on the street and the parking in back

2010-04-20T13:21:12Z

The misplaced assumption that Americans like automobile traffic more than walkable streets has created some pretty awful disconnections within our communities. One of them has been the unfortunate dogma that places (and in some cases requires) parking lots in front of the businesses, civic institutions and apartment/condo buildings that they serve, between the buildings and the street. This creates longer and more dangerous walking routes for pedestrians as well as a visual incoherence that is anti-community. It also makes public transit less attractive and viable, since the transit user’s journey from the bus stop to the store or apartment must take place through a sometimes-large parking lot instead of simply to a door on a sidewalk.

It was disheartening to see this recently on a tour of Congress Heights (photo above), a revitalizing urban neighborhood in DC’s Ward 8, across the Anacostia River from the heart of the city, and one of the city’s poorest. Many Congress Heights residents do not own a car, or only own one for a household with two or more adults. The neighborhood is well-served by both bus and rail transit, though.

The tour was mostly good news involving encouraging redevelopment, pleasant densification, and restoration of the neighborhood fabric. Part of the good news – and it is very good indeed – is that Congress Heights finally got a Giant supermarket two years ago, after going for more than a decade without a supermarket. The bad news is that it was built to a very suburban, automobile-oriented configuration, a long way back from the street. There are also some nice-looking, neighborhood-serving businesses on the same site but they, too, are separated from the neighborhood by parking:

The row of new townhomes that you see in the photos is directly across the street from the Giant and the neighborhood services and businesses. But residents on foot can’t get to shopping or the bank branch, for instance, without walking to the end of a long block, crossing the street, and then navigating their way through the parking maze, dodging traffic along the way. I’m sure the result is that, if they have a car, they just drive, even if they don’t need to carry a lot of groceries on their errand. If they don’t have a car, they are just inconvenienced, which is a shame.

The configuration was criticized by urbanist commenters (see also here), but I was told by my hosts on the tour that the neighborhood simply didn’t have much leverage in the talks with Giant over the design of the site. If they wanted a supermarket, they were going to have to accept the company’s suburban model, and they did. I don’t really blame them, and in fact I’m really glad they now have their store. But I hope that as the neighborhood continues to redevelop it will find ways to improve its walkability for residents and visitors.

The effect of parking lots on the walkability and feel of a community was the subject of a recent post by Charles Marohn on the Strong Towns Blog. This is the central area of Brainerd, Minnesota, where he lives, with parking lots marked in red:

Below Charles’s delineation of the parking lots in Brainerd are street views of some of them that I retrieved from Google Earth. Note how in one of the photos there appears to be no sidewalk, and in another (the large one) there is a small business that fronts the street, a lonely orphan given the prominence of the much larger parking lot next door:

“[Parking in Brainerd] occupies prominent, valuable real estate. In fact, one of the two most important intersections in the city - the intersection of Laurel and South 6th - is 1/4 parking. (Unfortunately another 1/4 of this intersection is a brick wall building that looks like a jail. The other half of the intersection is one of the best coffee shops around and a retail location with revolving tenancy).

“Not only does all this parking underutilize the infrastructure, generate relatively nothing in tax revenue, employ no people and occupy some of the best real estate in the city, but it also detracts from the public realm. Brainerd just sunk millions into making their downtown more pedestrian friendly, but without addressing all of the sense-of-place-destroying gaps created by surface parking, the downtown is still struggling to create that sense of vibrancy.”

Charles contrasts the situation in Brainerd to that in the planned new town of Celebration, Florida, below:

Celebration puts its parking in the rear, creating a far different and more cohesive feel to its streetscape. While it must be said that Celebration has the considerable advantage of being planned from scratch and supported with a huge investment of corporate money, the principle is still well-illustrated: you can put just as much parking in back as in front, but the result when you do is far more inviting to pedestrians and conducive to having a “there” there, as someone once said. Brainerd will have incremental opportunities to repair its town fabric, and it should take advantage whenever possible.

Larger communities can be even more ambitious, using street-facing homes and businesses to hide entire multistory parking structures behind them:

Above is a 2,800-car parking garage that serves over a million square feet of office space in Charlotte, North Carolina’s Gateway Village. You don’t see it from the street, though, because it is lined front and back with a mixed-use project called Gateway Lofts, comprising 52 homes and 8 ground-floor retail spaces. Here is what you see from the street:

Gateway Lofts, designed by Charlotte’s David Furman, won a design award from the North Carolina AIA chapter. The Lofts and the rest of Gateway Village are in an older, once-industrial part of the city that is seeing a lot of redevelopment, close to Charlotte’s uptown central business district.

Here are two more examples, from Boca Raton, Florida, left, and Boulder, Colorado, right. The Mizner Park townhomes in Boca hide a surface parking lot behind. The mixed-use buildings in Boulder mask a multistory parking structure:

Back to supermarkets, Seattle-based planner Mark Hinshaw and Portland-based market analyst Brian Vanneman believe that the wave of the future is street-based markets that anchor rather than hinder walkability in a neighborhood. The two explore the subject in the March 2010 issue of Planning:

“[M]any grocery corporations are rethinking their business model, giving up the long-standing template of a single-story box surrounded by acres of asphalt. Increasingly, these markets are going into mixed use developments with little or no parking . . .

“In the past, the lack of parking was often cited as a factor that kept markets out of urban neighborhoods. This is because for decades markets assumed that every customer would arrive by car. But this view seems to be changing rapidly as well. Some recent markets have provided only a few dozen stalls, far fewer than the standard rule of thumb. Some provide no parking at all. And these stores are doing quite well . . . [The IGA market in downtown Seattle is] one of a growing number of urban markets that cater to shoppers who carry two bags of groceries out by hand every few days, rather than transporting 10 bags by car twice a month. Buying fresh also means buying more frequently.”

(The Planning link requires a subscription, but Neal Peirce summarizes the article on Citiwire.)

I’m not sure I quite buy the viability of that model for families, or for other than very-high-density neighborhoods, but it seems well-suited for communities with a high degree of walkability populated mostly by singles and/or empty nesters. And it’s an aspirational direction, perhaps, for more in-between places. For those, I say, let’s at least put the building on the street and the parking in back.

Some advocates might just wish that cars would go away entirely, or that communities make it so inconvenient or costly for their drivers that they dwindle in number. But, for most places, that isn’t realistic and could even be counterproductive, chasing businesses out of central cities and exacerbating sprawl at a time when we should be doing the opposite. What we can realistically do is to make sure our buildings and streetscapes are fully supportive of environment- and community-friendly modes of travel. Placing the parking to the rear still allows access for drivers while attracting more walkers and transit users in front.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.