Kaid Benfield's Blog: Health and the Environment

Baltimore’s Virtual Supermarket fills the gap in food-deprived neighborhoods

2010-05-14T13:34:54Z

Thanks to Daniel and his thoughtful blog Discovering Urbanism for highlighting an innovative program designed to help residents of urban “food deserts” - neighborhoods without nearby access to supermarkets - obtain fresh, healthy food more conveniently. The program also helps draw patrons to two branch libraries by facilitating online food shopping from the libraries’ computers, with next-day deliveries to the same branches. This allows the sellers to keep costs and prices reasonable by consolidating delivery times and locations.

In particular, in March of this year the Baltimore City Health Department launched its Virtual Supermarket Project, operating at the Washington Village and Orleans Street (East Baltimore) library branches. Both sites are located in areas identified as having a need for healthy food options. Washington Village has the 6th highest mortality burden out of 55 city community areas for causes of death related to diet, including heart disease, stroke and diabetes. The neighborhood where the Orleans Street library is located ranked 19th in this category.

In the photo above, for example, Douglas Homes (red brick building), near the Orleans Street branch library, has a nearby Popeye's but no nearby supermarket.

The Virtual Supermarket Project was piloted last year as an innovative way to address food access problems in Baltimore City. The Health Department partnered with the Enoch Pratt Free Library (the city’s public library), which offered to house the program. Santoni’s Supermarket, a long-time Baltimore grocer, is currently the primary provider of supermarket items for the program. The Center for Design Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art provided ideas on marketing and branding the project.

Urban “food deserts” are neighborhoods with no supermarkets or other resources that would provide healthy, inexpensive food within walking distance. Convenience stores and fast food or take-out restaurants may be common in these areas, but they generally do not offer fresh produce or much in the way of healthy menu options. In addition, few residents of the neighborhoods targeted by the program own their own vehicles (66% of the households in the Perkins/Middle East area do not have vehicles; 48% in Washington Village do not have vehicles), making travel to a distant supermarket an obstacle.

The program’s website explains its benefits:

“Consumers will receive a printout of their order and pay at the time of ordering with [cash, checks, credit cards or food stamps]. The Virtual Supermarket submits one aggregate Internet order per session, and the Baltimore City Health Department subsidizes this delivery charge. Groceries will be delivered to the ordering site the same or next business day, where consumers will return to pick-up their orders. They will be provided with a list at the delivery time to confirm that all ordered items are included in their package.

“This system benefits the consumer because a wider selection of high quality fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy is made available in the neighborhood than is offered by local corner stores. Pooling purchases for delivery at one convenient site allows consumers to circumvent the delivery fee and the requirement that a certain amount of money be spent for the order to be delivered. Consumers do not have to navigate public transportation to get to the grocery store, nor will they have to manage hectic schedules and childcare to dedicate time to grocery shopping . . .

“Development of this model in Baltimore can result in the Virtual Supermarket's adoption in other US cities that struggle with food deserts. The overall implication, of course, is for health. Risks for obesity, CVD, and diabetes are strongly tied to diet, and research has found consistent evidence that diet is greatly affected by one's food environment and built/social environment. That is, people's eating behaviors are largely influenced by their community context, which acts to promote or restrict healthy eating. Removal of an access barrier to healthier foods via the power of the marketplace will be an important step towards ensuring that all consumers in this country, regardless of location, race, or income levels, can enjoy a range of healthy foods at fair prices. In an era where over half of disease is caused by unhealthy lifestyles and the obesity epidemic is cutting lives short, public health agencies and grocery stores can partner in a win-win scenario to expand choice and, by proxy, improve the range of foods that enable urban consumers to eat healthy and live healthier lives.”

The Health Department is also looking into the possibility of an additional site within the city’s recreation and parks system. The project is currently funded with a $60,000 grant from the 2009 federal stimulus package.

Daniel’s post contains some additional links and a food-desert map; it can be accessed here.

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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.

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

Walkability 101-A, by Roger Lewis

2010-05-10T13:35:33Z

Washington Post columnist and architect Roger Lewis has published a terrific, concise summary of why we should do more to promote walking as a transportation mode and what a community needs to become more walkable. I hope that policy advocates read it.

Although it has been a long time (late 1990s) since I was a transportation lobbyist per se, I still spend a lot of time around transportation advocates, in part because it is a major focus of NRDC’s current legislative agenda, and in part because transportation and land use are so inextricably intertwined. And although most all, like myself, have consumed the location efficiency Kool-Aid, I generally have a very hard time convincing them that community features like street connectivity and streetscapes that promote walkability are things that they should incorporate into their platforms.

Maybe it is because, as I was saying in my last post with respect to city parks, it is because so much of my thinking and work is about sustainability at the neighborhood scale, while so much of theirs is about things like carbon reduction targets and the overall structure of massive state and federal programs. The community scale matters, though, and I wish we could have a community transportation title in the next federal transportation law, to fund programs for complete streets, retrofitting places to be more accessible by connecting blocks and neighborhoods to each other, incorporating green infrastructure into transportation facilities, community planning, and pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure. It could be modeled on the highly successful and popular Transportation Enhancements Program in current law, which already funds a limited menu of community-oriented projects.

Such a program would improve our access to recreation, education, goods and services while reducing our need to drive as often or as far as we do now. And, not coincidentally, it would promote public health, help restore watersheds, and improve our quality of life. Just because the benefits can’t always be measured in carbon molecules doesn’t mean they aren’t important, or that the federal government shouldn’t be a partner with states, regions and municipalities in promoting them.

Back to Roger's column, he believes that, by focusing so intently on transit-oriented development, we may be overlooking what may be the most sustainable form of transportation of all. His column (“Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities”) is only 14 paragraphs long, but every one contains a gem. Some samples:

“Street patterns must be easily navigable and latticelike, with blocks that are not too big and intersections that are not too far apart.”
“A thoughtful mix of shade trees and vegetation beautifies streetscapes and makes them ecologically greener.”
“It must be safe to walk, day or night.”
“Because there is safety in numbers, streets lined by eateries with outdoor seating are even safer, not to mention livelier. People will walk along such streets because walking is delightful.”
“Look at cities such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris and Barcelona. These cities have beautiful streets that encourage walking. Commuters in these cities happily walk 15 or 20 minutes from a subway or rail station, or from a parking garage, to their home, workplace or school.”

The “neighborhood pattern and design” section of LEED for Neighborhood Development places a strong emphasis on the quality of the streetscape, because of its importance to both walkability and community. We will find out in implementation how much of it we got right, but Roger’s column makes me optimistic.

One more personal note before I sign off for today: Not long ago I had a friendly give-and-take with a colleague whose opening position was that design should not be relevant to policy. To be fair, I think he was implicitly referring more to architectural building style than to the design of a community, and if so he had a point; but I tried to persuade him that, in fact, neighborhood design matters tremendously to sustainability and environmental quality. While I would heartedly agree that we should take care not to be overly prescriptive in policy, my position is that advocates need to know something about design in order to have a better understanding of which policy instruments will be most successful in achieving their goals. I don’t think I convinced him, exactly, but I hope I gave him something to consider.

Roger’s column helps my case, and you can read it here.

Move your cursor over the images for credit information. Next: Walkability 101-B, or why it's good to be connected.

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.

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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.

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.

My place on the earth

2010-04-22T13:36:03Z

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

Dick Jackson, articulate and passionate on health & the built environment

2010-04-16T13:28:59Z

Dick is a nice guy and one of the true leaders in the fields of public health, sustainability, and the built environment. He is being featured in a documentary, and here is a short trailer that shows you why. It includes a moving personal anecdote about how observing a struggling older woman carrying shopping along a roadway inspired him to think about the connections:

Dick will be a plenary speaker at CNU 18, coming up soon in Atlanta.

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

The walk of life – helping Johnny (and Joanie) walk to school

2010-03-31T13:38:38Z

“Aside from reduced CO2, less traffic time and health advantages, the most important benefit of walk to school programs is teaching children self-reliance.”

The quote comes from architect and urbanist Ann Daigle, who puts into practice all the things that this blog advocates. And it’s a fitting intro to telling you about the National Trust’s important new report, Helping Johnny Walk to School. The report is a sequel to the Trust’s seminal Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School, co-authored by my friend Constance Beaumont and published in 2002.

Helping Johnny Walk stresses policy recommendations and new ways (in many cases older but now under-appreciated ways) of thinking about the role of schools in our communities. I’ve written extensively on the blog about school sprawl, where some isolated newer schools are within walking distance of nobody, occupy lots twice as big as Disneyland, and are designed so that you can’t tell one from a Walmart, other than through signage and the presence or absence of shopping carts. (See, for example, here, here, and here.) Schools should be community anchors, not drains.

The new report is authored by Renee Kuhlman, who graciously gives credit to her able partners in the task. She introduces the report in a blog post:

“A school’s location has ripple effects on everything from the health of a local neighborhood to the health of its citizens. Consider this: moving a school to the outskirts of town typically means the loss of an older or historic school building, less public and private investment in a neighborhood, and lower property values. Not to mention the longer travel distances that increase the number of auto and bus trips, which in turn raise greenhouse gas emissions and busing costs.

“But what about our kids? How are they affected by outskirts schools? Think of it this way – if a school is located miles and miles from the residents it serves, few students can walk or bike. With so much concern these days focused on childhood obesity, we cannot overlook this simple fact. The American Academy of Pediatrics certainly did not; in 2009, this esteemed group found that school location has ‘played a significant role in the decreased rates of walking to school, and changes in policy may help to increase the number of children who are able to walk to school.’”

The report stresses the many benefits of community-centered schools. Here’s an excerpt:

Community-centered schools encourage close ties with community members. Because community-centered schools are used by residents of all ages for recreation and events during non-school hours, improvements are likely to be supported through local bond measures. These schools also provide more opportunities for interaction between students, teachers, and parents because long distances are not a barrier.
Community-centered schools offer educational benefits. Since community-centered schools are located within neighborhoods, they often have a small student body. Studies have shown that smaller-sized schools see more students graduate, have better attendance records, and experience strong participation by students in extracurricular activities.
Community-centered schools increase property values. The presence of a local school supports higher property values and encourages continued public and private investment in the neighborhood. This in turn reinforces the tax base available to the schools.
Community-centered schools save on construction and operating costs. By co-locating or sharing such facilities as libraries, theaters, athletic fields, swimming pools, and parks with non-school entities, both construction and operating costs can be lowered. Furthermore, renewing a school campus often costs less than purchasing a new site, mothballing or demolishing the original school, and constructing a new facility and supporting infrastructure.
Community-centered schools offer location efficiency. Community-centered schools keep travel distances short. Shorter and fewer auto and bus trips help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save on busing costs, and lower the number of traffic collisions. Community-centered schools are also accessible by several modes of transportation, including such low carbon modes as walking and biking.
Community-centered schools help the environment. Community-centered schools take advantage of existing resources, including roads, infrastructure, and buildings. Also renovating an existing building reduces waste intended for landfills and means less land is used on the outskirts of a community. The construction and operation of buildings account for 48 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. But reusing and retrofitting existing buildings can reduce these emissions dramatically.
Community-centered schools encourage healthier families. Schools in residential areas allow children and their families to get more exercise. Florida researchers found a higher rate of walkability for schools built prior to 1950 and for those built after 1996 when the state started requiring school districts and local planning agencies to coordinate land-use decisions. During these times, schools were built within or near residential districts which gave residents multiple ways they could travel to school.

Sprawling schools, by contrast, create myriad problems, including increased traffic, reduced opportunities for exercise, weakened community ties, disinvestment and property value decline when older schools are abandoned, and higher taxes. The causes of school sprawl are just as plentiful, from inflexible minimum acreage and building size requirements that essentially legislate walkable schools out of existence, to funding formula biases, to concerns about whether older buildings can be rehabbed to address safety issues (most of them can), to incomplete cost-benefit calculations, and more. These are addressed point-by-point in the report with “action steps” to help remove barriers to neighborhood-based schools.

Highly recommended.

Just after I learned of the Trust’s new report, I was heartened to see at least one school district take some aggressive remedial action. In direct contrast to the school in upstate New York that (until embarrassment led to a change) actually banned walking or cycling to school, an elementary school in Milton, Ontario, near Toronto, has done the opposite: it is now a “walking-only” destination (bikes and scooters are OK, too). Writing on Streetsblog, Sarah Goodyear quotes her Toronto correspondent:

“The Halton School Board’s Active and Safe Routes to School and local public health officials launched the program this year at Milton’s P.L. Robertson Elementary School. Costing the school board $125,000, the ban on driving is a one-year pilot with hopes of expanding to other schools in the community in the coming years.

“So far the project has been a success, with project manager Jenifer Jenkins saying that the school quickly reached a 100% compliance rate. Surprisingly the rate stayed high even as the weather worsened, indicating a broader change in behavior. Jenkins also says that some students who qualify for buses have opted to walk instead so as to join their friends. This implies that walking will become more attractive to students as more of their peers do start doing it.”

As Goodyear writes, “A little-mentioned side benefit of encouraging kids to travel to school using their own power is that it will get parents out of cars as well.” While I can see reasons for exceptions here and there, and I would be willing to bet that the school allows them, this is terrific. Of course, you need a walkable school to begin with in order to make it work, and that's where the Trust's recommendations come in.

(Now cue Dire Straits: "Hand me down my walking shoes/Here comes Johnny with the power and the glory . . . He do the walk, he do the walk of life . . .")

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

Hi, I’m Kaid, proud to be an 'avid cyclist'

2010-03-26T13:37:56Z

Amazingly, there are some well-meaning transportation advocates who would like the phrase “avid cyclist” banned from the lexicon. Their argument goes something like, “this phrase marginalizes all who bicycle and causes people in policy positions to discount cycling as a ‘normal,’ utilitarian activity.”

Huh? The notion was first raised by Michael Druker, whose thoughtful work on “the fundamental attribution error” I cited quite recently in another post. Here’s part of what he says:

“As if it wasn’t enough that we scare people away from cycling with our exclusively car-oriented infrastructure and even a socially constructed fear of cycling, we also do it by marginalizing cycling as something done only by the kind of people who cycle. Make a mental count of how often you’ve seen news reports or commentary refer to “avid cyclists” [note by KB: almost never], and the number of times you might have used this term yourself [lots].

“Banish ‘avid cyclist’ from your vocabulary. Self-marginalizing language like this is why we can’t have nice infrastructure.”

(I’m tempted to go into a rant about how no one uses the subjunctive mood anymore, but I’ll save that for another day.)

Soon others picked up on Druker’s admonition, including Mikael on Copenhagenize.com, Brad Aaron on Streetsblog, and my fellow urbanist and cyberfriend Dave Reid. I saw tweets and retweets.

Self-marginalizing language like this is why we can’t have nice infrastructure. Oh, please. The sentiment is absolutely right – we should take care to avoid marginalizing cyclists, especially those who ride for utility – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn't accurately describe someone as an avid cyclist.

Take me, for instance – I’m taking this week off (So why am I still writing the blog, you may wonder? Good question.) and riding my bike - indoors if necessary when it’s wet outside - nine straight days. I’m striving for 40ish-mile, fast-paced rides every other day, with 20ish-mile slower rides in between, when I also lift weights. I’ve taken seven cycling vacations, five in France (sigh). At my peak fitness which, sadly, is probably a thing of the past, I could hang with cat-4 racers, if not with the likes of Amanda. Am I not an “avid cyclist”? How about Geoff, down the hall from me, who commutes to work by bike in 20-degree weather and takes 60-mile training rides on the weekends? Or my friends Bob and Barbara who, as far as I can tell, ride every day pretty much for the hell of it and have never once taken a vacation without their bikes. Bob even rides a fixie, so he gets maximum challenge out of each mile.

So I say: Don’t try to tell me not to use a perfectly good phrase that accurately describes me and many of my friends. Don’t ban the phrase, just use it properly, and I’ll stay on your side. (And read up on the subjunctive, while you’re at it.)

Thursday was a recovery day, so I took a 20-mile ride that was mostly on trails. The route took me into Georgetown with the Potomac on one side and the C&O Canal on the other, then back through the woods into Bethesda, going right by Bethesda Row, our area’s best suburban retrofit, and through lovely neighborhoods, just about all of them walkable and compatible with smart growth, and then back home.

The longest stretch was on the Capital Crescent Trail (photos at top of post and just above left), slightly downhill into Georgetown and slightly uphill to Bethesda. If I had stayed with the trail instead of veering off to return home on suburban and city streets, I would have come to where the new Purple Line transit link will begin, and run alongside an extension of the trail from Bethesda to Prince George’s County.

Wednesday was more ambitious, taking me over the rolling hills to a route that is popular among avid cyclists (!) for training, mostly flat with few stoplights until you come to the monster climb up to Falls Road (locals know it well), after which I went down to the lovely Great Falls Park (only long enough to turn around and tackle the climb back to Falls Road) and then over the rollers to Potomac Village. On the way back, the monster turned into our area’s sweetest descent, but I did go up another killer (Chain Bridge Road, above right, for the locals) near the end to earn my lunch.

If you’re a rider, avid or not, it’s now officially spring. Get on your bike and go somewhere!

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

A "complete street," circa 1906

2010-03-25T13:32:43Z

As a member of the Complete Streets Coalition, NRDC believes that streets should be for everyone: walkers, cyclists, drivers, transit users, merchants, offices, even nature. Streets comprise the most important public spaces in our communities, and as such they should be designed with ambition and care, to nourish us, not just convey us. And multiple categories of users should be accommodated harmoniously and safely.

The late-20th century notion that streets should be designed primarily for automobile traffic, with everyone else in a submissive role, is an historical anomaly. It hasn't been that way throughout most of civilization. To illustrate that point, check out this amazing video from a century ago, which purports to show the view from the front of a streetcar as it makes its way down Market Street in San Francisco. While the scene is utter chaos (and that is not what I'm advocating), and one can't help but wonder if there hasn't been some tricky video editing, it certainly depicts a shared space. Enjoy:

We can do (a lot) better than that now, thank goodness, but we could also do a lot worse than to seek to recapture some of the fundamental humanity shown in that clip as we work to rebuild and strengthen our streets and our communities.

Thanks to Amanda Eaken for pointing me to this video.

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

Best practices for smart, sustainable community development: presentation

2010-03-22T13:33:28Z

Earlier this month I had the honor of participating in a webcast on the subject of sustainable community development, hosted by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

One of the nation’s premier organizations in its field, LISC “mobilizes corporate, government and philanthropic support to provide local community development organizations (CDCs) with: loans, grants and equity investments; local, statewide and national policy support; and technical and management assistance.” CDCs are nonprofit organizations that provide programs and services to neighborhoods or towns, typically focusing on lower-income residents or struggling communities. They can be involved in a variety of activities but many are engaged in real estate development and the provision of affordable housing.

Our full webcast is available online. The purpose of the session, which was superbly organized and moderated by LISC’s Julia Seward, was to explore the relationship between smart growth and the work of CDCs, and to discuss best practices. I was joined in the forum by Don Chen of the Ford Foundation and Teresa Brice, who directs on-the-ground operations in LISC’s Phoenix regional office. There was good audience participation and quite a bit of back-and-forth discussion after the initial presentations.

I led off the program, touching briefly on the environmental rationale for sustainable revitalization; presenting photos and a bit of supporting detail on some of my favorite examples in Atlanta, Saint Louis, New York, Seattle, Houston, and Los Angeles; and concluding with a few of the trends that I think are likely to influence the field in the next several years.

With impressive technology, the whole thing was recorded so that you can see and hear our presentations as if you were a participant; you can even see my pointer moving around my slide images as I talk. You’ll have to provide a name and email address to access the session, but it is free and access is immediate. My opening presentation was about 12 minutes or so, but you can fast-forward to any portion of the 89-minute program. I was followed by Don, then Lisa, and then discussion with the participants.

Go here to see the webcast. You can also separately download the visual part of the session from the same page, but the presentations are out of sequence in the download. LISC also has an archive of previous webcasts (lots of great subjects and good presenters), including another one with yours truly from back in October 2008.

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

Distressed city neighborhoods need green investment for community, environment

2010-03-19T13:36:48Z

Distressed city neighborhoods, more than others, are deficient in environmental amenities, particularly those that are typically provided by nature. That is almost a tautology, but they especially need trees, pocket parks, rain gardens, vegetated swales, permeable pavements, roof gardens and other urban green infrastructure to provide multiple environmental and quality-of-life benefits. So says Pace University law professor Alexandra Dapolito Dunn in a terrific new article published in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review.

(Today’s post is co-authored with my NRDC colleague Rachel Sohmer, who has written here before on the benefits of urban nature and more.)

Among environmental professionals, city green infrastructure is usually discussed as a matter of stormwater management, and Dunn has written a particularly helpful introduction to the subject from that perspective. We wish she had also included an explanation of why low-density development isn't the answer, but the point here was to focus our attention on the other end of the development spectrum. Dunn believes that green infrastructure investments directed to the urban core would not just be good for the environment; they would help alleviate urban poverty.

As Dunn explains, many cities have already successfully implemented strategies to protect water resources, but “green infrastructure has additional and exceptional benefits which are not frequently highlighted or discussed. Not only can it achieve water quality goals, protect sewer systems, and recharge groundwater supplies, but it also can improve air quality, provide green collar jobs, become a source for affordable produce, reduce crime, promote community interconnectedness and reduce energy costs for the urban poor.” But, for the most part, where green infrastructure could do the most good, you are least likely to find it.

Of course, none of the quality-of-life benefits linked with green infrastructure are specific to disadvantaged neighborhoods. They benefit neighborhoods of all sorts. But Dunn’s implied point is that the absence of green infrastructure in pockets of poverty puts these already stressed communities at even greater risk. Take, for example, the higher cost of food. Low-income city dwellers must pay up to thirty percent more for food compared with low-income rural and suburban residents, primarily due to food transport costs and postharvest losses. And healthy foods, particularly produce, might not be available at all. Likewise, heavy air pollution loads contribute to high rates of asthma in poor urban communities, several times the national average.

Unfortunately, even though targeting green infrastructure programs in distressed urban areas could provide much benefit to communities in need, there are considerable legal and policy barriers in the way. As Dunn explains, retrofitting existing neighborhoods for green infrastructure isn’t cheap, and cities and community development entities are often severely budget-constrained. Even when adequate funding exists, there may be a lack of political will to direct green infrastructure investments to areas where the resulting benefits, like neighborhood beautification, might be considered less visible.

So what can we do? Dunn reviews several big-picture, long-term strategies for getting more green infrastructure on the ground, from creating more public funding opportunities to refining cost/benefit models to battling political inertia with public awareness campaigns. That’s not an exhaustive list – we highly recommend downloading the article for a closer look.

The good news is that several cities are leading the way in green infrastructure initiatives that benefit lower-income communities. The article mentions Seattle and Philadelphia, among others. Even at the federal level there is a growing recognition that green infrastructure is an effective and economical way to reach sustainable development goals. Dunn cites the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus”) of 2009, for example, which provides significant green infrastructure funding to states for water quality compliance purposes. To that we can add the recently introduced and NRDC-supported Green Infrastructure for Clean Water Act of 2009, which would establish several research centers, a dedicated green infrastructure program at the U.S. EPA, and grants to help communities – especially lower-income communities – implement their own green infrastructure projects.

No doubt we’ve got a long way to go, especially when it comes to meeting the complex challenges of distressed urban areas. But considering all that green infrastructure delivers, we remain optimistic that green infrastructure initiatives will only gain momentum and support going forward. As Dunn puts it, “given the growing stresses on urban centers and the urban poor, taking [steps] to make city life healthier and more sustainable can only yield further benefits in the future.”

Thank you to our colleague Madeline Fraser Cook, director of the Green Development Center at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, for flagging this article for us.

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

Haiti update: Mourning, builder, architects donate emergency homes, work for more

2010-03-02T13:27:46Z

Former Georgetown University and Miami Heat basketball star Alonzo Mourning has always acted with intensity and purpose, as anyone on the receiving end of one of the nearly 3000 shots he blocked during his playing career can attest. Now those attributes are being channeled into helping others, especially the people of Haiti, where over 200,000 people lost their lives and at least twice that number lost their homes in the January earthquake.

In the face of such an enormous scale of tragedy, any one person’s – or one group’s – contribution seems miniscule. But it is nonetheless significant when someone of stature steps up. In ‘Zo’s case, that meant more or less immediate fundraising through his foundation and its progeny, the Athletes Relief Fund for Haiti, co-founded with former teammate and current Heat star Dwayne Wade. Their effort has already raised some $800,000 from NBA and NFL players and alums.

Some of those funds are being applied to an effort with Miami-based prefab construction builder InnoVida and architect Andres Duany to get emergency homes on the ground, quickly. As I wrote two weeks ago, Duany has designed homes that can be manufactured offsite, easily shipped in flat-pack form, and then assembled locally in a day or less. They are made of durable materials that can withstand severe weather events and may be configured in a variety of ways to suit families’ and communities’ needs (see illustrations). The group is donating 1000 of the homes immediately, and InnoVida is also moving to establish a manufacturing facility in Haiti that can build 10,000 more while providing job opportunity and training to Haitians.

The video I embedded in my previous post – made only two weeks into their work -- reveals the thoughtful approach that the Duany and InnoVida have taken, and all of us must wish them every possible success. You can learn all about the Haitian cabins, their technology, types, assembly and application in this well-illustrated publication. Sample from the opening pages, delineating some of their key characteristics:

Are built fast. Structures that are 160 sq ft (like the Starter Cabin) can be built in 12 hours. This is nearly 70% faster than traditional construction.
Are high-quality, durable, non-flammable, waterproof and do not provide a food source for algae or mold growth.
Are strong enough to withstand earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, fires and other natural disasters.
Promote a healthier global environment by producing very little construction-site waste, air pollution and natural-resource consumption.
Can be built with no heavy equipment and unskilled labor.
Significantly reduces the amount of energy needed to heat and/or cool the structure and provides excellent noise reduction.
Can furnish built-in platform beds, table, desk, closets, cabinets, and water and septic tanks.
Can be covered with any desired finish (paint, stone, stucco, wallpaper, etc.), but it is not required to do so.

The basic cabin (there is a range of types) can sleep up to eight people.

As promising as this effort is, no one person or company has “the” idea that can put Haiti back on some kind of path towards humanity, to say nothing of sustainability. We will also need many other efforts to succeed. The “Haiti House” built by Harbor Homes, for example, uses a similar flat-pack, prefab and assembly concept, but with aluminum and steel rather than composite fiber:

Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity emphasizes on The Huffington Post that no one should be naïve about the amount of time rebuilding will take:

“When we are rebuilding, do not let the media set the time line and expectations for reconstruction. I remember vividly well known news personalities standing on the rubble of homes in the lower ninth proclaiming that 'this time next year we will see families back home.' Some well meaning NGOs, who usually have little building experience, are even worse -- 'we'll have 25,000 Haitians back home if you donate today.' In reality, here is what it really looks like;

Pre-Planning Assessments and Damage Analysis (underway, will run for a year)

Establish Community Resource Center and Reconstruction Studio (Week 6 to Month 3)

Sorting Out Land Tenure and Building Ownership (Month 6 to Year 5)

Transitional Shelters, Health Clinics and Community Structures (Month 6 to Year 2)

Schools, Hospitals and Civic Structures (Month 9 to Year 3)

Permanent Housing (Year 1 to Year 5)”

Stefanos Polyzoides, like Duany a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, also has some thoughtful suggestions that stress the importance of using local labor.

What has been sad to read, unfortunately, has been a surprising amount of sniping in the comments sections of web postings (for example, here and here), with various proponents of particular approaches stressing why one or the other of these efforts is misplaced. In my humble opinion Haiti needs all ideas and as much effort from talented people as possible. Sinclair said it best:

“There is no 'ownership' in rebuilding lives. It sickens me when I hear agencies say their processes are proprietary. If you like what we are doing either support us or steal this plan. We need dozens of tug boat NGOs working together to build back Haiti better. Let's not waste donor dollars on working in silos. Haiti has suffered enough.”

This 97-second news clip from a Miami TV station (that has not enabled embedding, unfortunately, so the link takes you offsite) gives a great mini-tour of the Mourning/InnoVida/Duany effort. Check it out. 'Zo looks like he could still play, and heaven knows my Georgetown Hoyas could use him right now if that were possible.

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

How not to build a high-rise

2010-02-25T13:31:21Z

Yes, believe your eyes: that’s an apartment building in Shanghai, virtually intact but on its side after, well, falling over. The building was one of eleven 13-story buildings being constructed in the Lotus Riverside complex in China’s largest city. It collapsed last June, killing one construction worker.

According to an article by Li Xinran, Lydia Chen and Wu Shen in Shanghai Daily, investigations showed that the weight of earth removed from beneath the building to build a garage, and dumped on a landfill area near a creek 30 meters away, had caused the river bank to collapse. As a result, water seeped under the building, weakening its foundation.

The apartments in Lotus Riverside range from 66 to 128 square meters (710 to 1378 square feet) in size. The average price of apartments in the collapsed building was 14,297 yuan per square meter (about US $195 per square foot) and 77 percent had been sold. Shanghai Meidu Real Estate was developing the project, which was being built by Shanghai Zhongxin Construction Co.

Sky Canaves wrote last year on WSJ.com that “The disaster could reveal some uncomfortable facts about lax construction practices in China, where buildings are put up in a hurry by largely unskilled migrant workers, and developers may be tempted to take shortcuts.”

Earlier this month six defendants associated with the project plead guilty to the charge of “causing a serious accident,” and were sentenced to prison terms from three to five years, according to a more recent report by Canaves. They had been accused of lax supervision of the project and failing to stop the developer from engaging in unsafe construction practices. Two key defendants in the case are still awaiting trial.

Thanks to Gaby Chavarria for pointing me to this story.

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