After a long day of ghost-towning along the Mexican border, we set our sights on Bisbee Arizona, the biggest dot on the map for miles in any direction. Rumor had it, it was once the most happening place between El Paso and San Francisco. We drove into the town--or so we thought--and began searching for the town built into a hill that a tipster had told us about. As the sun began to set, we were hopelessly lost amongst a smattering of early 20th century small town developments. We found refuge at a hotel along the Mexican border. The next morning, we headed for Old Bisbee, allegedly the place we were looking for but had missed the night before.
The first place we came to, pictured above, wasn't Bisbee at all but a nearby suburb known as Lowell (to historians). Lowell had hit some hard times. A food co-op and a breakfast place were the only places still open on the main drag, outside of that, well...
It turns out the town of Lowell had been eaten by a pit mine. A mining town suffers a percarious existence.
Continuing down the highway, we finally found Old Bisbee. It didn't take long before we realized this town was a special place. It bore little semblance to the "small town-big suburb" monotony seen across the US. Instead, it felt like a big city. We spent the next couple days trying to figure out what sort of conditions spawned such a place.
Bisbee was established in the 1880s on a massive copper deposit along an incredibly narrow winding valley. The mines were successful and soon silver and gold were discovered. Though the mines ceased operation in the 1970s, there is speculation that recent mineral prices could cause the operation to reopen. Later in the 1970s, the village had hit rock bottom. The mining company was unable to find any local takers for the Copper Queen Hotel (which now commands upwards of $200 a night) but a pair of enterprising artists and actor John Wayne caught wind of the place and realized it's inherent worth. Real estate prices rivaled modern day Detroit and Old Bisbee became something of an artists colony, who, in their later years began attracting tourists.
Many remark that Bisbee looks more like a small European village than the frontier town that it is. The are no wide roads. Many houses are not accessible from the street. People stroll up and down the valley walls on sets of stairs. The few cars on the streets move at a snails pace, often ignoring the "one way" signs that exist on almost every road. Some roads are incredibly narrow, and the walkways that stretch into the hills are narrower still.
Somehow, this little town built a different fate for itself than the scores of deserted communities that surround it. The Bisbee difference, if you will, is scarcity of space. At one point, 20,000 people filled this little corner of the valley. Scores of saloons lined Brewers Gulch on the rowdy side of town. Churches and the county courthouse occupied the wealthy side of town. Miners made enough from working in the mine to put up humble domiciles, many of which are occupied to this day. Few owned cars and the city was not laid out with them, or even wagons in mind.
Bisbee was, and continues to be incredibly walkable. Looking at a road map, the city seems like a pain to navigate. But on foot, there are no shortages of short-cuts, walk-throughs and stairways to get to any destination. The lack of abundant space requires that the small space that does exist be used very efficiently.
We visited several establishments that could have been no more than 60 square feet in size. Everywhere art mingled with history in a way that is both refreshing and respectful.
For all its buildings--seemingly stacked on top of each other--Bisbee remains remarkably empty. Vacant lots and decaying buildings lay scattered throughout the city. Somehow though, the city in no way looks blighted. Each empty lot looks more like an opportunity than a blight.
This is a village that seems to understand that positive change is not defined by growth. New projects are rarely bigger, or better buildings. More often, they are art projects or retrofits of existing buildings. We found at least a dozen small independent hotels in the city and it seemed that even the smallest infrastructure project require a healthy dose of free spirit.
I left Bisbee with the notion that one of the most important factors for the growth of a healthy city is scarcity of space. This is a difficult proposition. In Bisbee, the scarcity was provided by steep valley walls. These same walls that helped create such positive space ultimately limited the growth of the city. How then does a city create a movable boundary? Is the legal urban growth boundary that Portland uses the answer? And how can a city keep real estate prices low enough to accommodate every economic condition?
In coming days and weeks, I'll try to answer some of these questions. As the grand tour of the nation (at least the west coast) comes to a close, Hannah and I are returning to Detroit. The focus of this blog, and the commentary contained herein, will turn its focus to that perplexing city. 
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Bisbee - A rare village
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tombstone - A Small Town
Small towns have long served as the model for urban development in the United States. Suburbia is certainly more closely modeled after the small town than the city. Aside from the vastly different scale on which suburbs operate, there are remarkably many similarities. The feeling of security derived from isolation, the lush greenery intertwined with the built environment, the total reliance on personal--not public--transit and the necessity of knowing your neighbors business are all shared characteristics of suburbs and small towns. 
I have made the claim before that suburbs--like small town--are resource based, and when that resource dries up, the town--or suburb--dies. In a suburb, the resource being harvested is the innovation of a neighboring city. The suburb supplies regimented workers to perform mundane (typically corporate) tasks. The small town is no different. Small towns spring up around valuable resources. In southern Arizona, the entire life cycle of the small town is on display.
Without vegetation to cover the traces, dead and dying downs dot the landscape, as do the sources of their former glory. Vast quantities of minerals were extracted from deep beneath the earth as the scarred mountains can attest.
But when the minerals run out, there is nothing left to maintain a population that is fundamentally unsustainable. A community that must import virtually all of their goods and has little time to develop alternative economies after the mines run out.
We did find some telling and amazing places in this back corner of the country, and this post will be the first on our adventures there. Without minerals to export and little production capacity due to water scarcity, a clever town would turn to tourism to prop up the economy. 
We visited Tombstone, the little town that is home to the famous clash between the Earp and Clanton families. Tombstone is a fascinating place because the form of the old main drag was carefully preserved. The vast expanse of the street was entirely closed to traffic, making this one of the largest pedestrian malls in the country and certainly the largest we saw on our trip.
In seeing Tombstone, it becomes remarkably clear how significant an influence planners had in the development of even the smallest frontier towns. The street is wide enough to accommodate teams of wagons and riders. Pedestrians are granted a wooden sidewalk, complete with a wide awning to keep away the intense sunlight. Even in the dead of winter though, only a few people ventured into the street, the rest kept on the sidewalks. The total sense of enclosure provided by the arcade is incredibly comfortable and is much preferable to the vulnerability offered by the street.
This town, kept alive for a time by holding the county seat and then later by playing host to tourists interested in some of America's rowdier history seems like it will fall off the map one day soon. While many champion tourism as a sustainable industry, I suspect that a prolonged economic downturn will drive this whole town out of business. As we headed out of town looking for something a bit more desolate, I wondered if the modern day residents of Tombstone all lived in the square street grid around the historic district. As we rounded a corner, the sight above came into view.
The suburb is generally the fraud of a city, emulating a small town on an massive. In Tombstone, the small town itself is the lie; the suburb on its edge is the truth.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Weekend Update
Hope the weekend is treating you well, here are some interesting posts to keep you going.
I talk a lot about space on this blog. This story illustrates some of the most common transportation uses of space and their relative consumption.
If you were ever wondering how we should really be building our infrastructure, this story might provide some guidance. The first image is the kicker.
John Norquist, the Congress for New Urbanism president gives an interview about CNU work trying to influence the upcoming transportation bill. I'm not convinced that our built environment needs an infusion of cash to support an old (but better) kind of road. I think we should be thinking about new (and even better) sorts of roads.
J.H. Crawford has an enormous collection of remarkable pedestrian places at his website, carfree.com. In honor of not being able to check out his recent book at the library (my privileges expired last week...) I'll present one of his photos. Find more here.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Southern California
Before I do a post on San Francisco, I'd like to briefly discuss southern California. Quite honestly, we had planned on avoiding the entire area out of pure fear but since we decided to cut the east coast out of the trip, we figured we ought to really focus on the west coast. So, without any real plan or strategy, we circled around LA and headed to San Diego, drove back up to the heart of LA, then fled eastward.
The city of San Diego literally sits in a desert, yet lush green foliage occurs in such abundance there that you could be tricked into thinking you were in a rain forest. I can't say for sure if this city will exist 50 years from now, but I would be incredibly surprised if they manage to maintain their lush greenery. More striking is the sprawling pattern of development that we saw in both San Diego and Los Angeles. It is almost as if nobody took the time to question the dominant form of development. I should add, that the outermost ring of suburbs was almost totally vacant, or in various states of incompletion.
They say you get what you pay for. In southern California, I think people paid a bit too much. It's important to understand that California is an incredibly beautiful state, with incredibly diverse scenery and ecosystems. Plus, who gets up for the sunrise, the sunset is where it's at.
So why not live in a place like this, a paradise, an oasis in the desert? Well, first off, it's not an oasis, it's a desert. Water is piped in from as far as Colorado to supply people with their feeling of comfort. And everybody has a piece of of the pie. Their little 1/6 acre tucked away from the collector roads and interstates and covered with green green grass.
It becomes incredibly clear, just by visiting this place, why plastic surgery is so celebrated and strip malls look like 1500 year-old Italian villas. This is a place uncomfortable with the truth. Their vision of California--with its overflowing springs and lush orchards--did not exist in southern California and it had to be forged out of the dusty desert with imported water and imported labor.
Nothing, near or far, is left untouched. A suburban recreation of Venice sits outside of LA proper. This is truly the epitome of all that is off with southern California. It is a place of superficial illusion, driven by an industry of illusion (film) and full of a people who have enormous illusions about its worth. At least, I suppose (and so must they), it looks a bit different.
Southern California is a place of great wealth. Their film and music productions, software, agricultural products and consumptive culture are exported across the world. I suspect, though, that the place they have built sits on the very edge of what their wealth can maintain. I would not be surprised to see massive transformations in this place driven by economic necessity.
As a disclaimer, I am well aware that there are a lot of good people doing good things in these places. They are, unfortunately, completely overwhelmed by people who don't care or don't know how they should help.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thoughts on Santa Cruz
I'm going a bit out of order here, but my mind today is on Santa Cruz and its interesting history. Like many small towns with liberal universities, Santa Cruz plopped onto the pedestrian mall bandwagon of the late 1960s. By the 1970's, the city had closed off traffic along it's main drag and created a winding pathway through an 80 (or so) food wide swath of maintained public access. Businesses were generally unhappy about the arrangement due to insufficient maintenance of the street and its accessibility to the homeless, yet change is difficult even for the business community and they were unable to reopen the street to traffic.
Yet today, Santa Cruz has a downtown that is totally open to automobile traffic. The main drag is incredibly pedestrian friendly and the entire place looks like an advertisement for the New Urbanism movement. What changed? In 1989, an earthquake destroyed (more or less) the entire pedestrian mall. With the car-free inertia gone, the business community was able to force a bit more of their vision onto the main drag.
There are loads of problems associated with having a downtown shopping district but before we get to those, we can use the Santa Cruz example to look into what goes into a good walking district. I think the mantra to keep in mind for any pedestrian area is controlled, enclosed space. If you consider the space between the buildings as the street (the cars stay on the road), it is important that you give plenty of space to pedestrians if you want them to use it. As you can see from the picture above, the sidewalks are ample. With all of this space, it's important to provide enclosure, a sense that you're not wandering around Tombstone Arizona (post on that later).
The cheapest way to provide enclosure is with buildings (they pay for themselves), of which there should be no shortage of in a city. Of course, the buildings are probably not arranged properly to provide enclosure to pedestrians, so you'll need something else; trees work tremendously well, though they take a while to get up to size. Santa Cruz has relied mostly on trees, though there are a few beautiful kiosks that terminate vistas quite nicely. A sense of enclosure is almost never planned into an auto based development because people take their enclosure with them.
The third, and arguably most elusive element of a successful district is control. Every inch of the walking district must be stewarded. There is rarely sufficient pedestrian traffic to justify an 80' right of way and that space must be consumed productively or it will become a haven for beggars, ne'er-do-wells and miscreants. It is imperative then that this space be effectively controlled by somebody--anybody will do. While it doesn't particularly matter who takes control from a planning perspective, consider the economics of a situation with an 80 foot wide street. A typical store front might have 20 feet of frontage with 30 feet of street (allowing for an ample 20 foot sidewalk) to design, maintain, police and landscape. While that may seem like an incredible expense, the aim of the business is to create economic value so it's likely they'll find a way to make the situation profitable. After all, they pay rent to be able to do the same indoors.
But that never happens. Instead, the city is stuck holding the bag. They try desperately to landscape, police and maintain thousands of square feet of space. The end result is disaster, either from crushing taxes to pay for the operation or from neglect. In Santa Cruz, the neglect came crashing down during an earthquake. The planners realized that given the space they had, they could provide an excellent pedestrian space while consuming half of it with a road. Roads are incredibly cheap to maintain and they are self-controlling--especially with the aid of some speed "humps". An even more clever solution would have been to fill that space with buildings but there were likely restrictions on infrastructure that would have made that sort of operation particularly cost prohibitive.
Now that we can have a wonderful pedestrian shopping district, we might consider some reasons why we shouldn't have one. Pedestrian shopping districts are for tourists, whether they come from nearby or from afar. Nobody lives in them, and there are few jobs outside the retail sector. Except for the most environmentally conscious, these outside tourists arrive with their cars and need a place to park them.
Here's the dirty (no-so) secret that the New Urbanists didn't want you to see. These pedestrian districts require an enormous amount of parking. Think mall-sized parking lots and structures. With these valuable parking lots surrounding the walking area, the entire district's growth is stunted. As real estate prices rise, landlords begin to squeeze every penny out of their tenants, and those that can't pay get the boot. That's how unique places slowly lose their charm as their unique and different walking mall full of independent shops morph into a run of the mill out-door mall, full of Starbucks and Cheesecake Factories.
Functionally, these shopping districts are barely better integrated into the fabric of a city than the suburban malls that they compete with. By concentrating creative entrepreneurs and mixing them with tourists, a city exports their brand but in doing so, they slowly starve it. Instead of specializing and separating their districts, cities should focus on diversifying their districts as a method of creating unique character and culture.
Cities would be better off promoting increased density and an appropriate mixture of uses. Shopping districts don't seem like a terrible idea, but without incredibly good public transportation for the locals, they are destined to morph into predictable tourist attractions. I suppose they do fit a need, but I would strongly contest any argument that these places should be the model for creating our built environment.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
San Francisco - Hunters Point
You won't find a city in the world that doesn't have some dark little secret of a place. Perhaps it's a vast expanse of decaying factories, a massive tract of decaying public housing, an unseemly large highway interchange or any other experiment in urban planning gone awry. As the value of the proximity of this space becomes more apparent to those in the development world, the obstacles that once impeded development look smaller and smaller.
San Francisco is no exception to this truth. In the south east section of the city, an abandoned naval yard sits vacant. As the Navy nears completion of radiological clean-up of the Hunters Point Shipyard, the city is gearing up to develop the area. I have a lot of experience with a similar brownfield project (Southworks in Chicago) so I thought I would try to talk to somebody at city hall to see if San Francisco was doing anything differently than Chicago. Luckily, I managed to snag Thor Kaslofsky, the Hunter's Point Project Manager for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. As for any glimmer of hope that this "liberal Mecca" would be doing things differently...
When remodeling an old house, one of the first things to get an update is the kitchen. The reason for this is not technological advances. Rather, it is a result of sexism. Kitchens in old houses were designed by men who rarely--if ever--had to use the kitchen. Their ignorance about the use of a kitchen lead to remarkably dysfunctional spaces. After much scientific study, quantitative measures (the kitchen work triangle) of the kitchen were developed to aid designers yet truly excellent kitchens weren't introduced until people who used them began to design them.
It should come as no surprise then that the people tasked with designing an entirely new development are only working with their experience, some buzz words and a few blunt quantitative tools. Take a look at this document, the proposed streetscapes for the first phase of the re-development. You'll notice the excruciating detail given to the variety and location of plants to be used. You'll also find no explanation why the smallest streets are 60' across. What is all that space for?
Space is important. The number of inches between the sink and refrigerator is important. Why is it that we don't consider our urban space important? It is certainly more difficult to remodel a city that it is to remodel a kitchen. I can only come up with two potential answers. First, planners consider architect's designs so thoroughly appalling and distasteful that they feel compelled to provide a pedestrian with a visual escape from the sidewalk view: the vast expanse of the street. The second--and more likely--answer is that planners do not value space, in fact, they are only concerned with filling it.
Consider this situation: you are a planning firm that has just received an assignment to draw up a "Master Plan" for a given parcel. Luckily, you're not starting from scratch. The city has implemented a series of laws the govern how space should be developed. The number of housing units is likely prescribed, as is the minimum width of streets and the percentage of (non-street) open space. Is there really any decisions that the planner can make other than the exact placement of each street?
The short answer is no. Making any changes would require tedious meetings ($) to prove their worth, variances from the various code enforcement boards ($$) and enormous risk associated with making something slightly different ($$$). The longer answer is that the city--which essentially controls the entire process--has a vested interest in using space wisely. San Francisco in particular, has an enormous need to increase the amount of housing available in the city. They have an enormous incentive to find ways to hold as many people as they can in the little space the have remaining. Instead of providing quality living space for orders of magnitude more people, the city is left with thousands of plants and play structures to maintain.
Luckily for the country (though not San Francisco), business as usual seems to have taken a bit of a break. Here's to hoping that its departure is a permanent one.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Bookkeeping Day
As we near the end of the truncated cross country tour (apologies to the east coast), I've decided to make the archives a bit easier to navigate. You'll not only only find a new panel on the right side of the page, you'll also find a photo below the fold.
Update: Side links work now...
Monday, March 23, 2009
San Francisco - The Mission
It seems that every city and town from San Francisco south and all the way east to El Paso had some sort of Mission District, Mission Hill, Mission Valley, Mission Street...etc. We were lucky enought to stay in the San Francisco Mission District which turned out to be a very interesting place. As it happened, it was our first true city stay since we were in Chicago. If you'll recall, Chicago was typified by large blocks of residential areas with a grid of commercial areas around them. By contrast, the Mission is a collection of long, thin strips of commercial areas with similarly long, thin strips of residential areas in between them.
Just by form alone, this was a new kind of place for us. The development of these sorts of near-by strips was likely a result of the frequent stops of a streetcar line along a main roads as opposed to the distant stops of subways. One of the most interesting aspects of these strips were their independent character and functionality. Valencia Street for example, runs just 500 feet parallel to Mission Street yet has its own unique character and feel.
While staying on Valencia Street, we witnessed a public display of one of the rarest actions in cities; the public got its way. Two doors down from the apartment building we were staying in, American Apparel had posted a massive sign in an empty storefront, appealing to an unwilling community for support in their bid to open up shop along Valencia St. In 2006, San Francisco began a tedious certification process for new chain stores opening up in the city. Most stores, especially those like American Apparel (kind of progressive), are granted approval.
The residents of Valencia St were not keen on the idea of a major retailer moving onto their block though. They were proud of the myriad of local shops that had taken decades to establish themselves on the street and they'd be damned if they'd have to bask in the glow of American Apparel's ever-burning high-intensity fluorescent lights. If you're interested in urban activism, and how a healthy neighborhood flexes its power, read this entire blog, it details the unfolding efforts to stop the new shop from moving in. Over the course of 20 days, an entire neighborhood was able to mobilize sufficiently to prevent one of the nations largest retailers from opening up shop in a vacant building. That's a symptom of a pretty good city. For those out there that think that this was a stupid issue, consider that the people who live in a place had some say in defining it. That is far more important that any single issue. Moving on...
A distance that gets kicked around a lot is 1/5 of a mile. According to research (hmmm), that's about the distance that most people are willing to walk to get somewhere. Those 1000 or so feet are used to design and layout New Urbanist developments across the country. There were probably at least a dozen coffee shops within that radius from where we were staying yet every morning we went to the same one that was two doors down. As it turns out, convenience knows no limits. If there had been a coffee shop on the floor we were staying on, we would have gone there instead.
As planners begin to try and provide conveniences to residents by zoning in special use areas, they misunderstand how people relate to use and space. For example, a coffee shop 1/5 of a mile away gets added to the "places to go" mental file, but not to the "place you're buying" file. A coffee shop downstairs means you don't even have to get dressed to go there, it's an extension of your house. That adds to the price people are willing to pay. But enough about density and convenience.
The Mission is an economically and ethnically mixed neighborhood, to the benefit of all. The variety of retail options was astounding, from a high end health food store to vendors hawking produce on the street and from $4 burritos to $9 burritos. This district exemplified the benefits of living in a city.
One thing that struck me as I first began wandering around the Mission was the wideness of the main streets. Mission Street, pictured above, is an enormous street. Valencia Street was so wide that it seemed planners didn't know what to do with all the space; the bicycle lane was 10' wide! All my thoughts about cities would have left me thinking that with so much street, you couldn't get sufficient density to support such lively districts. As I continued to explore, the answer became clear.
It was the incredible density of the residential areas--tall, modest homes set along narrow little streets--that allowed enough people to live in close proximity to these districts to make them functional. Even with the wide main streets, the districts are compact and dense enough to support some of the old-school sorts of freight delivery.
These people care about their neighborhood, and one of the easiest ways to tell is from the murals that adorned any exposed and undecorated building surface.
The climate and wealth of the place make it an excellent place to paint, even the trucks have a pretty amazing look to them. If this is how all automobiles looked, I think I might be more supportive of them.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Weekend Update
Some reading for the weekend, plus a picture below the fold...
The urban agriculture front gets a presidential boost, this is one of the most refreshing things I've seen in a long time.
Less cars are being registered for the first time in a very long time. Does that mean that there are less cars on the road or just more unregistered ones?
Here's a bit of interesting commentary on the plan to close some traffic along Broadway and in Times Square in NYC.
Speaking of NYC, Mayor Bloomberg made some cycling enemies by astutely noting that bicycles take up a lot of space and shouldn't be allowed on subways. Cyclists, in their crusade against global warming, don't seem to realize that there are indeed some drawbacks to bicycles, they aren't perfect for everyone and they do take up a lot of space. Perhaps they'll start adding bicycle racks to the trains.
An interesting article in a business magazine (for a younger generation though) reveals how permeating the dislike of suburbs is. If the author was trying to be clever, he could started with "The downturn accomplished what the downtown could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl." Oh well, maybe Fast Company will want to offer me a writing job. The title of the article is Suburbia R.I.P.
Ready for a bit of auto history? Don't forget to click the links on the right hand side for some images or click here for a Google image search of Fordlandia.
And perhaps the most important issue of the last week, the Department of Transportation (the federal one) declares that they'll be taking into account the total cost of living in concert with HUD. That total cost will include the cost of various transportation options, especially automobiles. Follow both links for more.
Don't forget the pic on the other side of the fold. A shiny prize for anybody who can place it.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Book Review: Getting Green Done
I'd like to take a momentary break from our whirlwind tour of the country to review Auden Schendler's first book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. Schendler works as the Aspen Skiing Company's (ASC) executive director of sustainability, a post many organizations have created but few know how they should function. He has turned ASC into a company that operates well beyond their stature on the sustainability front. Here's a quote from 2006 after they filed an amicus brief against the EPA for failure to regulate GHG emissions:
With Massachusetts and the Sierra Club in the lead, this crucial legal battle challenges the EPA on grounds that the Clean Air Act requires action against climate change in a case that has made its way through EPA channels and federal courts since 1999.Schendler is clearly an effective director, and his book is strongest as a how-to guide for the up and coming generation of climate crusaders.
...
The Skico filed an amicus brief supporting the petitioners in the case, which include 12 states, numerous cities, the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups.
Schendler begins with refreshingly truthful report of the current state of the green revolution. He argues (correctly) that individual action is insufficient and massive coordinated action is non-existent. While I think he comes across as a bit harsh on the bead-wearing, long haired climate-do-gooders, he makes a good point that those wearing suites tend to march in packs, an they have learned to avoid those that are poorly clad. If we're going to get serious about the climate thing, we need the suits on board.
For Schendler, the true meaning of "green" revolves around stopping climate change, and from his perspective, that makes sense. Living in a community that is totally dependent on cold air (snow really) makes stopping global warming the number #1 priority. To this end, much of the book is tailored towards increasing energy efficiency and it tends to cast aside other issues (water, food, air and health). While Schendler does seem to grasp the total insufficiency of programs like office paper recycling, he doesn't seem to accept the impossibility of halting global warming.
Schendler is convinced that if green leaders become more effective and if massive government programs are put in place, we'll avoid climactic disaster. Personally, I doubt that even if those things did happen we would be able to prevent very bad things (disease, famine, pestilence, war, plague, drought, exodus, death, destruction....) from happening within the next 50 years. His argument is that we still have time to avert the disaster, my argument is that we still have time to prepare for it. The book is still very much worth a read.
My only real issue with the book is a tangential chapter about the relevance of the Aspen, Colorado where ASC is located. ASC operates a five star resort that people fly--in their personal jets--to get to. While I think this chapter was illuminating of Mr. Schendler's character and his line of work (every discussion is a battle and you ought to come armed) I don't think his argument was especially effective or necessary. This book is supposed to be about how everyone can be an effective climate warrior (with or without the beads) so why throw in a chapter that proclaims Aspen, with its uber-wealthy community, the location with the most inherent impact? Why not Detroit, a place of great poverty that exports some of the least sustainable products across the globe? Or any other place for that matter...
On the upside though, he provides an enormous amount of insight on issues like Renewable Energy Credits, sustainability progress reports, capital impediments for efficiency upgrades, selling green to those who need to buy it, fighting back against the most effective arguments against greening programs and actualizing green building. He even provides a compelling defense of greenwashing. If you're interested in doing something "green" yourself, or learning more about "green"--and especially if you're going to try and convince others to work with you--this book is for you.
At 250 pages, it's a quick and pleasant read. I'll give it my inaugural rating of "Pretty Good Book" that I only hand out to books that do justice to their topics. You can pick it up at Amazon or your local bookstore for less than $20.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
San Francisco - Valencia Gardens
Public housing doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation in the United States. The "projects" began as an attempt to provide "adequate" housing to lower income families and individuals. In cities like New York, slums were demolished en masse to make way for sprawling public housing projects. The overall density (in DU/acre) of these places were always less than the tenements that they replaced and they introduced a feature rare to cities, mandatory open space. In most places, that meant pure, green lawn. As these projects descended into the very same chaos they were meant to replace (and the untouched slums slowly became valuable real estate), government funding for such adventures dried up.
But were there's a will, there's a way. San Francisco, faced with a decaying public housing project at the heart of the blossoming Mission District found a way to act. The liberal community would have never let the property be sold off to the highest bidder. Instead, the old project, pictured below (thanks Le Blog Exuberance) was replaced with a new one.
Before we get into how--and why--San Francisco developed this project and why others have difficulty, it's important to understand the concept of leverage. Just think JGWentworth (It's your money, use it when you need it!) only with way more risk than a structured settlement. Here's a page out of leverage's greatest hits (circa 2007).
Developer: If you give us 100 million, we'll build some apartments and pay you $200 million in 3 years. Here is a piece of paper with lots of numbers written on it. Since the $20 million project we did worked out, this one will too.
Banker: Sounds splendid. (To investors) Who wants to make some money? Put $10 million into this magic hat and in three years, you'll have $19 million back in your pocket! It's called investing, everybody is doing it!
The developer leveraged future earnings to obtain present money. What future earnings? The future rent money of the future inhabitants of the future building. The problem, of course, was that this model was so profitable, more future buildings popped up than there were future inhabitants to fill them, and they were certainly more expensive than the future rent money could pay for. But I digress, that discussion is for another day...
A city can leverage expected revenue increases (taxes) in exchange for cash that will be spent on generating that additional revenue. This pot of coins is known as TIF (Tax Increment Financing) money. Private developers generally try to dip into this pot when they develop infill sites, especially those that require a bit of clean-up. There's a lot of debate over the distribution of TIF funds.
The impediment with public housing, is that the federal money that subsidizes tenants rent can not be used to pay down debt. That is, public project money can't be leveraged. When faced with the prospect of raising funds to build a structure, that bag of loot is off limits.
In order to raise the money to build the structure, San Francisco did something somewhat odd. In order to create a larger tax increment (public housing residents don't have much in the way of tax bills) and to find a position to leverage, they created a mixed (gasp) public housing project. The city planner I talked to called Valencia Gardens a model that they hoped to use throughout the city.
I know, the picture is a bit rough. The financial model of this development might be seen as something to duplicate. Mixing the rich and the poor isn't as crazy an idea as most of us thought. The development itself though, while making some significant improvements over the traditional project model, leaves much to be desired. Is the fence intended to project exclusivity or to protect security? In the later case, a building front would have worked just as well. In the former... well, let's hope that wasn't their intention.
Why is this road so big for little three story buildings? Perhaps there are still open space requirements in the federal standards. And why does a city that actively discourages car ownership provide so much additional parking? The entire scene sucks away energy with vast stretches of negative space. The electrical boxes are more prominently placed than the entrances to shops. This sidewalk looks useful, no?
My biggest issue with this building is the attempt to imitate a collection of small scale projects. This is now common practice in the architectural world. Take a big project and slightly vary the material, setback, height...etc every 20'. That way it will look like it grew organically as a collection of many small buildings designed by many (not so proficient) different architects. Newer strip malls generally utilize this ploy.
While I understand that economic realities of the real estate world, I have seen with my own eyes large buildings that are designed as a whole yet detailed to the human scale. I suspect that it can even be done at a lower cost than trying to cobble together a half dozen different styles. While I'm not one to point fingers (architects fault), I do think it's important to realize that building "fake places" is a bad thing. Yeah, this project probably won't see the same degree of problems associated with other low-income public projects, but other than a place to sleep and some daunting storefronts, what does this place add to the city? In short, if you duplicated this development a thousand times, would anybody pay San Francisco rent to live in such a place?
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
San Francisco - Replate
This blog is mostly about the built environment and how creating positive space leads to positive action from ordinary people. While most American cities are largely devoid of these sorts of spaces, San Francisco is full of them. With that in mind, it seemed foolish of me to leave the city without finding some sort of evidence that might support my contention that good things happen in good places.
I head heard about a homegrown movement that was trying to address various issues relating to food waste and hunger and decided to look them up. The concept, called Replating, was started by Josh Kamler and Axel Albin. They had begun to notice doggie bags left atop public trash cans instead of inside them. After giving the idea some thought, they launched Replate, a website designed to spread the word about conserving food and helping out the homeless. I was able to track them down and have a quick chat with them before I left town.
Replating isn't for everyone. You have to eat out, order too much food and then be willing to part with it. Anybody with busboy experience could tell you that there's no shortage of these people. Restaurants are usually stuck throwing this food out. More enterprising individuals ask for the remainder of their meal to go, or perhaps the whole meal was to go and they failed to finish it. For many, cluttering the fridge is a bad option so the half-eaten and neatly packaged meal usually ends up in the garbage.
The behavior can be observed directly and indirectly, as the hungry go through garbage cans looking for something to eat. The alternative is called Replating, where the doggie bag is instead placed on top of--or next to--a garbage can. It requires an individual to acknowledge that they hold something of value in their hand and that it is something they ought to share.
It would be wrong to look at this as an environmental issue, though there is probably some small benefit (food morsel vs. doggie bag). This is a consciousness issue. An individual must be aware that less fortunate people exist and that they would appreciate a bite to eat. That awareness provides some small measure of defense against ever-growing excess and consumerism.
Replate is not the solution every problem anywhere, but it does a small part to make the world a better place. In essence, a movement like Replate is a symptom of a good city. I'll have one more report on symptoms of good cities before I'm through with San Francisco.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
San Francisco - Chinatown
Some of the most fascinating and appealing attractions of large diverse cities are their isolated ethnic communities. These communities are typically well established enclaves within a city. Often times, they cater to tourists who are eager to catch a glimpse of a distant culture without spending the coin on airfare. The most successful of these cultural attractions are able to provide a vastly different experience for visitors and residents alike as they cross a street or turn a corner into the ethnic district. Naturally, the built environment plays a huge roll in setting the atmosphere.
The San Francisco Chinatown is the oldest and largest in the hemisphere and has direct ties to the Chinese laborers who built the first transcontinental railway. Vegetable stands line the streets and every sort of business caters to the Chinese-language population. Despite sitting in the standard grid layout of the rest of the city, Chinatown is a vastly different place with a vastly different feel. As the modern day "placemakers" would say, it's quite a place. To fully understand why this historic collection of 16 or so blocks is so special, it is important to understand the two most important factors in "placemaking" (and no, hiring a consultant isn't one of them).
The Chinatown in San Francisco dates back to the 1850s. It didn't take long for the "natives" to see the Chinese as an economic and cultural threat so by the 1870s, ordinances were passed and deed restriction put in place to severely limit the ability of people of Chinese descent to own property outside of the historic Chinatown boundaries. This created one of the most important conditions for the creation of a thriving place, scarcity of space.
Every inch of space was valued and there was no chance for sprawl. Dark alleys became vibrant streets and every bit of open land was built as close to the street as it was allowed. The size of the historic Chinatown district--16 blocks--made it perfect for foot traffic. Every place in the district was less than a five minute walk to any other. Conditions varied over the years, and much of Chinatown was "westernized" after a failed attempt by city officials to clear out the neighborhood following the devastating 1906 earthquake however old Chinatown lives on in the small streets and alleys that were made precious by racist legal codes.
There are two generators of space scarcity, natural limits--water boundaries, poor transportation infrastructure, mountains...etc.--and artificial limits like cultural boundaries, racist deed restrictions, green belts, regional growth boundaries...etc. In the case of Chinatown, a natural boundary (San Francisco sits on a peninsula) encouraged city officials to implement an artificial boundary (racist deed restrictions and property ownership ordinances). Space scarcity alone though, isn't enough to make an interesting place. 
San Francisco is full of places that have no extra room, some are happening and some are avoided. The difference is culture. It turns out the melting pot analogy of America doesn't make much sense. I don't think many people want the entire country to look the same, feel the same, taste the same... Truffles are a nice treat, but I doubt most would adopt a truffle-only diet. Culture means contrast, and contrast can only develop in isolation. Old Chinatown was an incredibly isolated place. Much of the city was off limits to the Chinese and much of Chinatown was off limits to Caucasians. An incredibly strong language barrier maintained this isolation even when legal restrictions were removed.
Of course, the Chinese started off with quite an advantage. As immigrants from a distant land, their various traditions were all different enough from the dominant American culture of the time that they were melded together out of mutual isolation. Overall though, culture develops quickly in relative isolation. In contemporary communities, this is most often done by providing sufficient services within a small geographic area so that nearby residents will be forced to interact primarily with one another.
Architects still struggle with the "lost art of placemaking", perhaps one day they will realize that their job is to design buildings, the inhabitants of which will be glad to "make the place" ... free of charge.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Aprovecho Research Center
Ecovillages come in all shapes and sizes, there are over 100 (advertising) ecovillages in the US alone. While definitions try hard to stick to these places, they are generally small (on the 10-100 scale) collections of people who decided to live in a sustainable way outside mainstream society. They often have an educational component and generate income through cottage industries or art sales.
On the whole, I'm not particularly supportive of the ecovillage movement. I feel like it drains unsustainable societies of precisely the type of people that would be incredibly valuable in reducing the footprint of our mainstream society. Not all ecovillages are the same though, the Aprovecho Research Center, located in the Aprovecho ecovillage south of Eugene, Oregon focuses outside their own community. Unlike most ecovillages, Aprovecho's outreach effort does not end at school tours and internships; their very founding was based on improving society in the poorest parts of the world.
Thirty years ago, the founders of Aprovecho decided that to help impoverished people of the third world, they would have to live like them. They found a recently logged section of land south of Eugene, Oregon and attempted to live off of the land in the same way that much of the third world does. Their aim was to improve some of the most critical functions in developing nations, heating and cooking.
Their solution was to develop highly efficient and accessible stoves. A website contains publications that detail everything from stove construction to environmental impact. The "Rocket Stove" developed at Aprovecho is used around the world and is capable of cooking surprisingly much with amazingly little. Even those less concerned with deforestation credit rocket-type stoves with greatly improving indoor air quality in homes that utilize them.
Aprovecho itself is an amazing place, a mix of permaculture gardening, sustainably managed forest and a large plot of forest that is being returned to its natural state. 
My visit also provided some instruction on the logging in the country. Logging is still prevalent in Oregon, though the downturn is certainly slowing the industry. The damage that logging causes to ecosystems should not be understated. The logged properties around Aprovecho bear no semblance to the nearly restored forest area. Sustainable logging is done on tree-farms; mono-cultures that in no way resemble a true forest.
It is critical that future building become more permanent and move away from wood as a primary source. The work being done by Calcera to create a carbon-storing cement seems like the most promising alternative at this point. The issue of recyclability however, remains an obstacle.
As for Aprovecho, it will remain a small community with a reach far beyond its borders.
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