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Friday, December 10th, 2010

Urbanoscope

Just as one followup, in a recent Indianapolis-related post I called for the removal of sign-blight along the Cultural Trail. I haven’t seen it personally, but I’m told the abandoned library sign has been removed. Kudos to the city. Now let’s make the Keystone/86th removal happen.

Regarding my recent post on state GDP changes, some folks asked for the raw data. I threw it in a spreadsheet for you so grab it here.

Brookings recently put out a Global Metro Monitor Report that has gotten a lot of attention, though I have not yet gotten to dive into it myself.

Top Stories

ESPN: Believeland – This piece on Cleveland in the wake of LeBron James’ departure is long, but one of the best pieces of writing on a Rust Belt city I’ve seen. You may also be interested in my own James Drain Hits Cleveland.

Portland Oregonian: Is Portland the New Neverland? – “I sometimes think we’re the scatterbrained generation. You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the DJ-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker.”

Governing: The Search for Infrastructure Driven Transformation – “High-speed rail and the smart grid may turn out to be tomorrow’s Erie Canals. But in a mature society such as ours, it may be that small infrastructure connections — expensive though they may be — will be transformative in the future.”

The Guardian: Report Calls for Radical Redesign of Cities to Cope with Population Growth – You can also go directly to the Megacities on the Move site to check out the toolkit. I haven’t had a chance to dive in as of yet.

Rearranged Map of the World

Over at Big Think, someone rearranged the map of the world by population. Interestingly, the US and Brazil get to stay where they are (click to enlarge):

World and National Roundup

Owen Hatherley: Exposition Corporate – more on the Shangai World Expo.

NYT: New Arrivals Strain India’s Cities to the Breaking Point

Transport Politic: Envied the world over, the Strasbourg tram expands again

Allison Arieff: The Public Square Goes Mobile

Matthew Khan: Do liberal cities block new housing developments? – He says the answer is ‘Yes’ in California

Richard Florida: Why New York Needs to Make Way for Cyclists

Joel Kotkin: The New Battle for Brains

Portland Oregonian: Portland area wages, job creation lag most Western regions – So says a new report, but not everyone agrees with this. I can say that Portland’s GDP per capita is skyrocketing – it was #1 last decade among cities with more than a million people on that metric.

WaPo: DC Transportation After Gabe Klein

Greater Greater Washington: Should DC Drop the Sales Tax?

Andrew Kirby: Could the Dallas way be the right way?

Columbusite: How Columbus’ Progress in Urban Revitalization Stacks Up to Other Cities

Blair Kamin: Chicago’s Northerly Island Park Plan Promises an Oasis of Ecology

Detroit Blog: The Last Song

New York Fly By

The Architect’s Newspaper pointed me at this super-cool video of a radio controlled airplane with a camera strapped to it flying around New York. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

Super Cool Bike Parking

Trailnet St. Louis pointed me at this very short promo video for a super-cool bicycle parking device. The video is in German, and I have no idea if it’s real or not, but it doesn’t matter – watch it anyway. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Magic Highway

This is a pretty incredible 1958 animated short called “Magic Highway” I found on How to be a Retronaut. It was supposedly put out by Disney and talks about all the amazing innovations in highways and cars that will be coming soon and how they will improve our lives. There’s a Jetsons-like quality to this, but I think it illustrates the mindset about these things people had back then. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Post Script

Copenhagenize posted some wonderful vintage photos of bicycling in Copehagen. Check out the whole set, but here’s a sample:

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

State GDP Performance

Note: This post was updated on 12/21/2010 to fix an error in the maps related to Montana. Also, by request, the data behind the maps can be downloaded here.

Gross Domestic Product is the basic measure of economic output. The government released 2009 GDP data for US states recently, so it’s worth taking a look. Here’s a map of percent change in total real GDP from 2000 to 2009, with increases in blue, decreases in red, color intensity proportional to change:

As you can see, Michigan actually experienced a decline in its total real output over the last decade. Given the restructuring of the auto industry, that’s not surprising.

Here’s another view, this one a similar percent change view of real per capita GDP:

Here you can see that Michigan is not alone. Some of the fast growing Sun Belt states added people at a faster rate than they grew economic output. Georgia in particular is worth noting, because even metro Atlanta has been showing declining real per capita GDP. In fact, Georgia actually declined by more than Michigan did on this metric, so obviously all is not well down there. Texas, despite its vaunted jobs engine, is expanding almost totally horizontally. It is 9th lowest in the US on real per capita GDP growth, with a nearly flat 2% performance over the last decade.

North Dakota is also interesting. They are leading the charts, I presume driven by energy and high tech. (Thanks to Great Plains software, I believe Fargo is now Microsoft’s biggest software development center in the US outside Redmond).

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

Taking Chicago Transit from Good to Great, Part Two – Raising the Bar on Design

This is the second installment in my series on building demand for increased transit investment in Chicago. Part one was “Building the Vision“.

You must at least skim this article to the end to check out the photos of transit stations from around the world. (I found most of these on message boards without photo credits. If they are yours, I’m happy to credit you or remove them at your request)

Imagine a public transit system that was a source of pride to its community. A system that was so great people would actually take their out of town guests just to see it. What would that do for Chicago? When people take pride in something, when they have a sense of ownership in it, then they want to take care of it and see it thrive. They are jealous of its upkeep. This is one of the emotions we have to inspire to make Chicagoans stand up and demand more – and more money – for transit.

To do that, we need to up the ante on design – by a lot. This might prompt one to ask, “How can we afford to spend even more money we don’t have?” But I firmly believe that better design does not have to mean spending more money. I’ll return to the topic of cost later, but it is worth remembering the words of Daniel Burnham in his Plan of Chicago:

As a rule, the general aspect of our suburban [train] stations is not pleasant. They should be bright, cheery, and inviting in a high degree. More study, not more money, is needed for this work. Let the architectural schools and societies take up this topic; it demands artistic imagination as well as skill. Let the man who undertakes this problem think of the hundreds or even thousands of people who must habitually use the given station, and let him do his utmost to bring into being for these people something that shall be a joy to them. A delightful station conduces cheerfulness as a man goes to work and as he comes home, while a shabby or neglected station produces the opposite effect. [emphasis added]

Or in the words of former Curitiba Mayor Jaime Lerner, father of that city’s famed busway system – which incidentally carries more riders than the CTA: “If you want creativity, cut one zero from your budget.” Good design isn’t just about looking pretty. It also involves meeting the other needs of the project, and among them are the budget. Good design can embrace constraint, and budgetary constraints is one of them.

Great Design – Millennium Park

Speaking of great design, here it is:

Millennium Park is a fantastic, world class design. It should come as no surprise that consequently it is hugely popular, a must-see tourist attraction for the city, and has become almost an icon of the city’s transformation for the global age. Look at where Chicago is attracting the world’s notice in its built environment today, and you’ll see examples of great design like Millennium Park, the Koolhaas student center at IIT, and the Modern Wing.

The problem with these is that they are obviously very expensive showpieces. The ends up sending the message that good design is for special occasions and special places only. And it reinforces the notion that good design must be a budget buster. But the mark of a great city is not in how it treats its special places, but its ordinary ones. Lots of cities have hired starchitects for major buildings. But what have they done beyond that? Chicago has always been a city that got it on the importance of the everyday urban spaces in which its citizens live. And indeed, much of the design of things at present is competent and workmanlike. Things like bus shelters, street scape improvements, bike lanes, etc. have really improved the livability and attractiveness of the city.

But other cities are going beyond that.

To be direct: in many respects Chicago, for all the great things that are happening, is falling behind on the design front. This includes its public transit system. Chicago needs to take a look around, figure out how to up the ante, and get back in the game. By starting – right now – to change the game on design, Chicago can put down a marker of a new, ambitious attitude towards its transit system, and start building that community pride and sense of ownership that will lead to the demand for more investment.

The rest of this post will compare what is being done in Chicago transit design with what is going on around the world. I think you’ll agree that while we not doing bad, we could be doing even better. Please keep in mind, some of these items are actually not under the CTA’s control in Chicago.

Bus Shelters

Here is the bus shelter Chicago is currently installing:

About the best that can be said for this is that it’s not offensive. It does its job in a nice, background way, but certainly doesn’t inspire.

Here is the new San Francisco bus shelter:

Its polycarbonate roof is made of 40% post-consumer recycled waste and contains photovoltaic cells that store power by day to illuminate it at night and also feed power back into the grid. The steel frame is 75% recycled material. These shelters even contain integrated WiFi hot spots. It is a totally custom, unique design for the city. 1,110 of these are scheduled to be installed in the city by 2013. You can read more here.

Here’s a simple but effective design from, I believe, Brooklyn:

Here is a prototype design from Ljubjana, Slovenia

Bus shelters are an easy one. These are provided, for free, to the city by JC Deceaux as part of an outdoor advertising arrangement with the city. Interestingly, JC Deceaux has an entire subsidiary in Europe that does super-cool bus shelter designs for cities over there. I believe Chicago already had them do this one as a bespoke design, and perhaps we’re stuck with them for the lifespan, but next time out – and for anything new we deploy – we’ve got to do better.

I’d suggest a design competition where we especially encourage younger, local designers to get creative and take bus shelter design to the next level in terms of functionality, amenities, aesthetics, environmental friendliness, local materials and fabrication – and of course, cost efficiency. And they should look uniquely Chicago, like they sprang forth from our Midwestern soil, not just generically “cool”.

Bus Liveries

A CTA bus:

A good, solid design. But not inspirational.

A London bus:

There is simply no more iconic bus design in the world. The double decker bus is one of the signature images evoked by the very name London. London is a perfect example of how to use the design of the mundane to create a distinct urban identity. London is not just the city of the Palace of Westminster, the Tower Bridge and the London Eye. It is also the city of the double decker bus, the black cab, the red phone booth and the bobby’s cap.

The CTA doesn’t have to go this bespoke. Indeed, even London has many single deck buses. But a more unique livery could make a big difference. Perhaps the CTA and Pace could get some local artists and graphic designers to pimp our rides? We’ve got to put the CTA and Pace livery on to begin with, so the net cost of deploying a much better livery on new buses should be low to zero.

By the way, to see one good livery, you don’t have to look very far:

Subway Entrances

Again, let’s forget the old and look at the new. Here are the special decorative subway entrances to the Red Line on State St. in the Loop:

You should click to enlarge this since there’s a more elaborate fully enclosed one in the background. These are very nice. I particular like the illuminated red stripe at the top, which is a nice touch, and the light globes on top. But again, we have a very retro, play it safe design. It’s ornate, but not distinctive. And for some reason I can’t put my finger on, this design makes me think of New York first, not Chicago.

Here are the Blue Line versions on Dearborn. Done in black and with a cleaner design, I actually like these better.

Looking elsewhere, of course, the place to look for iconic subway entrances is Paris with its Hector Guimard designed metro entrances. They define the word classic in this space:

These work in Paris not just because they are excellent designs but because, in a very real way, the embody the essence of Paris. They capture its romance and history. To walk past one of these is to be transported back to the Belle Epoque. Sundered from its native setting, these could easily end up looking cheesy.

I really hate to admit this, but Chicago actually has a clone of this on its Metra system. Here’s the entrance to an underpass at Van Buren St. Station:

Paris gives out replicas of these to cities around the world, and I believe this was one such gift. Even so, this is the sort of thing that would, if done in say Cleveland, make a Chicagoan snicker.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say these designs need to look like they sprang from the native soil. We need designs that do for Chicago was Guimard’s did for Paris, namely capture its core essence in a way that even a stranger can process.

By the way, Paris isn’t afraid to get funky too. Here’s is the metro entrance at Palais Royal. Not my favorite personally, but you’ll never forget it and I’m guessing kids love it.

If clean and modern is more your thing, here is a Norman Foster designed metro entrance in Bilbao, Spain:

It’s probably more likely you’ll end up in London than Bilbao, and Foster has a very similar design at Canary Wharf.

And check out this metro entrance in Perugia, Italy:

Uniforms

I don’t want to show any local transit workers here to avoid invading their privacy. But most people know what CTA uniforms look like. Uniforms have an extremely powerful affect on the person seeing them. Military organizations such as the US Marine Corps have long taken advantage of this. I have not done any real research into transit uniforms around the world, but most of them I’ve seen are very poor. Chicago should not look to them. Instead, look to the military and to military like municipal organizations such as police and fire departments. Another good place to look for inspiration is the airline industry. Here is a picture of some airline pilots:

The camera angle is even great. I’d sure trust those guys to fly me safely home.

Airlines have no doubt put tons of research into the types of uniform imagery and symbolism that creates the desired effect in their customers. I think there’s a big opportunity here too – again, at modest cost since you can use the existing uniform cost as a design constraint. A change in uniform might change completely how the public perceives – and treats – our transit employees.

Chicago already has one good transit uniform example: Metra. My Chicago office has a lot of old time pictures of Chicago in it and one of them is of a couple of railroad conductors from 1910. They don’t look too different from Metra conductors today apart from wearing their uniform a bit neater. Metra is sometimes criticized for its old school operating practices. And while some modernization might be called for, in the case of commuter rail, the old school retro look works. It is a way to tap into a truly Chicago image of its days as the railroad colossus of America. Rather than sleek and modern, perhaps Metra should be trying to make us feel like a 19th century robber baron or Jazz Age plutocat. That private car they’ve got on the UP-North line is the kind of mystique I’m talking about.

L Stations

Lastly, we come to the feature cities’ transit systems are known for: their metro stations. Again, let’s not look at the old, rundown stations. Let’s compare some newly renovated CTA stations to others from around the world.

Here is the entrance to the newly replaced Brown Line station at Addison:

Here is the platform:

I think this was basically a decent concept that got derailed by value engineering. The basic, unpretentious red brick could have been the type of solid, masculine image I think Chicago should be projecting, for example. But with canopies removed from scope, escalators, paint, etc., we are left with a basic working station without much in the way of passenger amenities. You can tell that these were taken last winter. Clearly, being up on that platform in inclement weather is a bleak experience.

I can say that the CTA did a great job of preserving the public art program as part of this overall project. There are some delightful pieces at the various stations that make me want to visit them.

Here is a picture of what I think is the best new station so far: the rehabbed Red Line subway stop at State and Lake:

This station is like night and day versus what was there before. Check this out, then ride south to Monroe to see the difference. Just the lighting is a revelation. Speaking of which, I love the polished metal light bands along the roof line with the embedded signing. It’s excellent. The flooring is definitely a big upgrade too.

On the other hand, the pale color scheme, apart from the red, is very timid. The use of tile mosaic patterns is also a facile retro effect. Again, it’s seems more New York than Chicago. And its a big cutesy.

People will be very happy to travel through this station, but it won’t inspire pride or passion. It won’t attract people in any way like Millennium Park or other great designs locally.

Here’s a similar version at Chicago and State.

Again, very solid – and definitely a big upgrade – but pedestrian.

Please keep these in mind as I show you a sample of metro stations from around the world. This is, perhaps, a bit unfair since non-US cities tend to treat their metro systems as civic showplaces. But maybe that’s the point. After all, Chicago aspires to be a big time global city. It’s time to check out the global competition.

Los Angeles – Highland Avenue

Vancouver – Brentwood

Note the fully enclosed station here, not just canopies.

London – Westminster

This type of industrial motif would have worked great in Chicago, I think.

London – Bermondsey

Paris – Arts and Métiers

Lyon – Valmy

Berlin

Hamburg

This type of design thinking would be readily transferable to Chicago – not that I’d suggest just copying, mind you.

The Hague

This station was designed by Rem Koolhaas.

Rotterdam – Wilhelminaplein

Valencia, Spain

Santiago – Cristobol Colon

Santiago – La Cisterna

Valencia, Venezuela – Monumental Station

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

The famous “Dome of Light”

Minsk

Moscow

Moscow is famous for having the most beautiful subway stations in the world. This is but one small sample. Moscow is something that probably can’t be replicated, since Communist-era rulers spared no expense in creating the world’s most lavish system. I believe the Moscow subway carries the most riders of any city in the world.

Conclusion

Chicago may not be able to make its L system Paris grade, but there is a lot that can be done to improve design and start building the affection of the people towards our transit systems. Bus shelters, bus livery, and uniforms would appear to be among the easier places to start.

I’d originally intended to go straight to a concluding part three discussing how we pay for this. But with this so long already, I’ll insert another installment between now and then, talking about cost containment and other matters.

More Chicago

Chicago Transit: From Good to Great
Part 1: Building the Vision
Part 2: Raising the Bar on Design (this post)
Part 3: Cost Control and Governance
Part 4: Paying For It
Part 5: Getting It Done

Other Transportation Related Articles
The Urbanophile Wins Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Transit Competition
Transportation and the Burnham Plan
Metropolitan Linkages (high speed rail benefits case)
High Speed Rail (implementation)

This post originally ran on August 30, 2009.

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

College Degree Density Revisited

You may recall a while back that a blog post by Rob Pitingolo ranking cities and counties by their density of college degrees (and vs. their expected density based on population) deservedly got quite a bit of attention.

I wanted to return to that topic and this time look not just at college degree density, but how density and other metrics related to college degrees have changed in the last decade. I thought it would be interesting to ask what counties in the US increased their college degree density the most in the last decade. Here’s the answer:

On the one hand this isn’t surprising, since you think New York is big and dense already. But then you think that New York has actually been a slow growth city in the last decade. And then you look at the numbers. Frankly, it’s staggering. Manhattan increased its density of people with college degrees by 7,500 people per square mile in the last decade. That’s just the increase in density of just people with college degrees. That’s more than the total population density of most cities in the United States.

We also read a lot about Brooklyn’s (Kings County) transformation – and this metric shows it. But what jumped out at me was the Bronx – wow. Unsurprisingly, other talent hubs like San Francisco, Boston, and DC feature highly on the list. This helps illustrate what’s been going on with these places. I should come as no surprise to see the incredible resurgence of New York, for example, given this type of educational attainment performance.

Now clearly there are caveats. These places benefit from generally high density to begin with, and are geographically small counties. There’s no true apples to apples comparison here. If you are LA or Chicago, both of which occupy gigantic home counties, there’s simply no way to compete on this metric. You’d need to pick a like for like geographic element, which would require some custom analysis. (I did not do city population in this analysis, because city boundaries change so frequently it would entail a lot of work). I suspect that on similarly sized areas, they’d show similar results. By the way, Alexandria, VA is shown on here since cities in Virginia are treated as independent cities, and thus show up as county equivalents in the data.

Let’s take a look at these counties on some other dimensions of the educational attainment number. Here they are ranked by total increase in adults with college degrees.

Again, pretty big numbers for the most part. To put it in perspective, the 171,000 college degrees added in Manhattan in the last nine years would constitute by my quick look the 141st largest city in the United States in its own right, roughly equal to the entire population of Chattanooga, TN.

I thought it would be interesting to see what percentage of total population growth was accounted for by people with college degrees in these places. Given that they are generally low population growth, I was expecting a high number, but even I was surprised to see that growth in people with college degrees was actually more than 100% in most of the cases. In other words, the population of people without college degrees shrank in these places.

Hudson County, NJ actually lost population while adding about 45,000 people with college degrees. So I left it off the list.

This points out one of the negatives often highlighted about these cities, namely that they are getting more exclusive as increasingly you need to be in the educated elite to be able to live there (or at least to make it worth living there). This might be good for those cities at some level, but I’m not sure it’s entirely good for America.

This was a quick hand crank analysis, so a particular caveat emptor on this one. (I used Census midyear estimates for the population).

Here’s another experimental chart. I’m not sure how valid this is, but I applied a location quotient function to the numbers. LQ is normally used with employment data to measure the concentration of an industry in a region relative to the US concentration. If you have a number > 1.0, then you have a greater share than predicted by the US, and vice versa for < 1.0. Here I applied an LQ function for adults with college degrees, and looked at the change in that value over time:

As you can see, all of these places increased their concentration of college degrees relative to the US, with the exception of Alexandria. That city did grow degrees, but it was on such a high base to begin with that the percentage growth didn’t match the US percentage growth. But many of the rest of these were on a high base to begin with too, and still managed to increase their relative concentration. Manhattan already had an LQ > 2.0 in 2000, for example.

This was some of the data I was looking at this week, which will hopefully provide some context around the changes that have been happening in America in the last decade, particularly with regards to talent hubs.

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Replay: “They’re Not Current”

As part of keeping up with this blog, I read a lot of what other people write about various Midwestern cities. A recurring theme from Midwest urbanists is a frustration with local civic leaders’ unwillingness to implement what they see as new and better policies and approaches, especially in light of the struggles the region has encountered and the resulting imperative for change. This is often phrased in less than charitable terms and there seems to be a low opinion of community leadership in many places. I’m guilty of it myself at times. Sometimes it is warranted.

But other times a better way of looking at it was put forth by a friend of mine when he said of the people who he was working with on a civic project, “They’re not current.” By that he meant that while they were well-intentioned, smart, good at business, good at their technical specialty, and excellent at things like fund raising and building community support for initiatives, they simply weren’t up on the latest and greatest thinking in the urbanism space. They weren’t bad leaders or bad people at all – they just had gaps in their knowledge and thinking about cities.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Something to consider is that most Midwestern cities really haven’t experienced anything but decline in the last 40-50 years. Even in the best performing places, large tracts of the city look like bombed out shells of what used to be there in decades past. For people who’ve spent a good chunk of their lives fighting to turn this around, experience does not offer a template of what success looks like. Also, against a backdrop of secular decline, it is easy to delude yourself as to what progress means. A shiny new building downtown might seem like a coup, and indeed it might be in a certain qualified sense, but if every similarly situated city has a similar new building, is the relative status improved? I see little evidence that civic leaders in many places do what Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard advocated and “get out into the world” to see what is going on first hand.

Also, we find ourselves in a rapidly changing world. This means that there is a lot of innovation going on all over the place in all sorts of fields. It is easy to quickly fall behind the curve. I’ll use myself as an example. A couple years ago I asked one of the youngest people on my staff, a very tech savvy guy, whether he thought Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would win in the market. He looked at my like I was crazy and said that no matter which one won, it wouldn’t matter for long, since everything was going to go digital download anyway. He was already downloading high def movies legally on his XBox360 and thought the experience would only get better. Not a bad point of view – one that now appears to be right, in fact – and one I didn’t even consider. Why did I join Twitter or Smaller Indiana? Certainly not because I thought I needed another time sink. I just feel I have to be out trying new things, or else I’ll end up cut off from what’s happening out in the world.

That’s one reason I, like my friend, love talking to students. They are my pipeline to the now. I think it is incumbent on all of us, but especially community leaders, to be aware of the limits of their own knowledge in the context of a rapidly changing world. In today’s age, the traditional skills and ways of making things happen continue to be relevant, but there needs to be additional expertise and insight informing us as to what we need to be doing. People talk about underfunded infrastructure and such, but the reality is that money is often the least of our problems. Every day I open the paper and find lots of money being spent on some project of dubious merit. The challenge is as much about doing the right thing as it is about getting things done. So it’s more important than ever for cities to have a high receptivity to new ideas, a willingness to change and embrace calculated risk taking, and broader networks – including geographically dispersed networks – than ever before. People have to realize that there’s no way to keep up with both today and the way things are going in the future as easily as happened in the past.

The first step is awareness. Today’s urban leaders have to realize that they often, like all of us, aren’t current. Then they can proceed to make sure they seek out and incorporate more leading edge, innovating, and just plain different thinking into their approaches.

This post originally ran on May 6, 2009.

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

New York City’s Taxi of Tomorrow

Having redesigned almost everything else – from bike racks to sidewalk scaffolding – New York is now moving on to the redesign of its taxi. This is being done through, of course, another big competition. Due to the nature of the product, this one is among vehicle manufacturers rather than designers. They’ve even got a dedicated web site for the competition, where the public can provide its input and feedback on the three finalists. The idea is that the city will standardize on a single design for the next decade, signing an exclusive contract worth up to $1 billion.

Here are the entries. First, an adaption of an existing vehicle by Ford:

Next, one by Nissan:

Lastly, a ground up design from a Turkish company called Karsan. This is apparently the only one that is full accessible to the disabled at the moment, and also potentially supports wi-fi.

Personally, I think the styling on all of them leaves much to be desired. Too mini-vanish. Of course, I realize that functionality has to trump coolness. And although I appreciate classic design, I think the vehicle livery on this is definitely due for a refresh. That’s something that could be done in an open competition with artists and designers. The goal should be something classic, but which also has the potential to become iconic in its own right.

Whatever the case, New York shows yet again that it’s out pushing the envelope and and re-examining literally everything it does to make it more relevant to the 21st century global age. I’m not saying that any particular thing jumped out at me as awesome about these cabs. But it shows a mind set of taking a deliberate look at every aspect of city governance and services to figure out how to make it better and contribute to a more livable city.

You can read additional coverage in the New York Times.

More on New York:
New York’s Leadership in Transportation Design
Another Epic Public Space Win in New York
Janette Sadik-Khan on Changing the Transportation Game
New York’s Quality of Life Agenda
The High Line

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Taking Chicago Transit from Good to Great, Part One – Building the Vision

[ Last year I ran a five part series called "Good to Great" about how to fundamentally change the game on transit in Chicago. I guess you could sum it up as, "We need a Chicago2016 for transit." In the lead up to the mayoral election, I am re-running this series over the next month. Virtually all of the material is relevant to any US city with an existing major transit system, so please check it out.

I will add one thing by up front offering the new mayor a suggestion. As much as I might covet the job for myself, he should try to keep Richard Rodriguez as CTA president. I don't even know if Rodriguez wants to keep this tough and thankless position. But given the constraints and pressures he's operating under, I think he and the team there have done a very good job at managing the agency in some difficult circumstances. He's a keeper. If you need to see an example of why, read this article. ]

Earlier this year, I won first prize in a global transit competition sponsored by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. So perhaps it is past time that looked at transit in Chicago. While this article is about that city, the techniques are applicable to most places.

Both the current and former CTA presidents, Richard Rodriguez and Ron Huberman, said that Chicago has a good transit system (I agree) but deserves a great one (I also agree). So with apologies to Jim Collins, this article kicks off a multi-part series on taking Chicago area transit from good to great.

The Problem: No Public Demand

Why doesn’t Chicago have a great transit system? I’m going to make a rather contrarian and controversial indictment. Namely, I think Chicago doesn’t have a great system because its citizens don’t want one. If there were greater citizen demand for a better system, that’s what we would have. Absent that demand, we get at best a good system. That’s because it is impossible to create a great, world class regional transit system without more money – a lot more. This might sound a lot like blaming the victim, but please bear with me.

The numbers are stark. According to a joint promotional site run by the region’s transit agencies, Moving Beyond Congestion, Chicagoland needs $10 billion in funds just to bring the current system up to a good state of repair. Even if the city wanted to simply keep the system at current levels, spending at $1 billion per year would be required. The 2007 strategic plan says that $57 billion is needed over the 30 years to give the city the system it wants and needs. The stimulus funds and monies provided under the state’s recently passed capital program are only a minimal start. Even if you think these numbers are inflated – and I don’t – they are certainly not orders of magnitude too high.

Without significant new dollars being made available, it simply isn’t possible for regional transit agencies to create a transit system worthy of Chicago. It’s just not going to happen. I actually think regional agencies do a pretty good job considering the financial and regulatory constraints they operate under. As they say, “You can set your watch to Metra”. The CTA too has improved service markedly in recent years, and has proven that you can accomplish a lot when you take a “can do” attitude despite not getting more money. The CTA has done a lot to reduce the number of slow zones, roll out passenger friendly services like bus tracker, and experimented with things like iGo car integration.

So why do I say that the people of Chicago don’t want a great system? Because it’s true. People in Chicago like to grouse about the CTA the way they complain about the weather. But that doesn’t translate into anything more than amusing newspaper columns and blog postings. Like the weather, the problems of transit underinvestment are viewed as simply the “background noise” you have to put up with to live in Chicago.

Contrast public reactions to the state of transit investment with that on other controversial affairs of the day – parking meters, the Olympics, crime, or whatever. Heck, there are more people out there pounding the table about how upset they are about the pending demolition of Michael Reese Hospital than there are people demanding more money for transit. If tens of thousands of angry citizens were marching, publishing blogs, and writing letters to Springfield and Washington to express their unhappiness about this state of affairs, we’d see action. If politicians thought they would lose their jobs in the next election if they didn’t do something about transit, well, they’d do something about it.

So much of the writing on transit futures focuses on what we ought to do functionally and technically. But that’s irrelevant if we don’t have the money to pay for it. So this series will focus on how we build public demand for transit investment, elevating its status in our civic priority list. And give an idea of how to actually get the money. This will be a five part series:

Part 1: Building the Vision (this article).
Part 2: Raising the Bar on Design
Part 3: Cost Control and Governance
Part 4: Paying For It
Part 5: Getting It Done

This installment focuses on building a shared civic vision of the future of the city and its transit system.

Why a New Vision Is Necessary

Frankly, it is pretty easy to understand why the public views investing in transit with all the enthusiasm of a dose of castor oil. It’s what I call the “Rusty Furnace Effect”. Imagine you’ve got a gas furnace in your house that is pushing 20 years old. It’s been poorly maintained, is badly rusted, and has an alarming tendency to break down. You open the door to your utility closet and stare at that thing for a while and contemplate a choice: spend $6000 on a new furnace, or pay $250 every time it breaks down. I think most people are going to defer shelling out $6K as long as they can. It’s the same reason I put off getting my wisdom teeth removed until I was in college and had a particularly bad infection. Until the pain of the disease outweighs the perceived pain of the cure, we aren’t going to act.

Transit is in the same boat. We are told that we need to spend $10 billion to “bring the system in a good state of repair”. This will no doubt involve much inconvenience as well, including station closings, three track operation, etc. Why would anyone want to pay $10 billion to get a system that is basically the same as the one we’ve got today, only a bit spiffier? Until, for example, trains start derailing, people don’t perceive the need.

This is basically the problem with all “plumbing replacement” type operations. I don’t think it is any accident that the people selling furnaces tout their potential to reduce heating bills through energy efficient operation. You’ve got to have a hook to convince people that they are getting something.

That’s what we need for public transit in Chicago. We’ve got to have a hook to show people how they are going to get something for all this money. We have to create a vision not just of how transit will be better – though we should do that – but how life in Chicago is going to be different and better when we execute the capital plan. We have to make it real to people and inspire an emotional connection so that they say, “Yes – we’ve got to have some of that!” to the point they support the fund raising necessary to see it happen. That’s the piece we are missing today.

Why Transit Advocates Are Often Poor Marketers for Transit Spending

One thing I’ve noticed is that pro-transit advocates are ofter poor at selling the need for public transit to the public at large. Indeed, except where the public is already primed to support it – places like Portland and Seattle – opponents of transit are generally more effective at making their case. I recently noted this, for example, in the case of Cincinnati’s proposed streetcar system.

I think part of the problem is that the case is obvious to us, thus we are unable to conceive of others who don’t think or feel the same way, which creates a blind spot on selling. Pro-transit activists tend to view people who oppose it as Philistines or representatives of nefarious forces. The idea that people have to be convinced seems foreign.

We see this problem in the Moving Beyond Congestion site. It relies heavily on facts and figures to make its case, as if the mere fact that we need $10 billion to repair regional transit stands on its own. Well, people like me read that and think, “Seems pretty straightforward to me. How much can we afford to spend now and where can we go start raising the money?” But to others those are just numbers. The facts are not in dispute. The numbers on the MBC site are what they are. But facts don’t inspire. Because many of us live and breathe in this space every day, we don’t need the sales job and thus don’t appreciate the need for it.

Also, as we well know, political decisions aren’t always made on the basis of facts and rational analysis. The numbers elected officials really care about are the vote totals, the number of constituent letters and phone calls, etc. So we’ve got to make sure we create that public demand so that politicians see the numbers that matter.

I’m not going to be prescriptive as to what that contents of the vision should be here, but rather talk about some of the elements and techniques that should be brought to bear, including some that were used to great success in Burnham’s Plan of Chicago.

Learning from High Speed Rail

A commenter in one of my blog posts described a lecture at one of the Burnham Plan celebration events, and how the section on high speed rail seemed to really get people excited. This person was wondering why that was. Why has high speed rail captured so much of the public imagination and gotten so much federal funding when we can’t mobilize similar results for metro transit?

It is actually pretty easy to understand why. High speed rail would be a major new transportation system that doesn’t exist at all today, unlike fixing up the CTA to “bring the system up to a good state of repair” which merely lets us keep what we already have. Again, do you want to replace your rusty old furnace or get a shiny new kitchen?

Also, high speed trains tap into a deep romantic streak in the human psyche. The best description of this is Jonathan E. D. Richmond’s paper, “The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles. This is actually written as an anti-rail tract (metro rail, not high speed), but also provides the playbook in favor of it. I can’t do it justice here, but this is an absolute must-read paper. Among other things, he clearly explores the idea of the fast train as sex symbol. Per Richmond:

Arnold Pacey (1983) writes about the “virtuosity values” of technology, the enjoyment of:

having mechanical power under one’s control, and of being master of an elemental force. The teenage enthusiasm for motorcycles reflects this. Many farmers, it is said, buy larger tractors than they really need, to the detriment of soil structures, because of the pleasure they get from using such powerful machines… Dennis Gabor talks about “archetypal human desires” which include the wish to communicate at a distance, to travel fast, to fly [p.84-85]

It is the meanings related to power, virtuosity and sex which the train appears to symbolize which most convincingly seem to focus attention on the technology. The technological power of the train was often equated to sexual potency by those interviewed. A train as both genders: it is referred to as “she” and as a penis. According to LACTC Commissioner and Mayor of Santa Monica, Christine Red:

There was an intense amount of ego over the fact that San Diego had whipped a trolley system out, kabloom, like that. They just did it. And I mean everybody else was like, oh my God, you know, what an affront that this little city could do that, and here we are – a big county – powerful, two-thirds of the population of the state, blah, blah, blah, and we can’t do this [my emphasis]

The fact that San Diego got their bright red cars in working order before Los Angeles even got off the market left LA feeling impotent or even castrated. The metaphorical sexual imagery – of penis envy – in this account is unmistakable. When the LACTC (1991) publication Metro Moves announced the opening of the Blue Line tunnel into downtown Los Angeles, furthermore, it headlined: “A tunnel just waiting for a train.” A picture of the tunnel was contained within the outline of a heart (Fig 4)

Clearly, as the ultimate fast train, high speed rail is also high on the sexiness factor. Also, the idea that the United States is falling behind, and that the world’s super-power is being humiliated by much smaller countries (and major competitors like China) with rail investments plays a role.

There’s a lot more in there, and clearly tapping into the lessons Richmond teaches is important. Chicago is a city with a long history of massive civic pride and boosterism. A city that refused to be anything other than #1. This is something that can be leveraged to good effect in selling transit investment. Likewise Richmond’s “social connections” metaphor (investing in disadvantaged communities to connect them to opportunities) would appear to be a good one to leverage.

Learning from the Plan of Chicago

The most viewed article ever in this blog was called “What Made the Burnham Plan Successful”, which outlined nine items that contributed to the plan’s success. A few of these are highly relevant to this effort as well.

1. A mix of the practical and conceptual. Burnham’s plan both included things like a Michigan Ave. bridge – a practical and concrete item – with items like the harbors and ring road diagrams that were more just ideas. We need something similar here. A mix of practical items like “build this rail station here” with more forward looking items like high speed rail integration or airport express service.
2. A mix of both work in progress and new items. Burnham wisely glommed onto things that were already in the pipe or partially completed. The Michigan Ave. bridge and the lakefront park came to mind. By mixing these with the new, the forward looking items were associated with recent successes. Plus, by having near term items included, they could demonstrate rapid progress on the plan. The CTA could do the same. Today, projects like the Brown Line expansion or the Douglas L rehab are presented as standalone projects, not part of a larger program of renewing Chicago’s transit system. Similarly, the three new L extensions that were approved are likely to be viewed as ho-hum. Unless it affects you directly, why would you care? I’ll likely never take the Red Line to 130th. Having discrete projects instead of a program means each individual one is of mostly parochial interest. What Burnham did was draw the big picture and showed how the pieces fit in. That’s what we need to do. Actually, a lot has already been done. Combine the past projects with near term items and longer terms with an overarching vision to show the public that we are marching towards a better future. Then you also build a coalition in support of an overall program, instead of just having different groups and neighborhoods who care mostly about their own local project.
3. High quality renderings and design in the plan document. This is examined below. But the quality of design in the plan itself excited the public, made the vision real to them, and gave it an authoritative feel.
4. Sustained follow-through on sales and marketing. The plan didn’t sell itself. There was a big, consistent push behind it. This famously included the Wacker Manual, a condensed version of the plan taught to children in the public schools.

Planners today could learn a lot from the techniques of success used by Burnham and his team.

I’ll conclude this post with a look at three examples of efforts that have done this right, focusing on visualizations, to show the type of effect we need to be aiming for: Burnham’s original Plan of Chicago, the “Imagine KC” project from Kansas City, and Louisville’s 8664 initiative.

Burnham’s Artwork

One of great things about the Plan of Chicago is that its backers spared no expense in creating a high quality output. They commissioned an artist to do bespoke artwork to literally show a conceptual picture of what the Chicago of tomorrow would look like, drawing on the legacy of the World’s Columbian Exhibition. These were gorgeous, full color plates in the output. Even children could appreciate them. Here are a couple of samples:

It’s easy for us to take Chicago for granted today. But in 1909 it was a crowded, filthy, dangerous, and rather ugly place. For people to see these gorgeous renderings of a clean, beautiful, well-ordered, spacious city, with gorgeous parks and boulevards must have prompted amazement, perhaps even disbelief. This is Chicago? The city could really be like this? Ultimately, it whetted people’s appetites to actually get it.

Imagine KC

Here’s another example, this one transit specific. It comes from Kansas City. Kansas City does not have rail transit today. A proposal to fund the construction of a light rail system was voted down last November. Frustrated that people did not really understand what light rail would do for the city, a local design agency created this video for Kansas City Public Television to try to make it very clear visually. Some of you may have seen it since I’ve linked it before, but if not this three and a half minute video is well worth watching.

The video shows the time wasted in cars, followed by a demonstration of benefits of dense, mixed use development, then an example of transit creating this very type of environment in Kansas City.

One cautionary note here. This video would makes Kansas City look like a nearly 100% white city. Plus the development featured – fitness clubs, sushi bars, etc – are oriented towards yuppies. This feeds into criticisms of transit in small cities as being gentrification tools and subsidies to the already well-off. This is a common failing in small city transit advocacy. Of course, Chicago is nothing like Kansas City. The value of transit is clear to the whole community.

The techniques of this video are very applicable to Chicago.

8664

Lastly, I’ll mention again a movement out of Louisville, Kentucky called “8664”. This is a grass roots movement that wants to stop a major new downtown bridge and expressway widening in favor of tearing down an elevated waterfront freeway, replacing it with a park.

8664 tapped into a powerful idea of recapturing the rivertown heritage of Louisville. They’ve relentlessly touted the benefits – financial, recreational, environmental, etc – and have really captured the public imagination. Without any official backing, they have totally changed public opinion. While many many not be sold on the idea of tearing down I-64, they clearly have soured on the idea of the huge Spaghetti Junction reconstruction and new bridge.

Part of 8664 has been a series of wonderful drawings and videos, some of which I’ve shown before. Here’s their compare and contrast of the state’s plan:

with their plan:

Extremely effective. Their marketing is running rings around the state DOT’s. They are rigorously on message, repeatedly touting a more livable future for Louisville, and enumerating the benefits of the project, while continuing to generate quality collateral like this.

Conclusion

To really capture the public imagination and build demand for public transit is going to require the creation of a compelling vision, an emotionally resonant picture of what life will be like in our new and better future, and a strong and sustained marketing plan to sell it. As the examples above show, the vision can be conceptual at some level, as long as it is generally honest and there is a real, credible plan behind it.

More Chicago

Chicago Transit: From Good to Great
Part 1: Building the Vision (this article)
Part 2: Raising the Bar on Design
Part 3: Cost Control and Governance
Part 4: Paying For It
Part 5: Getting It Done

Other Transportation Related Articles
The Urbanophile Wins Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Transit Competition
Transportation and the Burnham Plan
Metropolitan Linkages (high speed rail benefits case)
High Speed Rail (implementation)

This post originally ran on August 19, 2009.

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Urbanoscope

Check out my Thanksgiving open thread to see what people are thankful for about their city.

Another awesome program by CEOs for Cities is the Give a Minute campaign, in which they are asking people what would encourage them to bike, walk, or take the CTA more often. Please click on over the web site and make your contribution.

And also if you’re in Chicago, you might want to check out Metropulse Chicago, a new community indicators site put out by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

For anyone interested in the story behind Cincinnati’s abandoned subway tunnels, Jake Meckelnborg wrote a book about it you can check out.

Indianapolis Parking Meters – Final Installment

I wanted to close the loop on the Indianapolis parking meter lease. Unlike in Pittsburgh, where a wise city council rejected a long term lease, Indianapolis unsurprisingly passed it, which is truly disappointing.

I focused on the bad public policy angle of this, others covered conflicts of interest or political angles or whatever matters to them. But all this debate over the transaction of the moment I think obscures the larger trend. Once, Indianapolis was a place where visionary and determined leadership across the community and across parties transformed an overgrown small town and backwater state capital known as “India-No-Place” into arguably the best performing large Midwest city and one of the few holding its own or even leading the rest of America. Today, as this contract helps illustrate, Indianapolis is more and more just another city. That’s disappointing. I certainly hope for the best, but it will be interesting to watch Indy’s performance going forward in this new civic era for the city.

Richard Florida on CNN International

Richard Florida talked about his book the Great Reset on CNN international last week. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here). Unfortunately, there will be a pre-roll ad on this video.

World and National Roundup

Esquire: Janette Sadik-Khan named one of 2010’s ‘Best and Brightest’

The National Endowment for the Arts published an interesting report on Creative Placemaking

William Fulton: City and State Smokestack Chasing Blows Mostly Smoke

Neal Peirce: A ‘Golden Moment’ for Cities?

Joel Kotkin: The Rise of the Efficient City

NYT: “Smart” Electric Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy

New Geography: The Other Chambers of Commerce

Richard Longworth: A Region on the Mississippi

Daily Yonder: Many outmigration counties are prosperous

NYT: Walgreens tackles food deserts

Owen Hatherley: Shanghai International Exposition

Steve LaFleur: Toronto Election Shows the Failure of Amalgamation

WSJ: New York Poised to Grab New Jersey’s Tunnel Money

NYT: New York Studies Subway Tunnel to New Jersey – Extending the 7 line to Secaucus.

Richard Layman: Corruption: DC vs. Maryland Jurisdictions

NYT: Los Angeles Mass Transit Is Expanding

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Area stunts growth by feeding on itself

Indianapolis Business Journal: West Side revitalization plan aims to capitalize on diverse retailers

Chicago Tribune: Deals bring Chicago’s public pension funds to the brink of insolvency and Risky investments not paying off for Chicago pension funds.

Chicago Sun-Times: Houses more valuable near Metra stations

Vote With Your Feet: Stalled on the Bloomingdale Trail

The Guardian: Top Players Fall Silent as Detroit Symphony Orchestra fights for survival – Even Detroit’s symphony issues are able to muster tier one international press coverage.

NYT: Hello, Columbus – How Columbus, Ohio became a gay mecca.

Winter Cycling in Copenhagen

Apparently most cyclists in Copenhagen keep right on doing it even in the heart of winter. Copenhagenize put up this great one minute video to prove it. (If the video doesn’t display, click here). It’s something to keep in mind as he head into the winter season here in the US and the rest of the northern hemisphere. Copenhagenize the planet!

Buffalo, This Place Matters

I normally don’t link to promotional videos, but this piece from from Buffalo’s CVB called “Buffalo, This Place Matters” is very well done. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

New York Bicycling

EcoMobility.tv in Montreal created the four minute video below about cycling in New York that’s definitely work a watch. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

Reinventing Pittsburgh

A web site called “Changing Gears,” a collaboration of public radio stations in Chicago, Michigan, and Ohio, did a five part series profiling Pittsburgh’s turnaround and the lessons it might offer to others. The site has audio available of course, but also the transcripts of the pieces are there for your reading pleasure:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five

Post-Script

Matt Heidelberger profiles the 12 most dingy New York subway stations in his wonderful post “The Dirty Dozen.” Like the loss of the Bilerico Project duo to DC, the loss of Matt Heildelberger to NYC is a cruel blow to Indy’s blogosphere.

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

Thanksgiving Open Thread: What Are You Thankful For About Your City?

I’m going to be off the rest of the week for the US Thanksgiving holiday. But I’ll leave up this open thread for people to chime in with what they are most thankful for about their city.

I’ll kick it off as usual. I won’t pick just one city, but I’m thankful that across America, no matter how thriving or struggling the city, it always seem there are people passionately making it a better place. From Austin and Chicago to Detroit and Braddock and Buffalo, there’s a passionate generation of urbanist out there fighting the fight for their city. I shudder to think where we’d be without them. This gives me hope that more places that we think that are struggling are going to ultimately make a turnaround.

All the best to you and your family.

PS: I realized late yesterday that all the links to my suburbs series were to my old blog site. Here are the updated links for you that should actually work:

Review: Retrofitting Suburbia
End Property Tax Collection in Arrears

Building Suburbs That Last Series:
#1 – Strategy
#2 – New Urbanism and Parcelization
#3 – The Mother of All Impact Fees
#4 – Supporting Home Based Businesses

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

Building Suburbs that Last #5 – Redevelopment Insurance

Photo Credit: Flickr/julianmeade

This is another in a periodic series about building sustainable suburbs properly so-called.

To recap, I consider the suburban decay facing inner ring suburbs across America, especially those of the 60’s and 70’s vintage built on a modern suburban pattern, as one of the key challenges facing urban leaders over the coming decades. I outlined a lot of the case in my review of the book “Retrofitting Suburbia”.

Why is this happening? One big reason cities tend to fall into decline is that they accumulate huge unfunded liabilities, and those liabilities attach to the territory, not the people. This lets one generation of residents rack up huge future bills, then skip town to leave the next generation or those not lucky enough to get out with the bill. It’s the equivalent of being able run up a huge balance on the civic credit card, then pawn the bill off on someone else.

Imagine if you will if your house worked this way. Your mortgage, your credit card debt, etc. all happened to be chargeable not to you, but to whomever was living in your house. If you simply stopped paying and moved elsewhere, you’d be relieved of all those debts. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly how municipal debt and unfunded liabilities work. It is a huge incentive for politicians and residents to vote for immediate gratification with the bill – infrastructure costs, pensions, redevelopment costs, or what have you – pushed out 25-30 years. Then these people or their children simply move to a greenfield and start the process over again.

I suspect this, perhaps more than any other force, is what drives urban and suburban abandonment in favor of newer towns.

For various reasons I won’t go into here, I don’t think it would be a good idea to have municipal debt follow people. So we have to find ways to prevent people from accruing unfunded debts and off balance sheet liabilities in the first place. My previous installment was about using more robust impact fees to ensure new development pays for the infrastructure it needs on a fully loaded basis. As with that one, my idea here is more of a concept to explore, not at this time a specific policy recommendation that could be implemented.

This one deals with redevelopment costs. Let’s imagine the life cycle of a strip mall. A developer comes in proposing to build a strip center full of big name retailers like Best Buy. The town council salivates over the prospect of a commercial taxpayer. They dicker about cosmetics such as facade materials. Then it is approved and the center built.

The developer goes into this with a certain business case lifespan – say 25 years. That’s a long way off, so for a long time, everything’s great. But eventually the next exit or two down the interstate opens up. And there are even newer malls. Some of those big name retailers move to the new mall. Maybe the owner invests in a refresh, or maybe he just sells it to some downscale operator.

Over time, the tenant mix changes. There are fewer upscale chains and more pawn shops. The mall is considered dowdy. It is old and run down and was cheaply constructed to begin with. And the format of the center is obsolete. The incomes in the area are stagnating or declining as too. And the infrastructure that was new 25-30 years ago is wearing out. Maybe stores close, leaving empty “grayboxes”. Maybe the owner demolishes them to save on taxes while holding onto the weedy remains as a speculator. Or maybe there are still some tenants, and not necessarily bad ones, but not the full range of neighborhood services the town would like to see.

The town as a problem on its hands. Where once it was locked into a virtuous circle as growth led to more growth and more increased taxes and fixed costs spread over more assessed value and income, it is now in a decline cycle. It’s taxes are going up as the tax base erodes and people leave. Many of the remaining residents are older and there is not a new generation waiting in the wings. Suburban decay has arrived.

What is this town to do? Many have fought back with subsidized redevelopment schemes such as new town centers or new urbanist developments or other flavors du jour, but that costs money – money the town doesn’t have. You have to buy out landowners looking for a big payout, you probably have to pay to scrape the site, and you have to give incentives to the new person to come in. It has a major redevelopment liability that has come due. To address it, the town has to borrow from the future, a risky bet that development will pay off enough not just to repay the bonds, but also add to the civic coffers. Some towns aren’t even in good enough condition to do that.

If you think about it, we spend virtually all of our time in the planning process thinking about the upfront side of the development. We charge impact fees to mitigate road needs from new development and such. We go through an extensive review process to make sure there are no adverse impacts on the surroundings. But we spent little time thinking about the back end of the project, of its end of life, and the types of negative externalities that occur there as people can simply abandon homes and malls and go elsewhere.

I suggest we need a lot more thought and more policy tools for managing the end of the life cycle – particularly around acquiring title if necessary and paying to get sites ready for redevelopment. We need to think and plan about the full lifecycle of what we are building up front.

One idea is to require developers to insure against redevelopment costs. That is, landowners and developers should be required to make some financial provision to indemnify municipalities against these types of costs. It could take all sorts of forms such a performance bond or even a credit default swap, but I like to think of it as redevelopment insurance.

Think about it, we don’t let people own and operate cars without liability insurance. Why let them operate strip malls that could fail and leave the town stuck with a bunch of grayboxes while the developer and retailers skip to the next exit down? Imagine if developers had to get insurance to cover any redevelopment costs from a third party in an open, competitive private market. We know the companies writing these policies would be keen to not lose money on them. It would also allow distinctions between good developers and bad ones. And it could encourage provisions such as guaranteed ongoing investment to make sure strip centers and such stay relevant.

The beauty of this is that the development could not be sold until the purchaser could also manage to get such a policy, sort of like title insurance. This would tend to prevent companies from scrapping developments by selling to sleazy operators – and make sure that the original developer could not try to easily wiggle out of his obligations.

This policy would be triggered when certain criteria were met. This is where it gets dicey. How could criteria be specified in advance? And what entitlement might the town have in terms of exercising these rights?

I won’t profess to have the answer. Unlike some of my other suggestions in this series, this one is again more of a thought experiment to show how we need to take more seriously the end and well as the beginning of developments, especially in suburban settings where preferences changes and older formats rapidly become obsolete. This is something I’d like to see academics and policy makers give more thought to know. (I believe some places have already started experimenting with this).

More Reading on the Suburbs

Review: Retrofitting Suburbia
End Property Tax Collection in Arrears

Building Suburbs That Last Series:
#1 – Strategy
#2 – New Urbanism and Parcelization
#3 – The Mother of All Impact Fees
#4 – Supporting Home Based Businesses

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Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century.

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