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Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Density, Vibrancy, and Opportunity Zones by Tory Gattis

[ Here's the second part of Tory Gattis' take on vibrancy and car based urbanism. - Aaron. ]

Last week I tried taking Jane Jacobs’ four tenants of vibrancy and applying them to the car-based city, describing the concept of the mobility/draw zone. It can be roughly summarized in this excerpt:

So the four tenets of vibrancy transformed for the car-based city get reduced to two:

1. Loose zoning/permitting constraints to enable both a wide diversity of businesses as well as population density where there is consumer demand (apartments, condos, townhomes)
2. Maximized mobility with a well-designed, high-capacity arterial and freeway network

These two principles maximize the population within the largest possible mobility/draw zone, which gives vibrancy its best chance of reaching critical mass and flourishing.

The next day, I promised these two topics (among others) in a future post. This is that post.

• Rename “mobility/draw-zones” to “opportunity zones”, since they represent the opportunity region for a consumer, explorer, job seeker, or business owner – and the larger it is and the more people it has, the larger the opportunity and the resulting vibrancy.
• How Manhattan and Houston have very similar opportunity zones despite dramatic differences in urban form, and have the potential for similar levels of vibrancy in some respects.

Density is a big focus of debate in today’s urban planning. Again, if your assumed mobility mode is 3mph walking, or walking plus mass transit, you need a lot of people in a small area to create vibrancy within the mobility zone. In Jacob’s world, mobility is basically fixed and density is variable. In the car-based world, density is relatively fixed (well below Jacob’s standard of >100 dwellings/acre because of the need to accommodate cars and parking plus the majority desire for single-family residential living or mid-density apartments), but mobility is variable depending on the road network and traffic congestion – which can substantially affect the size of the mobility zone. Since what really counts is the population within the 10-20 minute mobility zone – as a proxy for easily accessible diversity and vibrancy – lets take a look at some estimated mobility zones in Manhattan and Houston:

* Average Manhattan taxi covers 1.9 miles in 10 minutes, ~12 mph (source)
(note that some Manhattan scenarios actually show a mobility zone population larger than the actual population of Manhattan, due to the circular nature of the model vs. Manhattan’s actual long, thin-island geography – but it still serves its illustrative purpose)

Several interesting observations come out of this table:

• A car-based city with a strong freeway network has the potential to match the vibrancy and diversity of a high-density city like Manhattan. This is not to say that Houston and New York are equivalent. This is an analysis of the diversity available in a typical, everyday 15-minute trip. Special occasion trips (museums, sporting events, concerts, theater, etc.) have a much higher acceptable commute time, and therefore draw on a larger area. New York is a much older and larger city that can draw on a regional metro population of 21 million, substantially more than Houston’s 5 million.
• The classic “monotony of the suburban edge cities” phenomenon is explained by looking at the all-arterial drive scenario, which is common on the fringes. The fringes also drop population density rapidly as they get farther out, further reducing the mobility zone population and therefore diversity/vibrancy (ex: the mobility zone of interest for suburban Sugar Land in southwest Houston is to the north and east, not south or west).
• Los Angeles was the first large-scale car-based city, and it is often not held in high regard. Why? LA has many arterials with overloaded, slow freeways and no frontage roads (although they do have higher density to somewhat make up for it). That drives LA towards the “all-arterial” scenario, or the middle scenario at best. Houston has a strong frontage-road network with substantial retail, office, and other commercial services – the car-based city equivalent of “vibrant street retail.” Even commercial/retail space not on the frontage roads is often within a couple minutes of a frontage road. This allows Houston to make the third scenario a relatively common one, with it’s attendant high access to diversity within the mobility zone.
• Jacobs describes a “density dead zone” of greater than 12 dwellings per acre but less than 100 dwellings per acre – too dense to be suburban but too sparse to be really urban. These areas almost never achieve vibrancy or diversity. Arterial-driven car-based cities with weak freeway networks seem to be the car-based equivalent of this “dead zone” with low density and relatively low-to-moderate mobility.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

This post originally appeared in Houston Strategies on May 11, 2006.

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Tory Gattis on Social Systems Architecture and Why It Matters

Tory Gattis is an ex-McKinsey consultant and Houston civic advocate who writes the blog Houston Strategies. As you might infer, he’s heavily aligned with the Houston model of civic development. I know that’s something that isn’t very popular in some circles, but it seems to be working for them at least.

Tory recently spoke at TEDxHouston on a variety of topics related to urban development and Houston. The video is below, followed by some commentary. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Here are a few of the takeaways in case you aren’t up for watching the video.

1. Size Matters. City size is important. City-regions benefit hugely from scale economics. For example, a football stadium costs the same if you have a few people to pay for it or a lot of people to pay for it. People are also more productive and make more money in bigger cities. Gattis cites a variety of statistics on this, which should be familiar to anyone who has been reading about the research of Geoffrey West.

2. Income/Cost. The importance of cost adjusted personal income. Looking only at income provides an incomplete view since regions vary widely in costs, particularly housing cost. Per Gattis, Houston metro ranks #1 in the country in personal income adjusted for cost of living.

3. Business Climate Houston has no zoning and is just generally a pro-business environment, making it an attractive place for entrepreneurs and established businesses alike.

4. Mobility. Personal mobility, especially highways, is critical to expanding the “opportunity zone.” In fact, Gattis claims good auto mobility reduces sprawl. Houston is approaching the limit on freeway expansion, however, and transit options are needed. But given the highly dispersed nature of the region’s origins and destinations, bus would be far preferable to rail.

5. Organization. This is a bit of a non-sequitor in the the video, but the limits of hierarchy in the modern age is very apropos of urban redevelopment. Many cities seek redevelopment via a strong “top down” model. That’s still the best way to get things like stadiums and transit systems done. Unfortunately, things like reviving the urban core require an equally vibrant bottom up culture.

I don’t expect this video to convince many folks, but it is always good to hear divergent points of view.

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Miscellaneous Musings

Someone over at SSC took a four day trip to Cleveland and posted a pretty great series of dozens of photos about that city. You can see them here:

• Day One
• Day Two
• Day Three
• Day Four

If you have time to peruse these, you’ll see another city with a sparkling urban history and built environment. But as with Cincinnati, these haven’t translated into a positive demographic or economic climate. Included are pictures of Cleveland’s transit system, which includes high quality rapid rail transit lines. If transit will revitalize our decaying cities, how does one explain away the Cleveland example?

Here is an interesting study. Called the Measure of America, it applies UN standards for human development to US states and congressional districts. I haven’t digested it in full detail, but here are some money maps of the nation at a glance by congressional district. As you’ll see, it is typically big city suburban districts that are doing ok in the Midwest. The rest of the place is suffering.

The mayor of Louisville was in Tampa, Florida last week trying to lure expats back home to Kentucky. I’m sure the free Maker’s helped attract them to that meeting at least. The city even has its own MySpace page. The concept isn’t a bad one, but I think overly focusing on trying to lure former residents back misses the broader opportunity for engaging them as an alumni network.

Houston is the cities urbanites love to hate. The NYT attacks them for not recycling. Ed Glaeser of Harvard defends them versus New York. Someone else takes offense at that notion. I’ve written about Houston before. That city, along with other sun belt boomtowns like Atlanta and Dallas, have to somehow be explained away by the sophisticates who say that the ultimate successful city has to look something like San Francisco.

USA Today writes about a new book called Traffic, by a guy named Tom Vanderbilt. It is all about driving in America today, and appears to have all sorts of interesting facts, including a discussion of roundabouts. It may be worth checking out.

Indianapolis has its own streetcar web page now. Welcome to the club. If the experience of other cities is any guide, it is probably $100-150 million for a downtown circulator line. I wonder how much of this would overlap the Cultural Trail? Oh, and Columbus just approved a streetcar study.

Kansas City is planning to put light rail on the ballot in November.

A Republican state senator in Indiana advocates privatizing the lottery.

Jam Productions buys the historic but decrepit Uptown Theater in Chicago for $3.23 million. I took a tour of this some years back when it was open for a rare visit from the public. It’s a magnificent building, but has suffered a lot of damage. Incredible as it might seem, almost all of the interior damage was caused during a single winter when the heat wasn’t turned on and the pipes burst – that was within the last 15 years.

Thanks to Jeff over at Daytonology for pointing out this NYT Magazine article about desegregation by class instead of race in the wake of recent Supreme Court rulings. Louisville, Kentucky is a big case study.

Apparently the Swedes are coming – to Columbus, Ohio.

An article about I-469 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “After 20 years, Interstate 469 remains a lightly traveled loop”

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Houston: The Next Great World City?

Joel Kotkin wrote a must read article about Houston at the American, the publication of the politically right American Enterprise Institute. Obviously your opinion on this piece will somewhat depend on your view of Kotkin and the AEI. Nevertheless, I thought this was a great article. It echoes a lot of themes that I talk about in my blog. Most especially, it explicitly rejects the notion that the path to greatness for cities lies in imitating the exemplars of the 19th century urban form, such as San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston. While I love all of those cities, they came of age in a different era and it is simply not feasible to attempt to replicate that model elsewhere in the 21st century. Rather, the way forward is to find your own path, based on what you are, not on what you aren’t.

That’s what Houston did. I’ve got to confess that I worked in Houston for some time and, for the most part, thought the city was awful. It’s a mix of too much humidity outside, and too much air conditioning inside. Conspicuous consumption, likely a legacy of boom-bust cycles in the energy business, is rampant. I saw more Ferrari’s in Houston than anywhere I’ve ever been. The average car in some neighborhoods is an SL 500. Large number of women appear to have indulged in artificial enhancement. Houston famously has no zoning, though it looks similar to most other Southern cities, that is to say, pretty bad. They’ve got great roads, I’ll give them that. They really know how to build interstates in Texas. And the Houston Grand Opera is pretty good. But for the most part this city was my personal definition of hell. Ok to work in on assignment, but not the kind of place that would be my first choice of places to live. The article makes this point way better than I do.

Despite an impressive growth record and positive signs for the future, Houston is hardly regarded by most journalists, academics, and urbanists as anything close to a model for a successful city. Many seem to share the impression expressed by journalist John Gunther in Inside U.S.A. in 1947 when he described Houston as a place ‘where few people think about anything but money.’ Its other negative attributes included being ‘the nosiest city’ in the country, Gunther said, ‘with a residential section mostly ugly and barren—a city without a single good restaurant.’

Opinions do not seem to have changed much even as Houston has developed a high-tech infrastructure and a spectacular skyline. The New Urbanist guru Andres Duany, whose city planning emphasizes cozy, walkable neighborhoods, seems horrified that Houstonians—driving SUVs across the sprawling distances of the city and its suburbs—appear to regard the galleria shopping center as Houston’s social center. Lauding Houston to urban planners is not much different than extolling red meat at a convention of vegans.

In other words, not the type of place that typically appeals to the urban intelligentsia. But that is and always has been a tiny minority of people. Obviously something about Houston appealed to the millions who’ve moved there in the last decades. Continuing:

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being ‘cool.’ Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the ‘creative class’ of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls ‘growth without growth’—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually ‘minimize’ the influx of new people and jobs.

Growth without growth is right. I’ll cite again the example of Chicago, which despite a huge skyscraper and condo building boom is flat to declining in population. According to the just released census figures, the Chicago metro area as a whole had net outmigration, including net domestic outmigration of 57,285 – comparable to Detroit. The creative class is flocking, but everyone else is leaving. The city of Big Shoulders is turning into the city of venti lattes. This is great if you’re part of the elite. But for the majority of people trying to build a solid middle class life for their families, it isn’t quite so great. Ultimately cities are about people, and the urban vision of all too many urban planning gurus extends only to a very small number.

So what did Houston do different?

Al Colbert’s emphasis on the importance of seizing opportunity would have warmed the hearts of the city’s founders. In an era when many other cities try to position themselves with trendier distinctions (as ’smart growth’ exemplars or as magnets for high-income households, for instance), Mayor Bill White, a Democrat, is happy for Houston to be known simply as an ‘opportunity city,’ which is a pretty good description of what the place has been since its inception: a venue where people who work hard can get ahead.

And:

Other cities enjoy better locations for shipping, richer agricultural resources, or similar proximity to oil fields. The answer, I have come to understand as I have worked in Houston as a reporter and consultant, echoes something that the late Soichiro Honda once told me: ‘More important than gold and diamonds are people.’ This critical resource, more than anything, accounts for Houston’s headlong drive toward becoming not only the leading city of Texas and the South, but also a player on the global scene: it is emerging as one of the world’s great cities.

It took a certain type of settler, back in the 1830s, to look at a sun-blasted, humidity-drenched, mosquito-infested flatland far from any major river or port and think: ‘Here is where I’ll make my success.’ That tradition of hopefulness and determination can readily be found in the city to this day. As Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg notes, roughly 80 percent of Houstonians, according to his annual local surveys, consistently agree with the proposition that ‘if they work hard, they can succeed here.’

The city focused on infrastructure as well.

Houston’s patriarchs worked assiduously to create competitive advantages. In the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated Galveston in 1900, for example, Houston’s business elite secured local and federal funds to develop a 50-mile-long ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico. The channel would allow Houston eventually to become the nation’s second-largest port.

In his Rental Car Tours report on Houston, anti-transit, pro-sprawl gadfly consultant Wendell Cox calls Houston the “can do” city, noting:

Few, if any, urban areas have been as successful in controlling their traffic congestion as Houston. Houston is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in North America. By the early 1980s, the area had managed to develop the worst traffic congestion in the United States, even worse than Los Angeles. Businesses were beginning to tell local officials that they were no longer interested in locating in Houston, just as is occurring now in Portland due to the smart-growth generated traffic congestion in that urban area. But, in this ‘can do’ urban area, local officials did not huddle together with their sweaters in Carteresque pessimism and whine about an era of limits’ or ‘our best days are behind us’ or even, as Anthony Downs would have us believe, that we had better start liking traffic congestion. Instead, they set about to solve the problem and in fact built enough new roadway capacity to make things better now than they were in the middle 1980s, and to fall to 14th in traffic congestion in the United States, behind Los Angeles, Portland and other urban areas.

Houston also worked hard to turn its setbacks into opportunities for the future. In addition to the hurricane noted above, note the contrast between how Houston addressed the energy bust of the 1980’s, when the city became famous for its “see through” skyscrapers, and how Rust Belt cities have reacted to the decline of manufacturing. Back to Kotkin:

Houstonians worked desperately to ensure that their city emerged from the early-1980s oil bust as the undisputed center of the energy industry. Many observers saw the oil bust as a harbinger of Houston’s inevitable decline. And indeed office construction nosedived along with rents, housing prices, and the job market. Yet, looking back, it is clear that Houston turned the oil bust to its advantage.

Using the lure of its relatively inexpensive office space and housing stock, as well as its ties to energy executives and leading engineers, the city attracted firms to locate there. In 1960, Houston was the home of hardly any major energy companies, ranking behind New York, Los Angeles, and even Tulsa; today, 16 large companies make their headquarters there, more than all those cities combined.

I’m not going to say that other cities should imitate Houston, though I think ideas like focusing on opportunities for the broad population base, infrastructure investment, and trying to aggressively play the hand you’re dealt have broad applicability. Houston isn’t the future model for America any more than San Francisco is. Houston has built something that works for them, based on their unique circumstances. The challenge for Midwestern and other American metros is how to do the same, to find a unique and personal path to a successful and prosperous future for all their residents. Don’t just follow the crowd but build a truly local and organic version of urban success that is true to the native soil.

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