Subscribe/Feeds

• Subscribe by Email
• Subscribe in a Reader
• Subscribe to Comments
• Become a Facebook Fan
• Follow on Twitter
• View Photos
• Watch Videos

Search

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Back to the City

Update: The NYT just ran an interesting story called “In Shift, More People Move In to New York Than Out” that provides further info on this trend using recent Census data.

My latest post is online over at New Geography. It is called “Back to the City?” and examines the question of whether in fact there has been a movement back to the city. Census figures suggest that while many downtowns flourished, albeit often showing large percentage gains on a small base, cities generally underperformed in the 2000s vs. the 1990s.

In this piece I look at intra-metro migration to measure people moving from the city to the suburbs and vice versa. Because data is only available at the county level, I selected four cities where counties offered a good proxy for the urban core: New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

As you can see from the chart above, there has been a shift in trends in the 2000s, with out-migration falling off late in the decade, while in-migration remained steady or even increased. The most striking trend was in Philadelphia, as shown above. That chart shows the migration values plotted as a index to render them in the same scale. There is still a net out-migration to the suburbs, but the gap has narrowed in these places. Here we see that on the chart with raw numbers:

Obviously with the late decade featuring a steep recession and housing bust, migration has been affected. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. But these numbers do clearly show improvements for core cities in the underlying migration trends.

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Replay: A Better Road to Clean Water Act Compliance

I’ve noted before that the astronomical cost of Clean Water Act compliance for our cities was a killer. Most older cities are also struggling with deteriorated street infrastructure that would require another massive dose of spending to correct. Also, in the Midwest, most cities have street networks that are not even right in their very conception for the modern day anyway. And, they need to make major investments to create a more green city as well. A plan out of Philadelphia shows the way to kill three birds with one stone.

With the most ambitious program of its kind in America, Philly is looking to remediate its combined sewer overflow problem with a massive program of green building designed to prevent the problem in the first place.

Philadelphia has announced a $1.6 billion plan to transform the city over the next 20 years by embracing its storm water – instead of hustling it down sewers and into rivers as fast as possible.

The proposal, which several experts called the nation’s most ambitious, reimagines the city as an oasis of rain gardens, green roofs, thousands of additional trees, porous pavement, and more.

All would act as sponges to absorb – or at least stall – the billions of gallons of rainwater that overwhelm the city sewer system every year.

The plan’s complex funding formula would raise rates somewhat but also attract grants and encourage private investment.

Further, the Water Department says the city’s greening would result in more jobs, higher property values, better air quality, less energy use, and even fewer deaths – from excess heat.
[ link to online article expired ]

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a combined sewer is where storm water runoff and sewage from buildings is carried in the same pipes. This was how sewers were built back in the day and were a huge improvement in public sanitation at the time. However, in heavy rains, the storm water runoff overwhelms the capacity of the treatment system, and the rest backs up in basements, pools on the streets, or is simply dumped into a nearby river, contaminating the environment with untreated sewage. Cities are being forced to largely eliminate these combined sewer overflows as part of the Clean Water Act.

The typical solution to this is to spend a few billion dollars building a “deep tunnel”. This is a huge storage pipe bored into bedrock deep underground, which holds excess sewage until after the storm when the treatment plant can process it.

There are a few problems with deep tunnels:

• They are ridiculously expensive. Washington, DC is spending $2.2 billion on one, Indianapolis $1.6 billion, Cincinnati $3.5 billion, and Cleveland $5 billion – or thereabouts. The prices seem to vary depending on the source you read, but the operative term is always “billion”.
• Like all projects designed to deal with peak of the peak capacity, it will be un-utilized or under-utilized 90% of the time. It’s mostly wasted capacity. If you can, it is generally better to use demand management techniques to smooth out demand spikes, such as congestion pricing for roads.
• It’s a hack. We’re still basically taking clean water (well, not entirely clean, but that’s another post), combining it with raw sewage, and creating even bigger amount of, well, sewage. That doesn’t sound too smart.
• It adds zero to the city. What does your city get for a deep tunnel no one can see? Not much. The environmental benefits will never generate a rational economic or recreational ROI and no one even attempts to justify it on that basis. We are simply doing this because we’ve decided it is the right thing to do.

The cost of this will add yet another incentive for people to move to suburban or exurban districts that are not part of the combined sewer zone to escape paying the sky high bills that will result. Those newer areas were built from the ground up with separate storm water and sanitary sewer systems. Sewer bills in Indianapolis are on their way to over $100 per month – triple suburban rates. This will certainly hurt low income people and make them look even more strongly at the collar counties.

Philadelphia is showing a better way to tackle this problem. Instead of building a deep tunnel for billions and getting more or less no return, it is looking to spend money at get something for it in terms of improved street and green infrastructure and more trees and greenery – while preventing the creation of billions of gallons of contaminated water in the first place. In short, exactly the type of demand management solution we should be looking at. There’s no guarantee the EPA will go along with them. Cincinnati floated this idea and it got shot down. But given the potentially huge benefits, it ought to be pushed with full vigor.

Consider the possibilities. Instead of a place like Indianapolis tripling sewer rates to dig a deep tunnel, then having to turn around and sell its water utility (a moving Cincinnati is also looking at) to raise funds to repave streets that, even if fixed up, still are not relevant to reinvigorating the urban core for the 21st century, why not instead do something like this? I was thinking about it just the other day walking past a construction zone on the Cultural Trail and seeing the rain gardens being built there. Why not use the billions for sewers to rebuild the streets with rain gardens, new curbs and sidewalks, bike lanes, new permeable pavements, trees and native grasses, etc? This would not be gold plated a la the Cultural Trail, but just what the new basics of a thriving urban environment today ought to look like. Think of the possibilities:

• CSO overflows fixed
• Streets re-imagined and upgraded
• New state of the art green infrastructure built

That’s called a trifecta. Any city that hasn’t already built a deep tunnel should launch a full court press on this – even it has already reached a settlement with the EPA. There are certainly challenges to overcome – I hear permeable asphalt can’t be salted, for example, a problem in a region with lots of snow – but technology is getting better every day and where there’s a will, we can find the way.

Cities that don’t do this, and go with the old school approach, face the serious of risk of building the civic equivalent of the new Comiskey Park. That is, the last of the 70’s style stadiums that were obsolete as soon as they opened as a new era of fan friendly ballparks debuted. Don’t be that city. Kudos to Philadelphia for really leading the charge.

President Obama is bringing a new focus on cities to the White House. If I could pick only one area he could make a huge difference in for our cities, it is in changing the game on Clean Water Act compliance. If he pressed the EPA to embrace a forward looking vision of using this type of green infrastructure program, it could be a huge force in increasing the attractiveness of our urban cores in an era when that is more critical than ever. And if the feds picked up the cost of this – and nothing would help cities more since it would remove a huge financial disincentive to live in the city – it would be the ultimate urban game changer. I’d urge the President to make this happen and our city leaders to go all out for it on their end.

This post originally ran on October 13, 2009.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Richard Florida: How to Revitalize Rust Belt Cities

How to revitalize America’s great industrial cities? How to balance people- vs. place-oriented policies? And why mega-projects and bailouts don’t work, but organic, community, bottom-up efforts do. Richard Florida explains in this excerpt from “The Death and Life of Great Industrial Cities”, Chapter 12 of his recent book The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity.

One response to the problems of rusted-out industrial cities such as Detroit has been a new urban reclamation effort called “shrinking cities.” The idea, perhaps inspired by Pittsburgh, has caught on in smaller cities in the American Midwest, such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan, and their European counterparts. The basic notion is that older industrial cities need not grow to improve. They can be better places by making do with less, by focusing on improvements in the quality of life for their residents, and by bringing their level of infrastructure and housing into line with their smaller populations. A June 2009 story in the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph bore the wince-inducing headline “U.S. Cities May Have to Be Bulldozed to Survive.”

The concept that certain places would be better off by shrinking has been around for a while. The notion of “planned shrinkage” was originally proposed in the 1970s by then New York housing commissioner Roger Starr. The late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan once suggested that benign neglect could be part of an urban policy. Though Moynihan meant to focus attention on dying cities – a cause he worked on over his entire career – the term “benign neglect” ultimately came to represent the Nixon administration’s neglectful attitude toward America’s urban centers: let hopeless neighborhoods fall to dust, and support the healthier areas that remain standing.

Today’s shrinking-cities advocates are much more sensitive to the issues facing older industrial communities. They recognize how globalization and market forces work against some older communities and sensibly suggest that such places would be better served by proactively managing the process of economic transformation and adjustment and by devising strategies to enable those communities to improve their quality of life and realign with the new economic and fiscal realities.

The most successful examples of shrinking, such as Pittsburgh’s, result not from top-down policies imposed by local governments but from organic, bottom-up, community-based efforts. While Pittsburgh’s government and business leaders pressed for big-government solutions – new stadiums and convention centers – the city’s real turnaround was driven by community groups and citizen-led initiatives. Community groups, local foundations, and nonprofits – not city hall or business-led economic development groups – drove its transformation, playing a key role in stabilizing and strengthening neighborhoods, building green, and spurring the development of the waterfront and redevelopment around the universities. Many of Pittsburgh’s best neighborhoods, such as its South Side, are ones that were somehow spared from the wrath of urban renewal. Others, such as East Liberty, have benefited from community initiatives designed to remedy the damage done by large-scale urban renewal efforts that left vacant lots in place of functioning neighborhoods and built soulless public housing high-rise towers. That neighborhood is now home to several new community development projects, including a Whole Foods Market, which provides local jobs as well as serving as an anchor for the surrounding community. This kind of bottom-up process takes considerable time and perseverance. In Pittsburgh’s case, it took the better part of a generation to achieve stability and the potential for longer-term revival.

The sad but unavoidable fact is that overall, and with few exceptions, places in the United States and in other advanced nations where the regional economies are based on blue-collar industries are headed for trouble. In my detailed statistical studies on hundreds of cities and regions, I found that those regions with large working-class concentrations have lower levels of economic output, lower incomes, lower levels of innovation, and lower levels of happiness. Our studies found this to hold true in a comparison of the fifty states and across the nations of the world, in a sample of more than one hundred countries. Stop for a moment and think about that. In both the nations of the world and U.S. states, locations with large working-class concentrations are far less happy. In fact they appear downright unhappy. Perhaps Marx was right after all about the alienation that comes from industrial work, or, for the purposes of our discussion, the unhappiness found in working-class locations.

The bigger question, then, is this: Should public policy toward hard-pressed, economically strapped cities focus on people, not just by encouraging retraining but also by helping them relocate to places with a better job market? Or should policies focus on places, by fostering geographically targeted reinvestment? For many urban economists the answer is simple – put people first. “While regional diversity within the United States might prompt politicians to pursue policies that target aid to distressed regions,” writes Harvard’s (Edward) Glaeser, “that seems likely to be counterproductive. America has always dealt with regional economic disparities through migration. … Today’s recession will also prompt mobility, probably toward more skilled, more centralized cities with less historical commitment to manufacturing.” My own view is that in most cases it makes sense to put people first. At the end of the day, people – not industries or even places – should be our biggest concern. As Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, aptly put it, “The plight of these people is also in a way our plight.” We can best help those who are hardest hit by the crisis by providing a generous social safety net, investing in their education and skills, and encouraging them, when necessary, to move from declining places to ones that offer better opportunity. Especially in tough economic times, we’re all better served by helping people. People need education and skills to shift from old industries to new jobs. And since these jobs are often in different places, they have to be able to move where the jobs are. This imperative is strongest for members of less-advantaged groups in declining areas, who we must prepare for new economic realities. There are times when it’s simply better for families to relocate to where the jobs are than to wait for longer-term efforts to rebuild declining industries to take hold.

That does not mean we should give up on places altogether. There is intelligent help we can offer to declining places that wish to turn around or at least stabilize themselves. First and foremost, their elected officials need to get over their love affair with big renewal projects. If we’ve learned anything over the past generation or two, it’s that large-scale top-down government projects to revitalize communities do not work and frequently do more harm than good. Bailouts of old industries are also a poor use of limited resources, because they simply forestall the inevitable and do little to bolster the prospects for older industrial regions.

So what can be done? Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories, or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place. One leading economic developer, who has extensive experience in economic revitalization in the United States, Canada, and Europe, explained the shift in economic development toward older industrial regions this way: “Urban revitalization based on luring so-called big game projects no longer has a place in the advanced countries,” he said. “If economic developers want to do that today, they should move to China. That’s where all the big corporate projects are or are heading. Revitalizing older cities in North America and Europe increasingly depends on being able to support lots of smaller activities, groups, and projects.” He talked about how efforts to support local entrepreneurship, build and nurture local clusters, develop arts and cultural industries, support local festivals and tourism, attract and retain people – efforts that he and his peers would have sneered at a decade or two ago – have become the core stuff of economic development. When taken together, seemingly smaller initiatives and efforts can and do add up in ways that confer real benefits to communities. These are the kinds of initiatives that Jane Jacobs and others have advocated as plain old good urbanism. [O]ne of the most effective things the federal government can do to help revitalize older Rust Belt cities and regions is to invest in a high-speed rail network that would better connect them to one another and to other, more thriving economic hubs, shrinking the distance between them and building economic size and scale required to compete more effectively.

Cities can take bold steps beyond the remaking of their physical space. One brilliant and beautiful example can be found in the City of Brotherly Love, an initiative called “Graduate! Philadelphia.” I’ve been making the point for years that cities with a higher percentage of college graduates in their populations are better positioned for long- term prosperity. The city of Philadelphia recognized this, too, and also knew it ranked poorly among cities in the level of educational attainment of its residents. Civic leaders also knew, however, that a very high percentage of the people, although they had no college degree, had accumulated some credits along the way. A partnership among the city government, foundations, and other private institutions formed to offer guidance and support to any Philadelphian who wanted to go back to school and get a degree. Quite a few nearby colleges and universities became partners in the project. A related project, Campus Philly, has worked to make the city and region more attractive to college students and to retain as well as attract recent college grads. And the city’s major universities, especially the University of Pennsylvania, devised new, more cooperative approaches for revitalizing their surrounding neighborhoods by investing in local schools, supporting home and storefront improvements, and making their own health centers and facilities open to residents as well as students and faculty. Here is a city looking toward the future, developing a strategy to raise its competitive position by preparing more of its people to succeed in the postindustrial, knowledge-based economy of the Great Reset. It seems to be paying off. In 2009, while older Rust Belt and sprawling Sunbelt cities were literally hemorrhaging people, the city of Philadelphia saw its population increase.

As with so many things in life, the small stuff really can make a difference to the people living in cities. That sounds like an easy thing to say, but there is considerable research to back it up. The quality of life in the place we live is a key component of our happiness, according to surveys of tens of thousands of people conducted by the Gallup Organization. There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself – great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone – everyone – contribute to and take pleasure from the community? My own work with cities across the United States and Canada and around the world convinces me that none of these things can be accomplished by government-sponsored megaprojects. Instead, they are organic in nature and require real leadership and the active engagement of the community.

This excerpt from The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity originally appeared in the Montreal Gazette. Reprinted here with permission of the author.

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Midwest Miscellany

If any of you are headed to Rail~Volution 2009 in Boston, please be sure to check out the panel discussion I’m part of called “The Rail~Volution Will Not Be Televised”. Others participating will be Pantograph Trolleypole of The Overhead Wire and economist Ryan Avent. We’re discussing the use of social media technology for transit advocacy. You won’t want to miss it! If any of my readers are attending or are in the Boston area, shoot me a note and maybe we can connect while I’m there.

Also, I mentioned that I am upgrading the blog, replacing the design and going to a new domain. I have tentatively scheduled the cutover for this Friday, so be ready for it and stay tuned for further instructions.

African Americans as Economic Development Platform

Smart City Memphis is a great blog for the reader, even if it is pretty locally focused on that city. A recent post suggests the city needs to blow up old myths and start acting on facts. This part caught my eye.

There’s the myth our African-American majority is an economic drag. Because distinctiveness is the basis for competitive advantage, Memphis needs to be a hub of black talent. If that isn’t at the top of our economic development agenda, we’re not really in the economic development business.

Amen. I’ve made that same plea to Midwest cities. As you’ll see in a future post from me, self-styled progressive paragons like Portland have virtually no African Americans. Don’t try to beat other cities at their game, try to make them beat you at yours. Their African American populations are among the key assets of Midwest metros in figuring out how to compete and be relevant in the marketplace today. It’s a shame so few places act like it.

Selling the Suburbs

@PD_Smith points us at an absolutely must watch BBC audio slide show on selling the suburbs. It’s about an exhibit of posters and marketing materials for suburbs in early 20th century London. Key to this era of suburbs of course was the extension of transit lines, since we had yet to enter the auto era, but the description of their marketing program holds extremely valuable lessons for people today trying to sell people on city living. And the graphic design of the pieces is gorgeous.

Again, so often today we are preached at about the need to live in the city and told how great it is for us, but seldom are we actually sold on it. I’ve yet to see any city with a marketing campaign to lure people to their downtown that compares with the brief few minutes of suburban sales slides from the BBC. Even the graphic design alone blows most cities out of the water.

Here are a couple of relevant samples. These were how public transit was marketed not just as a way for people to move out of the city to the suburbs, but to come back into it to for entertainment. That’s still relevant today.

Apparently these people did not subscribe to the position that people won’t ride buses:

Rail is good too of course:

Touting proximity to entertainment:

Midwest Bike to Work

The Census American Community Survey data is a treasure trove of good stuff. Bike Pittsburgh took a look at the bike to work figures for various cities. They’ve even got an embedded Google spreadsheet with the data for every mode of commuting, so check it out. Portland was #1 in America with 6% biking to work. Here’s how the Midwest central cities stacked up vs. a top 60 city average of 0.98% and median of 0.6%:

• Minneapolis – 4.3% (#2 in the nation)
• Milwaukee – 1.1%
• Chicago – 1.0%
• Columbus – 0.9%
• Pittsburgh – 0.8%
• Cleveland – 0.7%
• St. Louis – 0.7%
• Cincinnati – 0.5%
• Louisville – 0.4%
• Detroit – 0.3%
• Indianapolis – 0.3%
• Kansas City -0.2%

The Detroit Frontier in the News

My post on Detroit as the new American frontier continues to generate a surprisingly large number of hits as people keep discovering it and passing it along to others. Here are a few articles illustrating the theme.

Here’s a great piece on making a difference in Detroit.

The bad stories are easy to find in Detroit. More than a quarter are unemployed. The school district’s graduation rate is dismal. Violent crime is among the highest in the nation. But the good stories are there, and a common thread among many is persistence, pluck and patience in navigating the city’s sometimes cumbersome bureaucracy.

“If you want something done, you often have to do it yourself here,” explained Kate Devlin, who, although she doesn’t own it,boarded up a vacant building herself in North Corktown and is waiting to buy it at the tax foreclosure auction rather than waiting for the city to bring wrecking crews.

It isn’t easy. Sometimes, residents have to get creative.

Here’s another one on a North End activist.

Delores Bennett is known as the Grandmother of the North End for a good reason.

When she sees a problem, she fixes it. And for four decades, that’s meant helping children stay out of trouble….. “I don’t want any money from the city because when you do it on our own there aren’t any limitations,” said Bennett, 76, whose North End Youth Improvement Council provides scholarships and serves as an umbrella group for her other efforts.

And here’s one about a mother trying to run drug dealers out of her neighborhood.

One house remained a drug haven whose users craved privacy, keeping blinds drawn during all hours. “If we could get in there, we could tear those blinds down and that would be that,” Hoerauf said. The duo persuaded an officer to check to make sure the house was empty before they entered and took down the blinds. The drug use stopped.

The common thread a see in all of these is a sort of frontier ethic of self-reliance. In Detroit, everyone knows the city is not going to take care of these problems. If you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself. Life isn’t always pleasant on the frontier – it sure wasn’t in the early days of the American Midwest and West. But often that formative experience builds the foundation, and especially the character and ethos that enables good things to emerge even decades down the line. In Detroit, everyone from Afrocentric educators to artists and urban farmers are staking their claim. If Detroit really does revive, my money is on the solution coming out of this rich grass roots ferment.

Ohio Migration Data

Jim Russell pointed me at this interesting report from Community Research Partners in Columbus, Ohio. They used IRS tax return data, a standard source, to measure migration in Ohio. Here are some graphics I found particularly telling. These show intra-state migration for Ohio’s largest three cities. You can see strong suburban outmigration everywhere. But the telling thing is how Columbus is sucking in people from all over the state, but Cleveland and Cincinnati are not. Both Cleveland and Cincy have virtually no in-migration from the rest of the state and are losing people to Columbus. Their balance of trade with each other appears to be minimal.

Kansas City Transit

Kansas City has had an odd history with efforts to build a rail transit system. They voted for a system that couldn’t legally be constructed. Then they voted down a couple of other efforts. I never followed it that closely, but was always puzzled as to what was going on. A video out of KC this week explains a lot as far as I’m concerned. You’ll have to click the link to watch since it is on a newspaper web site and isn’t embeddable. I strongly encourage you to do so. The video is only two minutes long, and it’s priceless.

Meanwhile, the Jackson County executive unveiled a plan for a regional commuter rail system. This could get interesting.

Louisville Tourism and Relocation Ads

Louisville rolled out some tourism and relocation ads that generated a bit of controversy. They mimic the interminable TV ads out there for erectile dysfunction and depression medications. While I don’t think these ads really showcase the best value proposition or brand promise for Louisville, I thought they were pretty funny.

Taking a swipe at Ohio:

Cool Philly Transit Benches

Keeping with my theme of the importance of design in public transit infrastructure, the Architect’s Newspaper points us at a cool rail station bench in Philadelphia.

This was designed and built by the one stop design and fabrication shop Veyko.

National and International Roundup

The city as an interaction platform (The Mobile City) – via @endlessCities

The United Nations just issued a Global Report on Human Settlements for 2009. According to their research, 200,000 people around the world move to cities every day. Pretty impressive.

Architect Robert Venturi slams Barnes Foundation move (LA Times)

Luring artists to lend life to empty storefronts (NYC) – Hey there, Indy has been doing this for a long time.

San Francisco’s ground breaking parking meter study (Streetsblog)

More Midwest

Site Selection magazine has a great interview on the Midwest with Richard Longworth. (h/t Jim Russell)

Youngstown, Ohio: A young town again (The Economist) – Nice coverage in the international press.

Eyes on the Art Prize (NYT) – Dittos for Grand Rapids, where the Art Prize generated a ton of press.

GOOD interviews Flint Mayor Dayne Walling. For those who missed it, you can see the video I did with him over on You Tube.

Chicago
Dead Reckoning – Chicago Magazine looks at the cemetery relocation at the heart of a dispute over the O’Hare Modernization Program.
Chicago planners pinpoint scaled back locally preferred alternative for Circle Line (Transport Politic)
Block 37 superstation, unfinished and unused (Transport Politic)
CTA fare increases through the years (WBEZ)
High speed rail? (Michigan City News-Dispatch)
Seniors ride free policy nearing its end – good (Greg Hinz @ Crain’s Chicago Business)

Cincinnati
Museum tax will shrink no matter what (Enquirer)
Bringing street vendors to life in Cincinnati (UrbanCincy)
Metro sees 11.25% drop in ridership (Enquirer)

Columbus
Impressario with an iPhone (Dispatch)
Welcome! Don’t mind our blight (Dispatch)

Detroit
Mayor Bing unveils turnaround plan for Detroit (Detroit News)
Detroit’s crisis is nothing new (Laura Berman @ Detroit News)
Chamber wants to make region a logistic hub (Crain’s Detroit Business)
How to lose federal transit funding – again (Free Press)

Indianapolis
From the credit where credit is due department, I should note that I drove up Illinois St. the other day where sidewalks are being replaced, and only one of the sewer inlets I saw appeared to be raised above the sidewalk grade.

Milwaukee
Milwaukee seen as hybrid hub (JS)
The New Face of Downtown Milwaukee (Urban Engagement Weekly) – via @Twoaday

St. Louis
Stimulus stirs work on Eads bridge (Post-Dispatch)

Twin Cities
Southwest light rail line moves ahead (Star Tribune)

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

A Better Road to Clean Water Act Compliance

I’ve noted before that the astronomical cost of Clean Water Act compliance for our cities was a killer. Most older cities are also struggling with deteriorated street infrastructure that would require another massive dose of spending to correct. Also, in the Midwest, most cities have street networks that are not even right in their very conception for the modern day anyway. And, they need to make major investments to create a more green city as well. A plan out of Philadelphia shows the way to kill three birds with one stone.

With the most ambitious program of its kind in America, Philly is looking to remediate its combined sewer overflow problem with a massive program of green building designed to prevent the problem in the first place.

Philadelphia has announced a $1.6 billion plan to transform the city over the next 20 years by embracing its storm water – instead of hustling it down sewers and into rivers as fast as possible.

The proposal, which several experts called the nation’s most ambitious, reimagines the city as an oasis of rain gardens, green roofs, thousands of additional trees, porous pavement, and more.

All would act as sponges to absorb – or at least stall – the billions of gallons of rainwater that overwhelm the city sewer system every year.

The plan’s complex funding formula would raise rates somewhat but also attract grants and encourage private investment.

Further, the Water Department says the city’s greening would result in more jobs, higher property values, better air quality, less energy use, and even fewer deaths – from excess heat.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a combined sewer is where storm water runoff and sewage from buildings is carried in the same pipes. This was how sewers were built back in the day and were a huge improvement in public sanitation at the time. However, in heavy rains, the storm water runoff overwhelms the capacity of the treatment system, and the rest backs up in basements, pools on the streets, or is simply dumped into a nearby river, contaminating the environment with untreated sewage. Cities are being forced to largely eliminate these combined sewer overflows as part of the Clean Water Act.

The typical solution to this is to spend a few billion dollars building a “deep tunnel”. This is a huge storage pipe bored into bedrock deep underground, which holds excess sewage until after the storm when the treatment plant can process it.

There are a few problems with deep tunnels:

• They are ridiculously expensive. Washington, DC is spending $2.2 billion on one, Indianapolis $1.6 billion, Cincinnati $3.5 billion, and Cleveland $5 billion – or thereabouts. The prices seem to vary depending on the source you read, but the operative term is always “billion”.
• Like all projects designed to deal with peak of the peak capacity, it will be un-utilized or under-utilized 90% of the time. It’s mostly wasted capacity. If you can, it is generally better to use demand management techniques to smooth out demand spikes, such as congestion pricing for roads.
• It’s a hack. We’re still basically taking clean water (well, not entirely clean, but that’s another post), combining it with raw sewage, and creating even bigger amount of, well, sewage. That doesn’t sound too smart.
• It adds zero to the city. What does your city get for a deep tunnel no one can see? Not much. The environmental benefits will never generate a rational economic or recreational ROI and no one even attempts to justify it on that basis. We are simply doing this because we’ve decided it is the right thing to do.

The cost of this will add yet another incentive for people to move to suburban or exurban districts that are not part of the combined sewer zone to escape paying the sky high bills that will result. Those newer areas were built from the ground up with separate storm water and sanitary sewer systems. Sewer bills in Indianapolis are on their way to over $100 per month – triple suburban rates. This will certainly hurt low income people and make them look even more strongly at the collar counties.

Philadelphia is showing a better way to tackle this problem. Instead of building a deep tunnel for billions and getting more or less no return, it is looking to spend money at get something for it in terms of improved street and green infrastructure and more trees and greenery – while preventing the creation of billions of gallons of contaminated water in the first place. In short, exactly the type of demand management solution we should be looking at. There’s no guarantee the EPA will go along with them. Cincinnati floated this idea and it got shot down. But given the potentially huge benefits, it ought to be pushed with full vigor.

Consider the possibilities. Instead of a place like Indianapolis tripling sewer rates to dig a deep tunnel, then having to turn around and sell its water utility (a moving Cincinnati is also looking at) to raise funds to repave streets that, even if fixed up, still are not relevant to reinvigorating the urban core for the 21st century, why not instead do something like this? I was thinking about it just the other day walking past a construction zone on the Cultural Trail and seeing the rain gardens being built there. Why not use the billions for sewers to rebuild the streets with rain gardens, new curbs and sidewalks, bike lanes, new permeable pavements, trees and native grasses, etc? This would not be gold plated a la the Cultural Trail, but just what the new basics of a thriving urban environment today ought to look like. Think of the possibilities:

• CSO overflows fixed
• Streets re-imagined and upgraded
• New state of the art green infrastructure built

That’s called a trifecta. Any city that hasn’t already built a deep tunnel should launch a full court press on this – even it has already reached a settlement with the EPA. There are certainly challenges to overcome – I hear permeable asphalt can’t be salted, for example, a problem in a region with lots of snow – but technology is getting better every day and where there’s a will, we can find the way.

Cities that don’t do this, and go with the old school approach, face the serious of risk of building the civic equivalent of the new Comiskey Park. That is, the last of the 70’s style stadiums that were obsolete as soon as they opened as a new era of fan friendly ballparks debuted. Don’t be that city. Kudos to Philadelphia for really leading the charge.

President Obama is bringing a new focus on cities to the White House. If I could pick only one area he could make a huge difference in for our cities, it is in changing the game on Clean Water Act compliance. If he pressed the EPA to embrace a forward looking vision of using this type of green infrastructure program, it could be a huge force in increasing the attractiveness of our urban cores in an era when that is more critical than ever. And if the feds picked up the cost of this – and nothing would help cities more since it would remove a huge financial disincentive to live in the city – it would be the ultimate urban game changer. I’d urge the President to make this happen and our city leaders to go all out for it on their end.

Telestrian Data Terminal

A production of the Urbanophile, Telestrian is the fastest, easiest, and best way to access public data about cities and regions, with totally unique features like the ability to create thematic maps with no technical knowledge and easy to use place to place migration data. It's a great way to support the Urbanophile, but more importantly it can save you tons of time and deliver huge value and capabilities to you and your organization.

Try It For 30 Days Free!

About the Urbanophile

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.

Full Bio

Contact

• arenn@urbanophile.com
• twitter.com/urbanophile
• linkedin.com/in/aaronmrenn

Please email before connecting with me on LinkedIn if we don't already know each other.