Developing a YIMBY mindset

Suppose you’re a homeowner in a nice, classic inner suburban neighborhood. There’s a little bit of vacant land down the street from you, and rumors are going around that some developers have their eyes on it for new homes. Your neighbors are looking into their legal options for stopping any construction from happening before it’s too late. They ask you to sign a petition they are bringing to city hall. You hadn’t thought much about this issue before, but now the question is sitting right in front of you with a pen and ink. Do you sign it?

You already like where you live – that’s why you chose it – but you wonder why it couldn’t become an even better neighborhood. You want to show solidarity with your neighbors, but there’s a selfish voice in the back of your head saying: maybe I want a few more homes or even a store on my street. It’s true that the residents of these new homes may be criminals, but that’s not very likely. Most people are decent. Maybe you’ll borrow a hedge-trimmer from them, or they might even host a block party in a few years. You could gain some new friends. You realize that it’s far more likely these new neighbors will call the police on someone breaking into your house than actually try to break into your house themselves.

You know the neighborhood coffee shop where you stop in the morning runs on a thin profit margin, and you would hate to see it close down during an economic down cycle. It occurs to you that a few more homes nearby means a few more daily customers. Maybe with more revenue coming in, your shop could justify serving bagels and cream cheese, giving you more breakfast options. Same goes for your friend’s dental practice on the other side of the street. Economically vibrant surroundings benefit you in a number of ways.

Then there's traffic. That’s the big one. The thought of more cars speeding by your home does give you pause, but this is where you have to consider the long-term effects. The residents of these new infill homes will probably drive less than they would if they were forced out the exurbs, meaning less overall congestion. And the more people who move in the more likely this is to be true. Maybe some will even eschew their car altogether. More people also means more political clout to get neighborhood amenities like better transit, traffic calming, a nice playground, whatever it is your neighborhood wants. And there may be a way to influence the design of this new development to reduce the chance that the new people will bring motor vehicles with them.

But what if you are just odd? Everyone else seems to resist more density, not embrace it. Remember, your property values are determined by what some anonymous future buyer wants in a neighborhood, not what you want in a neighborhood. Maybe you should just join the angry crowd at the public hearing, if only to protect your largest financial investment and keep your options open when it's time to move. But here’s the bewildering paradox: for all the resistance, there’s actually a huge latent demand for walkable urban neighborhoods not unlike what yours could become. New neighbors and services are more likely to help then hurt your nest egg.

Everything points to a yes-in-my-backyard response, and you haven't even gotten into the moral heroics of saving the region from sprawl or allowing more people an affordable and accessible place to live (or recognizing property rights, for that matter). These are just your own wishes for seeing your own neighborhood change for the better.

The Reluctant Suburbanites

Rod Dreher, a social commentator who writes under the self-titled banner “crunchy conservativism,” shared on his blog an interesting confession about the suburbs. Not interesting because it’s strange, but interesting because it’s so altogether normal. Despite his long-standing preference for, or at times even a philosophical commitment to walkable urban neighborhoods, he thinks he just might choose the opposite kind of house next time he moves. A conventional suburban home. Why?

“Whenever we get ready to buy our next house, it's not going to be in the city -- here in Philly, there's a four percent tax added to your wages -- but in one of the suburbs. I'd be lying if I said schools weren't a big part of it. We can't afford private schools where we live now, and the urban public school in our neighborhood leaves much to be desired, for the usual reasons. … Besides, life with kids is just easier in the suburbs. I hate to admit it, but it's true. The older I get, and the older my kids get, the less tolerance I have for the kinds of things that I didn't much mind when I was younger and in love with city life.”

Looking through the lens of personal morality or rationality or whatever, who can begrudge Dreher this decision? Let me immediately distance myself from those who reflexively cast judgment on suburbia and all who inhabit it like hurling a ball of fire down onto Sodom and Gomorrah. Let the record show, suburbanites are not evil. Yet whatever honesty Dreher reveals in this personal question, there’s still a structural tension in his mind. He can go on to say in an update,

“I think any place that makes you car-dependent is bad for your soul and the community's soul. The way we built suburbia in the 20th century was foolish and destructive in a number of ways. But we are where we are, and the flaws of suburbia don't obviate the flaws of urban life for middle-class families in the year 2010.”

Very obviously, his ideals are clashing with the reality of how things happen to have been built in America.

This is exactly why you should immediately distrust anyone (ahem … Joel Kotkin)  who insists that because people are “choosing” to live in the suburbs, in fact, the suburbs are their market choice - that the silent majority has spoken with their actions. As the logic goes: if everyone seems to be buying cookie dough ice cream then it means they must really like it, so somebody should go ahead and make more cookie dough ice cream. It's only the pistachio-craving elites who urge otherwise. Ok, but buying a home is different:

First, every home is a bundled good. You’re not just buying the roof that keeps rain from hitting your head and a patch of grass. You’re buying the educational options for your children, the transportation access to your job, the character of the neighborhood and the status it confers, membership into a jurisdiction (or HOA, for that matter) and the services it provides, a perception of safety, and on and on. You can’t always just disaggregate these parts, like ordering a Soy Mocha Half-Caf latte at Starbucks, at least not if you need to fit it into a middle-class budget. This is why people like Dreher may have to compromise on neighborhood form for, say, good schools.

Which gets to the second point. Real estate supply is always constrained in some way, whether by geography or land use controls (yes, Houston too).  Even in metro areas with plenty of vacant land, there’s only one piece of land with that house on it. That’s just the nature of space. No two places are alike. Because the market price responds to these inevitable supply constraints, consumer demand does not always win the day. Middle-class families like the Drehers can be priced out of even preference bundles that seem logically reasonable - like a modest home on a small lot with ok schools near some neighborhood amenities.

Thirdly, transitions in the housing stock move painfully slowly - as they should, because these are really durable goods. But there are other reasons the supply does not hasten to meet new demand. Infrastructure built to support an old model is hard to readapt, vested financial interests try to maintain property values through land use controls, and well-worn development business models seem less risky. As a result of these forces of inertia, a lot of us are living in houses built for the preferences exerted a generation or two ago, maybe even if it was just built five years ago.

Fourthly, homes have traditionally been investments as well as consumer goods. You’re not supposed to just buy what you want, but you also have to buy what you perceive others to want. This can lead to a self-perpetuating bias for the status quo and an over-emphasis on quantitative measures like square footage. But maybe as the investment side fades these days, we can feel more free to exercise our own desires.

Finally, there’s a long-standing mismatch in most metro areas between the resources for social services and those who need them most. Over many years, the demographic categories have sorted themselves out geographically and circumscribed themselves with political boundaries. This is part of the reason for the extra tax burden Dreher is referring to. Many suburban areas have absolved themselves of having to pay this by ensuring that the region’s share of the poor are not within their borders. Making a personal decision to buck the trend usually does carry a cost.

The point, maybe hidden in here somewhere, is that there has to be many Rod Drehers out there, albeit most of them without the time or ability to wrack their brains over the urban planning implications of their choices. For every household choosing the suburbs as suburbs, in all their backyard-grilling, kid-shuttling, lawn-mowing glory, there’s another household who grit their teeth and accept this spatial arrangement because it happens to be the only option available at their price point. This is hardly an argument for building more of them.

Thanks to Architecture and Morality for launching a discussion on Dreher’s housing thought process.

Great streetviews

Allan Jacobs Great Streets is the definitive guide to good street design. As I'm working my way through it, I'm compelled to find the examples in the book on google streetview to get a closer look and explore the surroundings. The hand drawings and plan-view diagrams in the book are classic, but you can't beat the online tour for detail. Of course, I'm still logging these places away until I actually get a chance to visit some of them in reality.

Residential Street: Roslyn Place, Pittsburgh


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Still Great Medieval Street: Via dei Giubbonari, Rome, Italy


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Grand Manner Boulevard: Paseo de Gracia, Barcelona, Spain


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Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain


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Great Residential Boulevard: Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA


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Central Commercial Street: Motomachi, Yokohama


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I'd love to add more, but this may already be too intense with the bandwidth.

A garden block proposal

It looks like one of the main take-aways from the CNU 18 conference is something being labeled agrarian urbanism. Fast Company is calling it the "new new urbanism" and Treehugger has described the notion as the next phase in the evolution of this 30-year old movement. Andres Duany, in particular, has been pushing pretty hard in this direction for the last couple of years. Briefly, the idea is that walkable neighborhoods could be intentionally structured so that food production is integrated into the physical form and the lifestyle of the inhabitants. In other words, it is a synthesis between urban and rural.

Of course, this new new urbanism is really no newer than the old new urbanism was (but that's fine). One of the primary motivations behind Ebenezer Howard's Garden City was to connect working class households with a viable food supply to relieve some of their financial stress. He landed on the number twelve dwelling units per acre as the magic density for self-sufficiency with affordability, and he worked out a form of common land ownership to help it along. Christopher Alexander thought that something more like a tenth of an acre was necessary to supply vegetables to a family of four. He had plenty of practical, timeless advice for arranging an urban living space accordingly. More recently, some architects have been using the word rurbalization to describe this sort of synthesis. Having recently passed through the grad school circuit myself, I can attest to a strong interest in food systems among new graduates.

I think these are good trends. Local food systems should inform urban design and vice versa, but I'm not sure the new developments being modeled have been able to find this synthesis without swallowing one side with the other - specifically, subsuming the urbanism into the bucolic landscape. This seems to be the case with Southlands in British Columbia and Serenbe in the exurbs of Atlanta. Kaid Benfield has this to say about these "farming is the new golf" developments,

"In theory, these "new towns" are great - self-contained entities providing walkability, efficiency, and all the services of a community within the development.  So, their proponents (nearly all of whom profit from them, one way or another) claim, it is a good thing to build them almost anywhere.  In practice, though, the nearby once-remote locations soon become filled with sprawl, in no small part because of the initial development, and the theoretical self-contained transportation efficiency never comes.  They become commuter suburbs, just with a more appealing internal design than that of their neighbors."

So can this vision work? Or is building agrarian urbanism like serving a glass of hot cold water? I'd like to play with this a little and consider what it would look like if we followed Duany's vision but flipped it on its head. Instead of embedding hamlets within a rural landscape, the garden block embeds pockets of agriculture within the urban landscape. It is not a stand-alone community but just another gene sequence to be spliced into the DNA of existing inner suburbs and cities.

Start with the standard grid. It can be found all over North America, but the following sketch is based on the 340' by 340' block in the Fan neighborhood of Richmond. Cobble together property ownership for the whole block into something like a community land trust. Households would own their home individually but share ownership of the land with the other 38, in this case, units on the block. Certain commitments to planting and maintaining the garden, either personally or through payment, would be built into an HOA contract.

The exterior of the block functions as in any other urban area. The public streets are activated by the fronts of the buildings and streetscape features, and the full range of transportation access to the rest of the city is available. The interior, on the other hand, is devoted to the more constrained social scale of the block community, and the structures serve as a wall protecting this garden area. Enclosure is necessary to provide a degree of privacy, to protect produce from theft and vandalism, and to keep animals from wandering.

By the numbers, this block allows a density of 15 DUA while keeping 28% of all land for growing produce. This is not food self-sufficiency, but I'm personally not too worried about these kinds of absolutes.

Here are some of the pieces:

Mix of Housing Types. One might expect retirees and young families alike to be attracted to growing their own food, but there is a broad range in housing needs between these two groups. Allowing a range of housing types could facilitate lifecycle diversity, as well as allowing those from different income levels to share the same space. The larger homes include their own growing plot delineated by a short fence.

Shared Resources. The shady northern side of the condo buildings is a place for the utilitarian functions. Gardening requires many resources that can be shared by the whole block. A tool shed is accessed from the side by the glass elevator. A water cistern collects and stores runoff from the buildings above. Chicken coops are lined up against the building. Although chickens need sunlight, some shade could benefit them as well. Maybe they could be on wheels. The composting bins are directly in front of the block's dumpster, so households can deposit their organic waste while taking out the trash.

Childrens' Area -  The playground and "kindergarten" is in full view of the whole grounds. Children have their own 24' by 31' plot to grow whatever they choose. A row of fruit trees creates a sound barrier for the adjacent rowhouses. Being within the enclosed communal area allows parents a certain assurance of safety.

Green Roof. I know these things are expensive for now, but in this case it's integral to the whole concept. Connected directly to the rest of the grounds by an outdoor elevator, it expands the growing area measurably.  Less tangibly, the views to north into the block help create a sense of internal  cohesion, and the southern views to the rest of the city a sense of external connection. 

Greenhouse and Car Sharing. A greenhouse is one of the most efficient uses of solar energy, and it's  necessary in most climates for extending the growing season. A single 4100 sq. ft. greenhouse should be sufficient to meet the needs for the whole block. There is off-street parking available at a rate of roughly one space per three units. The relative paucity of spaces may be compensated for by car-sharing. For areas with greater transit accessibility, this lot could be substituted with two homes.

Corner Store. The corner store is the public interface of the block and a neighborhood shopping hub. Possibly, excess produce and supplies from the garden could be sold here. The upper floors could be leased out to offices or any other reasonably compatible use.

Learning from the early family-friendly suburbs

I ended the last post alluding to ways to make the built environment appeal to young families. Now I'll pull from some of my father's experiences growing up in Ridgewood, New Jersey to illustrate features of what I would consider a family-friendly suburb. Today, these kinds of places are so rare most younger families are completely priced out of them (and many were priced out then too), but the fact that they have existed in the past means they are technically possible to build.

The downtown of Ridgewood, near the New Jersey Transit station. Flickr Credit: Here in Van Nuys

Of the 600 students that my father attended elementary school with in Ridgewood, he recalls roughly 90% of them walking or biking to school every day. If you lived within a mile of the school, this is what you did. You also went home for lunch. The remaining students were mostly residents of a new subdivision built in the mid-1950's. These homes were so isolated from the rest of town, the school district had no choice but to use buses to bring them in. Of course, the rest is history. By the time my generation rolled around, walking to school in the suburbs was a rarity and we all bused. These days, mom drives the kids in and accompanying a child to school on foot is a good way to get yourself fined in some school districts.

The walk to school stats are a good litmus test for a family-friendly community. It has to be fairly compact to yield over 500 kids within a mile radius. The streets have to be well connected to allow a safe route away from the main auto thoroughfares. There's probably sidewalks everywhere, which is the case in Ridgewood. Growing up, my father remembers stopping by a neighborhood convenience store on the way home from school. Another neighborhood store next door gave out licorice in exchange for empty soda bottles. Uses were mixed somewhat.

My father doesn't remember any neighborhood parks, but the limits of the town were within easy reach for him. A wide swathe of undeveloped land and a creek separated his town from Paramus to the east, creating a distinct boundary and sense of territory, at least for a 10-year old. An abandoned trolley track had been used as a de facto walking and biking trail through the town, which made it easier to get around. As long as he was in by dusk, there were a wide range of places to explore.

The center of Ridgewood organically formed around the transit station to New York City, and not much of the development my father knew of as Ridgewood lied more than a mile from it. This is where he went for church, grocery shopping, clothing shopping, the library, the pool, and the weekly YMCA classes. Even the transit station had only a small parking lot attached to it, preserving the valuable central space for use by humans to do all of the things humans like to do.

Is the Ridgewood my father remembers a suburb? Yes, it's a suburb of New York City. But in contemporary planner-speak, it's also a transit-oriented development surrounded by walkable neighborhoods. It really is a town in it's own right. In many of the respects mentioned here, this living environment is as far removed from the late-20th century suburbia as it is from the dense Manhattan its connected to. Most families will probably not choose to live in high-rise condos anytime soon, but if there were places like Ridgewood more widely available, I can imagine many making this choice.

Do young families prefer suburbs?

A couple has a kid, moves out of their condo in the city, buys a house with a big yard, sets up a swing set in said yard, loads up the minivan SUV with backpacks and shin guards, and never looks back. This is probably our dominant life-cycle narrative in America, but does the actual data of housing preferences bear this out. Is this what we want?

There's generally two ways to figure out what people want: see what they do and see what they say they want. Both are tricky.

A new report from Statistics Canada saw what young families did. Between 2001 and 2006, many of them moved out of the Canadian cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver into the surrounding suburbs. A full 27% of first-time parents made the move out the city and very few moved in. While this is definitely statistically significant, we can't jump to the conclusion right away that these families have a preference for suburbs. As family researcher Clarence Lockhead explains,

“I think a lot of what we’re seeing in these patterns are really associated with housing costs and availability of affordable homes. I think that’s a really big factor.”

This is supported by the fact that young families with incomes over $100,000 do tend to live closer in, perhaps because they can afford to be homeowners in high-amenity, walkable neighborhoods. Any market choice reflects both supply and demand. It may look like families are demanding homes in the far-flung suburbs, but it could also be that there is a supply shortage of affordable, urban or inner suburban homes suitable for families. Or a little of both.

Another study just published in JAPA saw what families say they want. Researchers evaluated housing preference surveys conducted throughout the Southwest. They asked questions about trade-offs. Short commute or spacious yard? A Mixed-use neighborhood with things to walk to or a purely residential street? One finding:

"The presence of children in the respondent’s household is linked to less interest in small houses with short commutes, less interest in walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, and less interest in transit-oriented neighborhoods."

The correlation between families and conventional suburban homes was not huge, and it didn't apply at all in some states, but it still does raise our question again. It looks like families are more likely to say they want to live further apart from others, whether they are currently able to do so or not.

Yet here there are complications too. Although the survey tried to force trade-offs, it's impossible to fully construct the multiplicity of real life with questions simple enough be answered in a few seconds. For instance,

"Among the Southwest respondents who embraced a small house and short commute, 39% nevertheless said they preferred to live in a strictly residential (rather than mixed-use) neighborhood, and fully 61% of them said they preferred a low-density, auto-dependent neighborhood."

The researchers note that this is probably not a realistic bundle of preferences, but they were unable to truly force the decision between these ideals.

There's also the difficulty of parsing necessity from contingency. What factors are inherent to a type of physical form and what factors happen to be associated with it in Post-WWII America?  For instance, good schools may come to mind when the respondents imagine a low-density scenario, but there's nothing about the density itself that has anything to do with educational quality. It's just how things happen to have shaken out in recent U.S. history.  On the other hand, a large yard really is logically connected to lower densities, and lots of walkable destinations are only possible in higher densities. If what we're interested in is just the physical form, it's not easy to pull apart the conscious or subconscious prejudices that have become attached to that form in our culture.

I've hopefully been successful in shrouding this whole issue in a cloud of confusion. Or I could just admit that young families might be more likely to want lower densities, single uses, less connected streets, etc. and point to David Alpert's nice post about incorporating shared play space for children into neighborhoods. There's certainly more that can be done design-wise to make urban neighborhoods attractive to families.

Learning from Savannah

Eric Orozco has been mining some valuable lessons from the City of Savannah for over nine months now, making his blog series one of the longest-running and insightful I've read. My only experience with Savannah consists of a three-day stay in an historic district Bed and Breakfast, filled with hours of wandering and eating and more wandering. I came away with a fascination for the city and the intangible sense of magic everyone attributes to it. Eric's posts help me put words on some of this.

I don't have much to add beyond attempting a general summary of the posts thus far, in hopes they will keep coming!

(By the way, read the posts and expect to be drawn from Savannah into meaty philosophical dialogue and then back again.)

1. Odonomia and the Garden of Good and Evil.  When it comes to shaping cities, we like to classify our approaches as either form-based or use-based, when in reality this taxonomy breaks down on a number of levels. Most of the activity of real city building happens "illicitly," that is outside of the neat taxonomy we envision and apply in advance to a place. The unique wards of Savannah are an example of a rigid order that exhibits a wonderful diversity in both form and function in it's application throughout the city. I can't resist the money quote:

"It is as if the Platonic pattern from the mind of Oglethorpe (conceived for reasons very different than Savannah's needs today) was dropped into a fecund soup and allowed to copulate with the wonderful imaginations of every square district."

2. Savannah's Kind of Blue. Miles Davis, like the city itself, creates beauty by improvising on theme.

3. The Invisible Signs of Savannah. One of the aspects of Savannah's attractiveness is what it lacks: street signals and signs. Compared to a similarly connected street grid in Charlotte, a much lower percentage of Savannah's intersections have signs or signals. Instead, this city allows "the intimate scales of its fine-grain environment to dictate traffic control."

4. What the Savannah Square can do better than the Roundabout. While roundabouts have been a trend over the last few years for regulating traffic flow at intersections, the Savannah square is a similar alternative better suited for multimodal and urban settings. This is a brilliant post with diagrams that just needs to be read in it's entirety. The conclusion,

"Consider employing the Savannah square-flow strategy as smarter way to handle traffic flow while promoting a density-efficient land use mixture and bike and pedestrian friendliness. I would only use a roundabout when at least one of the intersecting streets (preferably both) is a thoroughfare or high-volume traffic street. Otherwise, I'd prefer to square it."

5. Admiring a Beauty. Like the medieval penchant for systematic order, the street grid of Savannah holds together nicely while creating a truly immersive experience for those traveling through it.

6. From Savannah to the Burbs: The American Art of Subdivision.The American suburb presents a puzzling question. How did a country that praises non-conformity and individual expression end up with an overall landscape of sameness? And what drives us to cluster around people like ourselves? The large-scale repetition of form has deep roots in American culture, and Savannah itself has its origins in a strictly egalitarian subdivision of land. Every settler was given a "tything" of 10 lots of 60' by 90' each, compactly arranged in town and a 45-acre allotment parcel for farming outside of town.

Savannah was built specifically to reproduce itself in a cellular fashion at a regional level,

"Carefully inspecting the arrangement of the 45-acre farm tracts, however, one can discern that they were arranged in a manner to encourage the future formation of hamlets and townships in the countryside, suggesting a fractal strategy of expansion for the entire colonization scheme of Georgia."

 7. "Not For Us But For Others" -- The Humanitarian Roots of America's First Subdivision. The original planners of Savannah must have had Chistopher Wren's London in mind as they laid out the street pattern. The British Enlightenment led to forms of city planning that were open to various possibilities of adjustment yet tightly geometric at the same time.

One difference between Savannah and the contemporary subdivision is the altruistic intent that the original trustees committed to while engaging in design. The town was explicitly for the poor and religiously persecuted.

"We would not be exaggerating to claim that Savannah is veritably America's first planned "habitat for humanity". The city was founded to give down-and-out British folks a second chance at life and prosperity."

The original Savannah had no center. Each of Oglethorpe's wards stood alone, and no hierarchy existed between them, keeping with the underpinnings of England's nascent movement toward liberalism. Interestingly, Oglethorpe himself never accepted a permanent lot, preferring to reside in tent directly along the river. He truly wanted it to be a city "not for us but for others."

8. John Locke's Savannah. The form of Savannah is not only shaped by the liberal ideals of equal opportunity for everyone, but also the everyday give and take of trades and services inherent to a dense urban marketplace. This type of human interaction should make us cautious about criticism of the suburbs on the basis of appearances of homogeneity and segregation. The real driver of community is not merely proximity of homes to each other - some urban areas can be as stratified as any suburb - but the existence of real people who serve as connectors across social groups. These connections can be surprisingly active in many of today's suburbs.

Following the lead of Savannah can help planners retrofit existing suburbs and, at the same time, help our urban areas become friendlier to the demographic conventionally attracted to suburbs. The city can teach us how to mix equal economic opportunity with truly vibrant community.

Libraries as food desert oases

NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It's being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered the next day from a local grocer.

This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.

There's so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.

The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it's own niche.

The following map is from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. It's their first swat at measuring food deserts in the city.

Church-based transit oriented development deemed legal

An Arlington, Virginia church, First Baptist Church of Clarendon, may have just paved the way for religious organizations to become more active players in affordable transit-oriented development. Last week, a U.S. District Court judge threw out a First Amendment lawsuit against the church's subsidized housing development, which claimed that their partnership with the county violated separation of church and state. This was only the latest in a series of attacks lodged against the development by affluent nearby residents, who claim the eight floors of apartments above the remodeled sanctuary ruin the character of their neighborhood. The proposed 116-unit addition (70 subsidized units) happens to sit one block from the Clarendon metro station.

My intention here is not to get into the legal details of the case, but just to point to the clear green light the church was given. The basic allegation was that Arlington County's support for the project was a veiled attempted to prop up a struggling church with public money. Barry Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called it "secular salvation." The judge, however, disagreed. He determined that providing highly accessible affordable housing is, in fact, a public purpose and there is nothing unconstitutional about the government partnering with a religious organization to meet these goals. It is relevant that all funds for the sanctuary remodel and preservation of the steeple did come from the church itself.

The NIMBY vs. TOD story is all too familiar, but the involvement of a religious organization in the process adds an interesting twist. If this development does come to fruition, and it is expected to by 2011, it will represent a win-win-win situation for housing advocates, the county government, environmentalists, and the church itself. The church gets to leverage it's valuable property assets to reinvigorate itself, while contributing toward it's mission for social justice at the same time. A number of families get a decent home right in the thick of everything they'll need. The rest of the community gets more density near transit and all of the attendant social and environmental benefits.

Church's have a long history of incorporating subsidized housing on site, going back to the ubiquitous parish house that was built to allow staff to live right on premises. The cooperative strategy modeled in Clarendon can be a wonderful opportunity to renew this tradition, especially for older congregations who occupy important urban sites but currently don't have the parishioners to fully utilize them. Adapting church preservation with new construction can breath new life into the building and mix uses that are quite compatible. I'm looking for this kind of partnership to spread to communities around the country.

Gardeners and urbanists unite

Michael Pollan is known for writing about food, but his first book still stands as a classic gardening autobiography. One of the enduring premises of Second Nature (and an earlier NYT feature) is his eloquent description of the strangeness and pervasiveness of American lawn culture: those sheer-cut acres of the same Kentucky Bluegrass layering the ground from coast to coast. Today, there are burgeoning lawn reform movements among gardeners to question the convention.

Research has measured the total acreage of lawns in the U.S to be about 40 million (and growing), making turf grass the number one irrigated crop in the country. Although yards may literally be green, there is very little environmental benefit to them.  The compacted soil functions as an impervious surface for stormwater run-off, and grass under six inches does little good for erosion control. The species monoculture of most lawns creates habitat dead space. A large chunk of household water use goes to lawn upkeep. Although they may sequester some carbon, the methane released by trashed grass clippings cancels a lot of this out. And the big one is the pesticides and fertilizers applied and washed into surrounding waterways.

Pollan asks: Why do we still do this?

The easy answer is because we have to. Many HOA covenants and zoning laws prescribe specific requirements for mowing and upkeep. If this doesn't do it, the often intense social pressure to mow will get the message across. But, sure, how did that regime come into existence? According to Pollan, the lawn conveys a number of important social messages:

"The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind hedge or fence since we all occupy the same middle class."

 And

"We are all property owners here, the lawn announces, and that suggests its other purpose: to supply a suitably grand stage for the proud display of one's own house."

The lawn also represents, and dramatizes on a weekly basis, our dominance over nature:

"For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one's neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the Toro's brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly."

His recommendation is to convert the lawn into a garden, that is, to subdue our patch of nature artfully, working with the rhythms of time and particularities of place. Sounds good, but this is where a sense of urban scale may help this transition along. It's hard for me to imagine the average large-lot suburban homeowner finding the time to creatively arrange a significant portion of his plot. Short of a sizable landscaping budget or loads of free time, most people will opt to simply fire up the riding lawnmower. You can even set your beer in the cup holder.

Small-lot homes on well-appointed streets are a much more manageable scale for most people. And there will be plenty of passers-by stopping on the sidewalk to admire the handiwork. A move toward more thoughtful and ecologically beneficial lawns is unlikely to be successful without a concurrent reform in overall land use patterns in America.

The accompanying pictures are of front yards that I found attractive on a quick ride around Charlottesville yesterday. Some are from more affluent neighborhoods and some less so, but they are all fronting a good street.

A practical art of sharing space

Some comments from last week’s post from Peter Sigrist and Eric Orozco stimulate a really interesting conversation about the feasibility of a pluralistic society living compactly. In Peter’s words: “could so many people with different values and customs avoid disastrous conflict” in a very dense living arrangement? Scrambling to come up with a response, it seemed worthwhile to launch a whole new post.

Has our diversity tended to spread Americans out from each other?

Pietro Nivola of Brookings thinks so,

“One may wonder whether nations that have lacked this spatial buffer, or that prefer to compress their urban populations into much closer physical proximity, could have kept a lid on urban social pressures comparable in duration and intensity to those withstood historically in America.”

From the anti-Catholic violence of the mid-19th century to the riots that shook inner cities in the 60’s, there’s ample evidence to suggest that the space available for outward movement served as a sort of “escape valve” for cultural tensions. Various groups responded by simply moving away, sometimes the affluent seeking greener pastures and sometimes dispossessed minorities being coerced to move on. This is an unavoidable part of the American story.

Multiculturalism is one of those ideas that have been investigated by the academy with a fine-toothed comb for decades. I was taught in elementary school that we were a “melting pot,” then we became the “salad bowl,” and now you may hear every imaginable metaphorical variety in between. I suspect this debate is a manifestation of what William James called the ancient question of “the One and Many.” How is everything unified? How is everything diversified? According to James, it’s unanswerable in the abstract - otherwise it would surely have been answered by now. All we really can do is see what arrangements along this spectrum meet our goals for specific, concrete situations.

Stanley Fish is probably the current torch-bearer of American pragmatism:

“We may never be able to reconcile the claims of difference and community in a satisfactory formula, but we may be able to figure out a way for these differences to occupy the civic and political space of this community without coming to blows.”

This is a call for strategy over theory; mitigation over solutions. It seems to me that this is the role urban planners have been playing in communities for years.

One strategy for “resolving” differences has always been privatization - an avoidance tactic. Another strategy is forging a common set of compromises that can govern peaceable use of the public (and the inevitable overlaps of the private). Each approach has its pros and cons, and probably both approaches are needed to some degree.

I live in a neighborhood in which I am a racial, and in some ways cultural, minority. This was an intentional choice, and warm evening walks passing families sitting out on their front porches remind me of the commonalities I share with my neighbors. Yet there are differences as well. To cite a trivial one, the same warm days allow me the opportunity to listen to loud music from passing cars that I definitely would not listen to in the comfort of my own home. This can be annoying to me, and the motorists are undoubtedly annoyed that I’m annoyed. Yet friends who own a bed and breakfast down the street are seriously advocating enforcement of noise ordinances for cars. It hits them in a different way.

I have no conceit that I’m experiencing an absolute pluralistic lifestyle. Not even close. Even given my relatively diverse spatial living arrangement, my life is predominantly privatized nonetheless. It’s not as if I’m hanging out in the neighborhood community center every day. I always have the opportunity to close the doors and retreat inward, or travel outside of the neighborhood. Diversity is nearby, but I'm hardly immersed in it.

All of this to preface the point:

I tend to be fairly optimistic about our chances for peaceful cohabitation of space, because it can be supplemented with reasonable doses of self-segregation, regulations for conflicting behavior, and the simple practice of closing the door or walling off the private garden. Every locality, indeed every household, will surely land on a different balance in their approach, but there are tried and true strategic options available for sharing space nonetheless.

An honest question about minimum school acreage

Many building codes require large sites for public schools. Flickr: Valarie Renee

I heard a story the other day about a major flood that hit Albany, Georgia in 1994. As is usually the case, many of the poorer neighborhoods in the core of the town, set along the river in the low-lying land, were hit the hardest. The U.S. FEMA agency had funds set a aside to help the community rebuild, including the reconstruction of two schools that were completely lost in this neighborhood. However, one of the stipulations was that the new schools had to be placed on at least a twenty acre campus. Naturally, the only suitable parcels were in the outlying suburbs, which happened to be more affluent, so not only did these folks have to get their own lives back in order but they had to start busing their children outside of the community from that point forward.

The obvious question: why a twenty acre minimum? Where did we get this fortress mentality that requires all schools to be set apart on a separate campus?

This brings me to some personal anecdotes about two schools:


Hellgate High School occupies a site very close to the center of Missoula, Montana. It was built in 1908 and somehow managed to not be destroyed in the intervening century. The school is nicely woven into the urban fabric of Missoula, and on any given school day the extensive row of bike racks in the back are filled to the brim. There is very limited motor vehicle parking.

Students are allowed to leave the school for lunchtime, and many of them walk to the local shops and restaurants across the street. I'm sure there are some who worry that the students will engage in the practice of shenanigans while let loose, but, as a nearby worker in downtown, I never saw a problem. What they did get was a half hour to explore the real world everyday in a relatively safe environment, even those who did not yet have their own drivers licence.


Newark High School in Delaware is where I attended school. The school abandoned its urban site in 1954 for a more spacious modern building further out of town. Although it is still relatively close to downtown Newark (we're talking 1950's after all), the site is designed for driving only. It's set back from the street, fenced off on two sides, and accompanied by a large parking lot.

When I was there, school administrators were not willing to risk the liability of letting students out for lunch, but many of us did anyway. Because teachers took turns patrolling the borders, we literally had to run out the door, cross a four-lane divided highway, and trek through a strip mall parking lot just to get to an Auntie Anne's fast food joint. I look back wondering why we were will willing to exert so much effort for a pretzel. I don't think we were being deviants for the sake of deviancy; I think we just wanted to act like adults.

The one student in our class who did die during school hours perished when his automobile rammed into a tree. He was running late for school in the morning. The self-contained fortress school design may be able to keep students sheltered while they are on its premises (that is, while the school district is legally liable for their safety), but all of those cars in the parking lot have to arrive from somewhere. In reality, all other threats of accidental harm are negligible in the shadow of teenage driving fatalities.

It turns out that Newark High School may have to move further yet out of town. Delaware has updated the school building codes, now requiring a minimum of 25 acres for the school site. Newark is in non-compliance, and some are starting to complain about the lack of parking.

Again, what is the reasoning behind requiring larger and larger lots?

A walkable grocery thought experiment

Randal O'Toole has proposed a thought experiment that he uses to "debunk the smart growth myth" of the ideal walkable neighborhood grocery store.

"For smart growth to work, then population densities must be high enough for businesses to have enough customers within walking distance to keep them going. Smart growth won't work if businesses in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods must attract hordes of auto drivers from other areas in order to survive. A modern large supermarket needs to draw patrons from a community of about 40,000 people. This is known as the trade population for this kind of store.

Joel Garreau says that, as a rule of thumb, 'the farthest distance an American will willingly walk before getting into a car' is 600 feet. However, 'if you do everything you can to make casual use of the automobile inconvenient at the same time that you make walking pleasant and attractive, you maybe, just maybe, can up the distance an American will willingly walk to 1,500 feet'...

The population density required to place 40,000 people within 1,500 feet of a grocery store is almost 124,000 people per square mile. That's about two-and-one-half times the density of Manhattan."

Therefore, smart growth won't work. QED.

O'Toole has asked a worthwhile question but plugged in the wrong numbers to answer it. Out of curiosity, I'd like to take a closer look at this hypothetical scenario to see how feasible the walkable grocery may really be.
Customer Base. O’Toole uses the concept of trade population, but this is begging the question. His trade population number is generated assuming an automobile-oriented environment, which is exactly what the proposed scenario is an alternative to. The more objective measure is the actual pool of customers a large grocery draws from. To get a feel for this I counted all of the food sources that serve the Charlottesville-Albemarle area. I came up with 14 large "modern grocery stores," between 30,000 and 60,000 sq. feet. This does not include:

• medium-sized full-service grocers
• about a half dozen health food stores
• specialty ethnic food stores
• big box stores like Target that sell food
• dozens of small convenience stores

I'm only counting the kinds of places O'Toole considers an unreasonable sacrifice to do without.

Taking the combined service area's population to be 134,086 from current ACS data (Charlottesville and Albemarle County), this breaks down to about one large grocery store per 9500 people. APA has determined the average customer base for a supermarket in the U.S. to be 8,412 , but I’ll just stick with my more conservative 9500.

Modal Split. O'Toole, as usual, characterizes the smart growth position as something far more extreme than anyone would actually propose: a 100% walking grocery store, as if bicycles, transit, and automobiles do not exist at all. The term walkable means able to be walked to, not only walked to. Every smart growth proponent I know would actually hope to see a multimodal balance to allow an array of transportation options. For the sake of this scenario, let's suppose our store has 50% walkers (with some cyclists included in here), 25% transit users, and 25% drivers.

Walking Distance. If you ignore Garreau's snarkiness, the 1,500 foot number is an alright estimate for typical behavior in a pedestrian-friendly environment. Walking 600 feet will seem intolerable if it's between the Best Buy and the Bed, Bath, and Beyond through a parking lot and grass berm, but Charlottesville's downtown pedestrian mall is 2,100 feet long and people will regularly walk its length for an errand because it is so enjoyable. A more objective way to go about this would be to fix the travel time. Apparently, the average drive to the grocery store currently takes about 20 minutes, including the walk from the parking lot. At a leisurely pace, the average walker could traverse about 3,000 feet in 20 minutes. I'll stick with the 1,500 foot number, noting that this will cut the travel time in half even for the furthest walkers.

Needed Density. Considering all of these conditions, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this grocer could be supported with a population density of 18,885 people per square mile surrounding it. This is about half the density of Brooklyn. If this still seems unreasonably high, it should be noted that this is only the density for one quarter of a square mile area. In theory, it could be surrounded by a greenbelt of parkland and have no effect on the calculation.

Charlottesville's new Market Street Market serves a walkable neighborhood

The more important question that I have not addressed is whether easy access to a “large modern grocery store” really adds much to quality of life. Granted that more choices are usually better than fewer, but is a whole wall of ketchup options that much more preferable than one or two choices. Psychologists for a while have been pointing to the phenomenon of too many choices, leading to customer confusion and even anxiety, so much so that major retailers have begun simplifying their selections and stepping up quality control. New corporations like Trader Joes are mastering this market.

There’s no reason why a medium-scaled grocer could not carry almost anything the average household would want on a much smaller footprint. And rather than singling out a one-size-fits-all shopping location, whether you're preparing Thanksgiving dinner or picking up milk, it's easy to imagine a full spectrum of grocery stores organized between convenience and selection. Walk to the neighborhood store twice a week; take a longer trip to Costco every two months.

Los Angeles from a different angle

Movies about Los Angeles have been about cars to the point of caricature. Whether it's James Dean's 1949 Mercury Coup or the drive-by shootings from Boyz n the Hood, we are led to believe that life in LA happens from within a car. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character Alvy whines the whole time he's in LA:

"Hey, don't tell me we're gonna hafta walk from the car to the house. Geez, my feet haven't touched pavement since I reached Los Angeles."

Steve Martin also joked about the LA and NY comparison in LA Story:

"Whatever you do, don't get dumped in L.A. I mean, it's not like New York, where you can meet someone walking down the street. In L.A. you practically have to hit someone with your car."

And then Mulholland Drive and Crash explore the darker side of the ubiquitous driving culture.

A still from 500 days of Summer

A still from 500 Days of Summer

Having only been to LA on a couple of occasions, and briefly, I've basically had to swallow the popular culture stereotype as the full truth of the matter. That is why last year's film, 500 Days of Summer, stood out to me as a unique portrait of the city - a heartfelt homage to a place that is entirely different than I've been told about. The main characters, Tom and Summer, bounce all around downtown LA - from cafes, to theaters, to museums, to work, to karaoke bars, to city parks, and to their apartments - all on foot or by transit. They take a light rail trip out to the countryside for a wedding. An old car only shows up for a quick two minute segment.

This deeply urban portrayal of Los Angeles is embedded within the characters and storyline as well. Tom's true passion is to be an architect, and he loves walking around downtown and appreciating the life of the sidewalks and historic buildings. He takes Summer to a downtown park to point out the cityscape, noting that the only blemish is two parking lots. Summer asks him to draw a picture on her arm of how the city can be infilled with more buildings.

Of course, in retrospect it's ridiculous to assume that a city of almost four million would have no urban fabric whatsoever. 500 Days of Summer does the service of telling the rest of us that it really does exist.

Toyota's vision "beyond cars"

This month's Atlantic has some fine articles, including one about the Orange County Walmart I posted on a few months ago, but I'd like to bring up the advertisement on the back cover: "Toyota, We See Beyond Cars."

From Toyota, Beyond Cars

This is part of an ongoing campaign Toyota has initiated with television commercials, print ads, and a user-created web site, all geared toward imagining a world "beyond cars." I have to say this entire concept is intriguing. It reminds me of those Abercrombie and Fitch billboards filled with attractive, half-naked young people. Why would seeing a guy without a shirt on make me want to buy a shirt? You'd think I would want less clothing. But I'm sure some high-level marketing executives have a good answer to that question.

Toyota is using the same strategy here. The town depicted in this ad is probably as close as it gets to the idyllic American small town, the kind of place survey respondents have in mind when they constantly mark "small town" as an ideal living preference. There is a sharp boundary between the town and countryside, with three-story buildings running directly up to open forests and plains. The scale is small enough to be easily walkable, allowing each of the residents to have access to all town services as well as natural amenities on foot. The development is nestled right up to the hills with no mountaintop private estates (overlooking their fiefdom), and lush street trees blanket the town. All of this is symbolically envisioned through the lack of a Toyota Highlander smack in the middle of picture. Interesting.

Incidentally, I'm not sure where this picture is taken. The ad mentions Princeton, Indiana, where a Toyota factory is located (3 miles outside of), but the topography in the picture does not match Princeton. I would guess somewhere in Vermont or New Hampshire.

Here's a television commercial in the same campaign:



It also portrays the conspicuous absence of a vehicle set in an attractive American place. This downtown, like the previous place, was undoubtedly built during a time when "Ford" was what you did when you reached a river and didn't have a boat. Toyota would have been completely foreign to you. These kinds of places have slowly been withered away by businesses and homes that require ample parking ... in other words, in part at least, by Toyota. Yet Toyota knows its audience still wants this to be the kind of America we live in.

It's hard to tell what Toyota is doing with this. Are they signaling a wish, or at least an openness, to move beyond manufacturing cars to other forms of transportation? Or do they realize that most of us have no choice but to own a car, and they want to position themselves as the least-like-a-car car company on the market? The Mrs. and I do happen to own a Corolla, and until Toyota's vision of a nation beyond cars comes into being, we'll probably replace this one with another Corolla once we've driven it into the ground..

Overheard in a coffeeshop

Standing in line in a coffeeshop in downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia, I overheard two women, presumably fairly well-off, having a conversation behind me.

“So, do you live downtown?”
“No, I live out in Spotsylvania County.”
“Really? So do we, but our house is way to big for us, especially after the children have left.”
“Yeah, we feel the same way. A few years ago we actually moved into a 3-bedroom house right down the road from us just because it was smaller.”
“We’d love to move too, but I don’t know how to downsize and stay in the same neighborhood. The people are what make the place, you know.”

While this is purely anecdotal, my eavesdropping made me wonder how many people are out there like this – folks who make their housing decisions based on relationships or social standing and merely tolerate having to live in a large house with a large lawn because they perceive this as the only option available to them.

This year's great places in America

The Squares of Savannah are a Great American Public Space

The American Planning Association has released this year's Great Places in America awards. This is a wonderful program, now in its third year, that recognizes the practice and preservation of good urbanism in a positive way. (Sort of the other side of the James Howard Kunstler coin). Every one of the winning neighborhoods foster a vibrant community with walkable scale and design. Each one of the great streets are multimodal and have more purpose than simply conveying vehicles from one place to another quickly.

Rob Goodspeed previously noted that the 2007 and 2008 selections give the impression of what he calls a "New Normative Planning":

"For a profession long maligned for a lack of clear identify or vision, the group of winners from 2007 and 2008 form a remarkably coherent group. Including such iconic places as Philadelphia's Society Hill and Washington, D.C.'s union station, but also more obscure sites like Cleveland's West Side Market and downtown Sheridan, Wyoming. In general the winning neighborhoods, streets, and public spaces are resoundingly urban and historic. None of the winners are strip malls, 1970s planned unit developments, or conventional suburban residential neighborhoods."

The 2009 awards certainly continue the trend, only with noticeably more attention given to smaller cities and towns than before. Places I had never heard of, like Bath, Maine and Charlevoix, Michigan, find their place on the map. Not only does this give some deserved attention to communities that have worked hard to become highly livable places, but it underscores the notion that urban design principles are not just applicable to big cities.

I'm remembering this list for the next time I travel and need a place to stop in and visit.