Bloomberg notes a Commerce Department report that U.S. housing starts surged 15 percent last month, reaching a four-year high. Could this finally be the beginning of the recovery in American real estate?
Planning Theory
Bloomberg’s New York City
Michael Bloomberg has put an array of game-changing development projects at the forefront of his administration’s urban planning policy– and seen a lot of them through. As Bloomberg prepares to leave office at the end of his present term, The Architect’s Newspaper has put together a fascinating survey piece that describes many of the individual projects of the Bloomberg era, which together have reshaped the city in the most significant ways since the time of Robert Moses. (Thanks, Jon Goldman, for the tip!)
A new vision for Coney Island. Source: NYCEDC.
As a New Yorker (regionally, at least), I have very mixed feelings about Bloomberg’s planning legacy. On one hand, I now work in the city two or three days each week, and I have to say that I really enjoy the streetscaping changes that have been made to Broadway, in particular. Sometimes, when I feel like I need some exercise at the end of the day, I’ll walk up Broadway from the office in Gramercy Park to the PATH station at Greeley Square. The transformation of Broadway is palpable: Traffic lanes have been replaced with trees, bike lines, and outdoor seating. One day last week, a wedding was being performed in the middle of the street. With the reduction of motor-traffic, it became clear how much of the stress-inducing aggression that one expects to find in New York City is a direct result of having homicidal drivers competing for blacktop. Without them (or, even, with fewer of them), Broadway– in Midtown– has been transformed into a relatively quiet and peaceful setting. The redevelopment of Broadway is part of a wider administration focus on complete streets. No doubt that further reductions in vehicular traffic, as the Bloomberg administration has sought, would improve the ambience of the city, immeasurably.
On a much grander scale, I also really admire the ambition of a lot of the city’s signature projects, as highlighted in the Architect’s Newspaper article. The Hudson Yards Redevelopment Area, for example, will herald the most significant change to Manhattan’s geography since the 1920s: It will open an enormous new section of the city to Midtown-style development, supported by a city-financed extension of the No. 7 subway (which is almost complete), and by the 2005 and 2009 upzonings of nearly 60 blocks on the Far West Side. Across town, in the middle of the East River, a new Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island will greatly increase the university’s footprint within the city limits. Downtown, the new World Trade Center is finally coming together, while Governor’s Island remains an empty canvas–but not for long. It’s an exciting time in New York City development. Forget about the numbers– the money to be made, the square footages to be built. Just look at the pictures in the above-mentioned article, and try to not be impressed by what’s happening.
On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that the city has become too managed, and too planned, on a human scale. It’s hard to characterize, exactly, what has been diminished over the last decade. But it feels as though the chaos and spontaneity that once made New York New York have been methodically reduced, and what we now have in New York is something more like a polished European capital, whose politically-connected denizens have shaped it to showcase their own riches and refinement, than like the crazy American city that we once loved. I still remember a city whose energy and danger seemed to promise that anything could happen here. What happened to that? The city of today is easier to deal with, in some ways. But it’s also become a preening, intolerant, and exclusive in-club, in ways that America’s largest city should never have been allowed to become. There’s something that I just find deeply dispiriting and stifling about much of New York now. It represents, I think, in all of its hair-splitting regulations, its commercialized hipness, and its matter-of-fact acceptance of locked doors, the decisive transformation of metropolitan America into a class-structured society whose boundaries are increasingly impenetrable to all but a select few. Its neatness is not something to celebrate.
It would be unfair, and perhaps too easy, given his personal characteristics, to lay most of the blame for this on Mayor Bloomberg. These changes have been coming for a generation, and many are the results of national and even global phenomena. Furthermore, to give credit where it’s due, the Bloomberg administration has probably done more to prioritize the development of affordable housing than any New York City mayor since the 1960s. Few things represent the narrowing of the city more starkly than its cost of living; and while Bloomberg’s willingness to tackle this may simply make good business sense, it also addresses an inequity that has been tolerated for far too long. At the same time, Bloomberg has had more than 10 years to leave his mark on the city, and it is what it is. There may be more affordable units in the pipeline as a result of his policies, but rest assured that their numbers will be very tightly controlled; and never will enough of them be permitted through the city’s land use policies to threaten the astronomical market equilibrium. Instead, the experience of living in New York City will become increasingly bureaucratized and contingent for those who are not rich: As Bloomberg once gloated, he believes the city is a “luxury product” for which people ought to expect to pay. And pay they do. His is not a vision of a city whose plans respond to the needs of its people; rather, it’s a city whose political players make room for the people they might need.
France Outdoes America
An interesting story from the Economist: national fertility trends are shifting.
Urban Farming to Reduce Violent Crime?
To the extent I’ve paid attention, I’ve mostly been a skeptic about urban farming. I recoil from thoughts of chickens on Charlestown rooftops or parsnips from vacant lots in Philadelphia. Call me a traditionalist, but, in my mind, there’s just a historical, practical, and aesthetic separation of commercially-productive agriculture and urbanism that deserves to be respected. I mean, who are all of these Williamsburg hipsters to tell the Mesopotamians, and every civilization since them, that they’ve been wrong?
Now comes Mother Jones, to tell us that there actually is value in urban farms— and it’s not that they encourage healthy-eating, or provide another carbon sink, or allow us to stick it to the Man, who would sell us boring, mass-produced tomatoes at the A & P. In a surprisingly compelling piece, Alex Kotlowitz and Emily Schiffer document the social impact of urban farms in Chicago, and how they’ve helped to weave together a new sense of participatory community in a place that has had the mentality of a war zone for years.
In our lifetimes, the depravity of the Drug War, in combination with a host of other bad ideas, has put a very fine point on what can go wrong with city life. In the 19th century, heavy industry did the same. But this story about urban farms causes me to wonder whether the Olmsteds and Howards of the 19th century actually missed a broader point: That is, it may not have been the presence of mere nature that was missing from the massive Victorian cities, so much as the connection to the abiding cultural patterns that are reinforced by proximity to productive land.
The impatience, narcissism, and myopia that so often characterize urban life also feed the violence at its extreme fringes– both on the streets, and in the boardrooms. These tendencies are also, interestingly, tempered by a hands-on relationship with the timeless but predictable ways of nature. With the industrial age, cities became large enough to sever their ties to the land– and with it, their social ties to the patterns of agriculture. So maybe urban farming is onto something: Maybe, if its culture ever reaches a critical mass, it could improve the spirit of our massive cities in ways that parks and suburbs tried, but never could.
I’m still a skeptic, but I’m more interested now than before.
The Radiant City
I found this video tour of Le Corbusier’s real-world Radiant City— the Unité d’Habitation, in Marseille– while looking around on Vimeo. It reminds me of just how ambitious this madman was– and how there’s still something very dispiriting about what actually came of so many 20th-century grand visions. Urban, and otherwise.
The Blight of Power Lines
David Frum had a piece on CNN.com last week in which he advocated an infrastructure program that would follow Germany’s example and bury America’s power lines. I thought of this as I was driving through East Orange, New Jersey recently, and was reminded that that city’s early developers had done just that– and that its aesthetics continue to benefit from their decision. For all of its trouble with poverty and disinvestment since the 1967 Newark riots, East Orange retains an airy and park-like appearance in many of its neighborhoods: There is a complete absence of the black, plastic cables and splintering wooden poles that ordinarily crisscross the American streetscape; and the street lamps are true lamps, rather than arms mounted to telephone poles. In his article, Frum describes practical reasons for burying the wires: fewer outages, fewer maintenance calls, and a ready-made jobs program for construction workers as the Lesser Depression drags on. Standing outside in New Brunswick one evening during graduate school, a classmate from Europe once made a more succinct case: “The cables,” he said, gesturing toward the twilight sky. “It looks like a third-world country.”
America’s Changing Capital
Natalie Hopkinson has a good piece in today’s Times Sunday Review about the demographic changes that are underway in Washington, DC. I like the honesty with which Hopkinson depicts the anger and resentment, and also the hopefulness, that go hand in hand with quick neighborhood change. It’s depressing how often the coverage of these issues will try to sanitize the messy reality and recriminations that so obviously characterize changing groups’ claims to valuable urban territory. (These can be especially ugly when the claims are being made in the zero-sum game of politically-regulated urban land use.) Hopkinson doesn’t do that, nor does she patronize the parties to the dynamic by attempting to treat their grievances as being petty. But– and I think this is what makes her piece more meaningful than most lamentations of change– she also captures the significance of the sort of organic cultural integration that is happening, as well. I wonder if it can last, or if it is just a fleeting moment.
Meanwhile, Matt Stiles, an NPR data journalist who writes at The Daily Viz, has some new maps of the changing capital:
Stiles created several new maps of Washington, DC, based on the 2010 Census.
TELUS Research
I’ve been working on a project for a research center in New Brunswick over the last few months. The legwork has involved conducting interviews with officials at Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and state DOTs to document their experiences with TELUS, a database-management platform that’s employed for logistical and compliance purposes. Agencies use the software to assemble their federally-mandated Transportation Improvement Plans (TIPs), track their infrastructure spending, classify and prioritize individual projects, and share project data. A web-based version helps officials comply with SAFETEA-LU requirements for public transparency; a land-use projection model works in tandem with TELUS to allow agencies to predict future traffic and land use patterns, as well as employment and population growth.
From what we’ve learned, TELUS seems to have been a big help for state and local transportation agencies. Instead of copying information back and forth between e-mail accounts, Access databases, and Excel sheets (as had been the practice), those that adopted TELUS now have a global framework for managing their project data and making it available. One problem that dogs all of the software in this niche is a lack of standardization among competing platforms. A number of state and local agencies have developed their own programs to carry out the same tasks that TELUS handles. The programs all seem to have been developed separately, with little regard for compatibility with others. In some cases agencies require their subordinate partners to submit data in their proprietary formats, making the adoption of an outside framework complicated. There’s a period of this that occurs in every wave of development– whether it’s rail gauges, or radio frequencies, or operating systems. Individual participants can waste a lot of effort and money by picking the wrong horse. It’s interesting (as an observer).
At the end of the research, two observations (personal, not directly related to TELUS) stand out. The first is the enormous role that the federal government plays in local infrastructure projects, especially in conservative, rural parts of the country. The second is the lopsided preference that federal funding gives to highway infrastructure, as opposed to passenger rail, freight rail, bicycle/pedestrian provisions, and ferry/shipping services. It’s almost a cliché that mass-transit is an insolvent business model, and one that requires massive public investments, while cars and trucks remain ubiquitous symbols of potent American individualism. Imagine how that picture would change if, instead of the highway system, the feds maintained all of the rail infrastructure, and allowed private companies to use it, for profit, at little or no fee? If the highways were all maintained by private entities who had to raise revenues through tolls, or forgo their maintenance?
I’ll post a link to our report when it’s published.
“Recalling Central Park’s Casino”
The article begins, “If I could return to just one moment in New York’s story, I would go back to the Roaring Twenties. . . .” Me too.
Nice Bottle
What it says: “This map of Aranda del Duero is the oldest perspective map drawn in Spain in 1508. The original was made on skin and is preserved at the General Archive of Simancas. Was used as an inspiration for planning the cities of the New World, just discovered. It was presented to Queen Isabella of Castille to document the city limits where underground wineries were already producing and aging the wines from Ribera del Duero.” Note the plaza/forum, the cardo, the decumanus: it’s basically a perfect Roman frontier city. Great wine, too. Thanks, Jim!