Clean Energy Springfield

As a general rule, I think that distressed properties ought to be rehabilitated rather than demolished. I think it's easier to reinvest in rehab than it is to get funding for new construction. I think that older buildings are assets that ought to be cherished when there isn't something immediately in the offing.

Which means that I'm distressed that most people in Springfield default to thinking that these properties ought to be demo'd. And that means that I'm doubly upset that there are apparently problems with the city's rehab program.

I think this is a good starting point for finding out about the problems, and I hope that Chris Wetterich is able to follow up on this article, which is mostly he-said, she-said stuff, and dig into what the program has accomplished and how widespread the problems are. What kind of tracking and reporting of its spending and successes does the city do?

Not hollowing out the core of Springfield is an important element to growing smart--good neighborhoods draw investment, which will otherwise continue to concentrate in the far west side of the city. (Of course, this means we need neighbors that welcome new development, but that's another, much bigger topic...)

To get a sense of what's possible by pursuing a strategy of rehabbing and reinvestment, rather than demolition, check out the success of Patterson Park Community Development Corporation, in Baltimore (a city that pretty defies all attempts at improvement).

Will sent me a copy of the Sierra Club's candidate survey yesterday, and asked if I wanted to make any comments. I zeroed in on the sprawl question and decided to write something about it:

6) What actions would you take to encourage development within Springfield’s city center, and discourage sprawl? but then couldn't find any quick way.

Last night's mayoral debate solved that!

Both candidates were asked about the possibility of "large-scale" residential growth downtown and its role in having a vibrant central city.

Davlin said he didn't "see downtown as having what's in downtown Chicago" and didn't know if he'd support "large-scale development." He said he likes the mix there now and hailed the growth of second-floor condos in downtown buildings.

Strom said downtown housing is as important, if not more so, than continued growth of the bar and entertainment industry. He favors "a philosophy ... that we need to increase residential properties downtown to drive the economy for other things."

There is so much attention in the urban world on the great American cities--Chicago, New York, Baltimore (my bad!), Philadelphia, and so on--that it's easy to forget that we used to have real urban small cities. In grad school, we worked for awhile with Jackson, Michigan, a city of 30,000 that used to have a solid union middle class, with a wonderful downtown. Now, it's struggling to keep its jobs, and it's downtown has been hollowed out to just a thin strip surrounded by parking. Sound familiar?

You can see the bones of Jackson and Springfield's urbanism, and they're good. It's a low-lying density that allows for walkability, work, retail. It's called neotraditional design or New Urbanism now, and it's trendy. But what they're creating aren't the dense urban cores of Chicago and New York. They're recreating the downtowns of Springfield and Jackson.

We don't need to recreate. We just need to fill back in.

Norman Hinderliter has a letter to the Illinois Times this week--in his words, "my yearly reminder to those citizens who are fed up with working 40 hours a week to just sign their paychecks over to local gas stations: Try bicycling this summer -- not just to save gas money but for health as well." I totally endorse that sentiment, but there's one quibble I have.

At the end of his letter, Hinderliter says bike parking is unbeatable, since bikes can park anywhere. To which I say: Not in my experience, sir! I have about six places I bike to repeatedly: work, downtown, the library, the grocery store, Hometown Pantry, and Walgreens. At work, I chain up to a tree; ditto at the grocery store (County Market on Monroe). Maldaners and the library both offer downtown racks, as do Hometown Pantry and Walgreens.

Bike racks--like bike lanes on heavily traveled roads--don't just make it easier and more convenient to cycle, they also signal that bicycling is an important part of our transportation system. Their absence--say, from workplaces, from grocery stores, from downtown at the old state capitol--communicates the reverse: bicycling is fringe and frivolous.

Bike racks are not expensive, and a tree is not a parking space.

I don't think there's anything groundbreaking here, but Kirk Westphal, from my alma mater, put together a short video about Ann Arbor's lively downtown (two links to his video are toward the bottom of the linked page). Probably everyone at Downtown Springfield is already familiar with these principles, but it would be nice to see a stronger constituency for support of downtown as a vital element of our city, not just for its ability to draw out tourist dollars, but simply because it improves our quality of life.

However, I'd go beyond that, and suggest that these are principles we can apply, in different ways, across Springfield. Certainly, I would hope that any view toward revitalizing MacArthur Boulevard would consider bringing that street closer in, emphasizing trees, pedestrian access, and centralizing parking.

But let's not stop there! Why not change how we develop the west side, so that we create new downtown-like clusters, that work as a whole, rather than building individual lots that cannot connect. Major retailers are increasingly looking to urban centers as the frontiers of their markets, and their range of design options are reflecting that. Why not simply ask* them to build more compact, pedestrian-oriented buildings, even if they're out in greenfields? That would give people a reason to use the bike paths that so many candidates for alderman are eager to promote.

* And, yes, when I say "ask", I probably mean "require."

Architect and planner Daniel Burnham instructed us to think big, but bigness is a surprisingly tricky business. A single vision, applied across many acres, is usually deadening, and recent attempts to dress up single buildings with multiple facades (and Meijer stores are only the oddest looking of the bunch, and not really atypical) often results in a Disneyfied artificiality that would be quaint if we didn't have to live with it.

Richard Layman has some thoughts. For myself, it's partly a problem of matching developer size to land costs. If land costs too much, development as a whole is squeezed out. If land costs too little, it's easy to build into bigness. Of course, the regulations that control how and where and what we build play a huge role, too.

One useful innovation, to my mind, was what was done in Fall Creek Place, in Indianapolis. FCP won the American Planning Association's Smart Growth award in 2003, and they did it, in part, by being very careful with how people got paid. They split the project's responsibilities up, so that the developer worked with many different architects to create a portfolio of house plans, ranging in size but fit to the historical character of the existing neighborhood. (Which neighborhood, incidentally, was 80% vacant at the start of the project, due to 30 years of aggressive demolition.) The developer connected homebuyers with architects, but was only paid a flat fee based on lots sold. Which means that they didn't have an incentive to upsize the homebuyers.

The neighborhood looks great now--I visited in 2004, and again in 2006, and while you can tell a lot of it is new, it has that hard to articulate balance between being stylistically consistent without deadening conformity that we look for in our great older neighborhoods. The best part, though, is that it's affordable--half of the homes are for low to middle income families. It's also transit accessible and pedestrian friendly. (It would almost have to be--it was built using all of the lot lines from the original platting in the 1940s or so.)

So, while we should make no little plans, maybe sometimes we want to make little buildings.

There are a few articles of note in today's SJR. Gas prices are always good for an active and amusing comment board, and the buffalo gnat story has, for me anyway, the ring of what's to come from global warming (even if it's not the case that our own infestation is due to warming, some googling suggests that other places are experiencing heavier swarms due to warmer winters).

But, no, my choice for story of the day is the education rally. A common complaint in liberal blogs is with the factionated aspect of the Democratic Party's interest groups. Environmentalists, labor, pro-choice--everybody pulls in different directions at once.

Education, though, ought to be the exception. From the perspective of environmentalism, one of the problems with school funding is that it drives sprawl. Because property taxes are the primary base of local school funding, and municipalities can zone out poor families, one of the drivers of sprawl are middle class households that, essentially, have to buy their way into a good school district.

So if school funding is evened out, and in turn, school quality levels even out, there's less pressure on families to move to sprawling areas, since those areas will no longer have a monopoly on the good schools. This is, of course, an ancillary benefit to the main one of simply doing better by low and moderate income families.

Via Richard Layman, the University of Minnesota has a broadscale study of accessibility in the Twin Cities region. For those not up on the latest transportation lingo, accessibility is contrasted with mobility as a way of judging the efficiency of a transportation system.

Mobility looks at the cost of travel on a per mile basis (that is, the speed of travel, basically, but you can also include fuel and environmental costs). Most traffic engineering today is within a mobility framework--traffic engineers want to see cars moving smoothly along, congestion-free.

Accessibility, on the other hand, looks at the cost of travel on a per-destination basis. That is, what's the total cost of a trip to your shopping center or job.

The difference between the two can be seen in that a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood can have low mobility--you move around slowly--but is highly accessible, because you can get to a lot of places, even at that low rate of speed. Personally, mobility seems to me to be an easier standard to measure against, but one that misses out on how transportation is experienced. Mobility also encourages sprawl, since you're only paying attention to the speed, it's easier for overall trip distances to grow unchecked.

The U. Minnesota group has put out a short report on their study so far, called "Asking the Right Questions" [PDF]. It's a reasonable introduction to the idea of accessibility, if you don't have much time.

ALSO: The ability, or desire, of Americans to respond to changes in the price of gas has lessened in recent years. I'm inclined to say that this is the result of people choosing less and less accessible locations to live in (and, of course, our regulated land-use market providing fewer and fewer accessible residences), but it could be something else going on.

Okay, so one more link for today, since I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about it. It's not strictly energy stuff, but it's useful info, I think. According to Kevin Harris, who is a pretty good source on what's going on in the UK to improve neighborhoods from the ground up, what makes the biggest difference (in terms of positive factors) for happiness with your neighborhood is that the people are friendly. This isn't ground-breaking stuff, but it is stuff that's easy to forget about. Kevin's post is about forgetting about friendliness while focusing on community involvement and influence (i.e., self-determination at the local level), but you could probably come up with a dozen other things that people focus on instead of friendliness.

Of course, that "instead of" is tricky, because I don't think you can solve everybody's problems just by forcing everyone to smile at everyone else, and at some point you do have to deal with self-governance or whatever else. But maybe while you're working on all those things, we need to also find ways to spread friendliness. These things work together, after all, and how much can a smile cost?

Go read Carolyn Oxtoby's letter "Lots of things 'snag' downtown rehab." There's a lot there for a short letter.

When I signed up for Blog Action Day, I had a vision of myself really pouring stuff out today--I'm in between jobs with nothing pressing on the horizon. Sadly, move-related stuff wound up trumping everything today, so here I am squeezing this into the last few hours of the day. Ah, well.

I think cities are underappreciated in their potential to be environmental solutions. It's not simply that they allow for more efficient transportation, it's that cities can be, and should be, understood as a social extension of natural phenomena. As their own peculiar kind of ecosystem, they're not living, but they are lifelike (see, for example, urban metabolisms). Understanding these flows of energy and materials through our cities is crucial to minimizing our impact on the earth, but that's just the beginning. Once we've got a better feel for those flows, we can start to imagine our urban systems as more like ecosystems, with one energy input (sunlight) and endless material re-use cycles. We can also start to better understand the interplay of different actors--the varied functions that trees can provide (water purity, material recovery, energy source, energy saver, wind break, climate control, and on), the cycle of food and wastes, the distributed production of energy.

But since they're also fundamentally social, cities are places where memory becomes culture and biographies become histories. Cities are where we're most exposed to one another--where differences can be perceived and overcome, where we have many roles to play, many ways to relate to one another, in many combinations of cooperation and competition, equity and inequity.

A proper understanding of the role of cities doesn't just create respect for them, however. I think it also creates more respect for the role of rural areas. In William Cronon's book on the history of Chicago, Nature's Metropolis, he talks about hinterlands--the non-urban areas that feed raw resources into cities. I think "hinterland" has a perjorative taint to it, which is too bad, because it's an evocative way to reinvigorate how we think about cities and the areas around them. Too often, urban and rural are seen as opposed things--urbanites mock hicks in the sticks, while rural folk mistrust and reject the urbane. Which is bad, because we're not at opposite ends of a spectrum, we're different parts of a whole. This becomes plainly apparent when we look at the metabolism of cities.

Cross-posted.