CNU 24: Exploring Detroit

Broderick Tower and Peoplemover track

I love living in the North Bay.  Walkable downtowns.  Nice people.  Comfortable Mediterranean climate, at least until climate changes progresses further.

But living in the North Bay presents challenges when I attend the annual gatherings of the Congress for the New Urbanism.  The recent CNU 24 in Detroit was no different.

There are some fine urbanists in the North Bay.  To my pleasant surprise, there was a handful in Detroit.  We had a casual assembly during the CNU 24 closing party.

But there aren’t a lot of urbanists in the North Bay.  We may be only an hour from San Francisco and Oakland, two hours by transit, but personal obligations often make those journeys awkward or impossible.  As a result, I often feel starved for large gatherings of urbanists of differing perspectives where the intellectual ferment can be set at a rolling boil.  Exactly the kind of setting that CNUs provide.

At the same time, CNUs are held in interesting cities, the kind of cities that demand closer inspection.  In my four years of attending CNUs, I’ve been to Salt Lake City, Buffalo, Dallas, and now Detroit, each of which offered lessons to the inquiring and the observant.

All of which creates a series of dilemmas when reviewing a CNU schedule.  Do I listen to walkability expert Jeff Speck or do I go on a field trip to a neighborhood revitalization effort?  Do I attend the keynote address by cutting edge traffic planner Janette Sadik-Khan or do I join a walking tour of local parks?

Looking north

For the fourth year in a row, I don’t think I made the right decisions.  Or perhaps more accurately, for the fourth year in a row, I found a satisfying balance impossible to find.  To an eager learner, trying to partake of urbanism at a CNU is like trying to slake a thirst from a fire hose.  There is just too much good stuff, coming too quickly.

This year, I arrived a day early so I could take a field to Grand Rapids.  It was a well-organized, well-filled day that I’m pleased to have done.  But as CNU 24 moved toward its conclusion, I began feeling that I hadn’t really partaken of the Detroit experience, aside from dodging a few cars and watching as Peoplemover doors failed to open.

Woodward Avenue

Woodward Avenue

So I convinced myself that I could skip the Saturday morning plenary to take an extended walk through downtown Detroit with camera in hand.  Luckily, I was at a conference with folks who knew a fair bit about downtown Detroit, so advice on a walking route was easy to secure.  Take the Peoplemover to the north edge of downtown.  Walk down Woodward Avenue with a jog over to Griswold Street as I neared the Detroit River.  And then return to my hotel along Jefferson Street.

Before writing of the walk, I have a couple of preparatory notes.  First, the layout of downtown Detroit is unusual and remarkable.  Perhaps complex for cars, but full of closed vistas and charming shortcuts for pedestrians.

Municpal parking lot

The story is that newly appointed early 19th century territorial governor for Michigan was a fan of urban planning and had carefully studied L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C., which had in turn borrowed liberally from Paris.  Augustus Woodward arrived in Detroit to find that much of his post had been recently burned in a fire.  Given the unexpectedly blank slate, Woodward quickly put his avocation to use, creating a plan for downtown filled with diagonal, radial, and circumferential streets that has largely survived.

He was apparently so proud of his work that he named the principal street after himself.

With most Detroit maps dominated by the freeways and expressways that had a role in its plummet, it’s hard to find a graphic that adequately depicts Woodward’s plan, but this map comes close.  Woodward Avenue is the principal north-south street through the heart of the plan, the street that bisects the semi-circular park and continues toward the river.  This was the path for much of my walk.  (It is also the route for a streetcar that will soon begin service, an improvement that seems to meet a key civic need.)

Chrysler Building

Second, I’ll admit that I’m only a fair photographer and an even worse architectural student.  When pushed, I can differentiate between Gothic, Art Deco, and International, but many of the finer points elude me.  It’s not that I disrespect the profession.  I’ve seen enough aesthetically appealing, well-balanced, and functional architecture to appreciate the skill.  But architecture is one of many fields connected to urbanism which I’ve never had the time to study as deeply as I would wish.

With that background, let me begin my walk through downtown Detroit.

Upon exiting the Peoplemover, I was immediately struck by the juxtaposition of the Peoplemover track and the renovated Broderick Tower, still blocking the morning sun on a day that would soon reach a humid 92 degrees.

Looking north up Woodward Avenue, the streetcar track construction and the final straggling buildings can be seen.  Beyond the buildings, the near void that characterizes much of Detroit soon takes hold.  (Let me take a chance here.  From left to right, Greek Revival, Art Deco, and Gothic Revival.  How did I do?)

Ford Building

Turning and heading down Woodward Avenue, I was surprised by how many buildings are in the more human scale of four to six stories, creating a feel very different from the canyons of New York City or San Francisco.  With the wide sidewalks, the setting and walkability were quite comfortable.  Of course, most downtowns feel more comfortable on Saturday mornings.

It’s not that Detroit doesn’t have tall buildings, but many are on streets a block or two from Woodward, allowing Woodward to function as a grand boulevard.

Guardian Building lobby

Heading down Woodward, I found myself oddly discomfited by a municipal parking lot in which the stubs of the columns of a former building had been left in place.  I can’t guess why, if demolition included severing the columns, the cuts were done three feet above grade rather than twelve inches under.  Perhaps someone thought the remaining stubs would recall the glory of Detroit.  I found them more redolent of the fall.

Guardian Building lobby

Guardian Building lobby

Turning toward Griswold, past a fully-stocked bike-share station, I came across the Chrysler and Ford Buildings within a block of each other, still massive reminders of what made and unmade Detroit.

A block further way was the reason I’d been told to take Griswold, the lobby of the Guardian Building.  I don’t know what to call the architectural style, perhaps Art Deco with a Native American color scheme?  Regardless, it’s a dramatic space that is securely and irrevocably of its time.

Monument to Joe Louis

Reaching W. Jefferson Avenue, I spied the monument to Joe Louis, a black forearm and fist, suspended from a slender pyramid.  Some have questioned the absence of a boxing glove, wondering if the sculpture was meant to evoke something of the black power salute.  (Recall that Tommie Smith and John Carlos unveiled the salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics, an event that came within a few votes of being held in Detroit.)

To that speculation, I’d add that the fist is palm down when the more normal boxing position would have the palm facing sideways.  With the pyramid support, it does appear that the fist is being staged, prior to being raised into a vertical position.  However, the sculptor never confirmed or denied this interpretation.

Buildings along W. Jefferson Street

As I headed back to my hotel to cool off and to prepare to return to the regular sessions of CNU 24, I took a final look back at the buildings at Jefferson and Woodward, with the Guardian Building to the right.  There was still much, much more to be seen and learned in Detroit, but it was a good walk.

When I next write, it will be to begin offering the best quotes from the sessions I attended.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

CNU 24: Getting Around Detroit

Downtown Detroit and the Detroit River

Being newly returned from the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, CNU 24, I have pages of notes to review, with the goals of extracting the best quotes and stories to share and also of reminding myself about the subjects into which I should dig more deeply.

But CNUs are more than four days of chatting with other urbanists and listening to speakers expound, often eloquently, on topics of city-building interest.  It’s also spending the better part of a week living in a city and learning its quirks.  Not having visited Detroit since 1999, I was particularly interested to wander about the city that has become the focus of much debate about the functions and failures of cities.

So, before I get to the content of CNU 24, I’ll write about my experiences as a visitor to Detroit.  Today, my topic will be mobility, both as a pedestrian and a transit rider.

Crossing the Street:  I was slow in making my reservations for CNU 24.  As a result, all of the hotel rooms set aside for attendees had been claimed by the time I began making plans.  After casting about, I found an acceptable hotel near the other end of downtown from most of the conference venues, but connected to the center of CNU activity by the Detroit Peoplemover, about which I’ll write below.

I arrived in Detroit on a Monday night, two days before the conference was to officially open.  I was there early to partake in a bus tour elsewhere in the state, which is another story I’ll eventually share.  Being in town early and at a distance from where I might bump into other early arrivals, I had a free evening.  After a day of flying, I was also hungry.

I have an aversion to hotel dining rooms, but Yelp quickly came to rescue, alerting me to a brewpub directly across the street.  It seemed a perfect solution.  I tidied up, headed downstairs, charged out the front door, spotted the brewpub no more than 100 yards away, and then came to a halt.  There was an eight-lane high-speed arterial between me and the brewpub.  And there was no crosswalk, at least not a direct crosswalk.

To walk to the brewpub, one had to cross the side street, then the arterial, and then back across the side street.  A total of three signal crossings to get to a front door that was no more than a long pitching wedge from where I stood.  There can be intersections where omitting a crosswalk is caused by legitimate site constraints.  But this one seemed solely the result of prioritizing drivers over pedestrians.

Wait, did I write three signal crossings?  Make that four.  The arterial was eight lanes wide, with a similarly wide median.  The lane count can be seen in the photo above.  And the same traffic engineer who had omitted the crosswalk also decided that cars shouldn’t wait for pedestrians to cross eight lanes of traffic plus the median, so timed the cycles such that walkers had to stop on the median.  So now four signal cycles were required to cross the street.  Four complete cycles as my hunger grew worse.

Except that four didn’t quite work out either. The second crossing of the side street adjoins a right turn only lane heading into a tunnel under the Detroit River.  As I waited for the light to turn green, drivers began making right turns on red in front of me.  It was a perfectly legal traffic motion.  But the turning cars gave momentum to the queued cars and when the light turned green, they kept on turning.  Fifteen cars and a city bus turned in front of me as I waited for someone to give me the right-of-way that was mine.  When the lane was finally empty, the light was again red.

So that was five signal cycles for a pedestrian to walk a hundred yards from a hotel to a brewpub.  Not much walkable urbanism in that equation.

Trying It Again:  The food and especially the beer were good enough that I returned to the brewpub twice more during the week.  Both times, I made the trek in four signal cycles, but both outings were still eventful.

The first time, I had to skip away from two cars that began slowing making the right turns without looking for pedestrians, one driven by a pair of young ladies flirting with a guy on the sidewalk and the other driven by someone absorbed in a cell phone call.

The second time, I left the brewpub to find myself fighting upstream through a sidewalk full of excitedly chattering folks.  A police officer told me to make my way quickly because beers and punches were beginning to be thrown.  I took her advice.

At least at this intersection, walking the sidewalks of Detroit was inefficient and eventful.

Transit Training: A truism among transit managers is that getting a new rider to take a first trip is one of the biggest challenges.  Even as a fan of transit, I concur that the first trip can be a source of trepidation.  Learning how to pay the fare, deciphering the route map, and knowing where to stand to catch the right train are all sources of uncertainty.

My schedule required me to catch the Peoplemover early Tuesday morning to the hotel where I would board my tour.   So I decided to take a trial run Monday evening to learn the system.  The plan worked out fine, with the only surprise being that the loop was recently reversed to run clockwise after years of running counterclockwise, so I was determinedly looking for a train in one direction only to have it sneak up behind me.

I finished the outing comfortable with the Peoplemover, an outdated but functional rail system that runs autonomous two-car trains around a loop of perhaps three miles through downtown Detroit.  A total loop takes perhaps twelve minutes, so having two trains running gives a headway of about six minutes.  It could have been a component of an efficient transit system if it connected to transit hubs.  Unfortunately, those transit hubs were never built, although Detroit is finally taking steps in that direction.

With my first trip complete, I looked forward with confidence to my Tuesday morning outing.  Perhaps too much confidence.

I hopped on the first train Tuesday morning, with my destination station firmly in my head.  As the train pulled into the station, I noted the location of the hotel where I would catch the tour about a block away.  I stepped to the doors, ready to complete my trip.  And the doors didn’t open.  As the only passenger on an autonomous train, there was no one to whom to complain.  A pair of would-be passengers looked back at me through the door, but seemed impassive.  Perhaps early morning door malfunctions were common.

After a thirty-second pause, the train moved on, the doors never having opened.  I quickly recalibrated, disembarked at the next station and found my way to the hotel in plenty of time.  But it took me several days to again trust the Peoplemover, which isn’t the way to build ridership.  However, the system never let me down again.  Indeed, it was integral to the success of my time in Detroit.

So walkability and transit had their small Detroit failures, much like most cities.  Perhaps Detroit isn’t a unlike the rest of the country as many would argue.  Lessons were being learned.

When I next write, I’ll return to the theme of becoming active North Bay urbanists, again listing opportunities to get publicly involved.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Link-Fest: Detroit

Detroit skyline (from Dreamstime)

I’m still in Detroit, soaking up the lessons that the Motor City can give because any city that believes what happened to Detroit can’t possibly happen to it doesn’t understand how the world works.  Ugly fates are always lurking near those who don’t learn from history.  History may not repeat itself, but it can certainly rhyme.

To keep you on the Detroit learning curve along with me, I’ve collected a tidy set of links about the Motor City.  Enjoy.  And learn.

Quick Overview: The New York Times provides a compact quintet of articles on the reasons behind the fall, including over-reliance on a single industry, race relations, too many mayors with dubious ethics, lack of a transit system that melded the city and its people, and the impact of poverty.

If for no other reason, you need to click on the link for the photo of the Michigan Theatre.  In a single shot, it shows much of how and where Detroit went wrong.  (And please note how, even in the most glamorous parking lot in Michigan, one driver ignores the striping.)

Longer Overview: National Geographic offers a more expansive trilogy on the current state of Detroit, from a look at the people to a tour of residential neighborhoods to the prospects for recovery.  The highlight is a quote from one subject, “You can’t save Detroit.  You gotta be Detroit”, a sentiment that applies in some way to most cities.

The Best Seat to Watch the Changes: CityLab introduces readers to a mailman who, after nearly three decades on the job, is able to provide particularly insightful observations about how the city has changed from decade to decade and from block to block.  He’s sufficiently personable that a movie-maker to trying to assemble a film around his perspective.

Picking Up Where Park Department Stops: A Detroit entrepreneur saw a chance to make a difference and organized a loose group of lawn mowers and other landscapers who gather once a week to maintain a park that falls beyond the limited resources of the city.

What is Art Worth?: CityLab describes how Detroit worked to preserve its art collection, even as many suggested it be sold to cover municipal debt.  Writer Kriston Capps suggests that a similar decision may face Greece as it struggles with national debt.

How to Buy a Home in a City without Property Values: My shocking statistic of the week is that, of all the homes sold in Detroit during 2014, only 13 percent used mortgages as part of the financing.  My wife, who spent much of her career in mortgages, assures me that the equivalent number in California would be 95 percent or more.

The problem in Detroit is that mortgages are generally available only for homes in good repair.  And few homes in Detroit meet that standard.

Recognizing the problem and the desire to build a new generation of homeowners, the City is developing a mortgage program to loan the full purchase price of the house plus another $75,000 for repairs, while also assuming some of the risk if the house doesn’t increase in value to the amount of the mortgage.

It’s a desperate measure, but it’s also desperate times.

Relish the links.  And think about lessons that can be applied elsewhere.

By the time I next write, I’ll have returned from Detroit.  I’ll tabulate an updated calendar of North Bay opportunities for urbanist-slanted public involvement.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Detroit: Reading List

Detroit skyline (from Dreamstime)

In my previous post, I wrote about my personal draft history of the fall of Detroit.  I also noted that I’d established and partially completed a Detroit reading list before traveling to CNU 24 in the Motor City.  Today, I’ll give pocket reviews of the books read, partially read, and still to be read.

“Detroit: An American Autopsy” by Charlie LeDuff: I started here because this was the key point I wanted to study.  Why had Detroit died, or at least gone into a profound and startling decline?  After all, that is what “autopsy” means, right?

Well, apparently not to LeDuff or his editor.  Although imminently readable, the book is about the dysfunction within Detroit after the fall.  The images are often haunting and the book remains worth reading, but it’s more a study of decomposition than an autopsy.

“A Detroit Anthology” edited by Anna Clark: Like any anthology, this volume has high points and low points.  But some of the high points will long remain in my memory, affecting my view of Detroit.  Perhaps the most poignant was a memoir by a young African-American girl who made the gradual acquaintance of a white boy, new to her neighborhood and of roughly her age.

Their growing friendship wasn’t demonstrative, but quietly comfortable until the day the boy arrived, apparently newly educated on race relations, deliberately urinated on her porch, and disappeared from her life.

There is much of Detroit and of life in that story.

“Once a Great City: A Detroit Story” by David Maraniss: Perhaps it’s because I’m partial to well-told popular histories, but this is the book that I’d recommend above the others, at least thus far.

Maraniss tells the story of Detroit in a single year, 1963, although he slightly stretches his margins to include the loss by fire of the principal Detroit tourist attraction in fall 1962 and the arrival of LBJ in spring 1964, enroute to giving his “Great Society” speech at the University of Michigan.

The image is the of manufacturing power and political importance of Detroit in 1963, a year in which the city came within a few votes of securing the 1968 Summer Olympics, contrasted with the cracks that were beginning to appear, especially to those who know how the story will end.  If there was a movie genre of urbanist horror, in which a placid city is about to be bloodily murdered by a monster the audience knows to be lurking in the closet, Detroit in 1963 would be a great plot.

To me, the most significant transitional moment was a civil rights march organized in the summer of 1963 by a coalition initiated by Reverend C.L. Franklin, father of Aretha.  The march was intended as a contrast to the civil rights marches in the South that summer that often ended in confrontation.

Franklin insisted on the inclusion of whites who had been supportive of the civil rights movement, particularly Walther Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers, who had provided the funds to release Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Birmingham jail earlier in the year.  Reuther eventually walked close to King in the march.

In the gathering after the fully peaceful march, King gave the first draft of his “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech that was recorded by Motown founder Berry Gordy.

There is much of Detroit’s history that intersected on the day of the march.

But the peacefulness of the march masked underlying problems.  In the months after the march, Franklin was gradually displaced from his leadership role by those less willing to recognized non-black friends like Reuther.  Meanwhile, Franklin’s congregation had only recently found a home after their long-time church was demolished to make way for a freeway, a common occurrence in the Detroit of the 1960s.  And four years later, Detroit erupted in race riots that many describe as the moment that Detroit began its slide.

“Once a Great City” is highly recommended.

“Lost Detroit: Stories behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins” by Dan Austin: I know that ruin porn is offensive to many, particularly those whose lives were derailed by the same forces that created the ruins.

But “Lost Detroit” really isn’t ruin porn.  For one, the photos aren’t as good as the best ruin porn.  More importantly, the book isn’t about the artistic interest of the ruins but about the stories before the ruins, the histories of the buildings that were lost to the dysfunction that claimed Detroit.

Having already read “Once a Great City”, some of the buildings felt like old friends.  Cass Tech, the first college prep high school in Detroit and a success story for many years, was one.  Having read of the prominent place Cass Tech held in 1963 Detroit, alma mater to Diana Ross among many others, it was difficult to see the state of dishevelment to which it had been reduced before its demolition.

“Detroit: A Biography” by Scott Martelle: The author uses “biography” rather than “history” to allow himself the freedom to pick out a particular thread from the full city history.  The thread Martelle chooses is race relations.  He does a reasonable job and I agree with many of his conclusions, but I give the edge to “Once a Great City” as being less obvious in its effort to narrow its focus and more able to capture the full panoply of the city.

“The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit” by Thomas Sugrue: The most erudite of the books on my reading list, the book comes highly recommended but intimidating.  A hundred pages of notes at the end of volume never portend a comfortable read.  It will accompany me to Detroit, where I hope to at least make a dent.

“The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides: Having found value elsewhere from the reading of fiction closely tied to a city, I asked readers for a Detroit recommendation as I assembled my reading list.  A long-time follower recommended “The Virgin Suicides”.  Having often been given good advice by the reader, I secured a copy and broke it open after buckling my seatbelt on the airplane.

Even with the reading I’ve consumed, the reading I will consume, and the time I’m spending in Detroit, the city remains a fascinating tale on many levels.   If anyone has further reading recommendations to make, please do so.

Next time I write, I’ll share some links about Detroit.  There are many good ones out there.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Detroit: A Draft History

There was a time in the history of this blog when I had an antagonist who spent much of his time submitting adversarial comments.  I’d wake in the morning to find six new comments.  Urbanism was about creating neighborhoods for illegal immigrants.  Climate change was a government fraud to take away our cars.  Someday we’d all be marched downtown at gunpoint to live in bare concrete boxes.  Agenda 21 was about promoting communism.  Name your favorite conspiracy theory and it was part of his gospel.

I generally tried to respond to his comments, not because I thought he was educable, but so that other readers wouldn’t see his rancor go unanswered.  But some of his outbursts were so incoherent that all I could do was reply that I had no idea what he meant.

Before you go digging into my archives looking for his trail of inchoate animosity, don’t bother.  He never found either my personal blog site or the Vibrant Bay Area site.  Instead, his only presence was on Petaluma Patch, further back than the Patch archives seem to go.

He finally disappeared during one of the occasional quiescent periods to which Petaluma Patch has been prone.  I never learned his real name and refuse to write his screen name, fearing that I might call him back into existence, much like Beelzebub.

I mention my old foe because one of his favorite themes was Detroit.  How the fall of Detroit was proof that urbanism didn’t work.  How all big cities would follow the same path.  How the folks remaining in Detroit were incapable of re-establishing a working city.  Yes, he often veered close to racism, although that never seemed to concern him.

My adversary loved it when a few members of the United Nations made a brief show of investigating Detroit, the argument being that cutting off water service for non-payment of bills was a civil rights violation.  (It’s an interesting argument which might have merit, but responding to it would require changes in water utility rules across the world, not just in Detroit.)

My foe had disappeared from my world by the time the Flint water story became public.  I can’t guess how he would have spun that story.

I mention my old antagonist because I’ll soon be traveling to Detroit.  The annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, CNU 24, will be in the Motor City this year.

Considering the fall of Detroit as one of the more compelling stories in urbanism, still wanting to find the right responses to my old foe, and soon having the opportunity to nose around Detroit for a few days, I undertook a reading program to prepare myself.  My goals was to read what others saw in the fall of Detroit, a subject on which there is a broad range of opinions, and then to begin assembling my own thoughts into coherent hypotheses, which I could test during my time in Detroit.

It was an aggressive goal, which I won’t achieve.  My reading program remains incomplete.  I’ll still be reading on the plane. 

But I’ve read enough, along with sneaking a few peaks ahead, to have some thoughts I want to check during my time in Detroit.  Some of those thoughts differ, to a greater or lesser extent, from the conventional wisdom.  My four key arguments follow.

First, it’s commonly stated that the fall of Detroit was the result of the fall of the auto industry.  It’s an accurate statement as far as it goes, but misses a couple of key points.

It wasn’t just the failure of the auto industry, but the fact that too much of the Detroit economy was tied to the auto industry, all the way down to glass and ball bearing manufacturers.  If there had been more industries in Detroit that hadn’t been tied to the business cycles and eventual decline of a single industry, Detroit would have survived in better condition.

This is a lesson that should be remembered by all who pursue large and closely related industries for the near-term economic vitality.  Twenty years ago, Petaluma thrived with a major enclave of telecomm businesses.  When telecomm slowed and was consolidated elsewhere, the decline was felt throughout the community.

An element of urbanism is the argument for a diverse economy.

Second, most believe that white flight, triggered by racism, was much of the cause of Detroit’s collapse.  It’s a valid hypothesis, but over-simplified.  I find much evidence of white families who were content to have their neighborhoods integrated.  But they feared that their property values would plummet as their neighbors left and as the pool of potential buyers shrunk.

In essence, even if people weren’t racists, they feared that the racist beliefs of others would undermine the savings that were tied up in their homes.

I suspect that white flight in many communities has a similar story.

Furthermore, an aggressive program of freeway construction, consistent with the car focus of Detroit, had caused the disintegration of otherwise stable downtown neighborhoods, feeding the dislocations that evolved into white flight.  So much of what became white flight wasn’t inevitable, but the predictable result of infrastructure decisions.

Third, many argue that those who remained in Detroit were incapable of electing good governments, triggering a recurring cycle of corruption.  I think the correct argument is more subtle than that.

As housing prices plunged, property tax revenues to maintain government services also disappeared.  Although most of us interpret the StrongTowns warning about excessive infrastructure as applying to growth at the urban fringe, Detroit is an example of an urban core that suddenly had more infrastructure than it could maintain.

Faced with this government failing, voters desperately looked for hope, often falling for populist solutions based more on rhetoric than logic.  (I can see echoes of Detroit in the 2016 presidential election.)  We can criticize the voting decisions of the residents or we can recognize the despair that caused them to grasp at straws.

It also remains important to remember that some of the most financially thriving counties in the country are those surrounding Detroit, building on the wealth that was sucked from Detroit by freeways and white flight, and to wonder what Detroit would be had the wealth not escaped.

Fourth and last, many argue that Detroit will never recover, but will remain a perpetual basket case.  I’m not convinced.  Detroit once rose because it was a place with resources and transportation routes.  Those realities remain.  The car industry will never again drive Detroit, which is probably a good thing, but there are good reasons why Detroit can again rise, once it gets a foot or two firmly placed on the ladder.

Bringing some of the wealth of the suburbs back into Detroit from where it sprang would be a good start.

If I was thirty, I’d be looking for Detroit real estate in which to invest.

I’m eager to see Detroit, to test my hypotheses above, and to report back on what I find.  Now, if only my old antagonist was still reading.  (But not commenting.)

When I next write, I’ll give quick summaries of the books I’ve been reading to prepare myself for Detroit.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Circling Back to Buses and Books

Petaluma Transit bus

I have several North Bay updates to share today, from new and improved bus routes in Petaluma to a revisited book club to a request for reading list suggestions.

A couple of months back, I wrote about how the staff at Petaluma Transit was working hard to build connections with SMART, the commuter train system that will begin rolling through the North Bay later this year.

The building of bus-to-train connections was a high priority effort for many parties, from SMART, which is eager to have fare-paying customers delivered to its stations, to Petaluma Transit, which is always seeking to better serve its community, to the City of Petaluma, which has an interest in keeping SMART riders from driving cars that would overburden streets and available parking.

The earlier post asked that local citizens attend the February meeting of the Petaluma Transit Advisory Committee, a group that I currently chair.  At the meeting, Petaluma Transit staff would present the route realignments and the public would be allowed to comment.

 The suggestion didn’t take root.  Perhaps because I began my marketing effort too late or perhaps because I didn’t reiterate the request enough, there wasn’t a single member of the general public in the City Council chambers that day.

It’s possible I wasn’t a complete washout as a publicist.  It may be that a greater number than usual watched the meeting on the local community access channel.  I know that a surprising number of local citizens watch the broadcasts regularly.

(True story: I began a trip last summer with a 3:15am taxi ride to the Sonoma County Airporter pickup.  Enroute, I chatted with the driver about Petaluma.  But he soon interrupted the conversation, asking how he knew my voice.  I said I had no idea, but he persisted, asking if I was ever on television.

The only television exposure I could suggest was the transit committee meetings on the local channel.  To which he responded, “That’s it!  I knew I recognized your voice.  You’re a local celebrity!”  Darned if I know how he might have set it up, but I still think it was a prank.)

Despite the apparent desultory response to my earlier public outreach, Petaluma Transit continued to refine the route realignments, which will soon be folded into the MTC-mandated Short-Range Transit Plan (SRTP).

The draft SRTP, including the route realignments, will receive its final review during an upcoming transit committee meeting, followed in May by its adoption, first by the committee and then by the City Council.  Implementation will be in August.

Everyone, from Transit staff to SMART to MTC to me, would like Petaluma citizens to look at the route realignments and to provide comments on points that might have been missed.  For the community to effective embrace SMART, and to thrive with reduced car dependence, it’s important that the routes work.

So please join us on Thursday, April 7, 4:00pm in the City Council Chambers at 11 English Street.  If you insist on watching from home, that’d be okay, but we’d really rather have you there in person.

If you want an advance look at the route proposals, Transit staff has assembled an on-line poll that depicts the routes and asks questions about how the new routes will serve your needs.  You’re encouraged to look at the poll and to offer thoughts.

And if you want to review the entire SRTP, which addresses many aspects of Petaluma Transit’s operation beyond route planning, it can be viewed under Item 7.A. of the agenda for the meeting.

Also, recognizing that 4:00pm public meetings don’t fit everyone’s personal schedule, Petaluma Urban Chat will dedicate their next regular meeting to the route realignments.  Petaluma Transit staff will attend the meeting, which will be Tuesday, April 12, 5:30pm at Aqus Café, 2nd and H Streets in Petaluma.  As always, all are welcome.

Staying on the topic of Petaluma Urban Chat, a casual gathering of urbanists that sprung from this blog and has been meeting since 2012, I recently turned over management of the group to Teddy Herzog, a Petaluma resident with an interest in urban topics and a desire to grow the group.  I love the meetings and will continue participating, but feared that my other personal and civic obligations, including this blog,  were interfering with my ability to nurture the group, so was pleased to accept Herzog’s offer.

Herzog and I have been meeting to plot a trajectory for Urban Chat.  An idea I resurrected was a book club.  There was a time when the entire Urban Chat functioned as a book club.  I thought it was a successful effort, but it ultimately became clear that not everyone had the time or inclination to be book readers.

So I won’t propose that Urban Chat return to being a book group.  But if there is a small group of readers and thinkers who wish to return to a study of books on city planning, I’d be happy to facilitate book selections and meetings.

The group needn’t be limited to Petaluma.  It might be fun to have participants throughout the North Bay, especially if we can find brew pubs along the SMART corridor and assemble for the meetings by train.  Perhaps we could even begin with a book on effective transit planning.  If you’re interested in participating, let me know.  A comment below or an email would be great. 

I have one last topic that continues on the subject of books.  In nine weeks, I’ll head to Detroit for the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism.  CNU meetings are always great, but I’m particularly intrigued by the prospect of spending four days in Detroit, a key place in the debate over the future of cities.

To ensure that I’m prepared, I’ve assembled an expansive list of books about Detroit, seven total of which I’m deep into the third.  But if readers have Detroit tomes are of particular interest to them, I’d appreciate titles.  I may have time to slip an eighth or even a ninth book into my reading list.  An email or a comment below would be great.

That covers my topics for the day, from bus route planning to urbanist reading.  Lots of chances for community involvement.

Next, I’ll return to the topic of universal housing, the extent of its deficiencies and how walkable urbanism can help.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Wealth-Stealing Suburbs

Aging former home in Buffalo,
an earlier CNU conference destination

I’ll spend five days in Detroit this coming June, attending the annual conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

I’m anticipating the trip with eagerness.  I haven’t been in Detroit since 1999.  And my focus back then was absorbing the atmosphere of Tiger Stadium during its final days.  Although I knew the extent to which the Motor City had already slid and had a hint of the depths still to come, my interest in that aspect of Detroit was confined to making sure that we avoided the more dubious districts in our navigation to the ballpark.

This time, my interest will be in the causes of the sickness that has befallen Detroit and the prospects for a recovery.  (Although I note that the Tigers have a home game on the evening before the conference convenes.  And I’ve never seen Comerica Park.)

I know the causes to which many ascribe the fall of Detroit, the mule-headedness of the car industry, the work ethic of the unionized labor force, the self-aggrandizement of union management, the corruption in City Hall, and I suspect that each is valid to some extent.

But I’ve also long had an inkling that something else, something more fundamental and insidious, was at work.  The biggest hint was that many surrounding cities and counties were doing fine, perhaps a bit dinged by the collapse of Detroit, but surviving well.  Also at play was the attitude shown by the executive for a neighboring county who declaimed, “I love sprawl.  I need it.  I promote it.  Oakland County can’t get enough of it”, as he showed off the expansive collection of chain stores within his jurisdiction.

My hypothesis was that the fall of Detroit, although the mistakes of industry, labor, and government all had roles, was more about the fluke of where the political boundaries had been drawn on a map and the ease with which we facilitate the movement of produced wealth from the urban centers to suburbs.

I suspected that Detroit might be only the worst example of a pattern that could be found elsewhere.

Writing in the Washington Post, Emily Badger and Lazaro Gamio have now done much to support my hypothesis.  (Once again, the Washington Post is proving elusive to links, at least from my computer.  But clicking on the top link from this Google search should get to the article.)

What Badger and Gamio find is that most of the richest counties in the country, as measured by household income, are located on the perimeter around large cities, although most of the cities themselves show much lower incomes.

Furthermore, there are few prosperous counties that don’t adjoin cities.

The most reasonable conclusion is that cities create wealth.  Even when we allow the wealth to be too easily exported to the suburbs, most cities continue to generate exportable wealth, with the exception of the occasional city that craters under the burden and its specific circumstances, such as Detroit.

How do we facilitate the wealth exportation?  We allow suburbs to assume forms, with demographic separation and car-dependence, that are neither environmentally nor fiscally sustainable but seem attractive to many because the residents aren’t paying the full cost.

And we subsidize the costs of the transportation that conveys wealth and economic activity from the cities to the suburbs and within the suburbs.

There is nothing inevitable about affluent suburbs ringing struggling cities.  That distribution of wealth is the inevitable result of policy decisions we’ve made and that we can still reverse.

What are the implications to the North Bay?  First, we owe greater appreciation to San Francisco and Oakland for our economic prosperity than we may sometimes acknowledge.  Second, even on a sub-regional scale, the same effect may well occur.  It’s likely that Windsor or Rohnert Park would be in worst fiscal conditions if Santa Rosa wasn’t filling the role of regional driver.

We need an alternative form of governance that correctly values and rewards the roles of urban centers and ceases undermining them.  And we need to begin modifying our suburbs to function more like wealth-generating cities.

Simply put, we need more urbanism.  And Detroit, far from being a warning sign about cities, should be a case study of why cities need our support.

In my next post, I’ll return to the topic of community separators, a Sonoma County land-use planning tool that complements urban growth boundaries from the outside.  The current separators are up for renewal and possible supplementation during 2016.  The Greenbelt Alliance is beginning their advocacy efforts.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

More Thoughts on the Motor City’s Road Upward

In my last post, I wrote of the financial issues around the Detroit municipal bankruptcy.  A key concern was the impact of the bankruptcy on availability of capital for future municipal improvements in Detroit and elsewhere.

Access to capital is a critical factor in the viability of cities, but it’s not the only obstacle to a post-bankruptcy rebirth for Detroit, Stockton, and the many cities for which a bankruptcy may be in the future.  Instead, access to capital is less important than a sound strategy for new land uses and attitudes that can revitalize a city.  Luckily, we have many examples of good strategies.

Sophie Quinton of Atlantic Cities writes about a booming urban district in Cleveland.  Although the industrial histories are different, Cleveland shares a Rust Belt heritage with Detroit, so should be a good role model for a Detroit rebirth.  What has worked in Cleveland may also work in Detroit.

The key player in for the 4th Street district in Cleveland was a land development firm with the resources, patience, and good timing to assemble the parcels to provide necessary for a critical mass.  The strategy was to create an entertainment district that would create a demand for housing and retail.  The strategy is working as other development firms are jumping into the district with their own projects.

I was recently introduced to the term “risk-oblivious”, which provides insight to the Cleveland effort.  The concept is based on the fact that the early stages of urban revitalization often include pushing back against a lawlessness that had permeated the district.

Many demographic segments are unwilling to reside in a district in which illegal activities recently held sway.  However, young adults are often willing to be risk-oblivious in exchange for lower rents and the sense of living on the cutting edge.  The process of urban revitalization is the gradual transition from risk-oblivious residents to risk-averse residents.  By the time the risk-averse folks arrive, the risk-oblivious have begun pioneering another revitalization district.

Using that terminology, the 4th Street district in Cleveland is well along the process from risk-oblivious to risk-averse.

Also, a developer need not be the catalyst of urban revitalization.  In both Chatham Square in New Haven and Codman Square near Boston, it was neighborhood organizations who led the effort.

In Chatham Square, the key step occurred when multiple citizen initiatives to preserve the district were coordinated into a coherent strategy.  The strategy included neighborhood festivals and outreach to the real estate community.

The outreach featured a frank acknowledgment of the challenges still faced by the neighborhood, but paired those challenges with the strategies being implemented to overcome the challenges.  It was a successful approach, with new residents buying into a neighborhood with vision.

For Codman Square, the focus was on new transit stations.  A transit line had been extended through the district, but no stations had been provided.  Extensive lobbying eventually brought those stations to the district, triggering other neighborhood improvements

It’s interesting to note that the Cleveland, New Haven, and Boston stories were are all headlined by relatively minor players.  In one case, it was a small development firm, with the other two being neighborhood organizations.

I recently debated a friend about the need for major capital in urban rebirth.  He argued that a large player was required to secure sufficient land and to provide sufficient capital for urban revitalization to succeed.  I disagreed, arguing that the better route was through numerous small players working in parallel.  The Cleveland, New Haven, and Boston examples buttress my argument.

I suggest that urbanism, in its totality, is a winning gamble, but that individual wagers can be lost.  That fact argues for many small bets in place of fewer large bets.

I’ll offer an analogy to support my point.  Let’s say that a gambler has $10,000 that he must turn into $100,000.  Furthermore, let’s assume that he has identified a casino which will return an average of 102 percent of a wager.  (As most presumably know, a realistic number is 98 percent, which is how casinos stay in business.)

To continue with our analogy, what is the best strategy for the gambler upon entering the casino?  Is it to place the entire $10,000 on a single bet?  Or to place a series of $10 bets?

Although the odds favor the gambler, a single large bet would give away that advantage.  With a single large bet, especially if winning bets are doubled, the gambler would likely soon go bust.  But with many smaller bets, the gambler would almost assuredly build his stake to his $100,000 goal.

Urbanism similarly benefits from many small bets, however frustrating it may be to those who wish to take a big jump into urbanism.

There is another way in which small works better for urbanism.  Urbanism is an attempt to recreate a historic way of building cities, but applied to 21st century technology and sensibilities.  No one has a perfect vision of what that means.  Numerous small projects, acting as crucibles, provide the best laboratory for that effort.  If a project is struggling to find market acceptance, the developer can look to another project a few blocks away for different ideas.  Large, extended scale projects don’t offer that opportunity.

I’ll offer one last thought before closing.  The Cleveland, New Haven, and Boston examples provide models for urban revitalization where the neighborhood has reached bottom.  But the concepts also have application when the bottom is still in the future.  With many cities looking at the possibility of bankruptcy in the not-too-distant future, now might be the best time for developers and neighborhoods group, with support from city hall, to implement these strategies.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)