CNU 24: Best Moments, Part 3

Downtown Detroit

Having given a pair of updates on efforts to change the political picture in my town and provided urbanist marching orders for the week, it’s time to return to the highlights of CNU 24, the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, held a month ago in Detroit.

I previously provided the best of Andres Duany, who was so prolix, in a good way, that I needed two posts to cover his thoughts.

Today I’ll move on to Kaid Benfield, a man whose quiet but eloquent love for the subtle points of good cities has caused him to appear often in this blog when he still with the Natural Resources Defense Council.  He has since moved to PlaceMakers LLC, taking him further from my radar, but I still looked forward to hearing him speak in person for the first time.

He didn’t disappoint.

 As before, the quotes are reconstructed from my notes and are likely imprecise, but capture Benfield’s intent.

On the job still to be done: “Anyone who thinks that battle for good urbanism is already over, whether won or lost, should remember that by 2050, half of built environment then in place will have been built after today.”

On the current breakdown of CO2 emissions by sector: “Buildings 44.6 percent, transportation 34.3 percent, and industry 21.1 percent.”  With urbanism directly impacting the first two, it has a key role to play in combating climate change.

On knowing when public places are working: “The indicator species for public places are kids and elders.  If both are present, the public place is working.”

And lastly, on the six strategies for good community planning:”1 – Guide development to the right places, in urban cores and along transit routes. 2 – Make America walkable again.  In 1969, 48 percent of children walked to school, today 13 percent do.  3 – Integrate nature into the urban fabric.  4 – Get buildings right, starting with energy.  5 – Employ density with sensitivity.  6 – Create places that people love and will retain, which is a literal version of sustainability.”

(For those who want to dig deeper into the six strategies, here is an earlier version, slightly different in its emphases, but equally valid.)

It’s all good, thoughtful stuff.  As a Parks Commissioner in my town, I tour a set of assigned parks monthly.  Although not as many as I’d like, I often find children playing there, but rarely do I see seniors hanging out, with the possible exception of myself.  It’s a point I need to ponder.

The session was one more reminder of why I love going to CNUs.

When I next write, I’ll provide a collection of links on regional transit planning in the Bay Area.  It’s a subject on which I wrote about almost exactly a year ago, shortly after I returned from CNU 23.  A year later, spurred by coverage on the topic in the New York Times, a number of organizations are taking a hard look at the subject.

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

Competing for the Next Generation

Last fall, I expressed a concern that Petaluma in the North Bay wasn’t doing enough to attract young, cutting-edge professionals, the group that Richard Florida calls the “creative class”.    I noted that studies are showing young people with marketable job skills are increasingly choosing where they want to live before deciding for whom they will work.  To those from earlier generations, the priority may seem inverted, but it does seem to be the growing reality.

In my earlier post, I observed that Petaluma, although acknowledging the need to become a more desirable place for young professionals, still seemed to be devoting the greater economic development effort toward attracting firms.   I suggested that attracting workers, and thereby encouraging firms to follow, was increasingly the more effective strategy.

I was hardly breaking new ground with that analysis.  Others, including Florida, had been there for years.

Since my post, further supporting data has been arriving on my desk.  Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council reported on the pending move of a Motorola division from a Chicago suburb back into the Loop.  The reason, which was just as expected, is that Motorola needs to attract workers who want to be in downtown Chicago.

To a large extent, this demographic trend is bad news for the North Bay.  The message is that young workers would rather be in San Francisco or Oakland than in a more sedate North Bay community.

But the trend also provides a direction that the North Bay could follow.  San Rafael, Santa Rosa, or Windsor will never compete, at least in this generation, with San Francisco.  But all of them can work toward creating neighborhoods that replicate something of the urban feeling of San Francisco, perhaps creating a symbiosis of the edginess of a big city and the affordability of a smaller city.

San Rafael and Petaluma even have a running start toward that goal, having recently been listed among the top 50 most exciting small cities in the U.S. in a tally compiled by Movoto.com, an on-line real estate service.  (The method of compiling the tally is simplistic, but even simplistic analyses can provide legitimate insights.)  San Rafael comes in at 11th, with Petaluma finishing 34th.

Furthermore, the data that went into the Movoto tally provides insight about the nature of the North Bay urban scene.  Both San Rafael and Petaluma score well in live music and in non-fast food dining, with Petaluma also scoring in nightlife. 

But both cities fall far short in population of young adults, with San Rafael at 57th and Petaluma at 113th, pushing their overall rankings down. 

Why the shortfall in young adult residency?  My interpretation is that San Rafael and Petaluma lack the housing options to go with the active urban and music scenes.  It may be fine to spend an evening in Petaluma checking out bands, but if the primary housing choices for young professionals are apartments and homes in non-walkable settings, those young adults will live elsewhere.

The Motorola story tells us that small cities need to attract young professionals if they’re to retain current employers and perhaps attract new ones.  The Movoto tally tells us that at least a couple of North Bay cities have some of the pieces needed to attract those young professionals, although they fall short in the area of housing.  But creating housing preferred by young adults is a key province of urbanism.

As so often seems to happen, urbanism is again the right answer to a civic challenge of our time.

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

Urbanism Gaining Ground, but the Outcome May Remain in Doubt in the North Bay

For the last few posts, I’ve riffed on arguments made by Jeff Speck in his book “Walkable City”.  It’s been a remarkably easy way to write, because Speck offers a wealth of riff-worthy arguments.

I’ll continue on this path for today before leaving Speck for awhile.  But I will return to “Walkable City”.  It’s a remarkable book that I continue to recommend highly.

Speck argues that the battle between urbanism and sprawl is tending different directions in different places.  There is much confirmation to be found.  Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council looks at the numbers and points to places where sprawl seems to have the upper hand.  Closer to home, Sacramento County has recently approved a project that appears to be textbook sprawl.  Ultimately, I’m thankful to live in the North Bay where we haven’t been as fully seduced by sprawl.

From Speck’s introduction:

“We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities – after forgetting for four – yet we’ve somehow not be able to pull it off.  Jane Jacobs, who wrote in 1960, won over the planners by 1980.  But the planners have yet to win over the city.

“Certain large cities, yes.  If you make your home in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, or a handful of other special places, you can have some confidence that things are on the right track.  But those locations are the exception.  In the small and midsized cities where most Americans spend their lives, the daily decisions of local officials are still, more often than not, making their lives worse.  This is not bad planning, but the absence of planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning.  The planners were so wrong for so many years that now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.”

Benfield concurs, looking in depth at where sprawl continues to be the predominant form of new land use.  Consistent with Speck’s observation, Benfield finds sprawl occurring not in metropolises, but in the hinterlands.

Closer to the North Bay is a recent land-use approval in Sacramento County.  On a controversial vote reported in the Sacramento Bee, the County Supervisors approved an 8,000-home master plan on 2,700-acre site, which is a disheartening 3 homes per acre.  The approval was based on the hope of a university occupying a portion of the land, an anticipation that, if not a complete pipedream, is at least unlikely.

Luckily, the North Bay, although not yet a bastion of urbanism, hasn’t been as badly seduced by sprawl.  Perhaps “stroads” function as our canary in the mineshaft.

Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns writes about stroads, a coined word for a roadway that a part rural highway and part city street, usually an overwhelming width of pavement with too many driveways, often accessing outsized retail, and providing an inhospitable environment for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Folks in the North Bay sometimes ask me to point to a stroad in our part of the world.  I struggle with the question.  Perhaps South Santa Rosa Boulevard in Santa Rosa?  Or maybe Soscol Avenue in Napa?  But neither is nearly as bad as the Midwest examples to which Marohn points.

One of the North Bay folks recently took a trip to Albuquerque.  He reported back that now he had truly seen what a stroad was.  And that he was thankful to live in the North Bay where we didn’t have stroads.

He’s right.  The North Bay wasn’t as fully seduced by sprawl as many other places.  Benfield doesn’t list the North Bay among his worst sprawl offenders.  But Speck would put us among the places where there are lessons still to be learned and minds to be changed.

The transition to urbanism will be easier for the North Bay.  But it’s a transition that still must be made.  The North Bay may have a competitive advantage over other regions because we have a headstart on urbanism.  But it’s a headstart that we can squander if we don’t pay attention.

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