NFL Called for Intentional Grounding, Penalty is Loss of Credibility

Back in 2012, the NRL was eager to tout the urbanist pleasures of Superbowl XLVI in Indianapolis, where many of Superbowl week venues, including the stadium, were within walkable distance of the host hotels.  Four years later, the NFL keeps stubbing its urbanist toe.

The first urbanist bust was at Superbowl XLVIII.  The NFL failed to account for the increasing use of transit to reach major sporting events and gave New Jersey transportation officials bad estimates of the division between car passengers and transit riders for game day planning.  When far more fans used transit than expected, the results were overcrowded cars and long wait times.

 And now, in the run-up to Superbowl L, the NFL has misread the changing urban realities once again.

Having decided that most Superbowl festivities should be in San Francisco, rather than 45 miles south in Santa Clara where Levi’s Stadium is located, NFL officials have been meeting with representatives of the City of San Francisco to discuss event coordination.  One request recently made of the City was for the temporary removal of the overhead electric bus wires along Market Street.

I understand the motivation behind the request.  The overhead wires are ugly and detract from the vista down Market Street toward the Ferry Building and San Francisco Bay.  I’ll celebrate on the day when evolving technology allows the wires to be removed.

But until then, the overhead wires and the buses fed by them are key links in the San Francisco transit system.  While the NFL reportedly offered to reimburse the City for the estimated $1 million cost to remove and later replace the wires, no acknowledgments were offered to the commuters or businesses who would be inconvenienced by the weeks when the transit system would be compromised.

Luckily for all, the NFL recognized the problems with the request and soon withdrew it.  But having made the request at all shows urban colorblindness in NFL headquarters.

Choosing San Francisco over Santa Clara as the center of Superbowl festivities correctly acknowledged the fundamental role of major cities.  But cities are multi-layered entities with complex internal logic.  To blithely tinker with one element, such as a portion of the transit system, without trying to understand the integrated whole was akin to buying the Mona Lisa because of her enigmatic smile, but with the intention of adding braces.

It’s not that cities can’t be modified.  Indeed, they can be and must be.   But those changes must be carefully proposed and vetted considering all the ramifications, not suggested only to provide better photo opportunities for a week of football tourists.

Hopefully, the NFL will begin to grasp that urban reality before Superbowl LI.

Milestone Note: The first post in this blog was published on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend of 2011.  Thus, this post is the end of my fourth year.  When I began, I had no expectation of how long I would continue.  But I kept finding topics about which I wanted to write and somehow the years passed by.

Thanks for coming along, reading, commenting, and being tolerant when I struggled to find my voice.

I have no plans yet to cease my efforts.  Instead, I’ll be back here in couple of days, starting my fifth year.  I hope you’ll be here also.  And if you want to bring a friend, I wouldn’t complain.

Speaking of coming back, my next post will be a look back at Black Friday Parking, with thoughts on my personal interaction with an over-filled parking lot and links to some of the better writing on the subject by others.

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

On the Coherency of Transects and Urban Growth Boundaries - Part Four

With this post, I’ll close my far-flung cogitations on the alternative location for the second SMART station in Petaluma and the conclusions to which my thinking led me.

I fear I may have confused a few readers by the way I connected the dots in my head.  It seemed logical to me, but know that I don’t always think like other people.  Today, I’ll try to smooth over any rough patches in my logical progressions.

(When I was a student at Cal, I took a class on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I was enroute to becoming the first civil engineering graduate in Cal history to complete the liberal arts requirement, normally met with lower division classes in American history or political science, with upper division classes on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

For my class term paper, I tried to compare and contrast Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s Superman.  It was a worthy topic, but I didn’t have the chops for it.  In one particular tortured section, the professor, a Nobel Laureate in poetry, wrote in the margin “I have no idea what you’re saying.”  So if I lost you somewhere during my preceding posts, you have my apologies and the knowledge that you’re in good company.)

To recap where I’ve been, I introduced the alternative location for the second station and why it would solve dual problems for SMART, delved into the regulatory constraints on the alternative location, and described the insights about urban growth boundaries and transects to which the contemplations  took me.

To me, the most important conclusion is that urban growth boundaries, the limit beyond which cities may not expand, and transects, the urbanist theory by which cities progress logically from wilderness to urban cores, are fully complementary, the coherency to which the title refers.  The declining leg of transects, as the uses transition through lower density development to agricultural uses is exactly where the urban growth boundary should be.

The only caveat is the urban growth boundaries must remain fixed, or nearly so, over time.  A city that conforms to the theory of transects would have appropriate uses at its boundaries, perhaps low-density residential, development-supported agriculture, large natural parks, or even improvements such as community airports or multi-field sports complexes.

To move an urban growth boundary beyond these uses, allowing apartment buildings or strip malls on the far side, would result in an incoherent, difficult to serve community.  The fact that we’ve built communities in this way for seventy years doesn’t mean we should continue to do so.

This summing up leaves three lingering questions to address before I close.

Why did city building of the past not need urban growth boundaries?:  San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.  These are all fascinating places that we love to visit.  But they grew during an era when no one spoke of urban growth boundaries or transects.  Why do we now need tools of which the city builders of the past knew nothing and yet succeeded well?

The answer is the automobile.  The great cities we enjoy today reached their near final form when people moved about on foot, on horseback, or by common conveyance.  Those means of transport limited how far people could reasonably travel, so cities remains relatively compact, a feature that we continue to find attractive.

If San Francisco hadn’t been settled until after the car was commonplace, it would likely look very different.  More freeways and wide streets to enable people to leave quickly after work.  More chain stores.  Less population.

Indeed, I suggest that if the Bay Area hadn’t been settled until after the advent of the automobile, San Francisco wouldn’t be the dominant city.  Instead, that distinction would have gone to Oakland or San Jose for their easier access to the suburbs of Hayward, Fremont, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy.

With no disrespect to either Oakland or San Jose, both of which have places I enjoy, I’m happier living in a Bay Area where San Francisco is the dominant city.

To a large extent, planning tools such as urban growth boundaries and transects are little more an attempt to recreate the development patterns that existed before the automobile.  And maybe even to improve on what early city builders accomplished.

What happens when a city is complete but development pressure remains?: What if a city is logically bounded by physical barriers such as rivers, bays, and steep hillsides or by appropriate man-made limits such as airports and golf courses such that future development would bust the transect?  And what if the same city has bumped up the transects to create an appropriate number of urban centers and urban cores, but is still experiencing development pressure, perhaps because its form is successfully attracting the creative class?  What then?

To me, this is where the garden city fits.  New villages or towns can be encouraged a few miles from the city.  But the new places must be compact places, with strong transit connections to the larger city.  People who prefer fewer lights at night or perhaps a lower housing cost could live in the new places, but still be convenient to urban life.

This idea may seem far-fetched, but I actually proposed something much like it a few years back.  Sonoma County acquired Today Lake, a dry lake bed and productive farm in the hills a few miles southeast of Petaluma.

Shortly after the acquisition, my wife and I attended a fall festival at Tolay Lake.  At the time, County planners were still trying to develop a vision for the place, so were asking people to join an email list.

I eagerly signed up and even more eagerly filled in the comment section with my thought that Tolay Lake could be a small village, perhaps something like Seaside, Florida, populated by park employees, workers at a small model farm, shopkeepers to meet the needs of the residents, writers and artists who would enjoy the quietude, and perhaps a few weekenders also.  Cars could be discouraged, with a frequent bus connection to Petaluma.

I impatiently waited to see if my thoughts would make the email newsletter.  I never found out.  I wasn’t even put on the email list.  It can be tough to be out in front of the curve.

Where does the second SMART station belong?: If the alternative location for the second SMART station is a poor solution, what then?  What other sites remain?

I’ve looked at the rail alignment through Petaluma.  There aren’t many other reasonable places for a second train station.

I understand there was once consideration of placing the second station by the proposed River Front project, near the 101 overcrossing of Lakeville Street.  However, that site is too close to the downtown station.  I could see a location along the proposed Rainier Connector, but that option is likely more than a decade away.  The Corona Road location made sense, but SMART may have poisoned that well with their acquisition strategy.

And that leaves one location I can see, a location that a reader first pointed out to me.  There is a currently vacant parcel along North McDowell Boulevard a short distance north of Corona Road.  It has good rail frontage.  It’s a little smaller than the Corona Road site, but could still accommodate a fair number of cars.

The only problem is that the site is currently proposed as the parking lot for the successful pub at the Lagunitas Brewery.  A parking lot that is needed to address the current problem of patrons crossing McDowell Boulevard to reach the pub.

To my mind, the only way that the parcel can be freed up for use as the SMART station is if aggressive traffic calming is implemented on McDowell.  If traffic be slowed to 25 mph, then pedestrian safety would improve and the street parking on the opposite side could continue to serve the Lagunitas pub.

It would be a very urbanist solution.  But it would solve a lot of problems.  And, as another reader has pointed out, urbanist pioneer Peter Calthorpe long ago sketched up an urbanist community on the opposing side of the tracks.  Although that project would require moving the urban growth boundary, violating a principle that I elucidated above, the proximity of housing, train station, successful pub, and McDowell bus corridor is a compelling urbanist vision.

And the reason I’m here is to point out the urbanist solutions.

Okay, having thrown a lot of words at train stations, transects, etc, I’m ready to take a breath.  Perhaps the readers feel the same.  The next post will pick apart a recent ad that was intended to make us feel good, but falls short on urbanist grounds.  It’s such an easy target that the post will be short.

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

Organic Urbanism is Better for You

Those not familiar with the nature of successful urbanism might think that the project recently announced for the former site of San Francisco’s Candlestick Park  is good news.   The development is a 500,000-square-foot “urban outlet” shopping center that will serve as the retail anchor for the development of 6,000 homes described as “pedestrian friendly”.

It’s true that the news could be worse.  A vast swath of single-family homes at four per acre would be too hideous for words.   But mass-developed urbanism also fails to meet the mark for what our cities need.  “McNormal”, writing in the comments to the article, nails the shortfall, “Sad how these developers have been able to completely misappropriate the word ‘urban’.  Signing off the whole district to a single company is the antithesis of urban.”

Yup, McNormal has it correct.  Urbanism produced on a large scale under a single development team is mock urbanism and fails to satisfy the soul of urbanism.

I’ll point to two problems with mock urbanism.  First, having all the buildings constructed at the same time, using similar construction techniques and following a similar architectural zeitgeist, will result in a development in which all the elements age along the same glide path.  The constant regeneration that is essential to urbanism, the rehabilitation of individual structures to take advantage of neighborhood-wide vitality, is stunted because individual owners will hesitate to make upgrades in a neighborhood that’s in uniform decline.

This isn’t a theoretical objection.  As we look around our communities, we see many examples of shopping districts, office parks, and residential neighborhoods that were built by a single developer in the years after the World War II and are now in uniform disrepair.  Indeed, what to do with these aging sites and neighborhoods is a challenge for many city governments.  It’s hard to conceive why we would wish to impose the same hardship on coming generations, but we continue to do so.

But even more importantly, good urbanism is about experimentation and adjustment.  Small projects can test ideas in the marketplace.  If they find enthusiasm, and if there is a deeper pool of demand, other projects can continue along the same path.  If they fail, the next developer can try a different approach.

And when the needs of the marketplace change, similar experimentation can occur as existing buildings are modified to meet new needs.

It’s an elegant, organic process that works well.  But building 6,000 homes and 500,000 square feet of retail under a single vision precludes the process, shortchanging our communities.

Astute readers might point out that Paris was urbanism conceived on a vast scale which has been successful.  It’s a good point.  However, I’ll note that Baron Von Haussmann, in his grand plan, was working from a theoretical vision, not a plan to turn short-term profits.  I don’t always trust theoretical visions, with suburbia being a particularly notable example, but I trust them more than I trust a vision driven by short-term profits.

Also, Paris was constructed with materials and structural systems guaranteed to provide a long life, long enough for Parisians to find a way to modify their city to help it meet their needs.  (The photo above is a modern retrofit to a building that may date back to Von Haussmann.)

None of this post is intended to point a finger at the residential developer, the Lennar Corp., or retail developer, Macerich.  Both have done exactly what they should have, finding a way to make money for their stockholders and to provide salaries for their employees within the land-use rules we’ve put in place.  Their role isn’t to fix the deficiencies in our vision or our implementation, but to represent their owners and employees under the rules that we’ve written.

Instead, the problem is us.  We’ve failed to elucidate and to implement an adequate urbanist vision.  Instead of the newly announced plan, the City should have acted as the master developer, creating an overarching land plan for the site, constructing some of the initial infrastructure, and then selling chunks of land to individual developers, recouping the planning and infrastructure costs.  But that plan would have required costs, risk, and effort, commodities which we’re too infrequently willing to commit.

It was yet another missed opportunity. 

Next time, I’ll follow up on senior living and urbanism with several interesting links that recently crossed my desk.

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

Good Urban Planning is a Team Effort

Perhaps because I spend much of my time studying and writing about urban planning, I become prickly when folks write something that misrepresents the nature of good land planning.

A recent example illustrates my point.

I had a long professional involvement in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco.  It was a fascinating urbanist challenge to take land with a history of tidal marsh to landfill to railyard and turn it into a productive part of the city.  (Before anyone objects, I agree that it would have been environmentally preferable had the land had remained a tidal marsh, but that ship sailed over a century ago and there’s little we can do about it today.)

The engineering of building a multi-story city on top of more than a hundred feet of unconsolidated material is challenging, as is the extension of utilities into a neighborhood surrounded by land uses that extend back a century or more.

Given my familiarity with the area, the recent conflagration at a condominium construction site snagged my attention.  I had no involvement in the particular project, but knew the site and the context.

I read many of the articles about the fire, including the recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting the findings that the fire has been accidental.

The sentence that raised my hackles was at the end.  “City officials have pledged that the fire would not deter the revitalization of the neighborhood.”

On the surface, the sentiment seems reasonable and soothing.  No one need be worried that the fire would sidetrack the Mission Bay redevelopment.  And as the sentence isn’t a direct quote, but a summation by the article’s writer, perhaps the sentence doesn’t exactly capture what the “city officials” intended.

But there is nonetheless a proposition within the sentence that shouldn’t be there.  That proposition is that the City has the unilateral ability to keep the revitalization moving ahead, that if they decide that revitalization shouldn’t be deterred, then it won’t be.

That proposition and others of its ilk, have the potential to plant wrong and harmful messages.  Good land use planning requires the city, the developers, and the public to work as a team.

All the parties must be pulling on the same end of the rope.  The city’s role is to establish reasonable and appropriate goals for development.  The developers’ role is to react to those goals, to offer alternatives that may differ from the city’s vision but remain as consistent as possible while also capable of securing construction financing.  The public’s role is to keep everyone on track, to provide clear descriptions of what new development will meet the public need, not the need based on self-myths, but the need based on how we truly live.

When we forget those roles and begin to point fingers, we hear contentions such “The city is ignoring our wishes”, “Developers are all crooks”, or “The public is being unreasonable.”  And when those accusations begin to fly, our ability to build well for the future is diminished.

So, better than “City officials have pledged that the fire would not deter the revitalization of the neighborhood” would have been “City officials have pledged to work with developer of the burnt structure and the neighborhood residents to learn how to do their part to keep the neighborhood revitalization moving ahead.”

Am I overreacting?  Heck, yes.  I can undoubtedly scan the same issue of the Chronicle and find dozens of propositions that are equally or more severely flawed.  But this is one that is close to my heart on several levels, so it’s the one that rankled.  Or maybe it was just my day to be grumpy.

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

Micro-Apartments Revisited

Nearly eighteen months ago, I took a look at “micro-apartments”, which can be roughly described as apartments of 300 square feet or less.  Single-occupancy seems the most likely use of such small apartments, although some jurisdictions, by putting an occupancy cap of two people on the units, acknowledge the possibility of a couple making a home in one.

To give a sense of scale, a hotel room in a mid-range hotel is often between 400 and 500 square-feet, so a micro-apartment dweller is making a life, including meal preparation, in a space significantly smaller than a hotel room.

Since my earlier post, much as happened in the world of micro-apartments.  In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg spearheaded a push for 300 square-foot units.   Interestingly, one of the proposed developers is a tech millionaire who, after having lived the lifestyle of the elaborate and out-sized “crib”, decided that life was better lived with less stuff.  He reduced himself to a 420-square-foot home.  It’s invigorating to see a developer with that level of philosophical commitment.

In San Francisco, a political battle erupted over a proposal to allow 220-square-foot units.  Opponents argued that the micro-apartments would provide housing for young tech workers, forcing families from the city and demeaning the tenants by forcing them to live in tiny spaces.  I can’t grasp either objection.  Wouldn’t providing small units for tech workers reduce pricing pressure on larger units?  And how can it be demeaning to live in a micro-apartment if one does so voluntarily?

Eventually, San Francisco allowed 375 micro-apartments as a test.  After the units are complete, the impacts on the housing market will be assessed and a long-term policy developed.

Looking at the bigger picture, Business Insider commented on the national trend toward micro-apartments.

Nor are micro-apartments limited to new construction.  A shopping mall in Providence, Rhode Island dating from 1828 has been redeveloped into micro-apartments above small-scale retail.

Given the market trend, it’s not surprising that developers are finding effective ways to make micro-apartments more livable.  I’ll share several examples in my next post.

Despite the puzzling objections in San Francisco, micro-apartments still seem an essential component of urbanism.  Obviously, they can’t be the only living units, but they should be a component of a well-balanced housing mix.  Micro-apartments provide an opportunity for certain demographics, including newly-launched single millennials and active single seniors, to live affordably in settings where they can enjoy the benefits of urban life.

Unfortunately, policies in many smaller cities often work against micro-apartments.  Typical issues are minimum parking standards for units that are often occupied by people who don’t own a car and impact fees that are based on units rather than square footage, incentivizing developers to build a 900-square-foot apartment when three 300-square-foot apartments might better meet the market demand and community needs.  

It’s just one more way that inertia and a mindless clinging to the past are impeding urbanism.

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

Finding Ways for History to Accommodate Urbanism

I love a good historical building.  I enjoy looking at the craftsmanship and building materials from a long-ago time.  I delight in contemplating the human events that have transpired since a building was constructed.  There’s something thrilling about resting a hand on a brick that was mortared into place when Chester Arthur was president.

But the relationship between historical preservation and urbanism can be uneasy.  Sometimes, a surviving building interferes with the street grid needed to facilitate walkability.  Other times, an old building lacks the height and volume to meet urbanist goals. 

Thus, it’s a pleasure to find a historic building that has been creatively retrofitted to accommodate urbanism.  The Arc Light Building in San Francisco, near AT&T Park, is a fine example.  As described by John King in the San Francisco Chronicle, the footprint and façade of the building were maintained, with a block of apartments, largely glass-fronted and contemporary in appearance, added within and above the historic building.

I don’t claim to have a particularly discerning architectural eye.  I know what I like, but often lack the education or words to express that enjoyment.  In this case, I can only note that the contrast between the historical brickwork and the modern glass spotlights both elements and provides a clear image of a city moving forward.

I hope that all of our cities are able to find similar opportunities to save the past while accommodating the present and the future.

Scheduling Notes

For August, Petaluma Urban Chat moves to the first Tuesday of the month, which will be August 6.  The change was necessitated by a scheduling conflict.  We’ll begin at 5:30pm at the Aqus Café in Petaluma.  This will be a meeting for which speakers will replace our book discussion.  Bill White and Vin Smith of Basin Street will present the proposed Riverfront project.  Anyone with an interest in the urban form is welcome.

In September, the Urban Chat meeting will return to the second Tuesday of the month.  Susan Starbird of Petaluma Waterways will talk about the Petaluma River Access Plan.

For those willing to don walking shoes, Urban Chat will take walks around Windsor on Saturday, September 21 and around Petaluma on Sunday, October 20.  All are welcome.  More details will be provided as the dates approach.

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

(Note: Photos are from the San Francisco Chronicle article.)