Pointing the Ghost Ship Finger in the Right Direction

Building on International Boulevard near the Ghost Ship

I'm usually not one to talk back to the television during news broadcasts.  I may arch an occasional eyebrow if I find the understanding deficient on a key point, but that’s usually my limit.

However, there are exceptions.  One recently occurred during the reporting on the Ghost Ship fire.  For those who don't live in California, or have been in a monastery for the past week, a warehouse that had been illegally converted into residential space near the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland burned a week ago at the loss of 36 lives. 

During a news broadcast a couple of days after the fire, an Oakland City Councilmember took advantage of his 15 minutes of fame to describe the tragedy as a failure of the code enforcement role of the Oakland Fire Department.

His comments missed the fundamental point. And I expressed my thinking in strong words, interrupting my wife's viewing of the broadcast.

The problem is ultimately much deeper than whether the nine Fire Marshals of the Oakland Fire Department should have somehow inspected 20,000 commercial properties every year.  Instead the two root level issues are that we don't provide enough funds to many civic functions such that there can be any reasonable chance of complying with the multiplicity of laws and that we don’t have a commitment to provide housing for all.

Our cities are severely deprived of funds, a situation that has been inescapably and inexorably getting worse since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13.  We know this to be true, the civic balance sheets show it clearly, and yet we don’t accept responsibility for the shortfalls.

There have been letters in the Bay Area papers arguing that excuses of inadequate resources or staffing aren’t appropriate responses to a loss of human life in the Ghost Ship.  Poppycock.  We can’t ask public employees to perform their duties at impossible speeds so our tax bills can be a little lower, especially when none of us work at superhuman rates at our jobs.  Municipal services have reasonable costs and we must be prepared to pay them.

And with regard to the availability of housing, as long as we allow housing to be the product of a free market and a patchwork of subsidies, public and private, there will be people who fall through the cracks and needs the low rents of places like the Ghost Ship to avoid living on the street.  This is particularly true in a region that has a chronic housing shortage.

So, what are the connections between these two issues and the walkable urbanism which is the primary topic of this blog?  Walkable urbanism is a less expensive way of building cities, freeing up funds for other civic obligations such as fire inspections.

And walkable urban settings are the least expensive places to add new housing.  Walkable urban place won’t solve housing shortages just by existing, but they make it easier to solve the shortages if we choose to do so.

Walkable urbanism is the answer to many questions.  And the Ghost Ship fire illustrates exactly that if only we will listen and not blabber about simplistic and unhelpful answers such as the failures of overwhelmed fire marshals.

My next post will return to the proposed road diet in my town.

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

How to Interpret the Google Bus Protests

Private shuttle buses have recently become a Bay Area controversy.  The buses are usually described as Google buses, although that term is inaccurate because more than 30 companies operate shuttles between urban residential neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland and offices in the Silicon Valley.

Although the Google bus protests raise legitimate questions about the private use of public curb space and bus stops, many observers correctly describe the bus protests as the visible sign of a deeper concern about young and affluent professionals displacing older residents of more limited means.

Several correspondents have suggested to me that the Google bus issue is a sign that urbanism is a flawed strategy.  In response, I can only suggest a remedial course in economics.

When the price of a resource, such as urban housing, is rising rapidly, the most reasonable marketplace conclusion is that demand is growing and supply is insufficient to match demand.  A key tenet of urbanism is increasing urban housing.  So, if one agrees our cities should moderate the prices of urban housing and allow for long-time residents to remain in their neighborhoods, urbanism is an appropriate path.  Indeed, it’s probably the only path.

So, the underlying cause of the turmoil in San Francisco and Oakland isn’t urbanism, it’s that the naysayers who for too long prevented good urbanist policies.

A great many people, among whom I humbly put myself somewhere in the back rows, have pointed for years to the looming trend of young adults moving back into cities.  We warned that institutional biases against urban housing must be reduced if a housing crunch was to be averted.  Those warnings were largely ignored.  Indeed, based on the comments from my correspondents, the warnings continue to be ignored and the underlying market reality misunderstood.

Given their strong heritage of urban residential life, it might be easy to assume that San Francisco and Oakland are good at urban housing approvals.  They’re not.  San Francisco Supervisor Scott Weiner, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, suggests that the housing crunch in the City is largely self-created.

Using an anecdotal story about a San Francisco project that was whittled down during extended review, Weiner notes that the City entitlement rules allow the process to drag on for years.  Many of the resulting compromises reduce unit counts, units that would lessened the marketplace price pressures.  He also notes that the environmental lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) can often be used to further delay projects.

(For newer readers, I laud the environmental improvements that have occurred under CEQA.  But many of the balances that it implicitly makes and the opportunities it provides for judicial review are contrary to the environmental trade-offs required in urban settings.  CEQA was written for a drivable suburban world and its roots still show.)

To recap, getting to the Google bus protests took the following steps:

• Following the prerogative of youth to mark a new path, young adults of this generation are increasingly interested in living in urban settings.  (My generation had rock-n-roll.  This generation has urban life.  Both are good.)
• Observers saw the trend getting underway and warned that our cities needed to facilitate more urban housing.
• In many places, those warnings were ignored and the urban housing supply didn’t grow quickly enough.
• The young came downtown anyway, using the paychecks from the tech world to displace older residents.
• Employers, in an environmentally laudable move, began providing buses to carry workers to tech business offices.
• The displaced residents, seizing on the buses as a symbol of the change, began public protests over the buses.

It’s a very clean, simple story, with effect logically following cause.  And the only truly lamentable element was the disregard given to warning of the demographic sea change.  We should have done better.  And we need to do better starting now.

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

Olympics Hangover – Part 2

In a continuing post-Olympics review of what the land-use planning world is saying about the London Games, today we’ll look at the housing problems in East London, both before and after the Games and at the sustainability of the Olympic improvements.  Once again, I’ll add a couple of “North Bay Lesson” notes.

A Bloomberg article highlights the housing issues around the London Olympics site.  The chance to address housing deficiencies was a key element of the London Olympic bid.  To show their sincerity, the London Olympic Committee took local residents to a meeting of the International Olympic Committee.  But through the opening of the Games, few improvements have been accomplished.

Instead, the international economic problems and the loss of existing housing to redevelopment have resulted in illegal “sheds with beds”, many of which have plumbing so deficient that the 19th century blight of raw sewage running in the street has returned.

New housing is being built, but much of it is beyond the financial capability of the current residents, raising the specter that “gentrification is likely to be part of the [Olympic] legacy.”

As the director of a London non-profit notes, “London councils are reluctant to set aside land for cheap housing because they earn so much money by selling to developers.  Without cheap housing, people have to move away from their families.”

Ricky Burdett, writing for British Politics and Policy at the London School of Economics, takes the long view of the London Olympic land-use issues.  He notes the depth of the problems to be solved in East London.  The points of concern have long included employment, housing, infrastructure, and public health.  “[The] life expectancy of a man, for example, is five years lower in east London compared to parts of west London.”

Burdett goes on to argue that the land-use process around the London Olympics is generally similar to how London land-use issues are usually addressed, only on a far quicker schedule.  “The project has become an elaborate chess game in time and space that mirrors, in an accelerated fashion, the normal, organic planning process that determines London’s DNA.”

He also noted the higher level of sustainability which London targeted, including the possibility that the velodrome, basketball arena, and other stadiums will be dismantled and shipped to Glasgow for the 2014 Commonwealth Games or to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics.  “London has invented a new planning methodology for the construction of the games and what it leaves behind for its so-called “Olympic Legacy.”

Burdett closes with the same warning as many others.  “But all this will only be possible if city government retains control and ownership of the land, and puts in place checks and balances to ensure that land values and gentrification do not push existing communities in the vicinity out.”

North Bay Lesson: Once again, the Olympics are orders of magnitude above any likely North Bay land-use issues, but lessons about creating housing options for all demographic are applicable.  As someone noted at a recent OneBayArea public meeting, those with resources can always find places to live.  But we must remain attentive to the lower-income housing options.

Lauren Parr of the Urban Land Institute describes the London Olympics land-use process as working in reverse, as having a vision of where the future of East London lay and then working an Olympics into the shorter-term picture.  From Bill Hanway of AECOM, “We always knew what we wanted to end up with; we worked backwards.”

Parr notes that making places for education was also important, “Historically, many of the major regeneration projects in London have begun with educational facilities, which are valuable in their contribution to place creation.”

North Bay Lessons: Regardless of the size of the community, visualizing where the community wants to be in twenty years should be a key step.  In California, General Plans fill some of that role, but the question is whether the community as a whole, and not just the 200 citizens who participate in the process, buy into the vision.

 The American Planning Association offers a write-up of the obsolete industrial site, known as the Lower Lea Valley, that existed before the Olympic redevelopment began, describing it as “an unregulated valve where the city could let off steam.”

After an extended word tour of the Olympic park, the writer notes the key design challenge is to avoid making the park look like it was constructed solely for the Olympics.  The goal was to create “the impression of a park in which the Olympics happens to be taking place, rather than a relentless campus tailored to this one-off event. “

The writer then concludes with a worry about the future of the park site and whether it can be made to integrate with its surroundings.  “It relies on the London Legacy Development Corporation – which will manage the park for at least the next ten years – and the nature of the forthcoming neighborhoods to ensure that the place does not become a privatized enclave of gated communities and sponsored mega-events, forever sold off to the highest bidder.  Any sense of the old Lea might have been smothered for now, but it must be allowed to return to give this place the character it needs.”

To close, the Sustainable Cities Collective provides a summary of the sustainability measures met by the London Games.  And the San Francisco Chronicle adds thoughts on the design of the event venues, noting that the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium will be reduced for 25,000 seats for future uses and that most venues will be dismantled and taken away, so that “a ghost town of sports venues isn’t left behind.”

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