Monthly Archives: September 2012

Space, the earth’s suburban office park

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Ian Bogost argues that space exploration has become dull, just like a suburban office park:

It’s not so much that the space program is broken in the sense of inoperative. Space is alive and well, for the wealthy at least, where it’s become like the air and the land and the sea: a substrate for commerce, for generating even more wealth. Instead, the space program is broken in the sense of tamed, domesticated, housebroken. It happens to all frontiers: they get settled. How many nights can one man dance the skies? Better to rent out laughter-silvered wings by the hour so you can focus on your asteroid mining startup.

In the 1960s we went to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. In the 1980s we went to low Earth orbit because, you know, somebody got a grant to study polymers in zero-gravity, or because a high-price pharmaceutical could be more readily synthesized, or because a communications satellite had to be deployed, or because a space telescope had to be repaired. The Space Shuttle program strove to make space exploration repeatable and predictable, and it succeeded. It turned space into an office park. Now the tenants are filing in. Space: Earth’s suburbs. Office space available.

I don’t think this is a new argument: others have argued we need a new vision for space travel that involves looking for new frontiers. But the comparison to the suburbs is intriguing. The suggestion is that suburbs are fairly dull places themselves generally populated by wealthier residents where stuff happens (indeed, a majority of Americans live there) but it is rather routine and is done more out of habit than pushing beyond existing boundaries. This is not an uncommon image of the suburbs and it dates back to the early days of mass produced suburbs when critics worried about conformity, homogeneity, and quiet desperation.

Yet, the suburbs have continued to grow and perhaps more interestingly, they have changed in a number of ways in recent decades: new groups have moved to the suburbs (including more immigrants, minorities, and lower-class Americans), a variety of suburbs have come to serve a variety of functions from bedroom communities to center for office and industrial parks to entertainment and cultural hubs, residents, developers, and business leaders have adapted to a changing landscape with some new innovations. Putting this back in space terms, even if we don’t get much further than the moon or Mars in the coming years, can’t we still discover new and important things? Can’t some good come out of just-out-of-Earth’s atmosphere office parks?

One note: I would be interested to hear from Bogost about how new space exploration could be financed. There could indeed be some issues if exploration is limited more and more to wealthy individuals and corporations but what governments have the money to pay for this out of public funds?

A few graphs suggest people in wealthier countries spend more on housing, less on food

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Look at some graphs of how families in different countries around the world spend their money and a few things stand out:

Two big ideas for the road: Houses and food. Everybody needs somewhere to live and something to eat. But you can learn a lot about a country by looking at housing and food spending. Here’s how the U.S., where middle-class families spend about a third of their income on housing, compare to the developing economies in this survey…
I don’t want to push this point too far, because these sort of surveys have obvious limitations. Tremendous income inequality in developing countries with hundreds of millions of people makes it impossible to tell the story of the frothy middle class *in one graph.* But the bigger picture is clear and uncontroversial. When families earn more income, they can afford to eat more and buy more clothes, but the real shift is from those essentials to bigger better houses, education, and health care.

Interesting. However, I wonder much of this differs by country based on political, economic, and cultural values. Clearly, items like food are necessary for survival. But once citizens reach a certain income threshold, I assume there are differences across countries in how they spend this more discretionary income. For example, in the United States, transportation is a relatively high cost because of a reliance on automobiles. Similarly, people in the US might spend relatively less on food but how much of this is due to policies that help keep food prices low? More broadly, don’t government policies affect whether people have to spend more in certain categories; for example, they might spend less out of their income for health care but if that is due to paying higher taxes which cover more health care costs, then such figures of discretionary spending might be misleading.

Perhaps this situation is ripe for a cross-cultural experiment. Go to different countries and give people a scenario: suppose you are given a decent sum of money (might differ by country) and then ask how people would spend that money. What emerges as a common need or want?

Sao Paulo traffic jams can stretch over 100 miles

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A massive traffic jam in China last year attracted a lot of attention but it sounds like Sao Paulo has this beat: how about traffic jams over 100 miles long?

This is the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the BBC reports that, in the city of 11 million, traffic jams average 112 miles long on Friday evenings. It can even stretch to 183 miles on particularly bad days. With so much time spent in cars, it’s inevitable that life events like meeting your future spouse occur there too.

IBM’s annual Commuter Pain Survey (which did not include Sao Paulo) awarded Mexico City the ‘most painful’ ranking:

The index is comprised of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

Mexico City scored the worst overall, and Sao Paulo’s traffic jams may cover the longest distance. The record for worst traffic jam ever, though, goes to China.

Any solutions to this problem? The BBC report has some ideas:

Professor Barbieri says Sao Paulo has skilled and experienced traffic engineers that somehow manage to get the city to flow, albeit slowly.

“But the big problem is that we Brazilians are terrible with planning and traffic will only become more manageable if we start looking into real long-term solutions.”

But he is also clear that a “more manageable traffic” environment is the best possible scenario that can be achieved.

“No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion because when traffic flows, people are drawn to their cars. The key is to find a balance, the point at which it is worthwhile for commuters to use public transport because it’s faster then driving,” he says.

“That way Sao Paulo needs urgently to invest more in public transport instead of building new roads and expressways that will only be filled up with more cars.”

While the article suggests the local helicopter industry is thriving, it sounds like an opportunity for an enterprising politician or leader to chart a new course.

William Julius Wilson on what has changed in the 25 years since “The Truly Disadvantaged” was published

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William Julius Wilson offers some thoughts on what has changed since his book The Truly Disadvantaged was published in 1987:

It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Based on what Clarence Page reports here, perhaps not a whole lot has changed? It doesn’t seem that poverty or inner-city neighborhoods have really been a major priority of any major political candidate…

Architect discusses “natural historic evolution of neighborhoods”

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An architect discusses historic preservation and ends with two paragraphs on the changes that neighborhoods experience:

Yet embracing historic preservation too fervently and dogmatically can be problematic. Not all old buildings in historic neighborhoods are salvagable. Some are functionally, technically and architecturally beyond redemption. And over time entire neighborhoods change in ways that necessitate appropriate physical changes. For example, homes constructed 50 or more years ago, perhaps unrealistically small and impractical by today’s standards, may need enlarging, upgrading of windows and exterior materials, and new environmental systems.

Furthermore, insisting that all new buildings look like old buildings in a neighborhood is an overly restrictive policy. Good architects can design modern buildings that, without being historic replicants, aesthetically harmonize with historic buildings. Indeed, mindlessly creating architectural clones denies the natural historic evolution of neighborhoods, towns and cities, where community fabric is collectively enriched over time as human needs and desires, available technologies and aesthetic styles play out.

Perhaps the trick is ensuring that this “natural historic evolution” happens more smoothly and both sides, those who want to preserve some of the older buildings and those who want to build new structures, feel like they are getting something out of the deal. I wonder: are there neighborhoods that have successfully done this?

Additionally, what is the time frame for this natural change? A few decades? Fifty years? I would suspect this would depend on the neighborhood, particularly if the older neighborhood had buildings people wanted to save. I’ll be very curious to see what happens to suburban neighborhoods. Particularly for post-World War II suburbs, how much will people want to save? If McMansions are lower quality construction, as critics charge, will they last long enough for people to want to save them?

Chicago leads big cities in increasing downtown populations between 2000 and 2010

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The residential population in the downtown of a number of American big cities grew between 2000 and 2010 and Chicago led the way:

The report found that the number of people living within two miles of Chicago’s City Hall rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010. Though many of the largest U.S. cities experienced a similar trend in the last decade, Chicago outpaced them all in that category.

More than 48,000 moved to downtown Chicago in the last decade, according to the report. New York City saw a 9.3 percent increase in its downtown population, or about 37,000 people…

Rob Paral, a Chicago demographer, says the city’s downtown population growth reflects several underlying economic factors, including downtown revitalization and an expanding job market.

But though places like the South Loop and West Loop have benefited from the trend, Paral says, its effects quickly fade the farther out you go.

“There’s a big difference between what you see in downtown and what you see in other parts of the city,” he said. “We wish it would be happening within 20 miles of City Hall, but no city has that kind of prosperity.”

In other words: one of the wealthy areas of the city continues to grow while less well-off areas struggle to tackle social problems while facing declining population. I assume this report will be spun by Mayor Emanuel and others to suggest that Chicago is resurgent even in tough economic times. However, a city is not just its downtown.

Northwestern mounts ad campaign against preserving Prentice Women’s Hospital

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Driving home yesterday, I heard a curious radio ad: Northwestern University wants to build a new research facility and this involves rallying people against the Prentice Women’s Hospital.

Chicago has an opportunity to become a global leader in medical research and lead the way in finding tomorrow’s cures by allowing Northwestern University to build a new state-of-the-art research center on the site of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital. The geographical positioning of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine near world-class partners – industrial, commercial, entrepreneurial and academic – provides rare opportunities for discovery that few universities can even consider.

With the new research facility, the University would attract an additional $150 million a year of new medical research dollars, create 2,000 new full-time jobs and generate an additional $390 million a year in economic activity in Chicago. The new center would attract the world’s best medical researchers and go a long way in helping a world-class city find tomorrow’s cures…

Make your voice heard! Click to submit our form to tell the Chair of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks that you oppose the proposal to landmark old Prentice Women’s Hospital and that you support Northwestern’s new medical research center…

Beyond furthering research on cures, a new facility will create more than 2,000 jobs for scientists and technicians and bring in an extra $1.5 billion in federal medical research dollars over the next decade. Learn more about why this project is vital.

Northwestern is apparently going public in their campaign to use the Prentice Women’s Hospital site. As has been reported in the local media for months, there are a number of people interested in saving the hospital designed by Bernard Goldberg. Northwestern is fighting a monied group:

Less obvious is the primary source of funding for the preservationists: the Washington-based National Trust for Historic Preservation, which put old Prentice on its list of America’s 11 most-endangered sites in 2011 and has named it one of its “national treasures.”

Christina Morris, a senior field officer in the preservation trust’s Chicago office, declined to disclose how much the trust is spending on its campaign to save Prentice.

IRS records show that the trust held about $230 million in assets at the end of 2010. That amount still paints Northwestern as a goliath. But the trust’s participation would seem to deny preservationists the label “David.”…

The preservationists — Morris, Bonnie McDonald of Landmarks Illinois, architect Gunny Harboe and Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago — hired Eric Herman, managing director of issue- and corporate-advocacy firm ASGK. He’s also a Northwestern alumnus and former Chicago Sun-Times reporter. The team has worked to poke holes in a university poll conducted via telephone, which found — not surprisingly — that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed supported putting a new medical research center on the old Prentice site.

I know there is a big decision looming but I wonder about the need to take the fight public: as the poll cited above shows, how many Chicagoans really care? How many even know what the Prentice site is, notwithstanding the Bernard Goldberg retrospective hosted last year by the Art Institute?

Is a large net-zero home no longer a McMansion?

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Here is another possible defense for building a McMansion: just make it a net-zero home!

Blog readers in the construction market — and anyone interested in sustainability — should read up on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s net-zero test house in Gaithersburg, Md.

The 2,700-square-foot home (plus 1,500 square feet of unfinished basement) looks like a lot of the suburban McMansions built in the United States in the 1990s.

But this house is different. Thanks to state-of-the-art insulation and building products, plus a variety of solar panels, experts expect the home will produce as much energy as a family of four consumes over the course of a year…

According to Emily Badger’s story in The Atlantic (“This House Consumes Less Net Energy Than Your Little Urban Studio”), the home cost $2.5 million, although it could probably be duplicated in a suburban neighborhood for $600,000 to $800,000 — not counting the cost of the lot.

One critique of McMansions is that they consume too much energy. However, making a large house net-zero energy still leaves these possible McMansion traits:

1. It is still in a suburban neighborhood that probably requires lots of driving. Perhaps you have to buy an electric car to go with the house…

2. The house could still be considered too big; how much space does a household require?

3. Does having a net-zero home mean that suburban neighbors will suddenly start talking to each other and participate in civic organizations?

4. The house is still expensive and meant to impress people from the street.

But perhaps being a net-zero home magically blinds people from all of its other traits?

Argument: current and proposed streetcar projects are a “swindle”

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Samuel Schieb argues that the resurgent popularity of the urban streetcar is a swindle that doesn’t live up to its promotion:

There are currently 16 streetcar lines operating as public transit in the United States, but depending on how you count there are as many as 80 cities with streetcars in the planning or development phase. Far from the dominant form of urban transport they once were, streetcars have become prestige projects celebrated for their history, beauty, and alleged ability to promote development.

But the sad secret is that streetcars of all descriptions and vintages are at best modestly successful transportation projects, at worst expensive objets d’art that very few people use. Demand for the vehicles is driven not by the public but by the dreams of land-use planners and downtown boosters who imagine that aesthetically pleasing vehicles lumbering in slow circles through walkable areas will somehow prompt a boom in economic activity. Streetcar booster Gloria Ohland has often written that streetcars should be considered “economic development projects with transportation benefits.”…

The highest and best use for a streetcar system is to connect dense student housing, a university, a functioning downtown, and a regional shopping venue, hospital, or other large attractor in a community of around 100,000 people. Athens, Gainesville, Norman, and Bloomington are ideal for this type of alignment (as is Lansing, which has opted to build a bus rapid transit system). We already have models for how to do this. Three systems in France provide exactly this kind of service: LeMans, Orleans, and Reims carry between 35,000 and 48,000 trips daily on systems that have between 6.9 and 11.2 miles of track. These streetcars—called tramways there—not only serve universities and downtowns but also take advantage of the tram’s small footprint by wending between buildings, using rights of way that are useless to larger mass transit vehicles or automobiles.

Planners in Tampa and other streetcar cities have been betting on modal magnetism, the notion that the inherent attractiveness of rail will get people to use it even if there is not an existing demand for the service. This idea is wrong, and it has not worked. Transit projects should be built not to create demand but to serve the demonstrated needs of the public.

Read the whole thing to get an overview of the streetcar’s history as well as its reintroduction to American cities.

I think Schieb is making a larger point: projects built for nostalgic or historic purposes may not be enough to justify their cost or to expect that they will generate more traffic and revenues by themselves. Such projects still need to be designed well and take advantage of existing patterns, not just hope for new social patterns to emerge. Related to the streetcar, Schieb also discusses the pedestrian mall, a technique tried in a number of communities across the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. (A note: this was tried in Chicago on State Street and proposed in Wheaton for Hale Street but both streets returned to roadways.) While these pedestrian malls might harken back to a day without cars (though urban streets were possibly more chaotic before cars), simply putting one in is not enough in itself to attract people. In conjunction with other helpful factors, streetcars and pedestrian malls can be successful but they are not quick fixes that can simply be plopped into places.

h/t Instapundit

Defending new large homes by arguing the new homes are certainly not McMansions

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Here is an example of how to defend the construction of large, new homes: argue that they are certainly not McMansions.

When the Anderson home on Ridge Road in Rumson was demolished to the dismay of many, Rumson Historic Commission President Jim Fitzmaurice defended new construction, saying the work of most of the area builders was not tantamount to that of a cheap, McMansion-type reputation, but high end and diverse.

“The term McMansion is often used as a term of derision to describe new large homes,” Fitzmaurice said in a blog on Patch. “I believe the term is inappropriately applied to most of the new construction in Rumson [and the surrounding area]. The term should be reserved for cheesy false front monstrosities, clad in vinyl siding on the sides and back. The homes being built by most of the high class builders in our area are nothing of the sort and will someday be the focus of another Historic Commission in the future.”

Fitzmaurice had said in an interview that he knew of some high quality new construction and revamping of smaller homes in the area as well.

When asked if the trend was one that, as it was followed, ended up pushing out diversity more and making the borough one that could only be afforded by purchasers of larger homes with bigger families, Lucarelli said that while that was not the intent, the need for larger homes and proximity to good schools is one that continues to be satiated by builders in the borough.

Don’t confuse those high-end new homes with McMansions! Fitzmaurice seems to be primarily working with one dimension of McMansions: poor/”cheesy” architectural quality evidenced by impressive fronts but siding on the side and back plus not looking “high-class.”

I’ve encountered a similar situation before where people (metaphorically) almost fell over themselves to declare they personally did not live in a McMansion but they knew nearby people who did. I’ve wondered about that situation: how guilty did these people feel that their home might be labeled a McMansion?

Fitzmaurice also suggests these new large homes may be preserved years from now by Historic Commissions. I’ve never seen anyone estimate this before but I am curious: what percentage of current large homes will survive 50+ years and/or be recognized as places worth preserving?