Category Archives: Places

Are strip malls at “the end of the road”?

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One sociologist argues that while strip malls have seen much better days, they can be transformed in ways that they can once again be beneficial:

Strip malls — once anchors of postwar North American suburban neighbourhoods — are doomed, with thousands across Canada and the United States already derelict and eyed by land developers.

But at least one Canadian academic sees value in maintaining the ubiquitous local retailing plazas, and has amassed proposals such as adding community gardens or toboggan slides, or morphing them into giant bee hives or parking lots for food caravans.

“Strip malls were once the economic hubs of new suburbs,” said Rob Shields, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who received a government grant to rethink strip malls to benefit communities around them…

More than 11 per cent of strip malls in North America are derelict, representing 27 million square metres of vacant retail space, according to the Washington-based Urban Land Institute.

You can see some ideas generated for “reinventing the strip mall” here. This sounds like it fits into a larger idea, retrofitting, where developers and planners take “failed” projects, such as strip malls or big box stores, and design more sustainable, more urban places.

A few more thoughts:

1. If the strip mall is indeed in inevitable decline, I wonder if anyone is tracking what happens to all of the old strip malls. Is there a common use for them or more frequent uses? Will a majority simply be demolished and replaced with something more profitable?

2. It would also be interesting to hear how suburbanites themselves perceive the decline of strip malls – do they prefer “power centers” or is there something lost when strip malls disappear? Perhaps many won’t rue the loss of strip malls because of their very functional design but there may be more who don’t like the disappearance of some of the businesses, like Radio Shack, that once thrived in strip mall size settings.

3. Are strip malls excellent places for small businesses to start and thrive? Perhaps they are not used in this way but I was trying to think of commercial uses that might be particularly suited to a strip mall.

The rapid urbanization of China: from under 20% to over 50% of the population in cities in thirty years

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Much change has occurred in China in recent years and here is one of the big ones: more than 50% of residents are living in cities, up from less than 20% in 1980.

FOR a nation whose culture and society have been shaped over millennia by its rice-, millet- and wheat-farming traditions, and whose ruling Communist Party rose to power in 1949 by mobilising a put-upon peasantry and encircling the cities, China has just passed a remarkable milestone. By the end of 2011, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, more than half of China’s 1.35 billion people were living in cities.

Demographers had seen this moment coming. The 2010 census showed the differential between town and country to be within a mere few tenths of a percentage point. And yet it is still a remarkable turnaround. In 1980 fewer than a fifth of Chinese lived in cities, a smaller urban proportion than in India or Indonesia. Over the next ten years the government remained wary of free movement, even as it made its peace with free enterprise. Touting a policy of “leaving the land but not the villages, entering the factories but not cities”, it sought industrialisation without urbanisation, only to discover that it could not have one without the other.

This is rapid change that affects a lot of social life. It reminds me of the era when sociology emerged in the 1800s where observers started noticing that the move from more rural to more urban life was affecting things like social relationships, social cohesion, governments, and more. Does China have a similar crop of observers thinking through all the effects this rapid urbanization might have?

The article is accompanied by a nice chart comparing China’s urbanization to other regions and countries: it is now ahead of India and South-East Asia though still lagging behind Brazil, the US, and Western Europe. The Census Bureau has tracked the changes in the US in this document (see the bottom of pg. 33): the US first had more than 50% of the population living in central cities and suburbs in 1950, up from 28% in 1910. From the period of this chart (1910 to 2000), the US has not had such rapid change in urbanization as China.

Living in an era before snow plows

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I have wondered this before: how did people clear roads and streets without modern snowplows? Of course, we can reconsider this every so often when an eastern or southern state encounters snow and doesn’t have the equipment to deal with it all but I’m talking about the days before snow plows even existed. Here is some insight:

That changed in the 1840s, when the first snow plow patent was issued. According to a wonderfully comprehensive history by the  National Snow and Ice Data Center, the first snow plow was deployed in Milwaukee in 1862. They write that the plow “was attached to a cart pulled by a team of horses through the snow-clogged streets.”Over the next several years, other cities adopted the horse-drawn plow, along with a sense that snow removal was a city’s problem. As the Data Center notes “the invention of the snow plow initiated widespread snow removal efforts in cities and also created a basis for municipal responsibility in snow removal.”

Of course, with great plowing comes great responsibility. Cities were able to clear main streets, but side streets and sidewalks often ended up blocked off by huge mounds of snow. Again, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, businessmen and townsfolk “complained and even brought lawsuits against the plowing companies … [claiming] their storefronts were completely blocked with mounds of plowed snow, making them inaccessible to their customers.”…

In the early 20th century, the automobile entered the picture, creating new problems and new possibilities for snow plowing. In 1913, New York unveiled the first motorized dump truck (complete with tractor tires), abandoning the traditional horse-drawn cart. In the 1920s, Chicago unveiled the snowloader, an “ingenious contraption” that “was equipped with a giant scoop and a conveyor belt. As the snow was plowed, it was forced up the scoop, caught by the conveyor belt which carried it up and away from the street into a chute at the top where it was dropped into a dump truck parked underneath.”

Industrialization and technological change brought with it new forms of snow plowing plus expectations that cities would clear the streets. It would probably be fascinating to hear more about these expectations; did they arise because streets are city property? Did cities balk at having to devote resources to clearing snow as opposed to pursuing other goals? What were the outcomes of these lawsuits between business owners and municipalities? It sounds like the expectations about snow removal arrived at roughly the same time (late 1800s) that cities started providing other services to everyone including sewers, water, and police and fire coverage. There could be an interesting story here.

If many communities are facing budget shortfalls, is there any community willing to consider privatizing snow removal? In many places, it isn’t exactly a full-time task.

Another thought: how much more difficult does suburbia make snow plowing and removal? With the variety of streets that subdivisions add to the mix including cul-de-sacs and arterial roads, can snow plows be more efficient in cities?

Debating the idea of a “perfect suburbia” in Montgomery County, Maryland

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Amidst debates about sprawl and development in Montgomery County, Maryland, one commentator argues that whatever happens, it is impossible to return to a “perfect suburbia” that perhaps never really existed.

In the 1940’s, when much of Montgomery County was farmland, some people were probably upset to see their communities transition from rural to suburban. Others might have been excited at the prospect of new amenities, new neighbors, and the county’s emerging reputation as an affluent bedroom community. But no one really voted for that change to happen. It happened because of market demand for new housing, a lack of buildable land in Washington (and the declining status of the inner city), and a county government who, much like today, saw that people were coming and wanted to accommodate them appropriately.

Sixty years later, Montgomery County is a very different place. It’s a majority-minority county now. The Post did a story just yesterday about the gigantic Asian community in Montgomery County. Though many of those Asian immigrants have settled in so-called “suburban” places like Rockville or Germantown, studies show (PDF!) that they’re interested in a greater sense of community. For people who grew up in dense Asian cities, Montgomery County is the “perfect suburbia,” but not in the same way that Rose Crenca describes it…

Montgomery County became the “perfect suburbia” because people were invited in. We could turn people away who don’t look like us, who don’t think like us, who want to live in apartments, who make less money than us or get around on foot or by bus. But we wouldn’t suddenly go back to 1949 as a result. In fact, the county that would result would be far, far worse than what we have today.

Many people worry that plans to encourage urban development in Montgomery County is “imposing” a way of life on them. In fact, the opposite is true. Those, like Rose Crenca, who still cling to a “perfect suburbia” which may or may not have existed, are the ones telling other people how to live.

This is a common issue in debates about development: which vision of a suburbia will win out? There are lots of possible “winning” models: a place with lots of open space and plenty of restrictions on sprawl, places where redevelopment (and perhaps densification) is encouraged, places with a diverse population (Montgomery County is quite diverse compared to a lot of wealthy suburban counties), places that seem frozen in time. Of course, another way to look at this is who has the power to carry out their vision? Overall, this idea of an “ideal suburbia” is fascinating as people likely have some very different views.

Another aspect of suburban development debates is that it often pits “old-timers” against newcomers, people who have enjoyed the community for decades versus those who want to enjoy the community for decades. These groups might be very different demographically and therefore have very different visions of the world. For example, this blog post seems to pit a vision from an older resident who is partly worried about where older residents fit in the vision for Montgomery County. As land and home prices increase, older residents can be priced out of communities to which they have contributed. This is a particularly interesting issue in a lot of suburbs and is often behind what suburbs mean when they talk about affordable housing: how can we promote housing that allows our older residents to still live here? At the same time, communities don’t remain frozen in time and things change. Appealing counties such as Montgomery County are likely to draw a broad group of people looking for their own suburban ideal made up of quality (cheaper?) housing, good schools, and safety. This old-timer/newcomer split can last for quite a while until a community becomes characterized by a more transient population which is often tied to a spurt in growth.

The irony in all of this is that once you move into a community, it is likely to never be exactly the same again. New waves of growth tend to bring about different kinds of development and businesses. Places are not static; they tend to be dynamic as people and organizations move in and out. Managing this kind of growth can be done so it doesn’t turn into incomprehensible sprawl but change itself is inevitable.

I would also suggest that the people criticizing Rose Crenca for her views may just be promoting similar views in a decade or two after they have settled into Montgomery County and want to preserve the best of the county as they envision it. This is the essence of NIMBYism.

Argument: land restrictions lead to the American cities with the “most and least affordable housing”

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A new survey names the “most and least affordable housing” markets in the United States. Not too many surprises here. The top ten most affordable markets: Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Rochester, Columbus, Kansas City, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The top ten least affordable markets: San Jose, San Francisco-Oakland, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Richmond, Providence, and Portland.

What is particularly interesting is the reason given to explain the differences in affordability:

The authors specifically call out new construction that is significantly controlled by comprehensive plans or through more restrictive land use regulations “referred to as ‘compact development,’ ‘urban consolidation,’ ‘growth management’ and ‘smart growth.’” The thesis is that these places create housing that is unaffordable. And conversely, the places ranked as affordable – Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas – tend to be areas associated with sprawl development.

These two authors are known for their market-based preferences for land use and housing development, so their argument is no surprise. And though there is certainly a case to be made that restrictive land use policies can limit supply and drive up costs, these aren’t the only factors in play. That New York City is less affordable than its upstate neighbor Rochester has more to do with the fact that it is a much more vibrant and attractive city, and that people are willing to pay more to live that lifestyle than people who prefer Rochester living. Taking this and other factors into account would expand the understanding of why some places are less affordable than others. And while the picture painted by Cox and Pavletich is not wrong, per se, its limited scope offers a less-than-comprehensive analysis that could benefit from more context.

This sounds like an argument from the urban ecology school that argued sprawl could be explained by a search for cheaper land. If governments or other agencies restrict the amount of land available for development, then prices will have to go up.

This explanation also seems to suggest that the affordability sprawl allows should be a primary goal. Of course, sprawl comes with other problems including increased costs, longer commutes, more environmental concerns, and a loss of space that could have been used for other purposes or left open. If the affordability of a home was the only thing that mattered for public policy, policies would be quite different. But when doing urban and regional planning, there are a number of other concerns that must be taken into consideration.

Also: I’ve always wondered why lists of affordable or unaffordable places don’t try to overlay other data on the prices. At a quick glance, it looks like the more affordable places tend to be in the Rust Belt, the South, and foreclosure centers while the more expensive places are on the coasts. Some other factors that may matter: perhaps “creative class” cities more expensive on the whole, even controlling for other factors; demographics; the particular industries and companies located in each place; where cultural centers are located; the historical context.

When Aon leaves for London, is Chicago still a world class city?

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With the news this week that Aon Corp. is moving its headquarters from Chicago to London, a familiar question arises: will Chicago take a hit to its image as a world class city?

“It is appropriate to ask that question, not as a general hand-wringing kind of thing, but in the classic 120-year or more tradition of Chicago,” said urban strategist Paul O’Connor, a former deputy director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Development who was founding executive director of the 13-year-old World Business Chicago.

“You do have a special case here in Chicago insofar as the business leadership has for at least 120 years been intimately involved in the strategic growth and development of the city as an international center,” O’Connor said. “This is a phenomenon you don’t find historically in any other big American city. So the capabilities of the leadership of Chicago business to affect long-term outcomes of global competitiveness and whether this remains an easy place to attract the top level of talent, that’s the core issue.”…

“There are underpinnings that matter,” O’Connor, now with architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, said from China, where he’s working on a project. “You look through the board of Aon. These people were like the college of cardinals of Chicago boosters. So if you’ve got a good explanation that you can pick up (more money) by doing this, great. But if those college of cardinals of Chicago boosters don’t stay on it and make sure that you are a competitive business environment, then things do erode. … You’ve got to stay hungry.”…

“The thing you have to look out for is that you don’t slip (as a city in the world’s eyes),” O’Connor said. “That’s why everybody should be saying the rosary to make sure everything goes nicely at the NATO/G-8 (meetings set to bring international leaders and protesters to Chicago in May), so you don’t send bad messages. On the one hand, you have reality, which really matters. On the other, you have perception, which also matters, but I’d rather have reality over perception.”

The issue here seems to be perceptions, not the reality that Chicago still contains a number of headquarters. The reality is that Chicago truly is a world-class city – one 2010 ranking had Chicago at #6 in the world. The moves of highly visible companies might be problematic for politicians who have to create and defend a record on jobs but Aon moving to London will not knock down Chicago a notch unless multiple companies follow suit.

At the same time, perceptions are important. Maybe the better question to ask here is why Chicago needs to keep reaffirming its status as an important city. Perhaps it goes back to that “Second City” nickname that put Chicago behind New York but is also a reminder that Los Angeles has zoomed ahead in population (and status?) as well. Perhaps it is because Chicago knows it is part of the Rust Belt and has been a rare city that has been successful despite the loss of many manufacturing jobs. In the end, why doesn’t have Chicago have more confidence in its standing? The nervousness might motivate Chicago to pursue greater things but it also looks silly at times.

My verdict: Chicago will be fine. That doesn’t mean the city shouldn’t continue to try to woo new corporations or help encourage new start-ups. At the same time, Chicago should operate from a position of strength, selling the better aspects of Chicago, rather than a posture of weakness where any move might topple Chicago from the circle of great cities.

Cultural differences in pedestrian behavior

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How you act as a pedestrian is influenced by your culture:

Much of the piece focuses on the research of Mehdi Moussaid, a crowd scientist at the Max Planck Institut for Human Development in Berlin. A great deal of Moussaid’s work looks at how pedestrians respond to sidewalk traffic. When a person is walking straight toward another, for instance, a decision occurs whether to go right or left to avoid a collision. The decision has nothing to do with driving customs; in Britain, walkers avoid to the right despite driving on the left. Still people end up choosing the proper side through the some sort of implicit social understanding, Moussaid concluded in a 2009 study…

Not every society reacts to pedestrian congestion the same way. A recent comparison of Germans and Indians revealed that although people from both cultures walk “in a similar manner” when alone, their behavior varies greatly in the presence of others. As one might expect given the densities of their respective countries, Indians need less personal space than Germans do, according to the researchers. As a result, when Germans encountered traffic during a walking experiment, they decreased speed more rapidly than Indians did. “Surprisingly the more unordered behaviour of the Indians is more effective than the ordered behaviour of the Germans,” the study concludes.

Moussaid has found that it’s a natural tendency to clump together on the sidewalk. In a 2010 study published in PLoS One, Moussaid and colleagues reported that 70 percent of walkers travel in groups — a custom that slows down pedestrian flow by about 17 percent. That’s because when pedestrian groups encounter space problems on the sidewalk they flex into V-shaped clusters that “do not have optimal ‘aerodynamic’ features” just so they can continue to talk, according to the researchers.

I have been known to get frustrated with pedestrians on sidewalks, particularly those who suddenly stop in clumps, forcing other people to go around them. In high school, I remember thinking that the school could paint/put traffic lines on the floor to help remind students that they shouldn’t walk four across.

But I am very fascinated here by the idea that people of different cultures act in different ways as pedestrians. This must be part of the socialization process: children learn how to walk with other people around even though no one ever explicitly says do this or that. What happens in notable tourist spots – which sidewalk behavior “wins out”? Do some people have consistently quicker paces compared to others? Do different cultures have different goals in the average walk, say getting to their destination versus enjoying the stroll?

A movement away from one-way streets

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Even as one-way streets are found in thriving downtowns in cities like New York City, Toronto, and San Francisco, there is a movement away from one-way streets:

St. Catharines was only following the example of hundreds of cities in the United States and Canada that have been shutting down their one-way streets since the 1990s. In Ottawa last week, planners announced they are considering the two-way conversion of several streets in the shadow of Parliament Hill. Two-way roads would help to “‘normalize’ the streets, by slowing traffic, creating a greater choice of routes, improving wayfinding, creating a more inviting address for residential and commercial investment and improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists,” according to a plan drafted by consulting firm Urban Strategies Inc. In 2005, even Hamilton, Ont., began to end its addiction to fast-flowing urban streets by cutting the ribbon on two-way traffic on some of its most prominent thoroughfares…

“The one-way is designed to maximize efficiency for the car; that’s its purpose,” said Larry Frank, the UBC-based J. Armand Bombardier Chair in Sustainable Urban Transportation Systems. As car culture bloomed beginning in the 1930s, and city dwellers ditched their apartments and townhomes for suburban ranch houses, one-way streets became the “mini-freeways” that could speed them to and from work. According to U.S. urban development advocate John Norquist, one-ways were also particularly attractive to Cold War-era planners because they allowed speedy evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack.

The effects on urban cores were immediate. In small towns, the conversion of Main Street to one-way was usually the first harbinger of urban blight. A much-quoted statistic holds that 40% of the businesses on Cincinnati’s Vine Street closed after it became a one-way. By the 1980s, one-ways had become potent symbols of urban racial divides. In dozens of U.S. metropolises, poor black neighbourhoods were severed by loud, dangerous one-ways jammed with mainly white drivers speeding to the suburbs. “It’s environmental racism,” said Mr. Gilderbloom.

Since they encourage higher speeds, one-ways have consistently been found to be hot spots for pedestrian fatalities. In a 2000 paper examining pedestrian safety on one-ways, researchers analyzed traffic statistics in Hamilton from 1978 to 1994 and concluded that a child was 2.5 times more likely to be hit by a car on a one-way street.

It is hard to argue with safety today. But the larger argument seems to be this: planning cities in a way that privileges automobiles is now considered more problematic than in the past. With the blooming of movements like New Urbanism, more places and planners are now thinking about others who use the streets including pedestrians, bicyclists, and businesses and residences along the street. While one-way streets may be efficient, they don’t necessarily serve all interested parties well.

There is some history here: with the rise of the popularity of the automobile in the 1920s plus the beginnings of highway construction around the same time (Federally-funded interstates came later), city planners started building cities (and suburbs) around the car. The goal was to move as many drivers in and out of the city with the intention that the ease of travel would actually bring more people into the cities. While the ease of automobile traffic may have improved, it had negative side effects: people moved out of the city and sidewalk traffic decreased. Cities tried to adapt by doing things like making certain streets pedestrian malls (Chicago’s State Street was a notorious example) but these generally proved unsuccessful.

The claim about one-way streets being examples of “environmental racism” is not one I have heard before. While I have heard of highways being used in this manner, it would be interesting to see data on where exactly most one-way streets are located.

Poverty in Wheaton on PBS NewsHour

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In order to illustrate the rising number of people in poverty, PBS NewsHour went to Wheaton, Illinois.

PBS NewsHour: Suburb in Wealthy Illinois County Sees Unexpected Rise in Poverty

Some interesting material here including a look at local food banks, how middle-class people can end up in poverty, and how federal resources go more to urban areas than suburban areas. With the increase in the poor population in the suburbs and the knowledge that many suburbs are unprepared to handle this, this could change the image of and experience in the American suburbs for years to come.

While this is clearly a national issue, there hasn’t been much public discussion of this in Wheaton. Instead, I have heard more about high taxes, the government taking and wasting too much money, and the need to balance municipal budgets. I wonder how the City of Wheaton and others in the community would answer these questions:

1. Are there local resources to deal with this? Either way, should there be?

2. Is it a problem that suburban communities should help solve (with money, time, services, etc.) or is it someone else’s concern (the state, the federal government, private agencies, churches, etc.)?

3. Is this a problem for Wheaton’s image?

A slowed-down Plan for Transformation in Chicago

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The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation is taking longer than expected:

Since 2000, the CHA has been slowly working to transform how poor residents are housed. The $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation was developed to take poor residents out of crime-ridden, dilapidated, mismanaged high-rises and place them in mixed-income communities where they can thrive.

In its agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the CHA committed to restoring or replacing 25,000 units for public housing residents…

Officials blamed lulls in the economy, the collapse of the real estate market and other mishaps for slowing the Plan for Transformation, originally slated to be finished by 2010, reports show. Now the plan is scheduled to be completed by 2015, but some officials have said it could take 10 years beyond that.

This year, officials plan to deliver 845 housing units, which will bring it to 22,008 units completed. And officials expect to complete the master planning process for redeveloping Lathrop Homes on the North Side this fiscal year, reports show.

If you know the history of public housing in Chicago, this should be little surprise, recession or not. The most visible signs of public housing have been torn down, like the Cabrini-Green project and the Robert Taylor Homes, and yet it might take more than a decade to complete the Plan for Transformation. A cynic might wonder if this is all just a public relations matter. It would be interesting to know some more of the details about why exactly this Plan has been slowed down.

For what it’s worth, there is not much talk about public housing these days.