Tag Archives: communities

An overview of IKEA’s new 26-acre redevelopment in London’s East End

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Here is a quick look at IKEA’s large redevelopment project in London’s East End:

The new project is only the first step of Ikea’s journey into urbanism. Inter Ikea’s LandProp division has acquired a second parcel north of London and has initiated talks for a $1.45 billion project in Birmingham twice the size of the one in London; it has reportedly shopped for sites in Hamburg, Germany, too. LandProp also intends to build a hundred budget hotels across Europe and is considering a push into student housing, all covered by the stores’ bottomless cash flow. “Once we decide to do something, we go like a tank,” said LandProp’s chief, Harald Muller, at Strand East’s unveiling in 2011. (Citing overwhelming media interest, LandProp refused repeated requests for an interview.)…

The new town within a town pursues this dual goal by putting the Swedish vision of the folkhemmet (the “people’s home”) to the test. It’s a utopian dream that dovetails nicely with the aim of London officials to use the Olympic legacy to address historic inequalities in the city’s East End. Plans for Strand East depict car-free streets lined with low-slung multifamily town houses, while smaller homes face the back alleys in an echo of London’s beloved mews. Of the 1,200 homes and apartments, LandProp promises that 40% will be large enough for families; another 15% will be set aside for affordable housing, for which London has considerable pent-up demand. The remainder of the site will consist of public squares and parks, with mid-rise commercial districts along the edges.

So far, urbanists are impressed with what they’ve seen of the project. “Compared to the towering cities popping up around the world, Strand East is a quaint, pleasant surprise, mixing old and new in a way that gives the area an uncommon sense of history and place,” says Paul Kroese, strategic adviser for the International New Town Institute. The plans are of a piece with Ikea’s other ventures, too. “Ikea wants to build a world that leverages its knowledge of how people live,” says Steen Kanter, a former top Ikea executive in the United States who today runs his own consultancy, Kanter International. “And it’s a good way to gain expertise installing kitchens and wardrobes and other large environments.”

Indeed, some retail analysts suggest that Strand East is both a branding exercise for Ikea and a living laboratory for a renewed drive into housing. The company has been trying to crack the U.K. market since 1997, when it intro duced a flat-pack home. The BoKlok comes in three configurations (none larger than 800 square feet), with prices starting at about $112,500. (The houses are assembled by Ikea’s construction partner, Skanska.) More than 4,900 BoKloks have been built to date in Scandinavia, but it hasn’t caught on in the United Kingdom despite recently renewed interest in prefab housing.

Curbed sums up some of the more interesting aspects of the project:

1. Included in Ikea’s masterplan: shops, schools, theaters, a hotel, and, you know, apartments for 6,000 people.

2. Strangely absent? An actual Ikea store.

3. Starting prices for the town’s flat-pack houses, called BoKlock, are less than half the price of an average U.K. house—$112,500 vs. $260,850...

5. Of the 1,200 houses to be built, 40 percent will be large enough for families, and 15 percent of them will be earmarked as affordable housing...

7. The whole shebang will supposedly cost around $500M.

We’ll see what happens. Even if this wasn’t built with IKEA, there could be some questions about the design, how successful it will be as a mixed-income neighborhood, and how it will fit in with the surrounding area. While people seem interested in how might affect IKEA’s global image, I would be more interested to know how the community itself will relate to IKEA as developer and major corporation. The experiences of a place like Celebration, Florida and Disney suggest this can be a convoluted process that both attracts a certain kind of resident but can lead to governance and identity issues.

Potential solutions to fixing high streets in England

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While Americans have worried about Main Streets for decades, a similar concern has arisen in England about their high streets. A recent panel, including sociologist Richard Sennett, proposed some solutions – of which one journalist was quite skeptical:

In Tuesday’s Guardian, a panel comprising a politician, an academic, a policy wonk and two campaigners offered the high street a range of solutions. The politician, Labour’s Chuka Umunna, said almost nothing at all: “Shopping can become an experience where conventional retailers can complement the success of online retailing.” Sociologist Richard Sennett favoured a mixture of pop-up art venues and pop-in medical centres and government bureaux: “A vibrant high street must be more than a place in which to shop.” Others wanted cheaper rates to attract young entrepreneurs and, in the words of Anna Minton, “a new genuinely productive economy based on making, caring and exchanging goods and services”.

A lot is to be hoped for. None of it seems likely. A new ironmonger’s in a prosperous north London high street is one thing, but think of the dead shopping streets in almost any old industrial town: what a fusillade of pop-ups would be needed there! The future of these streets is surely the fate of the village I grew up in, where every shop but two was demolished or became the ground floor of a dwelling. It would be hard now to imagine that commerce (“That’s a penny for your liquorice and tuppence for your sherbet”) ever existed in these TV-lit rooms.

This is a pessimistic take and doesn’t really engage with what the panel said. Here is what Richard Sennett said:

The high streets of 50 years ago were all about retail commerce. Small manufacturers and craftsmen had gone elsewhere in the post-war city; planners – those bureaucratic bogeymen – thought to make the centre of the city tidy. But the high street inevitably then became vulnerable to an even more efficient, mono-functional retail space, the shopping mall. High streets “fought back” by imitating these out-of-town competitors; Oxford Street became a poor cousin to Bluewater. Of course the law of the capitalist jungle ruled: chains like HMV paid bigger rents than little shops, but the character and environmental quality of the central city eroded.

I am convinced we can reverse this trend, first by making high streets more truly mixed in use. They should house elder-care centres and medical clinics, government bureaus helping the public and pop-up music or art venues. A vibrant high street must be more than a place in which to shop. But, equally, the capitalistic beast must be fed. Horrific to our Conservative masters as it may be, the state should pay commercial rents to locate its own activities on high streets, and it should give small businesses tax breaks, even special loans, to allow them to return and survive as high street enterprises.

If we think of high streets as a “commons”, which like the old agricultural commons knit the entire community together, we’d think about them as places, in sum, which the community should support. Which means subsidy.

Sennett’s ideas sound like a mix of New Urbanism, Jane Jacobs, and plans in many American communities where civic buildings and residential units were located in downtowns to try to boost foot traffic and help bring about a 24/7 culture rather than a 9-5 culture. And why can’t there be a little art to try to bring in “the creative class” and others? But, even if Sennett’s plan is generally good for communities, it is likely to be a little (or a lot) different in each unique place which faces different current conditions, different histories, and different visions for the future.

Claim: those new municipal fees are here to stay

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More communities are charging residents more fees and they probably won’t be rescinded anytime soon:

As the nation’s cities attract an ever-growing share of the U.S. population, their capacity to honor service commitments, build and maintain necessary infrastructure, and meet their financial obligations will have a profound effect on local and regional economies, public safety, education, and overall quality of life for hundreds of millions of Americans. But U.S. cities are in a bind. Faced with a requirement that they balance their budgets every year, they have borrowed a page from the airline industry: increase fares (i.e., taxes) just a little if at all, and start charging big time for the “extras” that passengers (i.e., taxpayers) want. In the airlines’ case, it’s bag fees and the like that are going up. For cities, it’s charges for little things like, say, putting out fires…

In an annual survey [PDF] administered by the National League of Cities, more than four out of ten cities (41 percent) reported last year that they were increasing service fees in an effort to stanch the bleeding in city budgets. For the last two decades, when asked to identify a revenue action that their city had adopted in the previous year, city finance officers overwhelmingly selected “increase the level/rate of user fees or charges” and “impose new user fees or charges.”

Much like Newton’s Third Law, as cities raise fees, they decrease their reliance on taxes to support general municipal services. Back at the start of World War II, city taxes on sales, income, and property amounted to some 89 percent of all revenues cities raised (excluding aid from state and federal governments and borrowing or debt), with property tax generating 78 percent of “own-source” revenues. Fees amounted to some 11 percent. Today, nearly 40 percent of “own-source” revenues are derived from fees on services, and 60 percent from all other taxes (and less than 30 percent from the property tax). In other words, we have seen a sea shift over the last three generations from a city fiscal system that collected taxes—almost all of which were property taxes—to pay for the bulk of municipal services to one that identifies individual beneficiaries or users of services who can then be assessed a fee (e.g., fire suppression in Mondovi).

I wonder about several pieces of this:

1. What about the declining federal and state support for communities? If the federal government and individual states have less money themselves, there is less to pass along to communities as well as other taxing bodies.

2. The share of revenue from property taxes has decreased over time and I wonder how much of this is tied to an increasing number of taxpayers arguing against paying more property taxes. This has been gaining steam since the 1970s (see more about Prop 13 in California) and limits what communities can collect. It sounds like more communities see fees as a solution but is this because their other options are limited? Of course, municipalities aren’t the only ones who get money from property taxes as there are others who take more of this pie.

3. It would be interesting to see these numbers alongside figures about the size of municipal budgets and what the money is spent on. As fees increase, where is the money going and how much is it contributing to or paying for larger budgets? Some of this increase could be hard to stop; communities do age, infrastructure needs replacing, and the costs of services tend to go up.

Seeing the social layers in the foreclosure crisis through a photography exhibit

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A new photography exhibit at the Argus Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan takes a unique look at the foreclosure crisis:

Sociology, economics, and ultimately, autobiography, are the featured artistic elements in Charles J. Mintz’s “Every Place (I have ever lived)” at the Argus I Building’s second-story museum.

Subtitled “The foreclosure crisis in twelve neighborhoods,” this Cleveland-based photographer’s mixed-media investigation into his personal history—as told through a dozen color foreclosed dwellings in the vicinities where he’s lived—is touching and telling in equal measures…

“Each work,” Mintz tells us in his gallery statement, “is a 4’ x 4’ sheet of raw plywood with two photographs that are printed on fabric. The ‘inside’ photograph is screwed in place. The top image has been made into a window shade that pulls down over the first…

“Maps on the side pieces show where you are in my personal journey. In addition, there are charts of both the changes in median family income between the time I lived there and now (based upon the 2000 census) and the changes in racial mix between then and now (based upon the 2010 census).”…

Even as the economic and sociological demographics do their part in Mintz’s story, he makes it clear that he believes race and financial position are ultimately relative to the journey. The story might have differed at another time, but from mid- to late-20th century, Mintz seeks to build a case that our American commonalities are more tightly bound than we might otherwise expect.

It is one thing to see the numbers about foreclosures, such as the fact that the foreclosure rate in Illinois is still rising, and another to look at how this affects communities and individuals within them. What sounds particularly interesting to me about this exhibit is that this isn’t just about one person. For example, in political debates and speeches, we tend to hear stories about individuals or families which are meant to put a “human face” on the larger issues. But, through connecting individuals, communities, and larger social forces, such as the artist Mintz explaining his personal experiences as embedded in communities as well as race and socioeconomic status, we can better view and understand the multiple levels of foreclosures and how different actions at each level might be needed.

A conservative fighting sprawl argues it is a Ponzi scheme

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Here is a summary of the arguments against sprawl made by conservative Chuck Marohn:

But, while my concern with sprawling growth patterns was rooted in their effect on the landscape, on the environment, and on severely compromised populations left behind, Chuck is all about the money. As Thoughts on Building Strong Towns makes quite clear, Chuck believes that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme and we the taxpayers are the ones left holding the empty bags.

In fact, the lead chapters of the book are devoted to the Ponzi thesis, whereby municipalities chase outward growth to find new tax revenue that proves insufficient when the infrastructure needs repair; so they chase even more new growth to pay for the previous round, over and over, until the pattern chokes the economic life out of the place. In Chuck’s words:

“The local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange – a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation – is one element of a Ponzi scheme.

The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure.  In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance . . .

We’ve done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations – which are not counted on the public balance sheet — are a generation away.”

A few thoughts about this:

1. I’ve seen this in action in suburbs and the problem becomes particularly acute when growth slows or stops or the economy runs into trouble. At these points, the revenue flow based on developer fees plus the new tax revenues from property and sales taxes slows and budgets have to be looked at more closely.

2. Infrastructure is a long-term investment, not a short-term building issue. Lots of communities face this issue: how to generate enough money to substantially fix or replace aging infrastructure? Money needs to be consistently budgeted for these issues because issuing bonds is not always a good answer.

3. I’ve wondered this before: how much of growth is driven by money versus the status that comes with being a growing community? The money from new development is clearly important but there is also prestige associated with moving forward, adding to the population, and continually adding to the tax base. Imagine this line: “a good community is a stagnant/plateaued community.” I don’t think so.

4. More broadly, this is a call for more comprehensive long-term planning in communities. This doesn’t just mean 5, 10, and 20 year projections – communities need to think how the world might change, whether they will have the resources to change course, and how open they will be to pursuing differences courses given the changing world.

Old New York law says each community must have a historian

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Strange laws that are still on the books are occasionally rediscovered and make headlines. For example, here is an interesting 93 year old law from New York:

Back in 1919, the New York state legislature mandated that every “city, town, or village” must have an official historian. It’s a regulation that’s unique among the 50 states, and basically unenforceable. Towns are not required to pay these record-keepers, who are appointed by a town mayor or manager. Municipalities that fail to find a volunteer are sent a strongly worded letter, but little else can be done.

But this law could tell us a lot about American culture and our quest to preserve and understand our own history:

The phenomenon of local historians came of age in the early days of the Industrial age. As Americans began populating “the frontier,” they struggled to define themselves and their role in the places they called home. “In the late 19th century, you see a local history rush,” says James Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association.

This fascination with ourselves was fueled by commercial firms that drafted early town histories, books that resemble the Who’s Who franchise of today. For a couple of dollars, anyone could contribute a piece about their own place in the history of their town, be it the story of their family, their house, or their autobiography.

It was around this time that city historians also became part-time urban boosters. “Cities began using history as an economic asset,” Grossman says. Many early historians were “people who had relationships with commercial interests, trying to promote city growth.”

A couple of reasons are given here: Americans wanted to understand themselves and there was money to be made in this business of local history. This second reason would fit right in with the growth machine model of urban growth: local boosters, leaders, and businesspeople promote development in order to make more money.

One might wonder how much this boosterism affects the actual reporting and interpretation of history. I suspect it influences things quite a bit. This doesn’t necessarily mean a local historian gets the facts wrong but it is more about how the story is told and what parts of local history are revealed. I have read a lot of local history for research projects and several features of local histories stood out across communities:

1. The local histories are often most interested in big and exciting facts and less about day to day life in the community or how these big changes occurred. We might call this the “peak view” of history – you only see the highest or noteworthy points.

2. Tied to the first observation, these histories tend to report only positives about the community. The histories leave out some of the most formative elements about a community if it doesn’t paint the community in a positive light. For example, I’ve uncovered information about racial prejudice in action in some suburban communities but based on the “official” histories, you would never know there was even any tension.

3. It is suggested later in the article that local historians need some training before they are set loose to collect and tell local history. From what I have seen, many local historians got the job because they wanted it, not because they necessarily had qualifications. This person might have had a particular interest in the community and so had done a lot of research or perhaps they knew a lot of people in the community. This has changed somewhat in recent decades with the rise of museums and degrees regarding operating museums as there are now often “official” keepers of a community’s history.

How to define a good college town

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Livability recently released a list of the Top 10 college towns and here is some discussion of how they defined such communities:

And for starters, we need a basic definition of a college town. “True college towns are places where the identity of the city is both shaped by and complementary to the presence of its university, creating an environment enjoyable to all residents, whether they are enrolled in classes or not,” Livability’s editors write. “They’re true melting pots, where young minds meet old traditions, and political, social, and cultural ideas of all kinds are welcomed.”

That’s pretty broad. But the editors go on: In a college town, “the college is not only a major employer, but also the reason for more plentiful shops, restaurants, and entertainment businesses.” And it has to look like a college town, too: “It doesn’t seem right to call a place a college town if you can’t tell classes are in session with a quick glance at the mix of people on a busy sidewalk.”…

For example, what would Baltimore be without the Johns Hopkins University? The economic equivalent of a smoldering hole in the ground, that’s what. Or consider Rochester or Syracuse, N.Y., from the same perspective. And what about Boston and Philadelphia—are they “college towns”?

As you’ll see from the list below, most of Livability’s “best” college towns are relatively small, remote places, based on colleges that are highly ranked by the Princeton Review. Livability, true to its name, also factored in cost of living and walkability. (College towns, by their nature, should be among the most pedestrian-friendly communities America has left.)

This sounds like a very traditional use of the term “college town”: places that are heavily dependent on the university or college and that are quaint yet cosmopolitan enough. I like the contrast with the big cities which often have a variety of colleges and amenities that cater to college students, faculty, and staff.

This leads to a few thoughts:

1. How many college students today pick colleges based on it being in a “college town”? The surrounding atmosphere must matter some.

2. How have college towns been affected by the recent economic downturn and its effects on college campuses? Let’s say the college bubble bursts like some are predicting: how badly hit will college towns be? Another way to put it might be to ask how resilient these communities would be if the college/university started struggling or is this another example of what could happen to communities that rely too heavily on one industry.

3. Why not include an attitudinal component with local residents asking how much they like or approve of or even know what is going on with the college? Town and gown relationships can be difficult and simply because a place is a “college town” doesn’t mean there isn’t some tension.

4. It would be interesting to trace the history of college towns and their appeal. Historically, were there advantages to having colleges in communities that were heavily dependent on them?

5. Just because a place looks like it is where learning should take place (and this seems very constructed), does it actually improve learning?

How mowing your lawn might be soon affect your ability to get a mortgage

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A new proposed FICO score algorithm will include things like whether you have been cited for not mowing your lawn:

Just when you thought you knew all the ins and outs of how your credit score is calculated, it all changes. Last month FICO announced a new partnership with CoreLogic to create a new FICO score for use in the mortgage industry. While there are many credit bureaus that provide scoring on Americans, your FICO score is the report most widely used for mortgages. That’s because FHA and other government-backed mortgages use FICO as part of their means testing for approval. If FICO standards change, it could have a widespread effect on families looking for mortgage approval…

The addition of the CoreScore to your FICO will greatly increase a bank’s access to your personal finance information. The more doors that are open, the more doors that you will need to guard—even doors you didn’t know existed.

It’s not common knowledge, but seemingly unrelated aspects of your finances can get exposed through public information. Town ordinances and zoning are becoming increasingly restrictive in communities. There are plenty of local governments that can cite you for not mowing your lawn, leaving your garbage out on the curb overnight or owning one too many dogs. These types of local penalties may seem ridiculous and unfair, but they do have teeth. Many localities have the ability to place a lien on your property if citations remain outstanding. That means that it could get noticed by the new FICO score.

Failure to mow your lawn really could lead to a rejection on your mortgage application. The addition of the CoreScore opens the floods gates on financial information that was once unavailable to lenders.

From a lender’s point of view, having extra information is helpful. Yet, I wonder at the statistical connection between maintaining a lawn (and avoiding local fines) and paying a mortgage: are they always linked? Having too many pets/animals indicates less of a likelihood of paying a mortgage?

I wonder if there isn’t something else at work here. Given the increase in foreclosures, mortgage holders behind in their payments, and underwater mortgages, perhaps lenders are more interested in how well the home will be maintained so that if the lender does end up reclaiming the property in a few years, they don’t have to drastically reduce the price or spend money to fix up the home.

A last comment: the article suggests such local ordinances “may seem ridiculous and unfair” but there are at least two big rationales behind him. First, it is all about property values. You may want the right to keep garbage and junk on your property or return your yard to a more natural state but your neighbors could be negatively affected. Second, the uptick in foreclosures in recent years has pushed many communities to adopt stricter regulations as homeowners and banks don’t keep up some properties, affecting nearby property values as well as contributing to the appearance of social disorder.

Writing a story with “24 of the Funniest [American] town names”

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There are a number of communities in the United States with humorous names. This story weaves together 24 of them:

“I was holed up in Boring, Oregon, wondering whether I should try someplace different. So I hopped in my car and drove to Why, Arizona, to figure things out. After a few days I found my answer in Whynot, Mississippi: I needed a town with some life to it. I made a beeline for Disco, Tennessee, where I danced so much, I wore out my shoes. The next day, I headed to Loafers Glory, North Carolina, for a new pair.”

“Afterward I looked sharp enough to take a break in Handsome Eddy, New York. Eddy wasn’t around, but I knew where to find him—in Loveladies, New Jersey, where it seemed that all the women were trying to get to Husband, Pennsylvania…”

You get the idea. I’ve always wondered if there is some common characteristic behind these more unique community names: were the founders unusual people? Are these the result of some strange history? Are these primarily about differentiating these communities from more conventionally named places? Are these mainly publicity stunts that stuck? On the other hand, perhaps we should be asking why so many community names seem rather drab. Why not liven it up more and go for more phrases or colorful descriptions? American place names seem to go for efficiency with a lot of places named for famous people. And, of course, there is always the rise of suburban sprawl names that take common words like Forest, Park, Glen, Hills, and so on in a variety of combinations…

Finding the most extroverted town in America in Iowa

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A “marketing research firm” recently named Keota, Iowa as the most extroverted town in America. How exactly does a researcher determine the most extroverted town?

Pyco, which claims to specialize in “psychological profiling,” ranked 61.639 percent of adults in Keota (pop. 1,009, according to the 2010 census)  as extroverts — just beating Manchester, N.Y.’s 60.570 percent for the title of most outgoing. Yet despite this designation, locals are reportedly confused as to how they ranked so high…

In fact, nobody outside Pyco quite understands the methodology for the rankings. According to the Register, the firm collected data in part from other research firms, and processed the numbers with a proprietary 2,000 page algorithm. Keith Streckenbach, the company’s chief operating officer, could not specify which factors most affected whether a person was deemed extroverted.

Keota’s designation has led to a series of stories in Iowa media examining the honor. One piece on the blog Eastern Iowa News Now interviewed Kevin Leicht, the chairman of the University of Iowa’s Sociology Department, and found that extroversion may be a trait inherent to small towns…

Pyco’s algorithm found that only about 57 percent of New York City adults are extroverts.

Several questions follow:

1. I would be really curious to know how this proprietary data was collected. Is it culled from the Internet? Could it be partially determined by the number of local businesses or “third places” (found in the Yellow Pages or some other kind of community listings)?

2. The differences between Keota and New York City are not huge: 61.6% to 57%. If you factor in the margin of error from these estimates (possibly fairly large since how many data points could there be in each town of more than 1,00 people across the US?), these figures may be close to the same. It would be worthwhile to see how broad the range of data for communities really is: are there towns in the US where less than 40% of people are extroverts?

3. Would we expect an extroverted community to know they are more extroverted than another community? Put another way, are extroverts more self-aware of their extroversion or are introverts the ones that are more likely to be aware of these things?

4. Since this data was collected by a marketing firm, I assume they would want to sell this information to companies and other organizations. So if Keota is the most extroverted town, will residents now see different kinds of promotional campaigns in the near future?