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Why lovable places matter to sustainability

2012-02-14T13:26:37Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

Yesterday I presented a gallery of places that inspire romance – places that kindle love, if you will. But I submit that they are also lovable themselves. Is that important? Should those of us who care about sustainability also care whether a place is “lovable”? Shouldn’t we only care about the resources it consumes and the pollution it generates?

I grappled with a related question almost three years ago, in an article titled, in part, “Does beauty matter?” I answered my own question with a tentative yes, but I’ll confess to being made restless in my conviction by the whole “but it’s in the eye of the beholder” thing. If we can’t reach consensus on a definition, then how do we know when we have it?

I’ll grant that lovability – or beauty – can be elusive to define, especially over time. For people, being what we now consider overweight and unattractive was once considered a desirable indicator of wealth. I’m told that lots of people hated Victorian architecture before they started loving it.

But being elusive to define with certainty is not the same thing as being unimportant. While there may not be unanimity, there are in fact places that are pretty darn close to being universally loved. And they are the ones most likely to be defended and cared for over time, and thus the most sustainable in a very literal way. We need more of them.

I think I’ve always felt this intuitively, but I wasn’t able to articulate it until I came across the work of an architect and thinker who now is also my friend. Steve Mouzon, whose photography I featured yesterday, is unabashed in his declaration of why lovable buildings and places matter:

“Any serious conversation about sustainable buildings must begin with the issue of Lovability. If a building cannot be loved, then it is likely to be demolished and carted off to the landfill in only a generation or two. All of the embodied energy of its materials is lost (if they are not recycled.) And all of the future energy savings are lost, too. Buildings continue to be demolished for no other reason except that they cannot be loved.”

Steve prefers to link sustainability with “lovable” rather than “beautiful,” because he acknowledges that there is a cold sort of beauty that can be hard to love, and ultimately it is lovability that will lead to the care and retention of buildings. I’m adding “places” to buildings, but I am confident that Steve would agree with my addition. (His writings on the issue have focused on buildings because of concerns he has with the way they are evaluated in green rating systems.)

Steve also believes that, while lovability cannot be precisely defined, there are elements one can draw from classicism that can “stack the deck in our favor” when creating new buildings: time-honored proportions such as the golden mean. I would add that places that are in close harmony with nature compose another set of cards with which to stack the deck (to extend the metaphor, which as a writer I’m not entirely sure is a good idea).

He begins to approach the influence of nature in one of his more intriguing ideas, that “harmony with the region” may be an indicator of what may be lovable:

“Simply put, we might love a little clapboard cottage in Beaufort and a stone farmhouse in Tuscany, but putting that clapboard cottage on a Tuscan hillside would look absolutely ridiculous.

“I suspect that much of the mystery of lovable buildings may be embedded somewhere in the harmony with the region. I don’t understand it now, but it’s one of my top priorities, because we really need to figure this out.”

In the region where I grew up, the North Carolina mountains, there is a lot of stone and natural wood in some of the architecture. That is immensely harmonious with the region, in my opinion. I would also invoke the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright here: Wright is unpopular with urbanists because he favored a spread-out sort of aesthetic. I get that, but when you see one of his Prairie School buildings with strong horizontal lines and roofs actually on the flat prairie, it makes sense to me. Similarly, Fallingwater, perhaps his best known residence, fits incredibly well into its natural setting, cascading architecture above cascading waterfalls. His architecture has a lot of fans – and a lot of staying power – for a reason.

Basically, I agree with Steve that we don’t fully understand what makes a place (or a building) lovable. And I would add that mimicking a place that is lovable may not always be a safe answer. But I also agree that the topic is very important. In what possible definition of “sustainability” can a place fit if it is not literally sustained? In order to sustain something, we need to care. And we don’t have enough people who will care just because the consumption or pollution numbers argue that they should. We are so much better positioned if they, and we, can also do so out of love.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

City places that inspire romance (a gallery of walkability, part 2)

2012-02-13T13:37:51Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

London (photo by Chuck Wolfe)

There is a reason that romantic movies and novels are set in cities such as Paris, Rome, Prague, San Francisco, and New York. Or perhaps in picturesque historic towns and villages. And why they are seldom set in, say, sprawling Tysons Corner, Virginia or on Interstate Highway 610 during a Houston rush hour.

Love can happen anywhere, anytime - that's part of the wonderful magic of life - but the odds are much higher in nature or in a walkable city neighborhood (or both at the same time!) than in sprawl, or while driving in traffic. So this week, let's celebrate some of the world's more romantic walkable city places. London, above, has many of them.

Madrid (photo by Steve Mouzon)

Last year at this time, I posted a short essay titled, "What Do the World's Most Romantic Cities Have in Common?" These characteristics formed part of my answer:

Strong sense of place anchored by historic preservation
Lively, walkable, diverse downtowns
Compact development patterns
Extensive and well-used public transportation
Great public spaces for lively human interaction
Parks and quiet places mixed in with urbanity
Great traditional neighborhoods with a strong sense of community
Welcoming to people of diverse cultures

Tivoli Garden, Copenhagen (photo by La Citta Vita)

Two weeks ago, to mark my 1000th post as a blogger, I posted "A Gallery of Walkability," drawing from my own collection of photos. It took me a long time to put that together, but it was a labor of love. I promised then that I would do a follow-up featuring the work of other great photographers, including some of my enormously talented friends. This is the promised follow-up and assembling it, too, was a labor of love.

The top two photos above are by my friends Chuck Wolfe and Steve Mouzon, respectively. I'll say more about them below. The one just above from Copenhagen, a city whose walkability is legendary, is from La Citta Vita, whom I've never met. I've turned to LCV's photos, which are available for noncommercial use via creative commons license, often because they are so good at depicting the best of city life.

Market Street, San Francisco (photo by Payton Chung)

I think Payton may be the only one of my photographer friends whom I have known longer in person than online. His photo above is fantastic. Read his blog here.

New York City (photo by Ed Yourdon)

Ed Yourdon is like La Citta Vita in that I use his great photos, in his case often of New York City, time and again.

Paris (photo by Steve Mouzon)

Steve Mouzon is not just one of my favorite photographers but also one of my favorite thinkers and writers about sustainability. His book Original Green deserves to become a classic. The scene above virtually defines "romantic city place."

Tokyo (photo by Payton Chung)

(Amsterdam (photo by Claudio Alejandro Mufarrege)

Amsterdam has not only romantic beauty but an approach to urbanism that allows over half of all trips to be made by walking, bicycling, or public transportation.

Miami Beach (photo by digitalkunde)

Miami Beach has a lot going for it, including that it is amazingly conducive to a lifestyle based on walking. The City of Miami may also be headed in that direction, thanks to a new zoning code whose writing and adoption was led by my colleague on the Smart Growth America board, Ana Gelabert-Sanchez, named "public official of the year" in 2010.

la Promenade Plantee, Paris (photo by Fiona Cullinan)

New York’s City’s hugely successful and justly celebrated High Line wasn’t the first elevated urban railroad bed to be converted into a much-loved linear park. As I wrote last year in a Bastille Day tribute to the Promenade Plantee in Paris, NYC planning director Amanda Burden acknowledges the wonderful French park as the model for the newer one in New York.

North Beach, San Francisco (photo by Payton Chung)

Union Station, Washington, DC (photo by Pedro Szekely)

I made a point to note in my walkability gallery two weeks ago that a great urban public space needn't be outdoors. Likewise for one that inspires romance. This spectacular photo of DC's Union Station shows why.

Florence/Firenze (photo by Chuck Wolfe)

This is another of Chuck Wolfe's fine photos. If you can't feel a romantic tingle in a magnificent public square in Florence while listening to classical guitar, you may have a problem. Which makes me wonder about that guy in the foreground.

Chuck is a prolific writer who places his work in The Huffington Post, The Atlantic Cities, the Sustainable Cities Collective, several publications in the Pacific Northwest, on his own blog myurbanist and likely in additional places I haven't discovered yet. He usually builds his writing around images, most frequently his own. I frequently use his postings as a starting point for my own writing, as I did in this autobiographical essay on how I imagined cities as a kid.

Madrid (photo by Steve Mouzon)

And this is another of Steve's. City parks can add immeasurably to our well-being and can even help spur revitalization of distressed neighborhoods. Unfortunately, budget squeezes are forcing some cities to reduce their budgets to maintain and improve them.

Puerto Cruz de Tenerife (photo by esSos.de)

Portland, Maine (photo by Jane LaFleur)

City markets are great places to take a special friend and enjoy the flavor (sometimes literally) of a city. This photo is by my friend Jane LaFleur, who directs Friends of Midcoast Maine. Last fall, I wrote about some of her outstanding work furthering citizen engagement in community planning.

Monemvasia (Greece) (photo by Robert Wallace)

I love this photo, of an obviously romantic place I have never personally visited.

Saint-Raphael, France (photo by Chuck Wolfe)

This photo evokes a memory of a visit I made to Avignon some time back. I want to go again.

Grand' Place, Brussels (photo by Vase Petrovski)

La Grand' Place, a World Heritage Site, is without question one of the most magnificent city squares in the world.

Brooklyn Heights, NY (by Josh Libatique); Copenhagen (by Niels Andersen)

These two photos speak pretty well for themselves, no?

Georgetown, Washington, DC (photo by Dmitri Lyakhov)

As an unabashed lover of all things non-political about Washington (and some would be surprised at how little the real DC has to do with politics), I may love Georgetown's back streets and pathways most of all.

Third Ward, Milwaukee (photo by John December)

When I announced that I was going to do this gallery, John December offered up this photo of a historic neighborhood in Milwaukee. There is something inherently impressionistic about historic neighborhoods, because they engage our imagination. They also tend to be inherently green. Milwaukee, by the way, hosts a development-in-progress that is poised to become perhaps the nation's most ambitious example of adaptive reuse of older buildings.

New York City (photo by La Citta Vita)

This looks like Paris but is really New York. What a wonderful evocation of romance by La Citta Vita. I compiled my own bit of homage to a romantic New York City evening here.

Capital Crescent Trail, Montgomery County, MD (photo by M.V. Jantzen)

I have found no better photographer of the real Washington, DC region than M.V. Jantzen, who wonderfully licenses his work for noncommercial use via a creative commons license. He also writes an eclectic blog.

I can't tell you how many times I have bicycled through the Dalecarlia Tunnel on the Capital Crescent Trail, shown above. It must be well over a hundred. I wrote about cycling last fall.

Place des Abbesses, Paris (photo by La Citta Vita)

Ibeza (photo by Trey Ratcliffe)

In the end, sustainability is profoundly linked to place, and best when linked to places we love (more about that soon). For me, these photos show why we care when it comes to cities. Many thanks to the generosity of these photographers in sharing their work.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

A second winner at this year's Super Bowl: the walkable downtown

2012-02-10T13:37:15Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

I’ve had several occasions in the past three years or so to travel to Indianapolis, site of last Sunday’s Super Bowl. I am always struck, riding in from the airport, by how well Lucas Oil Stadium, where this year’s NFL championship game was held, fits architecturally within (or right next to, depending on your perspective) the city’s downtown. It’s an enormous building, to be sure, but the operative word here is “building,” which the stadium strives to be, with its neo-traditional brick design.

It’s about a six- or seven-block walk at most from Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, the symbolic center of the city. Most of the city’s big hotels and restaurants are also nearby. Not that Indy isn’t also plagued by sprawl and disinvested neighborhoods, by the way, but its relatively compact, walkable downtown is loaded with convenience compared to the locations of most NFL football facilities. Indeed, Lucas Oil Stadium has a "very walkable" Walk Score of 72. (By contrast, FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play, rates only a "car-dependent" 28.)

This point was not lost on the members of the press who were in town for the game. The most articulate was probably Robert Niles of the trade site Theme Park Insider, who hails the advantages of urbanism for a city hosting a major entertainment event:

“Indy nailed this Super Bowl because of infrastructure. No, its football stadium isn't the biggest. Its hotels aren't the fanciest nor are its restaurants world-renowned. But they are packed together within walking distance of each other in Indianapolis' pedestrian-friendly downtown. Take a 20-minute cab ride from the city's new airport, and you don't have to get in a car again all week. The high density of attractions gave the city a critical mass, turning downtown into a multi-day street party . . .

“It's all about convenience and walkability. People don't want to have to spend a big chunk of their vacation in taxis or rental cars, as they did in Dallas at last year's Super Bowl. If you can offer people a destination where hotels, restaurants and attractions are all within easy walking distance, you're going to have an advantage over an alternative that requires people to get into their cars and drive for 10, 20, 30 minutes or more between where they stay, where they eat and where they play.”

Niles is in the business of tourism and entertainment, and thinking about what attributes are needed for his business to succeed in the coming years. Turns out they are the same as many other businesses are now seeking: city-based convenience. He continues:

“Walkability's been an emerging issue in urban and attraction development for years. But Indianapolis just illustrated the value of walkability to everyone in the tourism business, and at the same time. People involved in planning tourism attractions now have to ask themselves: Can I afford to give up the advantage of walkability to my competitors by building an old-fashioned, car-dependent, exurban-style development? Is my attraction really so alluring that I can get away with sticking people with the inconvenience of having to drive everywhere during their visit?”

[Emphasis mine]

Peter King, the lead writer on the NFL beat for Sports Illustrated, agrees:

“It's been a great game site for the Super Bowl. So much to do downtown, all on foot, and the natives and even the drunks are in great moods. The meteorologists have helped, but there's something to be said for a vibrant downtown hosting everything at a Super Bowl, and holding the Super Bowl in a place where you never have to get in a car.”

In a second article, King continued the praise by noting that he basically didn't need a car all week, and that the New York Giants’ downtown hotel was only four blocks from the stadium.

Writing last week on The Atlantic Cities website, Emily Badger noted that Indianapolis has also taken advantage of the Super Bowl – and some resulting investment money from the NFL – to add to its urban fabric. Most notable to this writer has been the building of a youth center that the city hopes can help revitalize the troubled Near Eastside neighborhood.

In addition, Indianapolis has altered a two-block stretch of a downtown street near the convention center so that it is now a sort of woonerf, or shared civic space where pedestrians and slow-moving motor vehicles have equal rights. While the concept may seem counter-intuitive to Americans whose traffic engineers have traditionally separated walkers and cars from each other in order to allow motor vehicles to move smoothly without hurting anybody, the international experience has been positive (woonerf means, roughly, “street for living” in Dutch). Seattle, among other American cities, has begun to employ the concept in selected locations.

It must be said that some of the city’s recent building boom may not appeal to all tastes. There’s a massive new JW Marriott hotel (see the image above from Emily’s article) that takes the opposite approach from neo-traditional Lucas Oil Stadium: it’s a sleek, modernist building that dwarfs everything around it and makes no apparent attempt to complement or blend visually with the rest of downtown. To me, it seems like the prodigal cousin who comes to the family reunion with his own boom-box playing very loud music, notwithstanding the quiet jazz trio that the family mainstays had already hired. But I suppose that’s a matter of personal preference.

To return to the very positive impression that Indy’s downtown made on Niles and King, what I find most encouraging is that these guys are not urban design or environmental professionals like yours truly. Rather, they are a businessman whose industry has long been dominated by automobile-dependent sites, and a sportswriter, respectively. Their experience with Indianapolis has made them into accidental, if enthusiastic, urbanists – and that’s a very good sign to those of us who are in this field that our faith in walkability is well-placed.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

What's going on with new home sizes - is the madness finally over?

2012-02-09T13:30:32Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

After many years of dramatically increasing home size in America - from an average of 983 square feet in the 1950s up to 2300 square feet in the 2000s, despite declining household sizes - the trend appears finally to be going in the other direction. The real estate research firm Trulia found in 2010, for example, that the median "ideal home size" for Americans had declined to around 2100 square feet. More than one-third of survey respondents reported that their ideal preference was lower than 2000 square feet.

This is consistent with the forecasts of the National Association of Home Builders. (See detailed findings here.) Data from the census are also consistent in direction with those from Trulio's survey, though more subtle in the degree of change: according to the census, the median size of a new US home in 2010 was 2,169 square feet, up from 1,525 sqare feet in 1973 but down from the 2007 peak of 2,277 square feet.

So, while the recent change has been observed in the industry for a few years now, the graphs shown with this post are the best I've seen yet to depict both how out-of-control home sizes had become and the more recent trend toward downsizing. The downsizing trend is expected to continue even after the economy recovers, according to a spokesperson from NAHB.

The census data also include trends in average home size, which runs somewhat larger than median home size:

The recent downsizing is still evident and consistent with the median size data and the Trulio report..

Not all with an interest in the matter seem willing to concede the point, however. Stanton Homes, a North Carolina-based builder whose website features large new homes, groups all homes from 1,800 to 2,300 square feet (a 28 percent increase) in one category to show that the portion of homes sold within that size range has remained the same since 2006, although it has declined slightly from the preceding seven years. Even Stanton's analysis, however, shows declines since 2006 in the portion of the total new housing market claimed by homes of 2,400 square feet and larger in size, with the sharpest drop in the largest (4,000 square feet and larger) category. Stanton's data also show a decided increase in the market share claimed by homes under 1,400 square feet since the mid-2000s.

The National Association of Realtors doesn't seem ready to concede the point, either. The organization finds significance in a comparison of survey data reportedly compiled by the American Institute of Architects. This is from a recent NAR article titled, "Are Home Sizes Finally Done Shrinking?":

"In the first quarter of 2010, nearly 60 percent of the architects surveyed in AIA’s Home Design Trends Survey reported home sizes declining. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2011 and that number now has dropped to 52 percent, while 5 percent of architects are now reporting an increase in home sizes. Home sizes in the upper-end of the market, in particular, appear to be stabilizing ahead of more affordable entry-level homes."

Now, to me that sounds like a majority of architects in 2010 reported declining home sizes, and then a majority in 2011 reported even further decline. It also sounds like the Realtors are doing some wishful reporting (or at least headline-writing). But whatever.

Bear in mind that the census data include single-family, detached homes, semi-detached, and townhomes but do not include condominiums and apartments. If homes in multifamily configurations were counted, the average and median sizes would be considerably smaller and the trends perhaps more pronounced.

Meanwhile, new home size in the US is decidedly extravagant compared to that in other countries. A survey and data comparison conducted by the (now-defunct, unfortunately) British Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment found the size of an average new American home built in the 2000s to be approximately twice as large in floor space as one in Spain or France, and nearly three times as large as the average in the UK.

For more good graphs on the US trend from Trulia, go here.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

A new Native American village based on tradition helps a Tribe reclaim its sustainable roots

2012-02-08T13:30:20Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

The Ohkay Owingeh Tribe and Pueblo in New Mexico has returned to its roots with an award-winning, mixed-income housing project based on traditional Native forms. It's an exciting and inspiring project.

Built by the Ohkay Owingeh Housing Authority explicitly as an alternative to sprawl-type housing, Tsigo Bugeh Village is a $5.3 million residential community that reflects traditional pueblo living with attached units divided around two plazas, one oriented to the solstice and the other to the equinox, as the tribe’s original pueblo was built. As the Housing Authority’s website points out, the homes are attached, their scale and massing similar to the original Ohkay Owingeh pueblo: “this is key to our architectural heritage, and the idea of community living that is central to our way of life.”

As someone who has a part Cherokee ancestry and is proud of it, I can’t help but feel a bit of wistful irony in the accomplishment, given that Native American settlements were in so many respects the original sustainable communities in North America, before the arrival of European colonists. Indeed, the well-known sustainable development firm Jonathan Rose Companies highlights the pueblo form as a model:

“Like villages in the Himalayas, [traditional] Pueblo villages have a clear edge and are surrounded by fields of sustenance. The community is organized in a progression of spaces from the private realm, to the semi-private, to the most public reality, the plaza, or town square. Culture after culture, each with different ecosystems, have built their communities this way. We believe this is the natural form for human communities.”

Tsigo Bugeh Village places 40 rental homes on a 6.5-acre site. Nine have been made available at market rates, the rest reserved for those earning between 40 and 60 percent of the area median income. The Village also includes a number of traditional outdoor ovens for community use, along with a community center featuring a large kitchen, business center, exercise rooms, and laundry facilities.

The Village was built pursuant to a larger master plan to guide the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo’s future. Bestowing a national award for smart growth achievement in 2004 (when the pueblo was known as the San Juan Pueblo), the federal Environmental Protection Agency hailed the plan as the first smart growth model for Native American tribes:

“It provides a long-term growth strategy, coordinates existing infrastructure with housing and commercial development, preserves the walkable historic plazas, and encourages retail and commercial uses in a ‘main street’ style. The plan also includes design guidelines that enhance the traditional building pattern to preserve the architectural heritage of the pueblo, fostering a distinctive sense of place.”

Implementation of the plan is guided by a Tribal Planning Department and a community advisory council of neighborhood representatives.

The Housing Authority’s website points out that “Tribal leaders realized that continuing to develop sprawl housing would severely limit the land base for agricultural use and open space for future generations.” A premium was placed on involvement from the Tribal community and respect for the Pueblo’s traditions:

“This is the first tribally driven planned housing development on the reservation since the creation of the traditional housing constructed over 400 years ago, and it is the only rental housing on the pueblo. As a result, OOHA placed a focus on planning, and sought community involvement and input. We held a series of meetings to understand what our community’s housing needs were, and we asked people to tell us how their home could support their values: social, family, cultural and spiritual. We asked them what materials were most important to them in a home, and whether their current homes satisfy any of these values or needs.

“We also had esteemed storytellers in the community come to the meetings and describe their experiences growing up in the historic core of the Pueblo, with everyone’s grandmother watching over them as they played, the yearly whitewashing of plaster under the portals, and the seed ball game that was played every spring. As a result, not only was the site plan and building massing built similarly to the old pueblo, but the floor plans were developed to accommodate the many people that come through the homes on feast days.”

The Village’s landscaping comprises all native, drought-resistant plantings. The homes are equipped with energy-efficient, high-insulation windows, and those that face south have overhangs for passive solar gain. The process and financing were not simple, but that just brings all the more credit to the Tribe and Housing Authority for such an outstanding result.

I did a bit of research on the history of the Ohkay Owingeh Tribe while preparing this article. As you might imagine, it has been rich but not pretty, especially during the many years of Spanish rule, followed by those of American occupation. Only with a Supreme Court ruling in 1913 and Congressional passage of the Pueblo Lands Board Act of 1924 was the Tribe able to fully reclaim title to Pueblo land. In the decades sense, Tribal members have blended their traditions with participation in the larger American economy. In a sense, the master plan and the completion of Tsigo Bugeh Village represents a culmination of the Tribe’s reassertion of its right to a sustainable future.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

'The power of the post-industrial city'

2012-02-07T13:25:06Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

In this illuminating TED talk, Don Carter of Carnegie Mellon University places the future of Pittsburgh and other post-industrial cities in the context of global environmental trends and concerns. He makes the point that, like many so-called “shrinking cities,” Pittsburgh hasn’t really been shrinking but, in fact, expanding in the wrong way while its population remains stable.

Nonetheless, the city hasn’t been growing. But Carter believes that the proper measure of a city’s future prospects is not population growth but, rather, growth in per capita income. On that measure, it turns out, Pittsburgh is doing just fine. The problem with Sun Belt cities, he argues, is that the Sun Belt is going to become the “Drought Belt” because it is on its way to running out of water. Pittsburgh and other post-industrial cities are much better positioned for a future where “water is going to become more important than oil.” Twenty percent of the surface fresh water in the world, it turns out, is in the watersheds and water bodies of the Great Lakes and American Upper Midwest.

Enjoy:

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

What does the new economy mean for the shape of communities?

2012-02-06T13:28:58Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

About a year ago, several of us attended a meeting in Washington at which a prominent smart growth leader was showing a presentation on “the business case for smart growth.” Much of it was based on the need for everyday, face-to-face business communication within companies and the need for dense environments to facilitate efficient productivity and movement of goods. He stressed that this has always been the case, making connections to history and to studies reaching back for decades.

There was only one problem. Several meeting attendees were participating via conference call, following the presentation via their computers and internet connections in remote locations. They were virtually countering the speaker’s point as he was making it.

Indeed, a number of partners in the smart growth coalition we represented were, and are, advocating telecommuting as a way of saving transportation energy and infrastructure. The communications director for Transportation for America, a coalition whose staff is based in DC, works remotely from Seattle. An official at the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has an aggressive telecommuting program, reports that at a given moment up to a staggering 80 percent of agency employees might be working from remote locations. Heck, I have one colleague who worked for NRDC (in theory, as an employee of our San Francisco office) for five years seamlessly from Italy, for no other reason than she wanted to and was able to make it work. And so on.

Our speaker was making a 20th-century argument in a 21st-century economy.

And yet the 21st century is shaping up as a decidedly urban epoch, with downtowns more popular than they have been in 50 years and suburbs reshaping themselves in ever-more urban forms. What’s going on?

Thomas Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, believes that we are undergoing an enormous change in “how people will live and work, in how businesses will operate, and in what services and support we will need from government.” Writing in The Huffington Post, Fisher contends that the 20th-century model of large-scale, heavy industry is largely over and that the new workforce is much more independent and nimble:

“In the next economy, ‘manufacturing’ may more-often occur at a micro scale, with free-lancers 3D printing in their back bedroom or the self-employed laser-cutting products in their garage . . . Self-employed entrepreneurs rely upon durable, high-bandwidth infrastructure in order to communicate with and ship to customers globally. They need affordable health care equivalent to what large companies provide their employees. And they tend to congregate in places with a high quality of life, where other entrepreneurs go.”

So, yes, we still want to congregate, maybe more than we have in a long time, but for different reasons now.

Continuing, Fisher explains that the new economy demands changes in our built environment, to encourage adaptation of old buildings in new ways and to foster intermingled homes, workplaces, and shops:

“With the rise of the contingent workforce, people will also live and work in ways we haven't seen for a very long time. We have developed our cities based on the old economy, with residential, commercial, and industrial areas kept separate and ‘pure’ through single-use zoning. That made sense in an economy that divided our work lives from our private lives, and that spawned large-scale noxious industries that no one wanted nearby. The next economy, though, may look more like the way in which people lived and worked prior to the industrial revolution, in which home, office, and shop co-exist in some combination of physical and digital space. This may require rethinking our zoning laws to allow for a much finer-grain mix of uses and repurposing buildings designed for single functions that will have no tenants or buyers if they remain that way.”

With former mainstays of retail such as bookstores and music stores giving way to digital commerce - and workplaces getting smaller - we’ll still need urban neighborhoods, mainly for “what we can’t get any other way.” This will certainly include face-to-face conversation, not necessarily within businesses but for socializing and for impromptu encounters among entrepreneurs pursuing separate goals that are stimulated by new ideas. And we may need a new educational approach, too, that stresses creativity, since preparing students for an ordered world that is becoming less so every day could be doing them a disservice.

This, of course, leads directly to Richard Florida’s argument that we need cities more than ever, not to maximize efficiencies in the old order but in order to nourish the creativity that will be needed for success in the new. He elaborates in Business Insider:

“Our school system was designed in the Nineteenth century to socialize immigrants and provide them with the skills they needed to work on production lines. It is badly broken – a giant creativity-squelching machine—and must be retooled from the bottom up, no more tinkering at the margins. Our schools should stoke their students’ passions, unleash their talents, and nurture their creative and entrepreneurial potential . . .

“But the real key to unleashing our creativity lies in humanity’s greatest invention – the city. Cities are veritable magnetrons for creativity. Great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs—the Creative Class writ large – have always clustered and concentrated in cities. Deeper in our past the concentration of people in cities not only powered advances in agriculture, but led to the basic innovations in tool-making and the rudimentary arts that came to define civilization . . .

“Real cities have real neighborhoods. They are filled with the flexible old buildings that are ideal for incubating new ideas. They are made up of mixed use, pedestrian scale neighborhoods that literally push people out into the street, cafes and other third places, encouraging the serendipitous interactions, the constant combinations and recombinations that result in new ideas, new businesses and new industries.”

Last week I moderated a panel at the annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference, in San Diego this year. The speakers in my session included my friend and architect/planner David Dixon who, along with Kevin Ratner of the large development firm Forest City Enterprises, shared their story of why the prosperous but sprawling Columbus suburb of Dublin, Ohio, is trying to reshape its center into a much more urban form. Simply put, Dublin has several large, corporate employers who need a steady influx of creative new employees. While in a strictly business sense many of these young, new recruits probably could telecommute to perform the tasks their employers require, they simply don’t want to live and socialize in sprawl. In order to stay competitive – the most important goal of Dublin’s business leaders – the suburb must attract creative-class workers by offering more urban amenities and a much stronger sense of place.

So, in the end, our coalition speaker who was making the "business case for smart growth" was right that business needs urban densities, but perhaps not much longer for the traditional reasons he was citing. If the reasons matter - and Fisher, Florida, and the Dublin experience all suggest that they do - both city planners and companies will need to take note in order to ensure that they are prepared for them. Cities will still be cities, but education, retail, and workplaces may all need to change, along with government services and regulation. The companies and communities that figure this out first are likely to be the ones to succeed in the next economy. Likewise for urban advocates.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

How to start transforming sprawl with shared personal vehicles

2012-02-03T14:42:36Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

WheelChange, an advocate for new, smart multi-modal transportation systems, asserts that a more sustainable future of personal transportation could be based on communications technology, smaller vehicles, and sharing: “By enabling a diverse set of existing and new transportation options to work together to allow an individual access to their city, one could think of this smart multimobility future as being a set of stepping stones across a river, while the conventional car ownership model is more like the large and heavy bridge.” It is the brainchild of Dan Sturges, a Colorado-based transportation designer and entrepreneur.

The video below, produced by Sturges, is a very clever and fun animation of how such a system could be deployed as a tool in reforming sprawl into smarter, walkable communities. Enjoy!

New Wheels for Joe from Dan Sturges on Vimeo.

All props and thanks to Lisa Nisenson and her new blog Planning Edges for highlighting the video first.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

The environmental building blocks of urban happiness

2012-02-02T15:05:37Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

As regular readers may remember, I am fascinated by the relationship of our cities, and the way they are configured, to our mental and emotional well-being. The relationship of urban form to physical health is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, but how the shape of our communities and neighborhoods affects mental health and the much more elusive concept of happiness remains under-explored.

New research, however, provides some intriguing clues. In particular, a fascinating study authored by a team from West Virginia University and the University of South Carolina Upstate, and published last year in Urban Affairs Review, examined detailed polling data on happiness and city characteristics from ten international cities. In an article titled “Understanding the Pursuit of Happiness in Ten Major Cities,” the authors concluded that good urbanism contributes positively to happiness:

“We find that the design and conditions of cities are associated with the happiness of residents in 10 urban areas. Cities that provide easy access to convenient public transportation and to cultural and leisure amenities promote happiness. Cities that are affordable and serve as good places to raise children also have happier residents. We suggest that such places foster the types of social connections that can improve happiness and ultimately enhance the attractiveness of living in the city.”

As I noted last June, in the US “the pursuit of Happiness” is listed in the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence, right alongside life and liberty as a coequal “inalienable Right” of all people. That’s a lofty dose of respect from the founders of our republic. Shouldn’t it get the same respect from those of us in the business of pursuing environmental quality? Trust me: it doesn’t.

There are a lot of reasons why this is so, but surely one of them is that happiness is viewed by just about everyone outside the mental health field as highly subjective. And it is certainly difficult to measure. The effect of environmental factors on happiness is more difficult still, notwithstanding some intriguing efforts in the country of Bhutan and the cities of Victoria, Seattle, and Bogata. The concept of “healing cities,” which I profiled recently, also appears to be on the case, taking a holistic view of health that includes “physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual needs.”

The new academic study, kindly forwarded to me by Kevin Leyden, one of its authors, attempts to approach the subject with scientific rigor. Leyden and his colleagues believe that city attributes do indeed make a difference and that, as a result, “happiness and its pursuit . . . is a subject that should be of concern to scholars of urban places and urban policy.”

Of course, city aspects are not alone in influencing happiness, and neither Leyden nor I would claim otherwise. Leyden cities a “Big Seven” group of factors recognized by prior research as most substantially affecting adult happiness: wealth and income (especially as perceived in relation to that of others); family relationships; work; community and friends; health; personal freedom; and personal values.

The researchers drew from an extensive “quality of life” survey undertaken by Gallup in 2007 for the government of South Korea and published in 2008. Approximately 1,000 people were surveyed from each of ten cities: New York, London, Paris, Stockholm, Toronto, Milan, Berlin, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo. Respondents self-reported their overall degree of happiness (measured on a scale of 1 to 5) along with their degree of agreement with a range of statements designed to tease out additional factors.

Leyden’s team examined the findings, looking for statistically significant correlations. They found confirmation of the Big Seven factors, but also variations that could not be explained by the Big Seven. Examining additional findings from prior research along with data from the Gallup study, they concluded that a feeling of connectedness was a key factor in predicting happiness, and posit that the extent to which urban design fosters – rather than inhibits – that feeling may be an important additional determinant of happiness:

“Do connections with place affect happiness? Does the design of the city and its neighborhoods and the way those places are maintained have an effect on happiness? . . .

“We hypothesize that the way cities and city neighborhoods are designed and maintained can have a significant impact on the happiness of city residents. The key reasons, we suggest, are that places can facilitate human social connections and relationships and because people are often connected to quality places that are cultural and distinctive. City neighborhoods are an important environment that can facilitate social connections and connection with place itself . . .

“But not all neighborhoods are the same. Some are designed and built to foster or enable connections. Other are built to discourage them (e.g., a gated model) or devolve to become places that are antisocial because of crime or other negative behaviors. Increasingly, researchers and practitioners have become aware that some neighborhood designs appear better suited for social connectedness than others.”

The Gallup study examined a number of questions directly related to the built environment, including the convenience of public transportation, the ease of access to shops, the presence of parks and sports facilities, the ease of access to cultural and entertainment facilities, and the presence of libraries. All were found to correlate significantly with happiness, with convenient public transportation and easy access to cultural and leisure facilities showing the strongest correlation.

The statistical analysis also included questions related to urban environmental quality apart from cities’ built form, and produced additional significant correlations:

“The more respondents felt their city was beautiful (aesthetics), felt it was clean (aesthetics and safety), and felt safe walking at night (safety), the more likely they were to report being happy. Similarly, the more they felt that publicly provided water was safe, and their city was a good place to rear and care for children, the more likely they were to be happy.”

Among these, the perception of living in a beautiful city had the strongest correlation with happiness. Curiously, though, the researchers found that the perception of "clean streets, sidewalks, and public spaces" actually had a somewhat negative association with happiness. Happy people apparently find their urban environments both beautiful and messy. (Well, the survey did include New York.)

Statistics geeks will find much to pore over in this intriguing and meticulously reported study. I find that it provides empirical strength to those of us who believe that “the environment” is concerned not just with traditional pollution or land conservation (both of which remain important) but also with what and where we build; and not just with parts per billion of this or that but also with the quality of human relationships and well-being. I believe the authors of the Declaration of Independence would agree.

Related post: Why We Love the Places We Love

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

The geography of persistent unemployment contains some surprises

2012-02-01T12:00:29Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

A bad economy hurts sustainability, in part because sustainability requires new approaches that must be funded, frequently with money from investors able and willing to take chances, or from local governments whose revenues are tied to declining property values or spending.

I suppose a saving grace may be in the case of real estate development. This persistent economic slump has hurt sprawl worse than it has hurt smart growth: the market for close-in living is clearly stronger than the market for living on the fringe, and that pattern holds for commercial development as well. Changing demographics will likely ensure that the trend toward a preference for more urban environments remains even if we have a full economic recovery.

But, in any case, the economic slump is not distributed evenly across the country. And, in some places, it’s a lot more than just a slump. Take a look at this map:

The areas marked in red are those where unemployment has remained at least two points worse than the national average for 20 years or more. Those marked in green are those where unemployment has been at least two points better (i.e., lower) than the national average for 20 years or more. The other color-coding is indicated according to the length of time that a particular area has had unemployment significantly above or below the national average.

Surprised? I was. Louis Ferleger, the author of the map, writes on AlterNet that there may be little to no recovery in places of persistent high unemployment:

“There are 216 defined metropolitan (metro) and micropolitan (micro) areas—with populations ranging from 10,000 to 4 million—that have had unemployment rates at least two percentage points higher than the national average for either 20, 10, or 5 years. These are America’s dead zones. Here employment growth is stagnant or non-existent and high levels of joblessness dominate. Some areas were once prosperous while others have recently experienced economic distress. In these communities paid work is hard to find for those who have not given up looking, and widespread involuntary idleness is the norm.

“Poor employment prospects are not related to periods of recession or prosperity; these communities have not had substantial and sustainable increases in employment for lengthy stretches. America’s dead zones cannot be described as containing ‘weak labor markets’ because many have had long term unemployment problems that are more than weak and not temporary. Even in zones with only 5 years of high unemployment, the prior years were hardly marked by robust job growth.”

Ferleger observes that the “dead zones” of persistent high unemployment seem to be evenly distributed throughout the US except for the Upper Midwest and New England. Meanwhile, the “prosperous zones” are “almost entirely comprised of the Upper Midwest down to Northern Texas and New Mexico.” He suggests that the low levels of unemployment in the Upper Midwest may be explained by low population levels, and therefore a low supply in the labor market. He also notes that prosperous zones tend to be defined by a single strong dominant industry.

Ferlenger concedes that the labeling of the zones, based on sometimes large metro areas, can mask intra-regional differences that can be significant.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what all this means for the recovery of cities, especially with respect to the more urban parts of cities and regions. One quite possible outcome might be that the differences we are seeing in home values and other market indicators with regard to the ascendance of urbanism over sprawl may be even more pronounced in weak-economy regions. It may be in the “prosperous zones” where there remains a stronger market for suburbia, because city locations can’t build fast enough to meet demand, making them less affordable (or perhaps only seemingly so, if you also consider transportation costs).

The map may also suggest where green there is both a need and a ready labor market for green jobs in clean energy and other environmentally-friendly industry.

In any event, I was also struck by how the unemployment map compared to the red/blue political map from the 2008 election. It's far from a perfect match, but there is a lot of blue in the "dead zones."

Read all of Ferlenger’s analysis, some of which seems counterintuitive to me, here. His article contains tables listing the regions in the various categories.

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

Affordable housing in a "gypsy wagon"

2012-01-31T13:25:47Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

Where I come from, a lot of affordable housing – especially rural and semi-rural housing – takes the form of mobile homes. Nothing wrong with that. But I wouldn’t expect to find many in the city of Boston, and I certainly wouldn’t expect to find one there that’s handmade.

But that’s exactly what Sage Radachowsky has. He calls it a “gypsy waggon” (he likes the double-g spelling) or, if you prefer, “wheel estate”:

“Living in a tiny house is great. You use a lot less energy to heat the space. You have less space to acquire clutter. You are forced to be organized. You are mobile. The entire house cost me $4,000 to build (plus weekends for 4 months). Real estate is priced out of range of a lot of people. But wheel estate is accessible. I love living in a quiet, lovely small house of my own making.

“Lately, the City of Boston noticed the gypsy waggon when the police investigated a nearby burglary. They reported it to the Inspectional Services, so i moved it off site for the inspection, to prove that it's not a fixed structure. I hope that works.”

Radachowsky’s 88-year-old grandmother, Dorothy Vining (“growing old online,” how cool is that?) says that her grandson “likes to live simple, green, and magical.” And so it appears, looking at the photos of his “kitchen” and “bedroom.”

Radachowsky says he does have to use “an outhouse-type situation,” and he rents the space where he parks the wagon. He also rents a nearby garage that he uses as a studio to build beautiful musical instruments, with the assistance of his conservation-biologist brother in finding sustainable tropical hardwoods.

This kind of living is obviously not for everyone, and not for me, but there is something admirable about the quest to live small, as I’ve written before. I found the gypsy wagon by following links in an interview of Deek Diedricksen, a “backyard architect” of artistically-conceived micro-houses with a new book about the phenomenon. Diedrickson thinks that micro-homes are catching on in part because of the economy:

“With the job situation the way it is, there are a lot of people looking for ways to cut costs, and wondering: ‘Why do I necessarily need this gigantic house I’m working 80 hours a week to pay for, to heat, to furnish, to maintain?’ Bigger houses require much more of all of that. And a lot of people think, ‘If I can build a smaller house (or even just find a smaller house) to live in, I’m saving myself a ton of money.’ I was talking recently to someone who brought up an interesting point — that if you have a smaller house, you’re more or less not allowed to spend more money on junk, because you just don’t have the room for it.”

In the interview, published on Salon and authored by Emma Mustich, Diedrickson says he hopes that, even if his tiny concepts aren’t practical for many people, they offer ideas that can be scaled up for somewhat larger living. (See his website for more.) Indeed, his own house is a bit larger, but he believes most Americans overdo it:

“I live in a house in the 1,000-square-foot or so range, but there are four of us and a huge dog. A lot of people say I don’t live in a small house, but it’s about a third of the U.S. average, which is almost 2,500 square feet — and I have quite a bit of stuff. I feel we have quite a bit of space, considering.”

He’s got a point. He also produced this very fun and interesting video of Radachowshy’s gypsy wagon:

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

Blog post number 1000: A gallery of walkability

2012-01-30T13:32:27Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

Hackescher Markt, Berlin

I’m not sure there is any one word that describes my concept of a sustainable community place more than walkability. At least when it comes to describing the physical aspects of a place. Is it safe, comfortable, and enjoyable to walk in? Does it have an abundance of places to walk to and from? Is it human-scaled? If the answer is yes, chances are that it also has many of the characteristics that smart growth and urbanist planners strive to achieve: density, mixed uses, connectivity, appropriate traffic management, street frontages, opportunity for physical activity, and so on.

But you don’t necessarily have to ask the technical questions. It often comes down to whether a place meets the popsicle test, the Halloween test, or the tourist test (see the comment).

Tuxedo Park apartments, Miami Beach

(By the way, I'm not saying that "how walkable is it?" is the only question you need to ask to determine likelihood of sustainability. But it's a heck of a start.)

Somewhat to my amazement, this is my one thousandth blog post since I began writing them in the fall of 2007. I’ve thought a lot about how I might mark the occasion. I considered whether I should attempt to write something reflective and eloquent. But I have had other occasions to reflect on this experience, and indeed on my personal journey as a lawyer and environmental geek who found my way to working on solutions for communities. I don’t need to write those things again, and the truth is that words don’t suffice this time.

Left, Galway, Ireland; Right, Rue du Moulard, Geneva

I will say that there is no question that writing this blog has changed my career, and much for the better. It forces me to stay on top of issues. It has given me the immense satisfaction of a thousand finished work products in a little over four years. Not bad, that. It has led to amazing relationships and collaborations with some pretty talented and wonderful people. That’s one of the very best parts. I hope it has contributed a little to the conversation of ideas about communities and sustainability.

I can’t thank my readers enough for encouraging me.

Jackson Square, New Orleans

So today’s post is going to be self-indulgent. I shared with my friend and colleague Wesley that I was thinking of going more with pictures than words today. He basically said that, if a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe a thousand blog posts are worth some pictures. Thanks, my man.

These are places that I have photographed, frequently but not always while traveling, and that for me capture the essence of walkability. I’ve used some here already in various posts, but not most of them. I suspect that many readers have their own favorite walkable places and photos, but these are some of mine.

Salt Spring Island, British Columbia

Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris

I must have 30 images of this wonderful city park, and any one of them could hold a prominent place in anyone's gallery of great city places. It's that special.

St. Peter Street, New Orleans

Inner Harbor, Victoria, BC

Hackesche Hofe, Berlin

East Berlin's Hackesche Hofe, not far from the market and transit station shown at the top of this post, has an amazing series of interlocking courtyards that, uniquely in my experience, create a variety of perfectly-scaled urban environments in the heart of a very large city.

Upper West Side, New York City

Left, St. Peter Street, New Orleans; Right, Via Fillungo, Lucca, Italy

These two scenes are so similar that one might expect them to be in the same place. If there is a large city in North America more photogenic, subtly evocative and impressionistic than New Orleans, I don't know what it is. I can make a case for San Francisco, Washington or Montreal, and all are wonderful. But not as soft and subtle.

Fredericksburg, Texas

If it weren't my own gallery, I would be surprised to see a small city in Texas here. But Fredericksburg is immensely walkable (and the Hill Country around it wonderful for cycling).

Inner Harbor, Victoria, BC

Lynchburg, Virginia

Lynchburg's historic downtown has the right assets to support a comeback.

Gare TGV, Avignon

A great walkable community place needn't be historic, traditional in design, or even outdoors, as Avignon's high-speed rail station demonstrates.

Near Les Halles, Paris

Left, Roussillon, Provence; Right, Les Baux, Provence

It's not a coincidence that so many of the world's most walkable community places were built before the automobile.

City Hall, Asheville, NC

After some rocky years, my hometown of Asheville has done a lot of things right with its very walkable downtown. As a child growing up there, I learned a bit about walkability and imagined what bigger cities were like. Douglas D. Ellington designed the majestic art deco City Hall and several other prominent buildings in Asheville, including my high school.

Washington, DC

It seems right to finish the gallery with a scene just a few blocks from my home in Washington.

If you've made it this far, please accept my appreciation for your support of my writing. I'll never take it for granted.

There will be a follow-up post, by the way. I have some friends who are just ridiculously talented photographers, and who also travel this same intellectual turf. Later this week, or perhaps next, I want to feature some of their great photos of walkable community places. Trust me: you’ll be impressed.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.

The word "sustainable" is unsustainable

2012-01-27T13:37:57Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

Cartoon from xkcd via NRDC's OnEarth website.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

Can Ontario deliver the continent's best land-use plan?

2012-01-26T13:25:58Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

I’m fond of saying that the best-conceived plan for managing growth and development in North America is the Places to Grow framework adopted by the province of Ontario, Canada. Constructed pursuant to enabling legislation adopted by the province in 2005, Places to Grow addresses the future of a New Hampshire-sized region around and including Toronto, Canada’s largest city, and Hamilton, its 8th-largest. Called the “Greater Golden Horseshoe” for its bending shape around the western edge of Lake Ontario, the region also touches Lake Erie and the Georgian Bay that extends from Lake Huron.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in some of the planning sessions for Places to Grow, and in 2007 I wrote that it was the best land-use plan I have ever seen. I’m still not sure that I have seen a better one, at least in concept: the plan, if fully implemented, will channel growth to the places within the Horseshoe region where environmental impacts will be reduced compared to an unmanaged scenario, as well as to places, including distressed inner city neighborhoods, that would benefit from more investment, jobs and people.

The Horseshoe region is forecast to grow by 3.7 million people (a 47 percent population increase) and 1.8 million jobs by 2031. It is already home to a quarter of Canada’s population and will soon be the third-largest urban region in North America. Imagine the consequences if development is allowed to spread all over the land, without good planning. Imagine the lost landscape, the additional roads and traffic, the pollution, the lost habitat, the global warming emissions.

The basics of Places to Grow

Here’s how Places to Grow (full, updated text here) seeks to prevent that from happening:

By 2015, a minimum of 40 percent of new residential growth in each municipality must occur not on what is now forest or farmland but within existing cities and towns, via such measures as building on vacant parcels, converting brownfields and grayfields to new uses, and redeveloping obsolete properties.
The plan places special emphasis on downtowns, transit corridors, and “major transit station areas.” Downtown areas, in particular, must strive to accommodate about 90 residents and/or jobs per acre by 2031, with highly urban Toronto’s target set at twice that amount.
The plan recognizes that not all growth can occur in existing communities, and municipalities may also go through a process to designate greenfield areas for development. But greenfield development, when it occurs, must create complete communities, with development configurations and streets that support transit services, walking, biking, parks, and a mix of housing and jobs. And it must be built to a scale that makes efficient use of land, accommodating a minimum of about 20 residents and jobs per acre.
All growth areas must accommodate affordable housing.
Development generally may not occur outside of the designated areas. Areas important to natural resources or the environment must be protected, and there are restrictions on development of prime farmland.
To support the plan, the government hopes to provide substantial public transit investments and other necessary infrastructure over five years.

Perhaps most visibly, the new plan will allow the continued protection of a greenbelt comprising 1.8 million acres of rural and conservation land, an area over three times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the US, and just a shade smaller than Yellowstone National Park. On the large map accompanying this post, the green area is the greenbelt and related protected land; the purple areas are urbanized zones, including Toronto and its suburbs; the lines represent existing and planned major transit; and the beige area defines the limits of the planning region.

Best of all, Places to Grow has the full force and effect of law, thanks to Ontario’s Places to Grow Act of 2005. That law requires that local planning decisions, including zoning, conform to the policies in the regional plan. If there is a discrepancy, the provincial government has the authority to amend municipal decisions.

Stumbling blocks

To say that this undertaking took massive amounts of time, process, cooperation, understanding, and political will is a gross understatement. It’s a remarkable achievement unequalled by anything similar to date in the US. But how does it all look now, a few years down the road since the plan’s 2006 adoption?

It’s a 25-year plan, of course, and it’s way soon to tell what the final outcome will be. But some pieces are falling into place. For starters, the Ontario Growth Secretariat reports a high degree of municipal compliance:

“There are 21 upper- or single-tier municipalities and 89 lower-tier municipalities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. All of them have undertaken work to implement the Growth Plan since its release in 2006.

“All 19 upper- and single-tier municipalities with official plans have adopted amendments to conform to the Growth Plan. These are currently in effect or in the approvals process. Two of the upper-tier municipalities - the County of Dufferin and the County of Northumberland - do not have official plans. Both, however, have completed growth management strategies to provide guidance to area municipalities.

“Nearly half of the lower-tier municipalities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe have adopted an official plan amendment to conform to the Growth Plan.”

That said, some regional environmentalists have been distinctly unhappy - not with the provincial goverment, but with a failure on the part of some municipalities to implement Places to Grow in good faith. In a scathing 2009 report (three years into the 25-year implementation period) titled Places to Sprawl, the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance charged that four of the 21 upper-tier (basically, county-level) municipalities had "passed, or drafted, official plan amendments that contain growth strategies that directly contradict the intent and spirit of the Places to Grow Act."

The sharpest criticisms were directed at the Durham region, which, according to a local Sierra Club leader's statement in a press release, "completely disregarded" the planning law and overestimated job growth projections "to justify the destruction of prime agricultural land and environmentally significant areas." That's a pretty sharp accusation. A separate Sierra Club statement noted that the Durham region was the only municipality to formally oppose the creation of the Ontario Greenbelt. The report also charged Niagara Region, York Region, and Simcoe County with serious implementation shortcomings. (It also found some municipalities to praise.)

An editorial published last week in the Toronto Star criticized municipalities in the region for a different problem, inconsitent compliance with the plan's direction that existing communities absorb a fair share of new development. The article called for the province to tighten the rules to limit local discretion so that the intent of the law and plan could be realized.

But a lot of progress, too

More optimistically, the Ontario Growth Secretariat has reported that the mix of housing types in the region is already shifting to a denser form that will consume less land, shorten driving trips, and promote more walkability and transit use. In particular, in the five years immediately prior to plan adoption, the share of multifamily and attached housing starts in Toronto, Hamilton, Oshawa and their inner suburbs was 53 percent; in the five years since adoption, the share has increased to 62 percent. The share of detached, single-family housing starts has declined from 47 to 38 percent. Even in the outer parts of the region, the share of multifamily and attached housing starts has risen from 29 to 41 percent after the plan’s adoption, while the share of detached, single-family housing starts has declined from 71 percent to 59 percent.

The protests of the Star notwithstanding, of the 63,000 new residential units that were added to the Greater Golden Horseshoe between June 2009 and June 2010, approximately 44,300 - or 70 percent - were located within the existing development footprint.

An article written by Vince Versace and published last summer in the Daily Commercial News and Construction Record summarized a number of significant construction projects that have taken place in designated urban centers since the plan's adoption:

"[The plan's] directive for downtown growth has resulted in numerous construction projects such as Oshawa’s new consolidated courthouse, the downtown campus for the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, a YMCA facility and the GM Centre arena and entertainment venue.

"In downtown Kitchener, construction of a new Health Sciences Campus of the University of Waterloo was completed and the Waterloo Region Consolidated Courthouse is under construction.

"The plan has also helped drive investments in cultural, recreational and civic infrastructure to help “create vital, mixed-use downtown communities”. Construction resulted across Golden Horseshoe communities such as the Pickering Recreation Complex, Brantford Civic Centre, Mississauga Civic Centre public square, Peel Heritage Complex restoration, Peterborough Market Hall restoration and Brock University’s School of the Performing Arts in St. Catharines.

"Provincial investment in urban growth-geared projects ranged from $1 million for Brantford’s Civic Centre to $379 million for Kitchener’s Waterloo Region Consolidated Courthouse.

"Other projects to receive provincial funding were Hamilton’s Lister Block receiving $7 million and Toronto’s Ryerson Student Learning centre which received $45 million."

The progress on transit is also impressive: the Secretariat reports that, according to data collected by the Canadian Urban Transit Association, the annual number of passenger trips taken by transit in the Greater Golden Horseshoe has grown steadily from 526 million trips in 2004 to 657 million trips in 2009. In addition, approximately $8.6 billion has been invested since 2006 in public transit across Ontario, including $4.1 billion in GO Transit (which serves the Toronto and Hamilton metro areas).

In addition, in 2006, the Province established an entity called Metrolinx to coordinate transportation planning and operations across the greater Toronto and Hamilton Area and as a mechanism to implement the growth plan. In 2008, Metrolinx released a regional transportation plan called The Big Move, a sort of transportation companion to Places to Grow. The Big Move outlines a $50 billion long-range strategy to guide transportation planning and investments across the region.

Aspirations and expectations

These are impressive achievements and impressive numbers, and there is every reason to think that they will continue to get better. Recall that population is expected to grow by 47 percent over the 25-year planning period. The provincial government projects that, under Places to Grow, the increase in developed land across the Horseshoe during that time will be only 14 percent, instead of 39 percent without the plan; and that the average density of development across the region will increase by 20 percent, instead of declining by 2 percent as it would without the plan. Absolute greenhouse gas emissions from transportation will increase under the plan as the region absorbs 3.7 million new people and 1.8 million new jobs by 2031. But, because emissions will decrease on a per capita basis, total emissions will grow only 13 percent while population grows by 47 percent.

With plans as ambitious as this one - and it really has no equal in the US - some problems with implementation are inevitable. Indeed, if there were none, I might suggest that the province's goals were too modest. But at least the citizens and advocates of the Horseshoe region can argue about whether goals are being met: that's a much better debate to have than whether there should be any legally meaningful goals at all. And at some point the enforcement mechanisms available to the province can come into play.

I’m not going to go out on a limb and say that I expect everything about Places to Grow to be perfect, or that continued support and vigilance by environmental interests won’t continue to be absolutely necessary. But I can think of about a hundred regions south of the Canadian border, including the one I live in, that I fervently wish were attempting something this good.

(Notes: In March of last year, a second Places to Grow plan was initiated, this one for northern Ontario. "A Place to Stand, a Place to Grow" is the title of a much-loved song that became a sort of unofficial anthem for Ontario.)

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Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s sustainable communities video channel.

How a rain garden cleans industrial pollution

2012-01-25T13:33:43Z

Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC

(Note: Today’s post was conceived and largely authored by my friend and frequent collaborator, Lee Epstein. Lee is an attorney, land use planner, and sustainability advocate working in the mid-Atlantic region.)

As NRDC’s water program rightfully emphasizes, one of the most vexing conundrums in highly urban areas is how to handle polluted rainwater runoff. The way we used to do it, shunting it out of sight into the nearest creek or river, as fast as possible, just won’t do anymore. We now know that untreated stormwater has lots of deleterious effects on the environment. Polluted runoff carries with it a toxic brew of heavy metals and oil compounds from motor vehicles, tons of loose dirt, nitrogen and phosphorus from construction sites and lawns, and everything else you can think of – or would rather not – that forms the detritus of our modern lives.

These pollutants wreak havoc in rivers, lakes and estuaries. Additionally, rooftops, parking lots and streets can get pretty hot on sunny days, so add thermal pollution to the mix. Finally, hardened urban surfaces don’t allow rain to trickle down through the soil and slowly recharge groundwater and streams; rather, stormwater runs furiously off these “impervious” surfaces, with volumes that erode the sides of streams, adding more sediment to the water column and gouging away any usable natural habitat.

Yet we also need urban density to absorb growth and development that would otherwise take the form of suburban sprawl, spreading even more pavement around watersheds. Density protects watersheds from new sources of runoff at the same time that it can complicate the cleaning up of existing polluted waterways.

Just as part of redeveloping cities and towns in a sustainable way must involve integrating pleasant, useable green space and nature into urban environments, another part of the equation must be creating more appropriate means to handle polluted rainwater. Fortunately, there’s been a good deal of work done over the past decade along these lines. This blog has featured much of this thinking, particularly with regard to “green infrastructure” and how it can serve multiple functions.

One of the most challenging things about dealing with stormwater in a city, however, is the fact that a city is, by definition, already largely urban. So bringing it back to a condition where its remaining (or now-buried) waterways are part of a living, functioning system isn’t easy or cheap. As redevelopment proceeds, more green can be required, such as green roofs, or plantings in parking areas and along streets that double as a means to infiltrate and clean stormwater. But sometimes, the green “kick in the pants” can come from some other demand or some other opportunity.

Seattle – like many a coastal or riverfront town -- is a major port city, and many of its edges are highly industrialized with port-serving facilities. One wouldn’t think to go to one of these rough-and-tumble sites to see a “rain garden.” (Rain gardens are one of the green practices used by stormwater managers to treat and infiltrate runoff. They’re basically depressions dug into the ground whose layers of soil mimic more natural areas, where water filters slowly through the ground, and where plants “take up” nutrients and trace elements that might otherwise become pollutants.)

But a recent article by Seattle Public Television’s KCTS 9 multimedia reporter, Katie Campbell, explained “how does an industrial rain garden grow?” in just such an unlikely location.

First, the scene described in Campbell’s story: Commencement Bay, Port of Tacoma. Very industrial setting. Lots of pavement, warehouses, container ship operations and… containers -- acres of containers. This is a major cargo shipping port. Totem Ocean Trailer Express (TOTE), a shipping company that hauls cargo between Tacoma and Alaska, couldn’t meet some of the tight pollutant discharge requirements in its Washington State industrial stormwater permit. With all that galvanized metal (from shipping containers and the metal sides of buildings), it’s pretty logical that there might be something not so good running off the parking areas, into the storm drains, and straight into the Bay. In this case, that something turned out to be zinc, which can be extremely hazardous to marine life. The pollution wasn’t easily visible; reportedly, the storm drain regularly emptied clear water into the Bay. But it was insidious, a silent toxin.

The customary response might have been to hire an engineering firm to develop an industrial-type solution, a mechanical filtering system or an expensive settlement and treatment basin. Instead, TOTE engaged David Hymel of Rain Dog Designs to design and supervise installation of a rain garden – for about $24,000, a fraction of the cost of an industrial-engineering solution. Pavement was dug up and removed along a thin strip of land, into which was mixed compost and mulch, and then some 600 plants and shrubs were planted. Runoff was directed into this rain garden. As a result, stormwater discharges directly into the water were reduced substantially and the discharge limits are now being met.

We asked Hymel about the water quality results: could the pollution be entering the waterway via infiltration rather than directly? While this is a possibility (and sometimes a problem in urban places where there are legacy polluted soils beneath the pavement), it is unlikely here, he said. Zinc largely binds up in the upper crust of compost and mulch, he reported and, I expect, some plants might even take up trace amounts as a nutrient.

So, are rain gardens a solution to every urban stormwater runoff problem in every place? Of course not, but as was shown here, a little ingenuity can go a long way to resolving some of these types of problems with non-traditional solutions – solutions that introduce some green among the urban gray infrastructure and that mimic nature, if they cannot replace it. In cities, rain gardens and other bioinfiltration techniques can often be installed in the sidewalk-to-curb strip along streets and in large planters in urban settings. Rainwater can also be harvested and recycled for beneficial uses – in chiller towers, fire suppression systems, and for watering and fountain features.

Stormwater runoff is an issue of increasing environmental importance. Greening our urban areas is often an issue of increasing economic and social importance. Some cities, such as Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are beginning to come up with solutions that resolve both problems. So are places like a heavy industrial site in Tacoma, Washington, where a little green has now sprung up in a very unlikely place.

David Hymel and TOTE are featured in this nicely informative video about the installation of TOTE’s rain garden:

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page. Please also visit NRDC’s Sustainable Communities Video Channel.