Planning

Interesting report out from Brookings – The State of Metropolitan America. It’s fully readable with lots of good comparative graphics. The ‘five new realities’ from the exec summary pull out the major trends, although the report makes more sense when you read through their descriptions of the types of metro areas.

Speaking of the graphics, there’s a great interactive map feature online with the report, that shows various statistics at the metro area, city, suburb, and state level – like change in foreign born population, how people commute, all kinds of stuff that are talked about in the report. It’s simple and relatively easy to use.

Consider the previous Brookings report along with this article in the Harvard Business Review about the Unintended Consequences of Cul-de-Sacs, probably the most representative form of development for the American auto-dependant suburb. Could it be that along with the demographic shifts occurring in cities/suburbs is an awareness that current patterns of development are not affordable in the long-term, for the new residents of these places?

Lots has been written lately about re-tooling or retrofitting the suburbs to make them more sustainable – mostly from a transportation perspective. So there’s recognition that connectedness is inherently a good thing, and maybe now we’re swinging back around to pre-war development layouts. Many more pieces to this puzzle than just streets, though. If you’re going to make a community more connected, more walk/bike-able, then you need a local destination, like a park, or a store, or a community school, etc.

 

The OASIS GIS mapping site is about to have a major upgrade with this 2.0 version, now in beta. Very nice UI design, the timeline feature for aerial photography and the location info are interesting and useful.

NYC now has a program where you can officially be a recycling champion (some might say 'nag') for your apartment building, which they've apparently based on 'market research' (focus groups for trash?) plus the results of the waste chara

 

I've been to some remote places: the southwestern tip of Costa Rica, the Andes of Peru. Seeing a dark sky, filled with stars and other celestial bodies is awe-inspiring, to say the least. David Owen has written a good article in the New Yorker about the problem of light pollution - the how outdoor artificial light is making it harder to find a dark place to see the beauty of the night sky. The article also mentions some interesting issues with the prevalence of bright outdoor lighting for 'security' purposes:

"Marcus Felson, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, has concluded that lighting is effective in preventing crime mainly if it enables people to notice criminal activity as it’s taking place, and if it doesn’t help criminals to see what they’re doing. Bright, unshielded floodlights—one of the most common types of outdoor security lighting in the country—often fail on both counts, as do all-night lights installed on isolated structures or on parts of buildings that can’t be observed by passersby (such as back doors). A burglar who is forced to use a flashlight, or whose movement triggers a security light controlled by an infrared motion sensor, is much more likely to be spotted than one whose presence is masked by the blinding glare of a poorly placed [flood light]."

Kudos the the International Dark-Sky Association for trying to keep our night skies visible and helping us to use less energy in the process. Another interesting proposal comes from the group Civil Twilight, who won a Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Award for their design concept: streetlights that respond to ambient moonlight, dimming and brightening each month as the moon cycles through its phases.

New York Magazine has an interesting article on (nominally) Jersey City, but it is really about the fast pace of gentrification in the New York metro area within different neighborhoods. About our search for the next neighborhood that is interesting, but not yet expensive. Still has the feel like we are moving into a place with real neighborhood character and home grown shops, but has the more refined and big time amenities that we like and may have lived with in other neighborhoods. Basically, we all want the best of both worlds, we want it all to be very convenient, and we don't want to pay that much for it.

Toronto, where I came from, is a metropolitan, multicultural, dynamic city in which people are notorious for talking wistfully of living somewhere else. I assumed that by moving to New York I’d escape that wistful longing, and I did, sort of. But what I found is that in New York, people don’t fantasize so much about other cities—London, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin—as they do about other eras. A friend of mine recently moved to Bushwick, the next frontier in gentrified Brooklyn, and he always sells it by saying, “It’s like Soho in the eighties or Williamsburg in the nineties.” You need only to flip through On the Street, Amy Arbus’s new book of photos taken in the East Village in the early eighties, or read reviews of Up Is Up But So Is Down, an anthology of writing from the same era, to be reminded of a time when, as one reviewer put it, the city was “infused with the energy and violence of a city where blackouts and social protests were routine, the East Village was still filled with tenements, and the subway was covered with graffiti”—and then, oddly, to feel nostalgic for that time. And yet we regard this nostalgia with a self-mocking irony. Gawker, for a time, reported gruesome murders under the snarky catchall heading “NYC Is EDGY!”—the joke being that we’re glad it really isn’t while simultaneously kind of wishing it still was.

Based on the latest census data, looks like the Mountain West and the South Atlantic states are the biggest percentage gainers.

Very interesting article in the New York Times on the "special" treatment of religion in government laws and regulations. Just how far should we go to accommodate any minority at the expense (literally and figuratively, as the article says -- regulation or the lack of it often comes at a cost) of the general public?

Like most Boulder County residents, several church members said they cherish the open space preserved by the county’s past land-use decisions. But they think the county was wrong to reject the church’s proposal.

Lanny Pinchuk, a church member who formerly served on the county planning board, praised all that the county has done to preserve the environment. “But you can’t keep people from coming to the religious institution of their choice,” he said. “I feel that is just, well, un-American.”

Church leaders and members said their current proposal was the “forever plan,” the last expansion the church would make on this site.

But they all struggled to explain why it is an unconstitutional burden for them to have to turn away newcomers now when, if they continue to grow, they will inevitably have to turn away people when their “forever” building is full.

“At some point, we’re going to have to say we can’t accommodate any more; I mean, we’re not going to have a 100-story building over there,” said Gerry Witt, a founding church member who has recently put his house on the market so he and his wife, Carole, can move to a less developed area on the western slope of the Rockies.

“So is there any limit?” He thought a moment, then answered his question. “Yes,” he said. “There’s God’s limit. When he says, ‘You’re at your limit,’ that’s when we will stop.”

Don't worry about a crash, just a much slower or maybe nonexistent rate of home price growth. Global Insight with some recent data:

New data released by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) reveal that price appreciation is now nearly at a standstill in almost all of the top 20 markets, and in some, prices are actually declining.

Brookings has published a comparison of land-use policies/regulations in the 50 largest metropolitan areas around the country. See where your city lies on the continuum from traditional to progressive.

The New York City Police Department really does not seem to like bicyclists. The monthly Critical Mass rides annoy them to no end, and they were not very nice to bicyclists during the 2004 Republican National Convention protests by either.

Now they have decided that the best way to get back at the bicycle community is by changing the parade permit rules and regulations to be so restrictive that pretty much anyone but a single person on a bicycle riding down the street could be in violation of the parade rules (that is not an exaggeration, 2 or more people on bicycles could be considered a parade or gathering that needs a permit).

The police department has lost all its recent court cases against bicyclists who have been arrested, and the judges in the cases have been quite harsh with the conduct of the Police. So the police have decided to change the rules heavily in their favor.

The police department has come up with an overkill and heavy-handed solution for a problem that almost does not even exist. As one New York Times columnist said, "What happened here is that a molehill became a mountain."

I urge every one to get in contact with their city council member and the mayor to voice their concern and displeasure with this ridiculous proposal by the police department.

NY Times 19 July 2006: "The Police Department wants to require parade permits for bicyclists traveling in groups of 20 or more, and any bicyclists or walkers who take to the streets in groups of two or more and disobey traffic laws for things like parades, races or protests, according to a public notice filed with the city...."