Developing Stories

Report from the hustings

Anthony Flint — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:59:00 +0000

Back from a book tour that took me through Denver, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Chicago, following stops earlier in New York (Mayor's Institute on Long Island sponsored by the Regional Plan Association) and Washington (Brookings Institution, National Building Museum, Politics & Prose bookstore). Two observations. One, people are very eager to talk about growth and our living circumstances and the physical environment we arrange for ourselves. Two, every one of these cities, while wrestling with schools and infrastructure and crime, is entering a new kind of golden age. The condo towers are rising in Seattle's Belltown, the sidewalk cafes in Denver's LoDo, Chicago's stunning Millennium Park -- all clear evidence of a continuing resurgence of interest in cities and city living. With the greater demand comes higher prices, and that led me to address, everywhere I went, the central challenge of the smart growth movement: affordability. My own prediction is that more Americans will be turning away from sprawl in the years ahead, turned off by crushing transportation and energy costs, that will quickly wipe out any inititial savings from lower sticker prices for single-family homes miles from anywhere. But for middle-class families, the worst outcome would be alternatives that are equally expensive. Inclusionary zoning and affordability requirements can help. The best solution, however, is to make livable urban neighborhoods and older suburbs as ubiquitous as sprawl. That means investment, cutting red tape and reforming zoning so the revitalization can extend well beyond what we're seeing in LoDo and South of Market and the Pearl District today. The message is sinking in. San Francisco Chronicle urban design writer John King had this to say about This Land: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/06/DDGOGJ7OF51.DTL. Syndicated columnist Neal Peirce also wrote on the need to get busy on viable alternatives to sprawl, given our unfolding energy crisis: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3981110.html.

Tipping point

Anthony Flint — Thu, 18 May 2006 02:21:00 +0000

Deciding where and how to live is the most personal choice we all make. With gas prices over $3 a gallon, the true cost of that choice -- the energy and transportation costs embedded in housing -- is changing the calculus. It's costing a lot more to heat and cool big homes, and $60 or $70 a week for gasolineis going to loom large in the family budget. Add that to quality of life and time spent in the car, and sprawl may soon seem like less of a bargain. Alternatives to a half-century of dispersal gain new prominence, I argue in this Op-Ed essay on the on-line journal PLANetizen: http://www.planetizen.com/node/19750

Expanding possibilities

Anthony Flint — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 04:06:00 +0000

Sprawl is getting celebrated these days, by the likes of Joel Kotkin and Robert Bruegmann and others. Their analysis can be convincing. But there is an awful lot of interest in smart growth, too -- that is, living in something other than conventional, spread-out, separated-use suburban or exurban development. The free market is driving the trend; the rules of development -- zoning -- just needs to be changed to allow more alternatives. R.D. Sahl explores current trends in land and living on Business Day on New England Cable News March 31, http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/business_day/.

No end in sight

Anthony Flint — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:21:00 +0000

Believers in the Oregon land use regulation regime were sorely disappointed that the state Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling claiming that Measure 37 -- the ballot initiative passed in 2004 that gives landowners either compensation or broad leeway to develop outside the zoning framework -- was unconstitutional. Oregonians in Action, the triumphant property rights group that so successfully campaigned for the measure, framed the Marion County Circuit Court ruling as the work of activist judges. In basic terms, what the ruling said was that the measure created a special class of people and ran afoul of other constitutional processes. But the high court rejected the premise, and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the organizers of the lawsuit prompting the ruling, said it would not appeal. 1000 Friends is working on other ways to limit what the group says is Measure 37's most problematic consequences. Oregonians in Action, meanwhile, is back in victory-lap mode. "I'm surprised and relieved and hopeful again," the group's top lawyer, Ross Day, told Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian. "We had law, fact and common sense on our side. But I was still wondering if we were going to win." This battle is obviously far from over -- not in Oregon, not in nearby Washington, which is looking at a similar ballot measure for the fall, nor across the nation. I vaguely expected the Oregon case would be taken all the way to the US Supreme Court -- which not incidentally agreed to hear two cases on the Clean Water Act, one of which is based on the grievances of landowners who were unable to build on their property.

Changing horses

Anthony Flint — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 03:31:00 +0000

After 16 years at The Boston Globe, my desire to do something different coincided with an attractive "voluntary separation" package, and I have moved on from the daily newspaper business. The industry is in considerable tumult right now, as any review of a media website like Romanesko will attest (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45), and as I acknowledged in a set-up piece for Emily Rooney's "Greater Boston" program on public television WGBH http://www.greaterboston.tv/ last week. I'm going to continue to write freelance, contribute to this weblog, and my book -- "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America" (Johns Hopkins University Press) http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html -- comes out in the spring. My new day job is doing research and writing as smart growth education director at the Office for Commonwealth Development, the state agency in Massachusetts coordinating housing, transportation, environment and energy. I wouldn't have predicted this coming out of journalism school twenty years ago, but there are obviously many more formats and forums today where this voice can be heard.

Rebuilding

Anthony Flint — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:58:00 +0000

My deadline for the manuscript for "This Land" -- a look at sprawl and smart growth to be published in the spring by Johns Hopkins University Press -- was the end of August, so I can now return to the weblog. In Katrina's wake, both sides of the development debate in this country have jumped into the fray on how flooded neighborhoods in New Orleans and Mississippi should be rebuilt. The New Urbanists see the disaster as a big chance to make a statement, urging the restoration of traditional urban fabric just the way it was, and more compact reinventing of lower-density areas, with a rethinking of transit at the same time. Meanwhile, Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute, a critic of smart growth, observes that anyone who owned a car could get out of New Orleans or Biloxi, while those without that crucial mobility could not http://www.ti.org/vaupdate55.html. Since Sept. 11, "rebuilding" was a term and a debate limited to lower Manhattan; the decisions about how these devastated stretches of human settlement are reimagined will reveal even more about attitudes toward the future landscape.

What next for Smart Growth

Anthony Flint — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 16:03:00 +0000

Post-Katrina, post-Prince Charles, smart growth and New Urbanism don't seem like outrageous ideas. But what does the future hold for these extraordinary planning movements? I am scheduled to talk about the recent history of sustainable development initiatives, the complicated political, cultural and economic landscape, and emerging strategies Wednesday Nov. 9th at noon at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. The dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Alan Altshuler, will be moderator http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/rappaport/. The talk will be based in part on my forthcoming book, "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America," due out in the spring by The Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8961.html

The interchange index

Anthony Flint — Sun, 01 May 2005 12:15:00 +0000

Smart growth states are pulling back, being a bit more obsequious and targeted as more comprehensive initiatives struggle in a tough political climate. Current regimes prefer to suggest voluntary compliance and provide technical assistance and promote things that are selling in the marketplace anyway, like transit-oriented development. More conventional development keeps coming, however, and states have to deal with it. In Massachusetts, state transportation planners agreed to study a new interchange for Interstate 93 in Tewskbury, which would serve a planned 750,000 square-foot retail and entertainment center proposed by the Virginia-based Mills Corp., the shopping-center giant trying to establish a foothold in New England. The local political establishment badly wants the commercial development for its revenues, and the administration is respectful of local control, but Romney's Office of Commonwealth Development has also made it plain that access roads to industrial parks and other state-sponsored roadway improvements serving conventional suburban development are largely a thing of the past: state aid is being channeled to places that embrace smart growth principles. Cities and towns can't get housing funding unless they prove their smart-growth mettle.

Evolving sprawl

Anthony Flint — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 01:25:00 +0000

While researching my new book I must confess I came away from several far-flung subdivisions thinking the development pattern wasn't my cup of tea, but wasn't so bad. I saw African-American families unloading cars in the driveways. The homes started at $120,000 (closer to the cost of a parking space than a studio in Boston). The houses were close together, and there were schools and community centers that were at least for some in walking distance, or skateboarding or scooting distance. In today's Ideas section of The Sunday Boston Globe I analyze Robert Bruegmann's new book and the general defense of sprawl -- and how the argument for it doesn't hold up for very long. Sprawl giveth, but ultimately it taketh away: separation of uses, long everyday trips and commutes, total car dependence, high gasoline prices, fiscal strains to extend the infrastructure, and inevitably, all the social and economic fragmentation that comes with the relentless abandonment of established urban areas. I point out that the smartest smart growth activists aren't spending a lot of time hammering sprawl these days anyway -- they just want the barriers removed to allow some alternatives to flourish. Then the market can decide. Here's the link to the piece:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/02/the_virtues_of_sprawl?mode=PF

The Density Dilemma

Anthony Flint — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:29:00 +0000

As the New Urbanists infiltrate the Gulf Coast to make sure reconstruction maintains urban fabric, I'm reminded once again how most Americans want to be in spread-out rather than dense settings, whether for the personal space or a sense of safety. Acceptance of density plays a critical role in the smart growth revolution, and I include a chapter on it in my forthcoming book. I also wrote a working paper on density for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., which is now available on the institute's website:
http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/pub-detail.asp?id=1053. The paper looks at transit-oriented and compact development in the Bay Area, Oregon, Texas, Maryland and Massachusetts.

Walk this way

Anthony Flint — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 14:39:00 +0000

I've just returned from a pleasant Sunday morning walk on Broadway in South Boston to get a coffee and a gallon of milk. I also got a doughnut so in terms of calories burned it's doubtless a wash. Still, it's always so refreshing not to climb into the car. The way urban neighborhoods promote walking is a big topic among planners and architects and, increasingly, public health experts these days. It's just common sense that when your physical surroundings allow you and indeed encourage you to walk, you're more likely to make physical activity a routine part of your day -- one way all those French women don't get fat. I have a piece on physical activity and design in today's Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section, which features innovative thinking in the Greater Boston area; communities around here are working on Safe Routes to Schools and better sidewalks, clearer wayfinding for those on foot and multi-use paths: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/31/activity_oriented_design/.

Terror's toll on cities

Anthony Flint — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 14:26:00 +0000

I was asked on the Chet Curtis Report on New England Cable News July 7 http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/chet/ how transit systems could be better secured following bombings on the London subway and bus system. The answer is, it's much harder compared to air travel -- although $18 billion has been spent on security for aviation, while $250 million has been spent on transit security. There are 32 million trips on transit on an average weekday in the US. You can't screen everybody who enters the systems. Here in Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority conducted random baggage checks using a GE-built explosives-sniffing machine during the Democratic National Convention, built new hub monitoring stations in the subway, and started the "See Something, Say Something" campaign, to enlist riders as eyes and ears, on the lookout for bags that have been left unattended. More police officers will be riding the rails, and plainclothes marshals may as well. Since many of the hundreds of injuries seemed to have been caused by shattered glass and flying debris, subway cars may be required to have shatterproof windows in the future -- now common in many secured government buildings. It's going to mean a lot of expense, and more reminders for urban dwellers of a creeping -- and justified, in the years to come, I think -- lockdown state. It is cities, their landscape and their system for getting around, that are the target. My most recent article in Planning magazine http://www.planning.org/planning/nonmember/default1.htm gauges the impact of physical security strategies, and a chapter in my forthcoming book on development trends in America www.anthonyflint.net looks at whether the age of terror is encouraging exurban dispersal.

Kunstler v. Kotkin

Anthony Flint — Tue, 31 May 2005 15:20:00 +0000

One believes the suburbs will be rendered useless by the disappearance of cheap oil. The other says the suburbs are the future and need only be fine-tuned. Both have new books out. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" (Atlantic Monthly Press), explains how the auto-dependent, spread-out development pattern is the most ill-suited system imagineable for the coming fossil-fuel crunch, which he argues will be the death of suburbia (Interview in Grist magazine: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/25/little-kunstler/). Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library / Random House), says, quite correctly, that the suburbs rule and are America's choice, for convenience, jobs and affordability; America's cities, Kotkin says, are enjoying very narrowly defined comebacks and aren't properly planning for the future (essay in The New Republic online: http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050523&s=kotkin052305). Town and country has never been so polarized.

A new take

Anthony Flint — Tue, 31 May 2005 02:52:00 +0000

What if homeowners in the inner city claimed that government policies encouraging sprawl had decreased the value of their property so much, it was the equivalent of a "taking" and they were entitled to just compensation under the Fifth Amendment? That was one of the more intriguing ideas to emerge from the 2nd National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice and Smart Growth in Philadelphia earlier this month, put on by Policy Link and the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. Former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk and Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, said legal specialists were reviewing the possibility of such a landmark lawsuit. The idea is to flip around the accepted notion that government action can result in a de facto taking, the standard approach of property rights lawsuits coast to coast. In this lawsuit, property owners in a hollowed out city -- and one or two distressed first-ring suburbs -- would make the argument that government action to promote growth at the periphery sucked all the economic vitality out of their neighborhoods, leading to sharply decreased property values. It's too early to say whether this would go forward, but the legal papers in such a suit would have to include an exhaustive and detailed account of how state and local governments actively supported sprawl. It would be interesting reading.

Ways the wind blows

Anthony Flint — Wed, 11 May 2005 15:21:00 +0000

Wind is all the rage in the renewable-energy crowd, though the harnessing turbines pit environmentalists against each other, what with the disruption to the natural environment that wind farms can have (messing with migratory birds, for example). Nantucket Sound has been the latest scene of this battle, with a proposal by Cape Wind for a "wind park" at Horseshoe Shoal (www.capewind.org) But a whole new set of issues for planners is on the horizon with the growing popularity of personal windmills or “residential wind turbines” for single-family homes – blades about two feet long, on a two-inch diameter galvanized pole about 10 feet tall. Depending on the location of the home, the devices can cut electricity bills in half; they provide the energy as the wind blows and reduce the draw from the local utility accordingly. They can also produce electricity during power outages. Town planners are thumbing through the zoning laws in Massachusetts and can’t find any references to this latest breakthrough in green technology. Solar panels, yes, and ham radio antennae, but nothing on wind energy for individual property owners. The wind turbines appear to be by right under many zoning bylaws, which allow projections of up to 75 feet on a single-family house, although that seems a tad high. This will be just one feature of green building and sustainable living that gradually transfers from big commercial buildings to individual homeowners. Pretty clever. Links are http://www.wind-works.org/articles/RoofTopMounting.html and http://www.awea.org/faq/tutorial/wwt_smallwind.html#How%20do%20residential%20wind%20turbines%20work for more information.

Easy Being Green

Anthony Flint — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 15:46:00 +0000

Washington, D.C. and San Francisco aren’t far behind, but Chicago under Mayor Richard Daley has perhaps the most energetic campaign to make urban living appealing, that goes well beyond the Soldier’s Field makeover and the Frank Gehry stuff at Millennium Park. Daley years ago picked up the idea to make the Windy City as green as possible, putting flowers and plants along some 70 miles of street medians, planting 400,000 trees, and replacing 125 asphalt schoolyards with sod. Municipal buildings must get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, and developers are being required to make their buildings green as well, with recycled building materials, waterless urinals, and systems for natural sunlight and ventilation. At the Center for Green Technology (http://www.cityofchicago.org/Environment/GreenTech/) they can tell you how to make an elevator run on vegetable oil. The city is dramatically reducing parking requirements, and is home to a two-story Home Depot in Lincoln Park that has no dedicated parking. The latest building to debut with a green roof – they reduce the heat-island effect in summer and absorb runoff – is a McDonald’s. Green building has caught on in a big way in the United States, but I posed this question to Daley’s staff (he was in Cambridge this week to accept MIT’s Kevin Lynch award): won’t a bunch of new requirements for sustainable building be in conflict with the overall goal of cutting red tape for developers who build on urban infill parcels? Builders in the city need fewer rules, note more (see below). The city’s answer is to appoint a team of building-code officials who are solely dedicated to green requirements – a kind of express lane for satisfying the new codes. I suppose it’s reasonable to make sure everybody does it, but the private sector is doing a lot of green building on its own.

Code blues

Anthony Flint — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:12:00 +0000

The press pulled out the black tie for the MIT Council for the Arts party for the “poet of glass and steel,” Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (http://web.mit.edu/arts/announcements/prs/2005/0202_calatrava.html) last night at University Park in Cambridge. But a compelling tale of citybuilding was also being told across the river in Boston in the offices of Utile, above a 7-Eleven in Downtown Crossing. There, architect Tim Love and Tim Pappas of Pappas Properties were explaining plans for an infill development called First + First – two dozen townhouses at the spot where East First Street meets West First Street in South Boston, where the residential neighborhood meets a more industrial zone. The townhouses are touted as a model for city living, with rear-entry two-car garages on the ground floor and flexible living space on the three floors above, including a terrace at the top for all units. City officials have made it clear they want to see more of this kind of housing built, on the hundreds of vacant parcels that are longstanding gaps in Boston’s urban smile. But the designers had to work within the restricting confines of the city’s building code, which requires, just as one example, a second stairwell if the floorplate is so much as a foot wider than the townhouse limitation. Developers willing to try new things in urban redevelopment need more flexibility. Newark recognized that, and cut red tape for builders re-knitting run-down blocks. Creative ideas can get stymied because of rigid rules put together by bureaucrats years ago, and that goes for buildings and street design, as well.

Eminent case

Anthony Flint — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:29:00 +0000

The property rights movement in the US has been on a tear over the last 20 years, proving with its myriad high-profile court cases that it’s not just about ranchers in the West. The quest has been to prove that regulatory actions in land use are the equivalent of a taking – based on the last clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Us Constitution, which says, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The movement seems unlikely to come away with a big victory in Kelo v. City of New London, set for a ruling by the US Supreme Court. In that case the “public use” part is at issue, and the court seems uninterested in revisiting 50 years of judicial deference in the justification of local eminent domain. But even in defeat – if that’s what happens – the case will have an impact. Governments and developers may think twice about using eminent domain, and will undoubtedly strive to make a more solid case for how the public will benefit from redevelopment of a site, a prediction made by Leonard Zax and Rebecca Malcolm in the January issue of Urban Land magazine (http://www.urbanland.uli.org/). One other thing to watch in the aftermath: lingering hard feelings between developers and property rights lawyers, usually hand-in-hand, but on opposite sides for Kelo.