Big City Sparkplug

Clues about Ideology in Obama’s Brand of Regionalism

Generally, whether or not presidents are reelected, and how they are judged historically, depends on their stances on a few key issues. President Obama’s reelection was, as he noted, a positive referendum on his health and stimulus bills, and his proposed taxing of the rich. But the measures which better reveal a president’s underlying philosophy are the small ones he takes, often incrementally and with little public notice. Under Obama such measures have amounted to a cornucopia of placations for traditional left-wing groups, from his energy policies, to his favoritism of unions, to his further nationalization of public schools. Such measures, writes Stanley Kurtz, signal his preference for centralized governance, and are particularly noticeable in his urban policies, which Kurtz criticizes in his new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.

According to Kurtz, Obama’s urban policies center on “regionalism”, which the author defines as the goal to “abolish the suburbs, ideally by having cities annex surrounding suburban municipalities.” Read More »

The Tattered Public Sphere: a Review of Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart”

There were many advantages to having the type of upbringing that I did in Charlottesville, VA. Both my family and the town itself—with its mix of Southern and university character—familiarized me with the best of traditional and progressive worldviews. But one thing Charlottesville didn’t reveal was what adult culture is actually like across the rest of America. Even following high school, I still believed most of the nation’s adults behaved like the professional-level ones from my childhood, holding jobs and raising families. So you can imagine my culture shock when moving at age nineteen to New York City. Read More »

Weekend Reading: NYC’s Innovative Public Housing Idea—Fill in the Empty Spaces

It’s ironic that New York City, which pioneered the national model for public housing in the 1930s, has been the slowest to reform its existing stock. After all that old model, inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden Cities” and Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park”, has proven particularly incompatible with Gotham. Walk today along Manhattan’s or Brooklyn’s waterfronts, or through Harlem, East New York, Red Hook, SoBro, the Lower East Side, or Queens, and you find variations of the same “project”: multiple high-rise public housing towers are separated from each other by several acres; the spaces between are filled with basketball courts, green spaces, and parking lots; while the complexes overall are bounded by large gates. NYC’s public housing was first designed in this spread-out way because planners thought it would bring a suburban aesthetic to the inner-city poor. But those public spaces soon became dangerous and underused, and the complexes themselves ghettos isolated from NYC’s vibrant street life. Over the decades similar projects became so problematic that other cities just dynamited theirs. But in NYC they continue as forbidding, multi-block behemoths that disrupt the city’s most valuable neighborhoods.

Of course this has led to calls for the Housing Authority to tear them down. But recently the authority has pondered a better idea: instead of spending the money on demolition, and on housing the displaced, it wants to repair the existing stock, and have private developers build new towers in the empty spaces. This would increase the amount of housing, generate more revenue, and according to New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson, fill these “cavities in the city grid” with foot traffic. But because it would also privatize public assets, and crunch market rate housing up against the poor, it is being criticized by social justice advocates. Links are below:

1. A government report from 2008 detailing how specific lots should be redeveloped
2. Davidson’s article in favor of the idea
3. A City Limits article that is more critical
4. A breakdown in the Atlantic Cities on how best to redesign these kinds of spaces
5. A City Journal article from way back in 1996 that covers the same subject

For Public Areas, as for Redevelopment, a Shift to Tactical Approaches

This parklet is one of several along a 2-block stretch in The Mission. It provides extra seating and bicycle parking for an iconic San Francisco establishment, Four Barrel Coffee. (photo credits to Christopher Berggren)

San Francisco, CA

Over time there have been substantial changes to America’s strategy for urban redevelopment. After World War II, and with the rise of modernism, it came primarily from the top down by cities that used eminent domain to demolish neighborhoods, in favor of subsidized complexes planned by lone developers. And while projects like this are still built—see Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, or the convention centers gambled on by struggling municipalities—they’ve become increasingly detested due to their unprofitability and formulaic designs. What’s arising in their place is an approach that emphasizes growth incrementally and from the bottom up, using smaller-scaled and more diverse architecture, and many small businesses rather than a few large ones. This has been used primarily in urban neighborhoods like historic warehouse districts, where development already exists, but where more is needed, to add vitality and foot traffic piece by piece.

This same “organic” approach has also been applied to public spaces Read More »

Weekend Reading: “Is it Time for ‘Smarter Smart Growth’?”, Switchboard blog, Kaid Benfield

- On Wednesday Kaid Benfield, director for the National Resources Defense Council, asked how the “smart growth” movement, formed in the 1990s, could better fit today. His article was inspired by another written in a San Diego magazine, claiming “smarter smart growth” would better enable cities to combat sprawl and enhance livability. It focused on things like respecting community planning, conforming new developments to local character, tolerating “NIMBYism”, allowing density only incrementally, and concentrating retail on existing corridors rather than letting it spread. To this Benfield added that cities should “pursue communities suitable for a diversity of incomes, housing types, ethnicities, and old/new residents.”

Are these good ideas? Benfield’s last one about increasing diversity certainly is. But that’s what makes the others so counterproductive.

The problem with “smart growth”, after all, is precisely that it empowers existing citizens—and the government—to dictate growth, rather than the market. This causes nothing new to get built, since everything proposed gets shot down by neighborhood reactionaries, who feel entitled at public meetings to dictate how others should use their land. And if buildings are approved, they must follow onerous design standards that prevent them from being too tall, wide, colorful, modern, obstructive, etc. etc. etc.

As Benfield points out, this highly regulated, NIMBY-riddled, “smart” form of urbanism is already “mainstream in nearly every planning office in the country.” It has created cities that are not only unaffordable, since new construction can’t meet demand, but ones that, to my thinking, aren’t even that interesting. Cities like Portland that reflect the philosophy are certainly nice, but also safe, predictable, unchanging. They lack the dynamism and diversity of places like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, which grew during the industrial era, before the widescale micro-management of urban development. But unfortunately these cities too have since caved into the mantra, at the expense of the poor and the environment, and in defiance of what first made them great.

- This week another one of my articles got published, about San Francisco parklets and how they represent a rise in “tactical urbanism”. It was on Sustainable Cities Collective, a website run by the urban technology company Siemens.

Disaster Porn, East Coast Style

Baltimore, MD

If I had wanted, during my first day biking around, to see an artificially nice version of Baltimore, I could’ve chosen last Sunday. That night the Ravens were playing in the Super Bowl, and according to locals, the downtown had become in the hours leading to it an extended parade of purple and black, which began at the harbor and moved towards the stadium.

But instead I’d chosen to bike around early morning the next Sunday, after the city and its weather had cooled down from the teams’ victory. And rather than visiting downtown, where a few well-publicized amenities have produced a veneer of revitalization, I focused on the nearby neighborhoods, which better reflect its true identity. Read More »

Weekend Reading: Design Observer, “The Displacement Decathlon”

- This article was sent by a reader, and although rather long, is worth your time. It’s about the slum clearance that occurred in Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics, and the way it is being replicated for the upcoming Olympics in Rio.

- Two past articles of mine were posted this week. The article on Baltimore’s “Disaster Porn” went up on UrbanTimes.co, and the one on the city’s “Highway to Nowhere” appeared on ThisBigCity.net. Apparently London has an affinity for U.S. urbanism, since that’s where both these websites are based.

Federal Immigration Policy Should Cater to Local Needs

Baltimore, MD

Last Sunday, as the issue was being prepared for Congress, I was witnessing the remunerative effects of immigration firsthand on city streets just an hour north. This was while at Chicken Rico, a Peruvian hotspot in Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood. After eating a plate of chicken and plantains–priced, as usual, at under $5—I stepped outside onto Eastern Avenue. This crowded thoroughfare is the center of Baltimore’s Hispanic community, which stretches a half-mile through the city’s southeast side, even merging into what’s known as “Greektown.”

But Highlandtown wasn’t always like this. Although once working-class, it suffered, like much of the city, through decades of industrial decline. In 2000 the City Paper quoted an official who represented it in the 1990s, when it teemed with “absentee landlords, dysfunctional families, loss of businesses,” and a robust drug trade. Its revival, just then beginning, has continued the last decade because of public improvements, and gentrification in nearby Canton. But this revival is also due to immigration, suggesting a potential long-term fix for Baltimore, and other declining cities. Read More »

Weekend Reading: The Church and the City

- What role should churches play in America’s cities? For decades this question had become less relevant, as many left for the suburbs. For example megachurches like Bellevue Baptist in Memphis, where I’ll be moving in May, caused controversy in the 1990s when it uprooted its longtime downtown home to build a campus in Cordova, TN. To critics this just symbolized the same inner-city escapism being practiced then by white businesses and homeowners.

But today as the nation urbanizes, religious people too are adapting. Churches like Mars Hill in Seattle and Elevation in Charlotte are appealing to alternative young people with services that are more casual, socially conscious, and located in hip neighborhoods. Others, like Redeemer in Manhattan and Glide in San Francisco, advocate reintegration into urban life through social service. A recent book by two pastors called Why Cities Matter claimed this reintegration was essential, unless churches want their message growing moldy in the suburbs, unexposed to new people.

But are churches and cities a good mix? They are according to social scientists Charles Murray and Robert Putnam, who view religious participation as a strong indicator of social capital. However two weeks ago Richard Florida cited studies linking a region’s religiousness with its economic and social backwardness. His work reaffirms the suspicions of many urbanites who believe that religion, because of its dogmatism, is inhospitable to diverse city life. Links are below:

1. Aaron Renn’s review of Why Cities Matter on New Geography, and urban religion in general on Urbanophile

2. A sermon of the same title by Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer

3. Charles Murray’s Wall Street Journal article on social decline, from a year back

4. Richard Florida on religion in the Atlantic Cities, here and then here

-After months of hoarding them on this blog, I’ve spent the last few weeks sending my articles to various websites and publications. And they’re getting snapped right up. The London-based Urban Times, which covers global trends in city-planning, posted my article on downtown L.A.; Joel Kotkin’s New Geography site posted the one on Richard Florida; and Aaron Renn’s Urbanophile site, which covers Rust Belt decline and regeneration, posted the one on Baltimore immigration. The latter piece was “original”, and will appear on this blog for the first time Monday morning.

Oakland—the Next Brooklyn?

Oakland, CA

Someone walking today through Brooklyn might be hard-pressed to envision its rougher eras. Much of the borough is now defined by cafes and renovated brownstones, and a new basketball arena. But in the 1970s Brooklyn was, along with the burning Bronx, a national showcase in urban blight. This continued through the 1980s crack epidemic, when neighborhoods like Bushwick suffered crime and abandonment, and some intentional fires of their own. It wasn’t until New York City’s overall reemergence the last twenty years that Brooklyn became trendy, full of these amenities, and a bunch of postmodern writers named Jonathan. Just last year it was labeled by GQ the “coolest city on the planet”.

It might be equally hard to imagine, while walking through Oakland, a similar transformation into what Brooklyn is now. Read More »