The Ground Floor

Moving Beyond 'Drive until you Qualify'

In a joint effort by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and Washington, D.C.-based the Brookings Institute, an interactive mapping web tool -- the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index -- was developed to measure the true affordability of housing by applying transportation costs.

The tool provides housing and transportation costs as a percentage of income on a neighborhood-level basis for 52 metropolitan areas using 2000 U.S. Census data and analysis of household transportation costs.

Urban planners, policy-makers, and transportation and housing advocates measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of household income. However, housing affordability is not always what it seems.

As Scott Bernstein, president for CNT explained during a presentation today at the Brookings Institute, the old adage of "drive until you qualify" is really no longer an appropriate measure of housing affordability. As gas prices increase along with suburban sprawl, much of the population is paying as much for transportation as they are housing.

Compact Communities - Is Density Incompatible With Safety?

Reducing the carbon footprint of metropolitan areas will require making them more compact in order to reduce driving or vehicle miles traveled (VMTs). Forgive me for saying this (density being a four letter word) but this will require increasing the density of existing communities and building new ones with appropriate density. 

So what are the best ways to design compact, densely populated, walkable communities which are attractive, safe and lively? One thing clearly needed is enough housing so people live in the community; this is what creates the "24/7" communities which have been shown to be most successful over time. What are the best ways to do this while reducing crime and enhancing public safety?

New ULI Published Book Shows how the Parking Garage is Both a Part of our Urban Culture and Has the Potential to Solve Mixed-Use Issues

Where to park? Whether you are searching for parking near downtown shops or fighting for a space close to your apartment, the lack of sufficient parking space is a constant problem for people in the city. What if there was the right kind of urban planning that created mixed-use parking garages? This might be closer than you think.

Yesterday, Atlanta architect, Shannon Sanders McDonald, gave a talk at the Library of Congress about her new book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form, published by ULI. In her presentation, noted that the parking garage is not a development from the second half of the twentieth century.

McDonald pointed out that there were thousands of parking garages across the U.S. before 1910. Not only were garages heavily prevalent during the first half of the twentieth century, but they were also mixed-use. In this time period, parking garages were designed to include auto showrooms and connection to apartments and shopping malls. In fact, not only was there no such thing as a single-use parking garage during this time period, but all parking garages were also heated.

In her presentation, McDonald mentioned that the book goes more into depth about the mechanization, aesthetics, and the future implications of parking garage design for urban planning and the environment. In her analysis, the book also provides readers with a deeper understanding of the parking garage evolution from the late 1800s and how its architectural design has been an urban issue since it early years. The book also examines the link between land, cost, and the automobile and how cities, such as Portland, are already ahead of the curve in parking and transportation design.

Shannon Sanders McDonald is a 1992 graduate of the Yale University School of Architecture. She was influential in her design assistance to Carol Ross Barney in the award-winning Little Village Academy in Chicago. She has worked on numerous other transportation projects, along with regularly writing and presenting on issues related to parking and movement.

Extreme Development

Last month I had the opportunity to hear about two great projects in the suburbs of New York -- one urban, one suburban -- that embody all of the principles that smart growth advocates like to see in a 21^st century project. They both featured density, a mix of uses, mid market housing, walkability, good transit connections, and great locations. Listening to the developers talk about overcoming the myriad of hurdles to their projects, however, I was reminded of the teenage (or later) guys who fly through incredible jumps in extreme sports, such as skateboarding or motorcross. Dealing with regulatory agencies -- the Corps of Engineers, the Federal Rail Administration -- skeptical lenders, local officials, citizens, and more, the hurdles these guys had to jump to get projects done sounded initially impressive, but increasingly ludicrous.

One project was on the waterfront in Yonkers, an image that until recently has apparently been apparently pretty bad, and required environmental remediation and rebuilding of decaying docks. The developer, Art Collins, told a symposium at the Pace University Law Center that he specializes in working with communities who have demonstrated leadership in getting projects done. That seems a good description of the Mayor and council of Yonkers today, but in talking with local people it was not too long ago when no same business would have wanted to work with the city. The project includes over 500 residential units, many with water views, and leasing spiked when the historic train station, which had turned its back on the water, gained a new entrance on the river side, courtesy of Metro North, the commuter rail arm of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority.

The Urban Health Advantage

A recent article in New York magazine by Clive Thompson called "Why New Yorkers Last Longer" pulls together some intriguing facts that anyone interested in walkable, mixed use, mixed income communities should consider. The article, as the title suggests, explores why the "average life expectancy" of New Yorkers has grown faster than that of the U.S. as a whole, especially in since 1990. Now it is 78.6, while the national average is 77.9; as recently as 1990, the average life expectancy of a New Yorker was three years shorter than the national average.

Certain factors may be unique to New York, such as the drop in the crime rate (New York is now the safest city in the U.S.) and new drugs that have extended the life of AIDS patients. But other factors are more generic to all urbanized areas.

Here are some excerpts:

Transit Oriented Development Needs Development Oriented Transit

This post was written by The Ground Floor contributor and ULI senior resident fellow, Bob Dunphy, who is a member of the task force that wrote the report referenced below.

Washington's Metro (subway) is widely hailed as the most successful new rail project in America, in a region which enjoys one of the nation's best real estate markets. So being able to develop on property directly adjacent to a station and owned by the transit agency would be doubly golden, right?

Not so much, as it turns out, according to a report by a panel convened to evaluate Metro's joint development program. A scathing report by a panel of experts Metro appointed in the hope of revamping its widely criticized land use program blasted the agency for its failure to encourage developers to build homes, offices and stores at the trains' doorsteps, projects that might coax more commuters from their cars and provide the system with needed cash. Gus Bauman, a former chairman of the regional planning authority for Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland, and the task force chair, said "Metro has been totally ineffective and counterproductive to any decent development at Metro stations. This is the national capital region of the free world. If you put up a sign and said, 'Hey, we're the government. We're opening the door for proposals for development,' you would think you'd get 10 or 20 proposals." Instead, in recent years, the average was only two per station. And of course, not necessarily two good ones.

Particularly amazing is that Washington's transit agency is often considered the best, by far, in developing its properties. Despite the growing market and developer interest in transit oriented development nationally, a survey by the National Academy of Sciences found a mere 100 joint development projects in cities across the US, the largest number of which were in the Washington region.

Reshaping Suburbia: A Tricky Task

The difficulty of reshaping an existing, segregated-use retail and office mecca on the outer edge of a metro area into a pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhood was clearly illustrated by an article in today's Washington Post. "Next Stop, Tysons" outlined efforts to transform car-choked Tysons Corner in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Fairfax County, Va., into a live-work-play environment easily accessible by public transit. Their model for success is but a few miles closer to downtown Washington: the Ballston neighborhood in Arlington County, Va., which has a dense mix of housing and shops developed along a subway corridor.

From a design standpoint, Ballston and Tysons have little in common -- and they show the difference between factors that allow dense redevelopment to work well and those that may make dense mixed-use more challenging. The article describes the dissimiliarities: Ballston is a "well-defined corridor with multiple entry points from the surrounding grid of streets; its proximity to the District makes its apartment towers attractive to young people; and the hodgepodge of car dealerships and low-slung shopping strips predating redevelopment was insubstantial enough that it would be replaced with something else." In contrast, Tysons "is a sprawling area lacking a street grid and is both broken up and sealed off by several highways...It is farther away from the District and thus less appealing to many potentially younger residents...And much of what is there today, including the two big malls at its center, is unlikely to be replaced soon, precluding a total overhaul like Arlington's." And, although Tysons is scheduled to receive a subway line, it is not yet decided if it will be built underground (the line serving Ballston runs underground, with transit-oriented uses above it patronized by passengers and area residents.)      

In making the case to develop in a manner similar to Ballston, Fairfax Board of Supervisors Chairman says, "If we don't change the old pattern of growth and development, we will continue to get what we have always gotten." He and other proponents of change contend that over the long haul, at least part of Tysons can be successfully regenerated. Those opposed to the makeover say it's not possible to turn an area completely dependent on autos into a walkable "town center" that is an attractive place to live, and that adding more apartments will only contribute to traffic gridlock.

To be sure, the struggle to improve growth in Tysons is daunting. But hopefully, those pressing for positive change will prevail, and Tysons will evolve into an example of "reborn outer suburbs" for the 21st century.            

Mixed development and the money

Mixed-use is starting its own quiet revolution among investors in Europe. From being a complicated offering for the traditional investor looking for a quiet management life, the mix of income streams and opportunities to work on a large scale in Europe has seen the sector climb up the prospects’ list.

In Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe 2007, released this week at ULI’s Paris Conference, mixed-used is rated as the third best sector product in the region. It was only introduced as a category in Emerging Trends Europe last year, when it stormed into fourth place. In 2007, it climbed up to third place beaten only by hotels and shopping centres.

Context is Everything

How a building relates to its surroundings and neighbors is crucial for the creation of an active streetscape and to foster a sense of community. West River Commons, a small (one-acre) mixed-use project in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is an excellent example of context-sensitive design.

Like many pre-WWII inner suburban neighborhoods, the Longfellow neighborhood comprises single-family homes sited on a dense and walkable street grid. Also like many neighborhoods from this time period, the scale and walkability of the area has been comprised by fast moving traffic on arterial streets lined with one-story commercial strip centers.

West River Commons fronts one of these arterials, Lake Street. Its 53 apartments, three townhouses, dry cleaning shop, two restaurants and one cafe are designed in such a way to provide a transition from the activity and traffic on Lake Street to the more quiet residential feel just a block away. The focal point of the project is a small park which provides outdoor setting for the restaurants and serves as an informal community gathering point.

A complete case study of this project can be found on ULI's Development Case Studies Web site. (If you are not already subscribed to the Development Case Studies, you can subscribe here.)

Curtains up for Signature Theater: Is transit in the wings?

Last week, Washington theatergoers celebrated the relocation of the Signature Theater, an award winning regional theater company, to new digs in Shirlington, Virginia, an older suburban commercial district emerging as an attractive suburban destination. (A Signature Space To Match Its Reputation: The 'Garage' Theater Parks in Shirlington, Washington Post.) Live theater and the adjacent new county library are capstone anchors for a vibrant place which enjoys a central location with nearby freeway access, thriving restaurants and bars, entertainment and civic uses, and thousands of new apartments and condos -- all organized around a street and pedestrian grid. It seems a text book example of transit oriented development -- except it is missing the transit. Sure, the county required the developers to underwrite shuttle buses to the closest Metro station, but buses do not cut it with the hip young clientele filling the bars, restaurants, stages and screens.

In Denver for the ULI meeting last fall, I toured a similar award winning suburban place, Belmar, a mixed use development growing up around the core of a failed suburban mall. (Belmar, winner of the 2006 ULI Award for Excellence—The Americas) It is also a complicated development being done as a partnership with the city of Lakewood and a local developer, and has a nice urban feel for a suburban place.  Same story -- great project, good location, and a pedestrian grid, but minimal transit service. Bus service is planned to connect to Denver’s new light rail system.

Is TOD without transit odd, or normal? These two projects embody all of the elements of TOD, residential, retail, entertainment, restaurants, civic uses, and residential. In fact, they are complete transit villages, without the transit. And they are not unusual. Many, probably most, of the leading examples of suburban mixed use projects, lack serious transit access. Most planners, knowing that transit is an important part of the mix, insist on some lame shuttle bus, often funded by the developer, as a poor option. Making transit work in the suburbs requires a strategic assessment of which suburban centers can be effectively linked into a regional transit network. It needs to be built in up front, not added on later.