Urban Oasis

Feed Me!

2006-05-10T19:12:00.002-04:00

RSS feeds, etc., seem to be working over on the new blog, http://www.urbanoasis.org/blog/1. Check it out and let me know.

Big ups to Scott T. (do the kids still say "big ups"?) for advising me on the most niggling of details.

Help Wanted

2006-05-09T20:48:00.000-04:00

I'm doing a planning thesis on the changing conditions of student housing in Ann Arbor ~1920 to ~2000 and I'm looking for some houses/apartments to document. If you live somewhere on the OWS or the student neighborhood south of Central Campus and think your house is interesting, let me know. My objective is to examine how these structures differed in their spatial arrangements and their uses when occupied by owners vs. students/renters, and when that change occured. It would take about an hour to take some basic measurements of your house and rooms and poke around in your closets and basement, taking pictures all the while. Sound interesting? Let me know lwinlingATumichDOTedu.

One more time

2006-05-09T20:47:00.000-04:00

For those of you with RSS feeds, the new domain is http://www.urbanoasis.org/blog.

Move Over

2006-05-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

The move is just about complete. I've set up shop at my own domain, urbanoasis.org. There are still some kinks to be worked out, like how the devil do I get rid of those "link" things at the top right corner of the page? Anyway, not the change in your blogrolls and your xml feeds.

Calling All Tech Nerds

2006-05-02T13:13:00.000-04:00

I'm starting the process of moving from blogger to my own blog, but I realize I don't know what I'm doing. Anybody want to barter some MySQLphpWTF help for something I have? Candidates for barter include Bell's Beer, photography, research skills, and rowing coaching. Just some plain old advice would be good, too.

Adventures in Large Format Photography

2006-04-24T12:29:00.000-04:00

LF Shant Front Elevation 1
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

I finally got around to taking my first two 4x5 photos to Foto1 for developing. Fortunately, I learned that Ivory Photo right near the Madison House still has a functioning darkroom, so it will remain a walkable hobby.

Here is one of my two attempts. It's not too shabby, but has four fairly significant problems. The first is clearly the framing. With my lens I would have had to get out into the middle of William St. to get it all, so I went for a practice shot. The second is that the top of the building is not in focus. I tilted the lens too much in trying to get both the brick wall and the cornice in focus, so the plane of focus is very oblique (it looks like from the garbage can through the brick wall to top of the doorway arch). The third is that it is not level -- the cornice should be parallel to the top of the frame. The fourth is that I was not dead-center. The top of the gate arch should be in line with the top of the doorway arch. Live and learn.

LF Shant Front Elevation 2
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

This one, actually my first, is even worse. First off, I double exposed it. It's even less level than the other one, and off center, of course, too. Anyway, it was my first attempt and now I'm going after some more attempts.

Bottom line, view photography is difficult, which is why so many archival images and proto snapshots I've come across in research are partially out of focus or show some vignetting. However, its results are awesome, as the lower 2/3 of the top image indicates. More to come.

David Kohrman, Genius

2006-04-22T15:17:00.000-04:00

I recently got in touch with a friend from WMU, Dave Kohrman, now at Ball State. Having turned to public history towards the end of my undergrad career, I had a couple courses with Dave, and a turn on the Phi Alpha Theta board. Another time I'll tell about our brief detour to Gary, IN.

Narrator of the most hilarious end-of-semester true story ever told, Dave is an urban explorer not unlike the dude from the Detroit Blog, but better in my mind. I'm thinking about looking at Muncie Indiana for part of my dissertation (of _Middletown_ fame), so I got an update on Dave and, though his famed Chuck Norris movie reviews have been in short supply lately, I got to see some more of his photography. He instantly made the blogroll, and I encourage you to check it out.

Eight Months Later

2006-04-21T22:37:00.000-04:00

New Orleans homes Hurricane Katrina
Originally uploaded by boyneworleans.

I'm having a difficult time understanding what is going on in New Orleans. If anyone went down there for Spring Break or has been there recently, please pipe up. What is the scale of cleanup and rehabilitation? Also, if there are any good maps about (re)investment or rehab, please link. The odd snippets I see in the New York Times or on blogs don't really give a sense of how this city is coming back or not.

Subletter Needed

2006-04-20T21:50:00.000-04:00

May 1 - August 28. $300/mo for own 10' x 10' bedroom in the Madison House, near the corner of Main and Madison, Ann Arbor MI. Washer/dryer and off-street parking on premises. 4 blocks from U-M campus; one block from Leopold Bros.; one block from Washtenaw Dairy. Great roommates, great house, great location. lwinlingATumichDOTedu.

Long Shot

2006-04-17T22:11:00.000-04:00

I just sent in a cover letter and resume to the Art Institute of Chicago. It doesn't make a lick of sense, seeing as how I'm a year away from candidacy, but I was trawling around the Web to see what sort of stuff opens up in Chicago (I also hit USAJOBS.com from time to time) and boom, I see they're looking for an associate curator of architecture. Hmm...twentieth century architecture? I study twentieth century architecture. Interest in contemporary design issues? I'm interested in contemporary design issues. Ability to raise funds and preserve and acquire pieces for the collection? I can preserve, acquire, and raise funds with the best of them! New Renzo Piano building housing their modern design collection? I can dig it.

There's not a chance in hell I'd get this job (but maybe an interview), I've got a ton of commitments here, still, and I'm way behind on several other semester's end projects, but it was too good an opportunity not to spend the last two hours revising my CV and writing a cover letter. Let me know what you think.

A Crime Against Architecture

2006-04-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

The Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago intended to celebrate the first one hundred years of urban development and achievement of the Windy City, opening in 1933. As part of the celebration, the fair contracted with several architects to develop demonstration homes exhibiting modern design -- somewhere between Art Deco and the International Style. After the immensely successful fair (which, by the way, was part of the reason baseball now has the All-Star game), a real estate developer moved several of the homes to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where there are a number of programs for leasing. One of the homes, apparently, made its way to Monroe, Michigan, where local "preservationists" turned what what once an innovative, creative design employing new technologies and materials into a faux-neoclassical atrocity.

I love Mark Maynard

2006-04-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

MM.com may just make my blogroll, yet. In a stroke of genius reminiscent of his brilliant Zombie Claus, Mark has proposed an Ypsi Shadow Art Fair preceding the Ann Arbor Art Fairs for non-overhyped artists hawking things other than art on a stick. Murph needs to get on this (cause everything he does rocks).

Wish I Were Here

2006-04-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

Great Lakes Myth Society at the Elbow Room. Show starts at 10:30. I'm at the grad instead, writing a paper on housing markets and policy in Austin Texas over the last 30 years. Then I'll be at the Art and Architecture Building doing the same later.

Woo.

A History of Ann Arbor

2006-04-10T23:46:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Marwil's light history of Tree Town contains this titillating excerpt:

In the autumn of 1928 the university announced plans to build a dormitory for women. This was not to be another Martha Cook or Helen Newberry--unique facilities constructed for specific purposes--but the first of many in a reversal of the long-standing (Tappan) policy of having students be responsible for their lodging. The news was met with anger and alarm, for it endangered the investments of hundreds landlords, the livelihoods of hundreds of domestics, the value of property (and thus tax returns) around the campus, and the trade of merchants along Main Street...

Faculty dismissals and student misbehavior had irked citizens, even outraged their notions of propriety, but the dormitory plan, said Bertha Muehling, a prominent businesswoman, jeopardized "the business interests of Ann Arbor."

I have noted before that college presidents testified before Congress in the 1940s that they needed help building dormitories because cities' private markets were unable to handle the swell of new collegians. They could only justifiably ask because the private market, which had the responsibility to house students, was not up to the task.

Wal-Mart to Subsidize Competition

2006-04-09T05:02:00.000-04:00

So sayeth an article this week in The New York Times. That's bizarre.

Clearly the public relations work of the anti-Wal-Mart faction (of which I number myself) is having some impact when Wal-Mart is giving money and advertising away to competitors. However, I have no illusions that this changes their business model or that Wal-Mart now wants to compete in a healthy economic ecosystem.

Preservation 101

2006-04-09T05:00:00.000-04:00

shant
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

This is a historical photo of The Shant, the meeting house of Delta Kappa Epsilon on William St. One of the projects for the preservation course will be to do a measured drawings project for the building (potentially for entry into a HABS student competition). This was designed by William LeBaron Jenney, one of the pioneers of the skyscraper. It was one of two he did while teaching architecture courses in Ann Arbor. The other was a University museum, since demolished.

Register now while there's still space.

She's All That

2006-03-12T20:51:00.000-05:00

Mystery Campus
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

Marriage brings a number of changes and compromises to this blogger's formerly autonomous life. Going to bed early. Eating square meals. Minding a budget. Perhaps the biggest change will not come for another 14 months, but come it surely will: a move to Chicago, IL. My wife accepted a tenure-track offer from a university in the Chicagoland area starting in September, and my husbandly duties compel me to follow as soon as the completion of exams and coursework allow. Leave it to my lovely wife to fulfill my fantasies of living and working in a major metropolitan area in the Great Lakes region.

I can't wait to get my hands on some wall maps like this.

Bells and Whistles

2006-03-10T23:32:00.000-05:00

Lobby of the Auditorium Building
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

You'll note the flickr image and link on the right. I figured my photos were underutilized, and with the most recent additions from the Chicago trip, my meager collection is shaping up. If only I could figure out how to make it cycle through my photos.

I'm taking a course on architectural theory that I find incredibly difficult. It's for the MArchs and not for PhD students, but I am required by my program to take a design theory course. The major semester project is a pair of posters in which students must visually represent and contrast two books on ecology. It's rather challenging and particularly so because I am totally incompetent with Adobe Photoshop. Basically everything the architecture students slapped on the page (or seemed to slap on the page) looked totally scrumptious and seemed fit for publication. God, I need to develop some visual skills.

In that vein, I've bought a large format view camera (Toyo G 4x5) and am slowly assembling the appropriate accessories and hope to be busting out some decent photos soon. Last summer, working at HABS, I got to go out with James Rosenthal on some shoots of Greenbelt, MD. (I worked with Jack Boucher, too, but didn't do any shoots with him). Having read some of John Stilgoe's early work on landscape, I had been primed for view photography (as well as landscape painting). This summer a chief project will be relearning basic optics -- the excruciating interdisciplinary education of Dale Winling continues.

Good God

2006-03-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration's and right wing's War on Knowledge and Education has become much broader than its early and ridiculous War on Science. It has now expanded to include a War on Higher Education. Via the New York Times comes news of this diversion of funds to "entrepreneurial" diploma mills:

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

For those of you following at home, that is the same budget bill that cut student loan aid for college. Check out the full story and see how campaign donations from online "colleges" laid the groundwork for this change.

Good Night, Chicago

2006-03-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Chicago
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

Back from a trip to the Windy City. Sadly, my wife and I saw no plays while there. Our time was booked up with friends, food, taking pictures of buildings, and professional matters. Chicago is really a great city, with the one drag being the infuriating trip on the el that took us more than an hour to go about 6 stops due to some crazy-ass work on the track. I have no idea why the delays weren't posted, but there it was. Being late for an appointment, we got out and took a cab up to Evanston from Belmont, an area on the near north side newly settled by hipsters and creative class types.

Evanston was a nice change from Ann Arbor, as well. They're actually building things there and retail rent hasn't chased office supply stores, hardware stores, or grocery stores from the city yet.

I talked to a guy at Aramantha Books who was from Ann Arbor and used to work at David's Books. He knew the owner of my favorite bookstore, West Side Books. The recent addition of another used bookstore brought Evanston's total to 5. My wife and I thanked him by buying several volumes, including James Ackerman's Palladio and John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

More to come if and when this blogger ever catches up on school.

(Cold) SNAP!

2006-02-19T20:58:00.000-05:00

Thermal Block
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

The mild January may have lulled you into complacency when you saw your gas bill was almost $100 lower than the one for December. Monsieur Winter, however, returned from vacation in February, and, finding you lolling around the apartment in a t-shirt and jeans, saucily slapped you back to reality with a frosty glove to the face, leaving you with a deep, malingering chill to remind you, once more, why a Michigan degree was a bad idea.

You've turned the heat down 5 degrees lower than you kept it last winter. You're already wearing a turtleneck and a sweatshirt to try to keep warm. If the girl next door comes over to borrow a cup of sugar and sees you've put a hoodie on over that, your chances are as good as gone.

What to do when overnight temperatures drop to the single digits? Put up a thermal block. From our friends, the architects, I have stolen a simple, clever, non-pretentious idea that will soothe the stinging slap from that punkass season. Basically, it involves hanging a sheet over the doorway(s) of a central room. In my case, the front door doesn't seal tight and cold air whistles in despite a storm door and weather stripping. The solution was to hang a curtain across the doorway from the entry area to the living room. Having blocked the cold air from immediately mixing with the warm living room air, the room stays warmer and the furnace isn't blasting away. The cold air coming indoors lingers at the door instead of wafting up the stairs to the second floor or rolling into the living room. Everyone's happy and toasty -- especially the cat with her mat by the heat register.

Give this option a serious thought if you're bundled up but still cold during the cold snap.

About This Blog

2006-02-19T20:27:00.000-05:00

Kleinschmidt Insurance Building
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

I am a graduate student in architectural history and urban planning at the University of Michigan. This blog is one of the many media I use to shoot my mouth off about planning, preservation, student housing, architecture, and the like.

It has seen numerous improvements and refinements since its inception in May of 2004. It will probably see more soon. Feel free to check out my growing Flickr collection of images.

Please check out the blogroll, my recent reads, and the archives of this site. Feel free to email me at l9winlinATyahooDOTcom if you have any questions, complaints, or comments. I will respond if the fancy strikes me.

Married!

2006-02-13T13:51:00.000-05:00

Husband and Wife
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

My lovely wife and I were married on February 5th at the Pittsfield Union Grange hall. A great place for a wedding, it has my high recommendation. $325 gets you a big dance/ceremony floor and a kitchen/dining floor with all the linens and table service you need.

In other news, I'm now a poster on Arbor Update and should also be working on an Urban Planning thesis on student housing this summer.

City Council Drinking Game

2006-01-25T10:01:00.000-05:00

Ann Arbor City Hall
Originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

Urban Oasis comes out of hibernation to mix politics and pleasure in Ann Arbor. Inspired by AAiO and Councilmember Lowenstein, we bring you the Ann Arbor City Council Drinking Game. [Note: Game best played with brew or spirits from Leopold Bros.]

When a Public Comment speaker addresses the issue of Palestine, drink.

When a commenter on Palestine significantly or angrily exceeds his/her comment time, drink.

When a councilmember praises the hard work and good intentions of another councilmember, drink.

When a councilmember asks for information from City Administrator Roger Fraser or an opinion on legal matters from City Attorney Stephen Postma, 2 drinks.

When a councilmember refers fondly to a former councilmember who had a lasting impact on the council, finish your drink.

When the council takes a recess or goes into executive session, finish your drink.

When the mayor makes a symbolic vote against a measure that doesn't affect the outcome of the vote, drink.

When a councilmember mentions the idea of neighborhoods to try to defend, explain, or strengthen his/her position on an issue, drink. Examples: "standing up for neighborhoods," "the neighborhoods want," "impact on neighborhoods."

In the ongoing efforts to involve college students and other young residents in the local political process, this Drinking Game is a significant accomplishment. Please add your own thoughts in the comments and in a week or two I'll put together a final set of rules.

Frivolity

2005-12-30T08:43:00.000-05:00

"The Chronic-WHAT?!-cles of Narnia." Utterly hilaricious. Watch it.

Zoo Life

2005-12-28T18:44:00.000-05:00

I headed to downtown Kalamazoo yesterday to tool around the place and do some work in a coffee shop. I remember again my many laments that Western Michigan University is not closer to downtown Kalamazoo. Despite its being overpriced, Ann Arbor has two things going for it -- walkability and free wireless internet.

Downtown Kalamazoo is home to the world's greatest magazine store, Michigan News Agency. I take a trip there every time I am home because it's got it all -- much better than Borders or Barnes and Noble. It's also home to the world's best brewery, Bell's (sorry, Leopold Bros). While I cannot vouch for its being the world's best, it also has a damn fine architectural salvage store, The Heritage Company. In addition, it also has a damn fine coffee shop -- Water Street Coffee Joint. The last 3 of these 4 attractions are semi-walkableon the far east edge of downtown; all you have to do is brave several lanes of one-way traffic, and several empty lots as you get there. You also have to get there, which requires a car, since Kalamazoo is, except for a few pockets, a much less pedestrian friendly city. (Check out the numerous surface parking lots on the Google map.)

However, these problems also provide the opportunities for improvement. Kalamazoo has been as aggressive and more successful than Ann Arbor in experimenting with downtown development. A downtown parking ramp went up without crying from downtown-adjacent neighborhoods. This is in part because Kalamazoo was a big city when Ann Arbor was a small town -- there's more (de-)industrial space between the CBD and the neighborhoods. Condo redevelopment has been faster and less contentious, and is more affordable as well. Did I mention cost of living is about a third lower?

Here's a New Year's prediction -- by 2010, Kalamazoo will be a better place to live than Ann Arbor (if it's not already).

Welcome Back to Nightly News

2005-12-16T08:38:00.000-05:00

David Gregory's White House reporting and grilling of Press Secretary Scott McClellan over the last 6 months may have won me back to watching network news. Thank God the press is done drooling over how "on message" the Bush White House is.

Hats off to the Mayor

2005-12-11T14:24:00.000-05:00

I certainly bust his chops now and again. But I'm not above giving him props when he earns them.

This shout out is prompted by several reports that wind energy is, in some cases, competitive or cheaper than electricity produced by coal or natural gas. As seen on CTN several weeks back and detailed at the Leopold Brothers meetup, the city is going to start buying energy from a wind farm going up in the thumb. I was thinking about these kinds of possibilities over the summer and I'm very pleased to see Hieftje is thinking along the same lines (which, with his authority to actually do something about these thoughts, is probably slightly more important). Now I've just got to find the study he quoted that said wind energy could create 9000 jobs in Michigan and use it in my economic development paper.

Get Out Your Schedules

2005-12-05T17:23:00.000-05:00

I will be teaching a course in Historic Preservation and Urban Conservation during the spring semester. As I have said elsewhere a number of times, I lament that in Ann Arbor, urban planners and historic preservationists are so frequently at odds. In my mind, preservationists ARE urbanists -- people committed to vibrant city life, friendly neighborhoods, and diverse social networks interacting within the built environment. I expect to incorporate several presentations from local preservation, research and planning figures, and to have some really interesting end-of-semester projects that students can choose from. My main target audiences will be students in the college of architecture and urban planning, as well as undergrads in history, landscape architecture, and even anthropology and sociology -- those whose work engages the built environment and urban settings. I will, of course, be considering input any readers might have, so feel free to rock the comments.

Sit-down Strike

2005-12-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

A reporter and a photographer from the Ann Arbor News rode the AATA number 3 bus to Ypsilanti to document and get reactions to AATA's commemoration of Rosa Parks' refusal to ride in the seat from the back of the Montgomery bus. As you may recall, upon Parks' death there was a great deal of emphasis placed upon the inspirational power of a working class seamstress' seeming decision that she was simply tired -- that practical concerns and common sense triumphed over a heritage of segregation. Part of the power and romance of this interpretation, to be sure, was that an average person could, with a simple gesture, spark a revolution that would overturn decades of egregiously racist public policy (and with it, culturally embedded segregationist biases). It has since been pretty well documented that Parks' demonstration was a conscious political gesture, planned, promoted, and rallied around for maximal effect; Parks herself, was a longtime grassroots activist. (Kelly Quinn, Sojourner Truth Fellow at TCAUP, has unearthed a letter from 1955 from the city's black community to city leaders, detailing their main complaints about treatment of Montgomery blacks).

For me, the irony that popular media and perception miss is that the buses were and are institutions that promoted economic equity, helping overcome the "spatial mismatch" between residence and work so often seen in urban areas. In so many cases, institutions of mass transit are under attack or are wilting from neglect -- how long will that #3 bus continue to go all the way to Ypsilanti, with the city's financial woes? As we celebrate Parks' inspirational act from 50 years ago, are we turning our backs on today's seamstresses, janitors, teachers' assistants, and food service workers (whatever their race)?

I hope not, but I fear so.

Watered Down

2005-11-29T22:46:00.000-05:00

Visiting a roommate's Public Policy class on Local Activism, I got to sit in on and participate in a discussion with Mayor Hieftje. Today's topic: Is Ann Arbor Overrated? From the outset, I was a mite underwhelmed by the class. It was at least a third urban planners and almost all the rest were policy students but no one seemed too eager to discuss policy or activism.

I came down rather firmly on the side that Ann Arbor is overrated, and perhaps more accurately, is overpriced. When I made the statement that Ann Arbor was far more expensive than other comparable Michigan and Midwestern cities, someone actually asked -- somewhat accusatorily -- what city was comparable to Ann Arbor. I asked about the cost of living and the cost of housing in the city as well as asking what is becoming my trademark question on affordable housing. The mayor responded that these were good questions, but that the people of Ann Arbor decided they didn't want to support affordable housing, particularly for students. He then, once again, repeated the canard that the university was to blame for the lack of affordable housing for students in the city because the university hasn't built any dorms in 30 years.

I found this particularly frustrating; at this point in the discussion, I felt more informed about affordable housing in Ann Arbor, historical conditions and present priorities, than the mayor of the city. Let me state my opinion and semi-professional conclusion emphatically -- that the university has no responsibility to house its students except as it feels necessary to promote its educational mission. Of the 168 years since the University of Michigan came to Ann Arbor, it was building dorms for about 30 of those years -- the rest of the time, the private housing market in the city responded to demand. In 1938 and 1939, the WPA made grants to the university for West Quad, East Quad, and Stockwell Halls to provide employment relief during the Depression. In 1950, the federal government implemented a low-interest loan program to colleges and universities for providing student housing. Colleges begged for this aid for five years after the war, claiming (amid senators' and representatives' skepticism) that cities' private housing market could not meet the increased demand for housing that veterans created. This loan program then financed Bursley, Markley, and the Baits and Northwood complexes. Almost all of the university's housing capacity was created in a 30-year period with federal subsidy, and only in response to the city's inability to provide housing (not because it was viewed as a university responsibility). For the mayor and other locals to shirk this responsibility and to blame the university is enabled by ignorance and motivated by politics.

Back to the class. Hieftje moved us away from affordability, and some students suggested strategies for Ann Arbor to take in promoting walkability and quality of life. People asked about grocery stores, about satellite business districts, and about parks. Murph asked about regional cooperation with Ypsilanti. Brandon asked about zoning. The mayor, to my surprise, suggested (or repeated the suggestion) that poor people should not own homes in Ann Arbor. Rather, they should do what the other people in this city have done and live in Ypsilanti, buying a house they can afford there and building equity, moving to Ann Arbor twenty years later when they can finally afford it. I have no words for how offensive I find this idea. I read it a number of times in residents' anti-ADU letters while researching the city's aborted attempt at developing an ADU ordinance. Ann Arbor, which can barely claim the mantle of a liberal community anyway, might as well admit that it is a Republican member of President Bush's ownership society if it takes this idea seriously (and a number of people do). A student from Boulder unwittingly and forcefully contradicted the mayor by talking about his neighbor, who, at 65, lives in the house he was born in, across the street from his parents, having lived in Ann Arbor his whole life and having gone to Michigan. I'm not sure how he possibly accomplished that without building equity in an Ypsilanti home for twenty years, but he seems to have done it.

Having taken his share of the slings and arrows of a grad class tossing underhand softball questions, the mayor decided to puff a little air back into the slightly deflated balloon of Ann Arbor's reputation. First he offered a plaque with the outline of Michigan's peninsulae, adorned with a white wine glass (which he "dinged" with his finger for effect), an award Ann Arbor won for the region's best tasting water. He followed that with one won for bikability, one for his own good work, and, in his estimation, the most complete, objective, scientific evaluation of cities ever done, a Froemmer's guide that rated Ann Arbor as one of the top ten places in America to live. Before time expired on the class, the student from Boulder (a Stifler look-alike) suggested that the way to get walkability was to bring more wealth to Ann Arbor; wealthy tech professionals are the only ones who can make Ann Arbor a livable city. This is doubly odious to me, first in its repudiation of the efficacy of the working and middle classes; second in that Silicon Valley is the exact opposite of what we should be emulating. I've sat in traffic on the way to San Jose -- anyone who suggests Google millionaires are the key to good planning is an idiot. The mayor had had enough, and concluded that despite "what a couple people on a web site might say," Ann Arbor was not overrated.

As with my last report on a discussion with a local politico, keep in mind that I am an excitable, righteous advocate of students and renters.

Accelerated Depreciation

2005-11-27T06:05:00.000-05:00

Christopher Leinberger, a new professor in the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, gave a job talk last spring talking about his philosophy and practice of real estate development, as well as some of his research work in that realm. If you go to his Web site, cleinberger.com, you can read his article on the 19 standardized products of real estate, or his thoughts on pedestrian-oriented developments. In the course of his job talk, he presented his idea of the 19 standardized products, and talked about financing buildings. One of his points that resonated with me was that in developing buildings, though they were formerly built with a 40-year obsolescence, the prevailing financing horizon is only about 7 years now. The idea stuck with me, though Leinberger offered no explanation for the change. He went on to discuss how these shorter-term financing deals made developers turn to disposable buildings like strip malls with smaller startup costs and the ability to sell or abandon them after the initial profitability period.

I was led to an article on tax policy and real estate development today, where I found an adequate explanation (American Historical Review, October 1996, pp. 1082-1110). With the Wilson-era expansion of the Internal Revenue Code, building depreciation was written in as tax deductible, though regulations were limited. By 1931, deductions claimed by businesses nationwide for buildings and equipment actually exceeded total business profits, nationwide. Thus, in 1934 the tax code was rewritten, establishing "straight-line" depreciation, meaning that the depreciation was assumed to be linear, taken in 40 equal annual increments. After a recession in 1953, the solution for this short-term situation was thought to be a long-term change in the tax code. In order to spur investment in industrial production, the term of depreciation was accelerated so that the life of buildings was taken to be something like 10 years. Another tax provision compounded this so that it really was more affordable to build new than to renovate old. While this may have promoted new construction, this, in conjunction with new developments in cheap, standardized building materials, meant that companies could build for the short term as profitably as they could build for the long term.

Think about every cheap, strip mall, ugly building you hate that took the place of a gorgeous, old, solid building that was torn down. I used to lament the change in the built world as a change in taste -- that people actually wanted these kinds of neighborhoods. In fact, it's tax policy. It all comes back to public policy.

Another Anti-Daily

2005-11-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

Columbus, Ohio, as you probably know, is home to Ohio State University. The New York Times reports that the OSU student newspaper, The Lantern, is getting some competition from a for-profit corporation.

I say good. When I worked at WMU's Western Herald, we found competition in the Kalamazoo Gazette, the city's afternoon daily. The Gazette sucked then and still sucks now, in much the same way that the Ann Arbor News sucks. The Gazette just wanted to inflate their circulation numbers so they could charge national advertisers more and didn't tailor their coverage to students in any fashion. It seemed to be more or less a flop. However, I would have welcomed a serious challenge to the Herald, because we could have used the competition to make us develop some actual reporting skills. While I was opinion editor and a columnist, our news editors sucked -- they didn't even know what was going on in the city generally, let alone having the wherewithall to do some investigative reporting. As the author of the daily editorials, I was regularly stymied by having to wait for the news department to do a story on a topic before I could editorialize about it, which could take days or weeks.

From what I've seen, campus newspapers generally suck (with the Michigan Daily being merely mediocre), so to anything that can help better inform students and/or increase total newspaper readership, I say "bully!"

Incredible

2005-11-13T12:54:00.000-05:00

The resources of the University of Michigan are, in a word, unbelievable. In doing some research for a professor in planning, I came across the ICSPR, the Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research. I had a foggy idea that it existed -- books by Olivier Zunz on Detroit and Sam Bass Warner on Philadelphia noted in their acknowledgements that the statistical data they created and relied upon was stored at UofM within the Institute for Social Research. Warner's, in fact, said that the data was on punch cards.

Anyway, I just came across it (along with some stuff from Wayne State's Center for Urban Studies) and all I can say is "wow." I love the study of history.

"Dems Sweep City Council"

2005-11-09T11:13:00.000-05:00

So claims the Michigan Daily. I said it before and I'll say it again, Democrats and Democratic values had a middling showing in this election; it was the establishment -- and particularly the Democratic machine -- that won out.

Think about it. Stephen Rapundalo and Marcia Higgins, both narrow winners in their wards, were until recently Republicans. What distinguished both of them from their opponents was not their values (nearly indistinguishable), but their experience within city government: Rapundalo has served on several city advisory committees and Higgins has been on council for several years. In contrast, Tom Bourque and Jim Hood were relative newcomers to city politics, having worked as a lawyer and a mortgage lender, respectively, in addition to serving the community in other ways. As Bob Johnson said, responding to some students before the New West Side debate, "You've got to pay your dues" to get elected. What this means is that you have to kiss the ring of the local Democratic party, support the party candidates year in and year out, and schmooze, schmooze, schmooze until its your turn at the front of the line. People who have been following City Council know that decisions are made at caucus, not in Council chambers.

Machine politics ironically arose in the 19th century as a means of organizing immigrants in American cities into voting blocks, to secure positions and patronage within city government. The Irish, Italians, Germans, and Poles all employed this strategy to work their way from the margins into mainstream society. I said "ironically arose" because in Ann Arbor, it is the most privileged in this city who are organized to fight back marginal groups like students. As Johnson indicated, no matter how charismatic or able a citizen might be, not until they have slogged away at cocktail parties and on the Historic District Commission will they get their chance to have their name next to the magical capital D on election day. THAT's why Eugene Kang lost in August.

Well, I think that sucks. I think the way for students and renters to break the middle-of-the-road Democratic and establishment stronghold in the city is to take it on full force. Let's employ the real Democratic strategy and run a student or renter in every ward and for Mayor next year. First we'll run in the Democratic and Republican primaries, and if we can't win there, we'll run independents. The Democrats of Ann Arbor are not serving the interests of a large portion of the city -- perhaps even the majority of Ann Arbor's citizens. It's time for a change.

Send this link around to your friends and relatives who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Send me an email if you're ready to run. There are 9 months until the primaries and 12 months until elections. Who's ready to fight for affordability, accessibility, equity, and progressive values in the city of Ann Arbor?

EDIT: Quotes in title.

For the Record

2005-11-08T19:51:00.000-05:00

You may have seen an old Web page I put together linked to in the comments on Ann Arbor is Overrated. You may have cringed or been upset when you looked at it. Let me sum up my thoughts and feelings on the subject: get over it.

I ran 3 MSA campaigns when I was an undergrad at Michigan, 1997, 1998, and another in 1998. In each case, I made fun of the political scene on campus, which I thought was totally ridiculous, self-serious, and knee-jerk liberal. Feel free to Google "Dale Winling AND MSA" and see what the internet has left from those years. One poster my sophomore year showed me holding my fist in the air like John Carlos and Tommie Evans from the Mexico City Olympics. Several people on campus thought this was offensive and complained. I sent one person a nasty email that was forwarded all over campus and I was branded a racist. I was investigated by DPS and I believe a complaint was made against me as violating the student code of conduct. There was never any merit to the claims. The following semester I ran again: the linked page was from that campaign.

I thought the materials were deleted when I transferred out of Michigan; it turns out they were not, and remained for someone who was clever enough to root around in my UofM Web storage area. When I realized they still existed I was embarrassed and removed them from the Web. For some reason Peter Honeyman felt it was worth saving, obtained a copy, and put it on his own Web site. Now I hear someone sent a link to the mayor. (What the mayor's interest might be, I have no idea.)

Here it is, for the record: if crazy pranks that 20-year-olds pull bother you, move out of Ann Arbor RIGHT NOW. I am telling you this for your own good. You will only be unhappy around an institution of some 30,000 undergraduates. And I can say with certainty, 20-year-olds do some crazy stuff. Just like you did when you were 20.

If you have any comment, save it; I don't want to hear it. I have real work to do and I don't have time to whimper around with people who don't know the difference between Stuff That Matters and Stuff That Doesn't.

LaDale C. Winling for City Council

2005-11-04T16:44:00.000-05:00

I am a write-in candidate in the 5th Ward.

So if you live and are registered basically west of Main St., north of Stadium, and south of M-14, you can vote for me on Tuesday, November 8th. It is VERY important that you write in "LaDale C. Winling," because I filed with my full name. It sounds like most other versions won't be tallied for me. For a semi-detailed ward map, click here.

How about we get 100 votes for a student-renter candidate?

Campaign Platform

City Life

2005-10-29T17:09:00.000-04:00

Come to the New West Side/Ann Arbor Alliance City Council Candidate Debate Wednesday, November 2. 7 pm - 8:30 at the Henderson Room of the Michigan League.

This debate is structured so that candidates must directly address the most important concerns for students and renters. For that reason, it is important that students and renters attend this event -- these groups can begin to shape the debate and the direction of politics within the city of Ann Arbor, an impact they have not had for about three decades. I just watched part of the League of Women Voters' Candidate Debate on CTN and I was fairly disappointed with the "debate" that ensued. Rich Birkett (Ind) worked to distinguish himself clearly from Leigh Greden, but much of the rest of the debate was bland discussion about things like working to preserve city services while keeping taxes from going up. I note in the latest Observer that there are still two leaf pickup dates for every neighborhood this year, while the Housing Inspection office has no appreciable presence within the city. And candidates should not expect softball questions about downtown density (with Bob Johnson calling 5-8 story buildings "tall.") Answer me this, candidates -- are you going to accept greater density in YOUR neighborhood? Will you see to it that EVERY neighborhood accepts greater density? Why or why not?

As a bonus, free food will be served at this event and attendees can submit questions for consideration at the debate itself. Don't miss this chance.

Espresso Vu

2005-10-23T17:05:00.000-04:00

This post comes from the Espresso Royale on Gainsborough St. in Boston a day after the Head of the Charles (they wouldn't punch my Ann Arbor card. Bastards.) Let the word go out to hipsters and proto-yuppies everywhere -- Allston has got it going on. A western village of Boston, just north of mega-chic suburb Brookline, Allston and Farrington Inn, a sort of flea bag rooming house just off the T played host to your newly engaged commentator and his rower girlfriend (now fiancee) this weekend. Home of lots of restaurants, great shops and friendly people. If only a theater venue were offering something last night, I would have put it atop my list of places I'd like to live. In between Boston College and Boston University, that part of Allston (Brighton and Harvard Sts.) is on its way back from typical 1970s urban desolation, though it's not too yuppified. Even still, real estate is crazy affordable (in Boston terms) there. You can get about 600 square feet for 200k (not much more than downtown Ann Arbor, I might note.) Buildings out to the sidewalk, sidewalks, T connections and buses going everywhere -- Boston's rep for walkability is well-deserved. Did someone say "get me out of Ann Arbor"?

Letter to Jim Chaconas

2005-10-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

Jim Chaconas is the leasing agent for McKinley, which owns or manages a crapload of real estate in Ann Arbor. Since Shayani Oriental Rugs is going out of business, the retail building next to the Madison House is going to be available. God, I hope they don't bring in a bank.

********************

Mr. Chaconas --

I live in the house immediately next door to what is now Shayani Oriental Rugs (106 W. Madison). I see that you are handling the leasing of this building and I have heard that several banks have inquired about this property. As a resident of this area, I strongly recommend against bringing a bank into this location. A much better business for this location would be a coffee or sandwich shop. There is a great deal of foot traffic on Madison -- students, faculty, and staff who live in the West Side use this route to go to central campus. (I see THOUSANDS of people walk by this location on football Saturdays.) In addition, this is something of a retail center just on the edge of the DDA area. Todd Leopold of Leopold Bros. has said that the best thing for his business in this location would be a sandwich shop -- the two locations are about 100 meters apart. Washtenaw Dairy is another nearby retail attraction. During the summer, Washtenaw Dairy has groups in the dozens hanging around outside their shop; during the winter people go there for beer, for ice cream, for eggs, and for milk. Less than a block to the south, the South Main Market has a few shops that would not only benefit such a retail business on the corner of Main and Madison, but would also be strengthened by the development of such a food retail cluster. Finally, developing this type of cluster, really a block and a half from the existing downtown, will only strengthen the expansion of "downtown" by drawing pedestrians from the limited number of blocks north of William, and will provide other leasing opportunities for the
nearby properties.

Please give this scenario -- the attraction of an affordable, preferably locally-owned, business serving food and drink to the local neighborhoods -- your consideration. Shayani Oriental Rugs was unable to tap into this foot traffic potential; I am sure a bank will have little to contribute to the neighborhood, either. Please let me know of any questions or concerns you
might have.
--
Dale Winling

UPDATE: Reply

Dale
Thank you for the E-mail, we are not talking to any banks. I am also
trying for the same type of business as you inquired about. I am the
agent that put the brewery in there space. Please feel free to inquire
anytime you may like.
Jim Chaconas

Nickel in the slot

2005-10-12T22:50:00.000-04:00

Having had my cell phone stolen by a thief who should be arrested shortly for making several local calls on it, I had to make a phone call on a pay phone recently. You may have noticed the empty nooks and closets in public places that once housed several pay phones. Pay phones seem to be on the decline at the hands of the cellular phone. I found the process of locating a pay phone and making a call annoying and nigh unto impossible. I wonder how many other people find the situation as difficult as I did.

Richard John, an historian of technology, gave a paper at the Urban History conference last fall about the nickel-in-the-slots, an early form of public phone. The thinking has long been that the telephone, in allowing the public to communicate in real time across long distances, allowed cities to get bigger and subsequently allowed business to be conducted across the continent -- another of the forces leading to the end of urbanism (in Doug Rae's words). Now we have almost completely scuttled our public-access phone systems, meaning that it is nearly impossible to make a phone call if you don't have a cell phone or your own office. I can't help but think this is a terribly foolish decision in terms of equity, one which we will come to regret like tearing up our trolley tracks. We are making the marginal -- those who can't afford cell phones and service -- even more so by eliminating any reasonable means of communication, particulary one that doesn't require significant long-term commitments. Not only that, one cannot make a long distance phone call from a pay phone in Michigan anymore. I was totally stymied.

I read an article in The Economist about Voice Over Internet Protocal winning out over digital cell telephony, since it would be so much cheaper. I hope they're right, and that we can essentially make land lines (necessary for VOIP) plentiful again, and hopefully cheap. I've still got a year-plus on my cell phone contract, but I'm wondering if trying to switch to a land line wouldn't be a better idea.

Back in Business

2005-10-09T12:51:00.000-04:00

I'm back to my pre-summer posting schedule, which is to say, rather infrequently. However, I encourage you to check out the New West Side page for a radio interview and information on getting ready for winter. Also, Wednesday November 2 will be a City Council candidate debate at the Michigan League.

The New York Times today had two features on New Orleans and Katrina, one by Nicolai Ourosoff on the city's pumps and pumpmen during the storm; one in the NYT magazine by Moneyball Michael Lewis, who returned to his hometown of NOLA right after Katrina hit. I don't have much to say except that this topic continues to interest me very much. I also think it is a terrible mistake to rebuild in the below-sea-level parts of the city. Most of that development was a 20th century phenomenon, wherein politicians, plannners, and engineers thought that humans could win against nature. You can't. Stop trying.

Two quick notes: Soon I'll have an ode to Sanborn maps, one of the greatest documentary aids to historians of the urban built environment. And check out the hippy city in California that imposed strict no-growth restrictions and became a town for millionaires. Sound familiar?

Did someone say "smash hits"?

2005-09-08T21:31:00.000-04:00

Yep. It was me and I was speaking about New West Fest and Arbour Fest. Both events together netted about a thousand dollars in donations and a dozen new Ann Arbor voters. Let me throw down at my Flickr account for visuals, but here I count the ways in which they rocked.

1. Chris Bathgate. So I didn't know who this dude was a week ago and now I've seen him perform 3 times in 4 days and he may be my new favorite local act. Great voice, clever lyrics, great range and execution in his music; I just wish he had another CD I could buy.

2. Arbor Vitae loft. A place I'd only heard about, seeing this place was pretty great -- like a hamster maze, as Brandon described it. The creation of late architect/planner Rich Ahern, definitely a top-notch sometimes social spot above Wazoo. When's the next show (including fiddler Sharon and accordionist Sean on the bill)?

3. Flyering. Brandon rocks. He flyered the hell out of Ann Arbor in the week and a half leading up to the shows and it paid off. Nearly a hundred paying customers at the Madison House and about 250 at Arbor Vitae.

4. Leopold Brothers. Todd and Scott hooked us up with a yummy Autumn Ale that kept musicians, volunteers, and fans alike company for the night (along with High Life and Bud from the Diag Party Shoppe). Definitely a big hit with the (21+) kids.

My next objective is a candidate panel in October, wherein the NWS/AAA will start to shape the debate of local politics. Anyone in?

Was He Just Lost in the Flood?

2005-08-30T12:47:00.000-04:00

Having come back from a trip to New Orleans a week ago, I find the hurricane's impact upon the city particularly poignant. (The trip partially explains this blog's inactivity). What a city. First off, they have two functioning streetcar lines -- Canal Street, running north from the Mississippi riverfront (which runs East-West at that point) and St. Charles Avenue, running a looooong east west perpendicular (and connecting) to Canal. These streetcars, limited as they may be, are integral to the city's identity. "A Streetcar Named Desire" was named for a line that ran on Desire Street, but doesn't any more. As in the film starring Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh, the name of the line shows above the car's front window.

These aren't merely tourist attractions, however. They serve a real need -- particularly connecting the garden district, which is largely residential, to the French Quarter, where even locals go to party. St. Charles was an incredibly smooth ride, if loud. Operated by electricity supplied by an overhead cable, the trolleys have conductors who literally make the thing speed up and slow down by opening and closing a circuit with a hand lever.

The group I went with took a swamp tour by airboat (think big fan on the back of the boat). The swamps were ecological marvels, a kind of place you may not want to be around, but are really grateful that they exist (and are preserved). We travelled a bit on the intercoastal waterway, a channel for barge traffic along the gulf coast and continuing up the eastern seaboard, then tooled about the swamps. The guides had an interesting relationship to the local natural resources. For one, they were long-time locals who were immersed in swamp-related activities and particularly hunted, fished, and trapped animals like muskrats and alligators. They didn't have much of a conservation ethic, however -- and I mean conservation in the sense of taking steps to make sure that current activities could be prolonged into the distant future. There wasn't much remorse or thought about the ongoing degradation of the swamplands and what might be contributing to it, except an anecdote about the arrival of the nutria rat at the hands of the McIlhenny family (of Tabasco fame). The nutria eats the root system of some type(s) of swamp vegetation, which allows the soil to wash away down the river, a serious problem in the Mississippi delta.

Anyway, much of the area in the city is underwater due to a breach of the levee system though the French Quarter itself, wisely built upon a hill, fared well. Though a LOT of the residential areas were run down, they had a special character, and throughout the city one found 2nd story verandas and balconies, a particular favorite form of mine. Lets hope the trolleys, for which replacement parts must be custom machined these days, get back up and running soon.

UPDATE: That doesn't look too promising. The whole city may henceforth be a memory.

Hey Hey! Ho Ho! NYU Sucks.

2005-08-10T19:46:00.000-04:00

Academia -- corporate greed in professorial robes.

As the New York Times reports, New York University is refusing to bargain with its five-year-old graduate student union. Last year, you might remember, Brown University graduate students lost a decision from the National Labor Relations Board (packed with Bush Administration appointees) on becoming the nation's second private university to have unionized grad students. NYU was the first. After the Brown decision, NYU started looking at ways to break off with the grad student union. Now they have made their "final offer" on a new contract, which the union rejected, and offered a thousand-dollars-a-year raise to anyone who breaks off from the union.

Well.

During last year's strike at UofM, I didn't cross the picket line and argued for support of the union to skeptics (even skeptical union members). At its most elemental and self-interested, the issue is this: you, as a GSRA or GSI, get what you get because the union has been fighting for you for decades. You owe it to your predecessors and successors to support the union on reasonable compensation demands, even if you don't agree with them, exactly. Put strategically, it is up to the students to work collectively to counter the significant power that the university has in setting compensation. If not for the union, it could and would be a totally unilateral negotiation. University faculties the nation over realized this long ago and organized.

Supporting graduate student unions is in fact a matter of protecting the research mission of universities and, yes, even the quality of undergraduate education, strange as it may seem. Case is point is my alma mater, Western Michigan University. At the outset of my graduate career, MSU grad students were organizing and I began advocating for WMU to do the same. WMU grad students were employees of the university and played significant roles in the research and teaching missions. Anyone who has worked in a science department knows that students run most of the experiments and do most of the bench work, where faculty members get the grants and set up the labs. In the liberal arts, grad students teach many of the classes and do the grading and give the individual attention that undergrads outside of the honors college need. My idea found no purchase and was in fact publicly rebuffed by the head of the graduate student group because the administration was already being generous with grad students.

(This person, at the very same time, was reputed to have been sleeping with the provost. It was extremely plausible [corroborated by 2 mutual friends] and the provost was summarily fired in short order for unexplained reasons. I worked at the student newspaper at the time and investigated, but both sides had signed a non-disclosure agreement and no one was talking.)

Anyway, since the economic difficulties of the state of Michigan and higher education, WMU has slashed graduate programs. In fact, my old department is no longer funding new grad students and the university is undertaking an "accelerated" assessment of graduate programs (to determine where the ax will permanently fall). Why are grad students being cut? Because they have no collective voice to stand up for their interests. Now there are no individual sections for undergraduate history courses and FULL PROFESSORS are forced to do grading and teaching of elementary writing mechanics and research methods. This is not only MORE costly (for example, having professors teach introductory courses once taught by grad students like doctoral candidates), the increase in responsibilities means that professors are LESS able to mentor and advise students, meaning a worse educational value.

Bottom line? For large universities and those emphasizing research, it makes sense for grad students to organize -- for their own interests and those of the educational project overall. More power to the NYU grad student union.

Mark Your Calendars

2005-08-09T14:47:00.000-04:00

The city's hottest new neighborhood politicos, the New West Side Association and the Ann Arbor Alliance, announce two events that you just can't afford to miss.

New West Fest -- Sunday, September 4, all day, at the Madison House.

Come meet your West Side neighbors, register to vote, and hear some emerging local musicians play sans electric amplification at the Madison House venue. The New West Side Association is a neighborhood association focusing on the social, economic, and political interests of students and renters on the West Side of Ann Arbor. Join and help form a permanent consituency for student and renter interests in Ann Arbor.

Arbour Fest -- Monday, September 5, nighttime at the Arbor Vitae loft.

If you are interested in developing a political voice in your neighborhood, wherever it is in Ann Arbor, come to Arbour Fest on the third floor of the Wazoo building on State St. If you can't make it to New West Fest, celebrate the end of summer at the nexus of town and gown on State Street. This will feature a live electric show of local artists. All ages are invited; all you have to bring is enthusiasm for local music and broad local political participation. Arbour Fest will also feature a voter registration drive. See you there!

Now, More Than Ever

2005-08-02T22:39:00.000-04:00

[Cross-posted at NewWestSide.org]

Given Eugene Kang's narrow defeat this evening in the Ward 2 Democratic Primary, it may seem that student interests have taken a blow. Not so. Eugene Kang's candidacy was better funded and more representative of Democratic values than Stephen Rapundalo's, and that was not enough to win. This means to me, first, that Democratic loyalty is not particularly strong in Ann Arbor. I have absolutely no problem with Rapundalo coming to the Democratic Party. I wish more Republicans would. However, it is indicative that people don't care that Rapundalo, until two years ago, identified more strongly with a party that did not advocate women's reproductive rights, that espoused trickle-down economics, and that had a problem with tolerance.

For me, the lesson is that Ann Arbor's summer voters want institutional choices. Rapundalo had been around city government for a while, running for Mayor in ~~2002~~ 2000 and serving on the Parks board in the interim. Students and renters -- those of us disparaged in the press and in conversation as "transients" and "temporary" -- have to form a permanent constituency for our issues. We have to organize in any of a thousand ways, participate in city and county government and, most of all, mobilize at the grassroots level. Every student and every renter should think of him or herself in that way; as part of a group which is only beginning to see itself as having common interests; as being underserved and underconsidered in a large share of city government; and as having the potential to help change that.

I think everyone reading this should join the effort to defend and promote student and renter issues. They should get to know their neighbors and learn that they hold common cause. And they should realize that getting involved and helping shape the future of this city is important because STUDENTS MATTER. Undergrad and grad school may be intellectually and emotionally taxing, but they are no reason to ignore the conditions of the place you live. Two years, four years, eight years in Ann Arbor: it matters not a whit to me. If you are here, you feel the affects of the culture and government of the city. Do not be a passive recipient or pretend it doesn't matter because you are only passing through. Every place matters, and I particularly think that Ann Arbor matters. Ann Arbor, as the home of one of the nation's largest institutions devoted to learning, thought, and experimentation, should be the state's -- if not the nation's -- laboratory for political innovation and cultural enlightenment. That it is not speaks to the influence of moneyed, conservative, and tradition-bound interests.

Let's get to work.

UPDATE: For those linking just to this post from AAiO or Arbor Update, please check out the rest of the site and feel free to comment.

Runaway Train

2005-08-02T06:02:00.000-04:00

I'm turning in an application to the mayor for a position on the City of Ann Arbor's Housing Policy Board. To coin an analogy, this board is to Affordable Housing money as the Planning Commission is to site plans and project recommendations. The HPB makes recommendations to the City Council on how to deal with developers and allocate (and extract) affordable housing.

I call on Mayor Hieftje to name me to the board despite my calling him out last night at the city council meeting for not wanting to "shove things down neighborhoods' throats." And despite my knocking the idea of a pedestrian mall, which was abandoned by Kalamazoo -- the first city in the country to develop one -- in 1997. And I hope that the Mayor will live up to his stated desire to get more students involved in city government.

I will keep you posted, and I may also try to get a viewpoint piece in the Ann Arbor News on my house moving idea. Also, did you know there's a program called "Ward Talk" that airs once a month on CTV? Gonna have to start checking that out.

Proto Campaign Platform, Take 2

2005-08-01T15:03:00.000-04:00

Historic Preservation

We should pledge that we will never knock down another residential building in Ann Arbor. I am involved in preservation and recognize the importance of maintaining the designs and materials of days past. I think they are generally superior to what we have put out in the post WWII era. That goes for residential and commercial and industrial. In nearly every thriving city, the area that is the most vibrant retains the form of days past. Preservation has become an engine of urban revitalization.

HOWEVER, in a fortunate few cities like Ann Arbor, that revitalization and vibrancy means that demand outstrips supply of urban land and space. The result is an upward spiral of real estate costs and decreasing affordability. Homes for less than $200,000 in the city of Ann Arbor are the exception rather than the rule. This is not sustainable, as the cost of a home should be about 2-2.5x the annual income of the family or household. This means that a couple would have to earn 80-100k a year to be able to afford a house that they want to stay in. That may be fine for lawyers, physicians, and even some engineers, but for most of the middle class, the only option is to live out in the townships. BTW, you should see the real estate fiasco in historic Chestertown, MD, I saw over the weekend. Houses go for anywhere from $300 to $600 a square foot (and, because of a robust land conservancy initiative there, there were NO OPTIONS anywhere outside the town [unless it was 30+ miles away]). It was simply unaffordable to live there.

How to reconcile preservation with the much-needed increase of the building supply? Moving the structures. Take the two houses that fell victim to the Glen Ann development. The space was incredibly underutilized, so I don't fault the new development. However, it was decided not to force the developer to pay to move the houses to some other lots in town. What should have happened was that the developer paid the million dollars to the Ann Arbor Housing Trust Fund, then either sold the houses for a dollar each or donated them to a non-profit developer. Really, it's no skin off their nose. Either they get two bucks and some good will, or they get a decent tax break, as the houses (without lots) would probably be worth a 100k each. The non-profit developer then would pay to have these homes moved either somewhere in town or on the outskirts, and at, say, 30k each to move, plus 25k for a lot and foundation, we have 2 new affordable units in town (plus all the money from the developer's "in lieu of" payment for future projects). "Win-win," they call it. In fact, moving structures is an historic housing strategy that got lost in the 20th century availability of cheap new construction.

Another bonus, while we're on the topic of density and affordability, is to change zoning in residential areas so that existing suburban plats within the city can see greater density (with these moved structures, perhaps). Another challenge to density and affordability is the perception that Ann Arbor is "built out." This is not the case. In fact, Ann Arbor has a CRAPLOAD of green space -- on nearly every single residential lot. First, what we must do is rewrite the zoning and covenants of our urban residential developments so that we can fill in this space. No more restrictions of 30 feet on each side of the house to the lot line. Then, we can reconfigure the lots -- say you buy 2 side by side lots and then slice some land off each lot where they meet to make a third lot -- to accommodate moved structures and greater density. To make considerations for fire hazards, let's stagger the houses so that they're not in a single line, but the third house is farther back from its neighbors, reducing the chance that a fire in one could jump to the next (part of the reason for the institution of side setbacks). Let me research how this last brainstorm might be practically achieved and update in a bit.

NOTE: Edited to clarify "residential" buildings in the first paragraph. Also, as Murph notes in the comments, it sounds like I'm blaming the developer for the loss of the two houses at Glen-Ann. I don't mean to; rather, I'm lamenting the whole process. As I hear it, the developer said, "you can either have a million dollars for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, or I'll move the houses and you can have half a million dollars." The city chose the former, which was wise, but the relocation of the houses is also an important measure.

Michigan Ambrosia

2005-07-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

Jane Jacobs, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, posits an alternate conception of economic development. She develops this theory using qualitative discussion of several instances or case studies that illustrate her points. It's fairly impressionistic and conversational, but it basically works for me -- there are many plausible methods for developing a new theory, I think.

This is not a review, however. I am using a part of her argument to discuss one of the many ideas I have about Michigan -- its culture and its economy. Cities, for Jacobs, are the origin of economic development. It is in cities (and city regions, she acknowledges, writing in 1984) that new products and processes are developed, that knowledge is shared and advanced, and that wealth is created. Perhaps the chief idea in this book is "import replacement." Basically, a party within a city or town, which imports its products, figures out how to create a particular product locally, obviating the need to import it. This could be something like nails. Where a city might do all its building with imported nails, if somebody figures out how to get their hands on an iron supply and to start up a small factory, that portion of the cost of building stays in the local economy, and the city or town takes a baby step towards self-sufficiency. (That self-sufficiency is aided in no small part by resources like iron in the surrounding "supply region," but it is not necessarily dependent upon the existence of those local resources.) Then, when that nail factory gets up and running and can even supply other towns and regions with nails, somebody might take that locally produced wealth and expand the factory into a more developed iron/steel product, or some workers who know the nail-making process might start their own factory for screws or ax-heads or shovel blades, or whatever, replacing another good that the city and region had imported. This process of developing new products is what makes cities prosperous. This can be applied to intellectual products, as well. (I won't go into discussion of many other important or interesting ideas in the book, but I could, and may at some point in the future.)

Anyway, to bring this around to the title of this post, I'm resurrecting an idea I had last summer. Basically, we develop a new soft drink that features Michigan fruit flavors (natural, NOT the synthetic equivalents) and is sweetened by sugar (or a derivative) from Michigan sugar beets. Did you know that Pioneer Sugar is based in Saginaw? You should NEVER buy Domino sugar. EVER.

Drawing on Michigan agricultural products, this spurs demand for Michigan fruit, which, aside from cherries, is languishing in competition with California fruit and foreign imports (though most Michigan products are better, I think). Actual sucrose is a better sweetener than high fructose corn syrup because HFCS-sweetened products do not give you a feeling of satiety even though you are consuming calories, so it would actually be less bad for you than Coke. In addition, these soft drinks would replace Mexican imports like Jarritos sodas (and maybe regionally-produced drinks like Coke) and would have an overall economic spur in production/manufacturing. It might also spur some food research and development of new sweeteners or other fruit-based products. Finally, the plant(s) should be located in an industrial brownfield like one might find in, say, Kalamazoo or Benton Harbor, both in or near the Michigan Fruit Belt, where paper, cigars, cars, stockings, and other manufacturing products were formerly king. Agricultural development AND urban revitalization? Where do I sign? The idea is free (and if somebody like Todd Leopold who knows beverage-making wants to drop me a line, please feel free), but if you make a million off this idea, send me 5 Gs at some point in thanks.

Run for It!

2005-07-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

Looking at the issue responses from our current crop of candidates for city council, I'm fairly disappointed. Press coverage is pretty weak (though the News should be coming out with something before the primary; they called me), only Kang has a Web site, and the answers they give to the questionnaire aren't even productive, let alone the vision I think this town is going to need in the upcoming years. So I've decided to start a list of issues and initiatives I think a candidate could effectively use to run for council. Maybe I'll get off my ass and register the urbanoasis domain and learn how to use some good features like a wiki, commonmonkeyflower-stizz. Maybe I should get some traffic through here first, though. And learn how to use a computer.

1. A dog park. This is SUCH a no-brainer. Ann Arbor is getting older and having fewer members per household. The frequency of dogs as companions will increase in these situations (empty nesters, young singles, etc.). Would it kill us to either acquire a park in the city or turn an existing park into a dog park? No, and it would make Ann Arbor more attractive to childless couples with pets -- they value dog-friendly amenities about like nuclear families value schools and regular parks. Let's give it to them. Two, in fact.

2. Promoting clean and renewable energy production and consumption. The AATA buses are using low-sulphur diesel. Great. City vehicles are using compressed natural gas (if somebody wants to chime in on this, feel free; I heard this was becoming an increasingly difficult option). OK. I think we need to get MUCH more aggressive on this.

A. First, car-sharing. The city should only maintain job-specific vehicles like dump trucks and the like. For regular cars, they should participate in a car-sharing service whereby they have several vehicles dedicated to them for regular hours and that are available for general use after hours. Flexcar in DC has an option like this -- note how this ties in with the Car Co-op? Yep, I'm clever like that. MAD clever.

B. Production. I was looking around at the DTE site for a green energy option for the Madison House for the upcoming year. I can't find one. They're JUST doing some experimental stuff in Detroit, but they are LIGHT YEARS behind Consumers Energy it seems. They do, however, buy energy from micro-producers (because they are required to, unless the bastards in Congress take that out in the new energy bill). Anyway, thinking about Toronto's Windshare project and this Montana project involving 5 cities purchasing a utility, I realize that Ann Arbor and maybe Washtenaw county need to get in on the act. I had been thinking about a similar 2- or 3-partner deal involving a co-op, the city (or a city-created corporation or authority), and DTE or some other local producer. Perhaps partnering with other Michigan cities could make this happen bigger and/or faster, and even more importantly, can get some wind turbines on or near the Lake Michigan shore, where wind potential is even greater. A 750kW turbine costs about 1.5 million dollars to get going.

3. Development and Affordable Housing. Nobody's got any balls on this score. First, the way the city is allocating its affordable housing resources is stupid, I think. Read my post on it for an introduction. Somebody should grow some berries and say "We need more density and we need more development. It's probably going to come whether we like it or not, so here's my plan to accommodate it in the way that we won't regret it." I might even say it's time for the city to start amassing land (I wonder how many houses they get each month from tax defaults?) in semi-outlying areas and making them available for redevelopment. Certainly they can start rezoning certain areas for higher density. The downtown rezoning is just a start.

A. ADUs. This is as much of a no-brainer as dog parks. Objections to accessory dwelling units (within city-established guidelines) are just BANANAs.

So that's it for now, but this will be updated frequently. I put the dog park first to show that I recognize tangible quality of life issues are important too. Every candidate's program should include small and large issues like that.

BTW, this reminds me of the time I planned the WMU campus. It's great being a know-it-all.

Ramping Up

2005-07-26T12:30:00.000-04:00

You may recall my past posts about affordable housing and non-profit development in Ann Arbor. Now that the city's 05/06 budget is online, here's an update. During this fiscal year, the city anticipates revenues relevant to affordable housing of approximately $5.5 million. That is $2.23 million from a HUD/HOME grant, $2.19 million from a Community Development Block Grant, $786,000 from the Affordable Housing Fund (extracted from developers) and $227,000 from the DDA Housing Fund. This does not include rollover from last year, which sources indicate there was (as there is every year).

I have requested a meeting with Jennifer Hall, Housing Services Coordinator for the city, next week, and should have a better discussion of the issues and possibilities then. Stay tuned.

Economy Through Community

2005-07-24T20:38:00.000-04:00

Murph and Pat Austin, two MUP students at Michigan, had the idea of starting up a cooperative car-sharing group in Ann Arbor a bit over a year ago, based on a course project they had done in transportation planning. I read about it on Murph's blog last summer and was smitten. The cost and tribulations of auto ownership have never been worth it, in my book, and so I have long been seeking an alternate model. Thus, the start of my involvement in A2C3, the Ann Arbor Community Car Cooperative. I bought into it last fall, but didn't become a driver. Having been only peripherally involved over the last year, the opportunity to become more integrally involved has arisen and I will be taking it. So, at this point, still having little to no influence in the organization but banking that I soon will, I begin what will be at least a year-long promotion of cooperative car sharing.

Why join a ride sharing cooperative?
Cooperative ownership of large assets like cars has a number of benefits for you, for the environment, and for the community. If you're like me, you NEED a car about once every 4-6 weeks. For an important trip home, to pick up a new purchase, or to take some work- or school-related trip. I sometimes have to go to archives in Kalamazoo, East Lansing, or Detroit. It's CONVENIENT to have a car once every 1-2 weeks. To go to a show, to go grocery shopping, or just to get out of town for a bit. Most of the rest of the time, driving (for those who live in town) is frivolous. If you need a car for a long commute, car-sharing is not for you. If you think you need a car to get up to North Campus, car-sharing is not for you. However, if you are dropping 1000 dollars a year on car insurance and on top of that have a car payment, car-sharing is a good way to cut down on those costs. If you have no car, joining a car coop is a way to have car access with a modest investment. With a clean driving record, the initial cost may be as low as $100. The benefits to the community are helping reduce the number of cars on the roads in Ann Arbor (traffic congestion) and the need for parking (an increasingly contentious neighborhood and city-wide issue). Environmentally, car-sharing has an inevitable reduction of pollution from frivolous trips and the reduction in market demand for production of new cars.

How would such a thing work?
Basically, you pay the initial fee to join. As I said, it currently starts as low as a hundred dollars for those with perfect driving records and goes up for those who have points. This fee gives you a share in the cooperative, meaning you own part of the assets with the other members. It also gives you a say in governing the coop. So it's sort of like ownership of stock, except the coop is not a heartless corporation devoted to making profits. It's a small local group of people seeking economy and who value alternative models for transportation. Once you join and are cleared to drive, you can reserve the car(s) as you want here. As you use the cars, you will be charged a small fee based upon how long you drove the car for and how many miles. This is currently billed monthly. This fee covers the costs of gasoline (you don't individually need to refill it, or if you do, you get reimbursed), maintenance like oil changes and repairs, insurance, and of the coop's overhead. The car currently has a parking spot a couple blocks west of downtown. The bottom line is, sign up, reserve the car and drive it, return it, and pay your monthly charges. You can come to meetings and help promote the coop, too.

That sounds great. Who thought of this?
Cooperatives have been around for more than a hundred years. Communal ownership of large assets goes back to the early industrial period in Great Britain, where workers owned the machinery they worked with instead of just working for a corporation that owned everything. Cooperatives became a particularly popular ownership model in the US in the late 20s and 30s when the economy went bad and people couldn't afford major investments. Farmers were the biggest beneficiaries of cooperative ownership as they pooled resources to develop utilities. Most recently, car coops and other car sharing groups have sprung up in larger cities where it's tough to find parking and cars aren't an everyday necessity. Zip Car, Flex Car, and I-Go are just three examples. Murph and Pat, who soon will be urban planners, thought that Ann Arbor, sometimes thought of as environmentally progressive, might offer fertile ground for a car coop.

Community ownership? Isn't that for communists?
Let me ask YOU a question. Aren't you a little old for name-calling? Seriously, there are LOTS of coops you patronize but probably didn't realize. Credit unions are coops. Welch's and Sunkist are fruit marketing coops. There are actually lots of coops throughout the U.S. and they fall all along the political spectrum, just as corporations do. Cooperative ownership is an economical, community-oriented way of doing business and providing services. Plain and simple.

How do I sign up?
Send me an email at lwinling[at]umich.edu. If you are really interested, within a couple weeks we should be able to get you driving around Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County. Tell your friends.

UPDATE: I'm including several links to articles about car-sharing elsewhere so that you can read about some of the precedents. Flexcar in DC, I-Go in Chicago and Evanston, and Zip Cars everywhere.

UPDATE 2: Via Bob Harris comes this LATimes Magazine article on how some home-hacking and a bigger battery can get the Toyota Prius over 100 mpg. As you know if you follow the links, many of the larger car-sharing services have hybrid vehicles, as a commenter notes. However, I think it is imperative that we do not simply try to replace our gas guzzlers with more efficient cars, without significantly altering the way we approach automotive transportation. The auto has, in some ways, be very liberating and empowering for our society. Its overuse and our national fetish with cars has been bad for the U.S. There is an acceptable level of auto use. It is a small fraction of our current use.

What's the Matter With Kansas?

2005-07-18T19:57:00.000-04:00

After holding off on buying this book for several months, I picked it up at Olsson's in DC and couldn't put it down until I finished it. Thomas Frank's book, to be honest, surprised me. I had not wanted to buy it because I thought it would be another volley in the ongoing name-calling fest between our top hackneyed journalists. It turns out I was wrong.

To summarize the main points of the book, Frank illustrates how Kansas, a state that just over a century ago was just about the farthest left state in the U.S., became one of the farthest right today. First, the Democratic party -- there and nationwide -- abandoned liberal economic principles in an attempt to court the American middle. In this way, New Democrats became economically indistinguishable from Republicans. Second, Republicans co-opted the cultural issues of the religious right -- reproductive rights, traditional family values, and the evolution debate -- to convince the working class that the Republican party had their moral interests at heart, convincing them that Democrats and liberals were the party of license and immorality. Third, they rhetorically reframed the idea of class as not an economic issue, but as one of "authenticity," for example how George W. Bush is reputed to be more like an average guy even though his entire life has been guided by privilege. This accomplished, conservatives/Republicans remained steadfast in dismantling the machinery of the New Deal (and even the Progressive Era) and further increased the gap between rich and poor with tax cuts and loosening of environmental and economic regulations on corporations. Frank also details how a handful of committed religious conservatives -- average citizens -- worked their asses off to build this conservative base, which eventually played into the hands of the economic conservatives. He chronicles the tension between the state's moderate Republicans (fiscal conservatives; social moderates) and the conservative Republicans (he depicts them as socially conservative and fiscally apathetic and/or credulous) along the way.

You can read more about it here, but for me the lesson is that the Democratic Party must embrace an economically liberal misson once again and must actively be building its base, just as the religious right is doing at the top and bottom levels. Frank also discusses suburbanization a bit in Kansas City, detailing the rings of working class, middle class, and upper class suburbs radiating out from the now-abandoned downtown. To me, it is the old story of urban proximity promoting solidarity among the working class. Now that we suburbanites are all spread out in our subdivisions, we don't have the time or opportunity to commiserate over working conditions, share common grievances, and formulate a cogent response to the economic and environmental conditions around us. This isn't entirely satisfying -- the suburbs don't make one bourgeois, as Greenbelt, Maryland, illustrates -- but I do think it is an important part of the story.

Thank God we elected Howard Dean chair of the DNC.

Tag. You're it.

2005-07-16T10:34:00.000-04:00

(Flickr photo by Storker).

Borf, the DC graffiti artist, was arrested Wednesday, turning out to be an 18 year old anarchist art student. Depicted above is his most daring display, on the Roosevelt Bridge leading into DC from northern Virginia. Stories on the arrest at DCist and WaPo. Background on Borf at goodspeedupdate.com (it's currently down) and DCist.

Aside from the above instance, which might have obscured information necessary for those traveling into the city (and set a precedent for other bold graffiti artists), I have no problem with graffiti in cities -- DC or otherwise. It is a way for individuals to personalize the space of their city, and to say "I live here. I am not a businessman or an elected official; I may have no power, but I can leave my mark upon this place." I particularly like the small and simple graffiti tags on public structures like USPS mail boxes, phone booths, parking meters, etc. Again, it humanizes the government's attempt at sanitary, efficient, and seemingly heartless operation. The city of Philadelphia has a major, city-wide initiative to develop murals and celebrate the people. Much graffiti does this without the bureaucracy, being an immediate representation of individual spirit (though I think the mural program is valuable). In addition, some graffiti can be exceedingly clever.

I personally like the bunny on the side of the Main St. Party Shoppe in Ann Arbor because it is so incongruous -- someone tagging a wall painted a bunny? Why?

Again I refer to Sam Bass Warner's idea of the importance of "small patterns," or Jacobs' imploring that the small, personal and local is superior to the large, unified, and impersonal in the weave of urban fabric. The more people that are actively involved in shaping, building, decorating, and participating in the city, the richer urban life will be.

One more for the road...

(Nyarlathotep)

UPDATE: Wow. It seems like people just don't get it. I think it's particularly interesting how orthodoxy can govern even a marginal form of expression, ie the guy who wants to see "something more mature." Like a wall mural, I suppose.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to Madison House all-around good guy, Chris, for the bunny pic.

Windy Cities

2005-07-13T22:03:00.000-04:00

Thinking about wind energy again. A poster at DailyKos has been talking about the possibility of setting up some sort of dKos investment in a wind farm. It's more than just pie-in-the-sky -- his livelihood is financing wind developments (in France, I think). That's pretty interesting, but even moreso is this initiative in Toronto. It's a cooperatively owned wind turbine on the edge of Toronto producing electricity that is integrated into the grid (and will eventually be consumed by the cooperative owners). This is just such gorgeous execution of the kinds of potential I see in cooperative enterprise, I can hardly contain my excitment. A small number of families interested in renewable resources got together with the idea, raised the investment capital and navigated the regulatory and business maze to get a 1.5 MW turbine built. One more is on the way, and these are on the edge of Lake Ontario.

This is another kind of thing I would LOVE to play a part in getting started in Ann Arbor. This one seems pretty doubtful, though -- there's only so many projects I can entertain. Sadly, the dean of the college of architecture and urban planning informed me no one is working on wind -- either on the planning side or on the design side (SNRE is at least thinking about it). I think that's too bad, because resource self-sufficiency and engagement with renewable resources is going to become increasingly important to cities. You may recall I wrote a while back that Sault Ste. Marie could be invigorated by combining design and wind farming. Holland, too, seems like a brilliant place for such innovation -- Old World tradition and technology refined and reconsidered in the New World.

Rembrandt's "The Mill."

UPDATE: Check out this recent Stanford evaluation of wind potential. In the US, the places with the greatest and most consistent potential are the coasts and the Great Lakes. See this Michigan wind map. As I note in the comments, the bird issue is old news -- competent siting is one solution. The other is the slow rotation of the more recent turbines -- they now rotate slowly enough that birds can see and avoid them.

UPDATE 2: An inquiry to the Michigan Energy Office reveals that grants up to 500,000 dollars (up to 25% of a project) are available for farmers and rural businesses to develop renewable technologies. It looks like this legislation just sunset; let me see if it, too, is renewable.

On the Rebound?

2005-07-10T11:21:00.000-04:00

A Sunday New York Times article addresses the soap opera that is Detroit politics. The unfortunate title is "In Troubled Detroit, Mayor's Race is a Referendum on Style." If that's the case, Detroit can expect four more years of hard times.

I was going to note that the federal Housing and Urban Development agency took over the city's public housing authority because it was so inept, but the article beat me to it. At a late winter event in the MUP equity planning series, two of the speakers, from the Detroit Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) and MOSES (a coalition of religious groups), lamented that the city was sitting on 50 million dollars of housing aid and HUD was threatening to take it back. It's really striking, the kinds of resources that Detroit (both city and metro area) has, but that are not being sensibly deployed.

I remember sitting at my job at 7-11 as an undergrad in Kalamazoo reading the Free Press when the 2000 census info came out and Detroit had dropped below a million (they had lobbied Congress and the Census Bureau to use sampling because it would account for transients and would probably keep the number above 1 million). I thought then, "God, I would love to move to Detroit and help it make a comeback." On Murph's blog last summer (in the comments) there was the idea of a bunch of Michigan people moving to Detroit and setting up a "colony," helping develop one neighborhood at a time. The Times article notes investment in several areas, which is encouraging, to be sure, and was also noted in the Detroit News back in April.

Two other notes, one of urban import, one personal. An entry at DailyKos discusses sort of a Richard Florida-education investment issue related to manufacturing. Auto companies are starting to look for better educated locales for North American plants because savings on labor are negated by increased training costs. Also, I'm seriously considering applying to the MUP program for a dual degree. I THINK I could do it with only one extra semester of courses if I played my cards right and took summer courses. At one point, my interest in planning was only historical study, as I didn't think it would be very creative. It turns out, I was wrong. Developing.

UPDATE: NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman makes the same argument about government, education, healthcare, and jobs. Check it out.

Defensible Space

2005-07-08T10:10:00.000-04:00

The attack on London's subway does not bode well for urbanism.

The US terror alert was raised yesterday to orange for mass transit hubs, though the nationwide level stayed at the yellow it has generally been since it was instituted. Because of the threat of rain, thunderstorms, and flashflood warnings, I did not bicycle into work today, instead taking a shuttle bus and the Metro. I arrived half an hour late because traffic on the 3 mile shuttle route (suburban Alexandria to Pentagon City) was bumper to bumper. I am convinced this is because of the London bombings and the fear of an attack in DC subway stations.

During the 1940s and into the 50s, the federal government began moving many of their agencies out of the increasingly congested capital district and into suburban Maryland and Virginia. The Pentagon just across the Potomac from DC was finished in 1943. NASA, out near Greenbelt, MD, was established in 1958. The CIA is in Langley, VA, where Eisenhower laid the cornerstone of their building in 1959, and the list goes on. It was in part because of this decentralization that the Capital Beltway was conceived and built -- to promote and facilitate decentralized development about DC.

During the early years of the Cold War, suburbanization was often promoted as being a preventative measure against nuclear attack -- if you lived far enough out from the city, your home, neighborhood, and life couldn't be destroyed by an attack on the central city. While we didn't see a nuclear attack, the subway bombings may be just as psychologically damaging. Tube ridership in London is necessarily lighter today, but London's is a history of robust urbanism -- you'd have to go back to the 1400s to see it as anything but an important, even global, city. But ridership in DC and New York are probably lighter today too, and probably will be for the next few weeks. This, of course, strains our clotted and sclerotic highways and, of course, INCREASES our dependence on foreign oil, fueling this vicious circle of Middle East intervention and backlash, if you'll pardon the pun.

What are we to do? I remain committed to cities and to my biking for the remainder of my stay in DC.

UPDATE: Scott Simon on Weekend Edition had an interesting piece this morning in which he discussed the cultural meaning of the Tube, where Londoners would seek shelter during the German bombing of the city during WWII. Perhaps it's my own romance with the subway -- I LOVE standing shoulder to shoulder with 150 people on the cars in the morning -- but these terrorists really know how to nail some culturally and spiritually important targets.

Recommendation

2005-07-06T14:40:00.000-04:00

Not explicitly about urbanism (or even implicitly), if you blog, you should take this MIT survey.

Down from the ledge

2005-07-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

Despite Monday's pessimism, there is a personal ray of light. I upgraded my bike tires and brake pads yesterday and started commuting by bike. This is roughly a nine mile trek from the sprawling part of Alexandria to northwest DC (near the White House).

It took me 2 hours to get home last night due to the nearly illegible bridge traffic over the Potomac. The Key Bridge connecting Rosslyn and Georgetown allows for pedestrian and bike traffic, but getting out of Rosslyn requires riding either on the GW Parkway, US 29, or I-66, which I think would be dangerous, if not illegal. Thus, I had to take the Mt. Vernon Trail past the airport, then ride from one side of Alexandria to the other. The Roosevelt Bridge and the Memorial Bridge didn't seem to allow bike traffic (or even access).

This morning, however, was a different story. After starting from home, I steeled my nerves and sped down US 29 for about 3 miles, then headed over the Key Bridge into Georgetown. Not much danger and no horn honks on 29. The best part was that it took exactly the same amount of time as my bus/train commute. I can bike 9 miles as fast as I can Metro -- 52 minutes. I can't believe how easy this was, except for one bastard of a hill in Alexandria on Walter Reed. Fortunately, my building has a fitness facility with a locker room and shower; this initiative should yield improvements in fitness and attitude while I bike in the remainder of my stay in DC.

UPDATE: 61 minutes home and 62 minutes in 7-7-05

UPDATE 2: Using this sweet site, I calculated my morning route to be 10.1 miles.

Reality Check

2005-07-05T00:02:00.000-04:00

This post was supposed to be a warm one about my experience this evening watching the fireworks in Washington DC and how Virginia suburbanites came together on 395, 66, and US1 to make these highways part of the public realm, pulling onto the shoulders and leaning against guardrails as traffic stopped during the celebration of our nation's declaration of independence. It was supposed to sheepishly admit that I drove all over DC with my girlfriend, burning through a half a tank of gas to see great DC, Maryland, and Virginia attractions -- assets, I should say -- during her brief stay.

But, in fact, I'm not so cheerful anymore. A foreboding feeling has gnawed at the fringes of my consciousness since the news a week-and-a-half ago that a Chinese government-owned corporation has bid for the purchase of Unocal. Since my sophomore year in college when Ken Organski taught us his Power Transition theory I have been warily waiting for the theoretical implication that China would surpass the United States in world power to come true.

We may very well be in the midst of this transition. The late Organski, when I queried him one day, claimed that the transition would not necessarily be bloody or confrontational -- as it often had been throughout world history -- if both China and the US were somewhat rational and amicable partners in the process. To return us to the present, this Washington Post article makes it look like the transition will not be as smooth as we might hope. Given the Bush administration's deaf ear on foreign policy, economic development, domestic politics, and every other topic they've touched, I can't help but be worried that this attempt to buy Unocal's energy assets -- oil, minerals, etc. -- is going to get botched by the White House ideologues and we are going to have a serious situation on our hands, both long-term and short-term.

The U.S., of course, produces nowhere near the energy we consume, so we have to go to other places to get it, particularly oil and natural gas. Thus, our unhealthy fixation on the Middle East. Then, our domestic companies are some of the ones to drill for oil and mine for whatever overseas. CNOOC, a government-owned corporation, wants to buy Unocal and control its assets. CNOOC claims it is investing in energy assets, a safe bet in our increasingly consumptive world; however, if the Chinese government owns the company that owns the energy company and its assets, I have no doubt that there will be no little influence from the Chinese government on directing these assets to increasingly demanding and lucrative Chinese markets. ie, I can see them horning in on "our" oil pretty easily and there being serious domestic political upheaval here as people complain about the price of everything relying on oil for production or transportation AND the fact that the Chinese will become a more important global force than the US.

I certainly am a pessimist and even have a little conspiracy theorist in me. God, I hope I'm overreacting to China's increasingly hostile rhetoric (given their government controlled currency and humungous trade surplus threatening the US economy) and everyone will play nice. But I am worried about where the U.S. is headed. Just what IS the future of the US economy and the world's last remaining super power? How will the US react to the rise of the increasingly powerful and assertive China?

The Rise of Neo-Modernism?

2005-06-28T19:29:00.000-04:00

Architectural critic for the New York Times Nicolai Ourossoff spent a good number of words today thrashing a straw effigy of Jane Jacobs.

That schism ("modernists vs. historicists") dates from the 1960's, when the activist Jane Jacobs challenged Moses' megalomaniacal plans, but it has little relevance today. For architects like Mr. Pasquarelli, the suburban promise embodied in Moses' freeway and park projects represent, for better or worse, a part of our collective memory. Their task, as they see it, is to salvage the corners of unexpected beauty from those childhood landscapes and give them new meaning. It is an approach that is far more relevant to contemporary life than Jacobs's - and every bit as humane.

Huh? Help me understand first, how Jane Jacobs can be dismissed as simply an historicist? It seems to me that her architectural preferences might be better summarized as "humanist." Second, in what way is her vision of urban life irrelevant to contemporary life? Let it be recognized that Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities had no illustrations and really had no specific proposals for architectural design or detailing (historicist or otherwise) -- she was not an architect and didn't pretend to be one. Jacobs did, however, propose a vision of the city that valued street life, the activities of immigrants and the marginal, and opposed the brutal (and brutalist) destruction of the city in pursuit of dubious claims of economic development, power, speed, and aesthetics.

Rowr!

2005-06-23T17:47:00.000-04:00

In an attempt to inject some more architecture into this blog, I've added gossip blog The Gutter to the blogroll. Make sure you've got some catnip and maybe a long ribbon before you click; this blog is catty. Today's subjects of derision: Daniel Libeskind and the NYTimes House and Home section.

To balance it out, Urban Cartography also goes on the pile. Don't worry, though -- I'm setting a strict limit of 20 links on the blogroll. I'm not going to go all Zwagerman on your asses.

Redesigning the American Dream

2005-06-20T10:53:00.000-04:00

Check out this interview with Dolores Hayden in which she exhorts the need for non-profit developers in the housing market.

One of the real issues is, I suppose, how you get more non-profit developers into the game. I don’t think we can rely on big for-profit developers to bring that much innovation to this country. We haven’t seen it. And in the 40’s and the 50’s there was a terrific shift in terms of the size of most development companies. I think that while there may be competition to sell different kinds of units, there’s not enough competition to come up with energy efficient, sustainable neighborhoods for people of mixed incomes that also have the kind of public space you’re interested in seeing. Getting this for mixed incomes is particularly difficult because of the whole history of segregation by race and class in this country. Many developers feel much more comfortable building a whole bunch of $400,000 houses than they do building something that has a mixture of units of different sizes and different prices.

[via Urban Cartography]

Affordable Housing -- Student Sector

2005-06-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

Now that I've suggested the formation of a non-profit housing corporation as a means of developing an Affordable Ann Arbor, I ought to talk a bit about its implementation.

As far as I can tell, there are currently two housing non-profits in Ann Arbor, Avalon Housing and the Washtenaw Affordable Housing Corporation. Avalon Housing was formed with the needs of the mentally and physically disabled in mind, a mission they have maintained. WAHC is more difficult to figure out, as they don't seem to have a Web site, but several sources indicate that they emphasize families. These two organizations, according to the City of Ann Arbor's fall 2004 HUD report, are the main enduring beneficiaries of federal HOME funds from the federal government -- they own and operate housing. "HOME funds" is money from HUD that's allocated for affordable housing (rehabilitation of existing units, purchase of new units, building of others). Groups like Habitat for Humanity also sometimes get HOME funds from the city (which got a million dollars last year from HUD).

Because of this federal funding, the city has to put together a 5-year vision statement and a one-year action plan to let HUD know what they're going to do with their money. I have found this report on the city's Web site, which first details the assessed housing needs in Ann Arbor. What it details is that most aid is going to small and large families who rent. Much as I hate to decry aid to the working poor, the city is utterly neglecting the largest portion of its low income population. These are "other households" who rent. According to the city, there are 10,924 unrelated renter households making 80% or less of the Median Family Income of 71k. I think it's safe to put about 90% of students into this category -- less the people who are married and who live outside the city. The city, in the next 5 years, is not planning on developing or supporting a SINGLE unit for this sector of low income households, which, incidentally, make up 40.1% of the 27123 low-income renting households and 33.9% of all 32230 low income households (owner or renter) in the city. Please check these calculations using the city's own numbers because I wish I were wrong. Unfortunately, it is the city that is wrong in neglecting (totally abandoning?) this needy and significant segment of its population.

While I am most sensitive to the needs of low-income students, this group also includes recent graduates, people without college educations (the working poor), and even young professionals. This is actually a broad grouping of citizens whose housing needs are not being met and are not even being planned for. I urge you to read through the city's numbers, because more than 3/4 of this group is spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and a frightening portion is spending more than 50 percent.

So we can CLEARLY see there is an unmet need here. The next question is, what kind of resources are there? First off, there is the million dollars in HOME funds the city got last year (3 million the year before). Then there is the 1.7 million in Community Development Block Grants. Then there is the 600,000 of affordable housing subsidies the city extracts from developers. Then there is the 500,000 of residuals from unspent money the previous year. These numbers come from the city's 2004-2005 budget, by the way. All told, the city annually plans for 6 million dollars in revenue for affordable housing and community development, and will not support the development of even ONE UNIT for students and other unrelated low-income renters in the next five years. And I emphasize support, meaning not that the city builds housing, rather the city doesn't contribute even A PENNY towards securing a construction loan or a mortgage or land acquisition. [The words of Mayor John Hieftje ring particularly hollow when he blames the university for not providing housing for its students. How about providing some housing for your citizens, Mr. Mayor?]

So what can we do on this front? Clearly there is a problem of affordability when demand for residence in the city and county increases and there is no increase in housing supply in the city. This is the chief cause of the problem of unaffordability -- demand exceeds supply. This fear of turning into a real city must be overcome. Second, as Murph talked about, there needs to be a plan (or at least a concept) for providing for the poor, including both those who are poor by choice (students, artists, etc.) and those who are poor by force (disability, age, lack of education, etc.) in an integrated fashion that will provide access to amenities and services AND that will integrate these poor into the larger community. I cannot emphasize enough how the presence of young people can improve the quality of life for the elderly -- a neighbor to help shovel the snow, someone to bring them meals, or simply providing a different type of social interaction. This goes for students and the working poor in a neighborhood. Instead of setting up tutoring programs that match up college students and underprivileged grade school kids an hour a week, why not put them in the same neighborhood where they can have interactions all week long? And why not put them both near a bus line or two? Radical thinking, I know. As I said, one of my goals is to begin the process of developing a non-profit developer that will begin serving this largest and most under-served segment of the city's low income population.

UPDATE: I made an inquiry to the city for discussion or clarification of my analysis of their affordable housing plans; no response has yet been tendered.

The Rural Studio

2005-06-19T11:13:00.000-04:00

Having dinner with one of my HABS summer colleagues last night, I tossed off the name Samuel Mockbee as a contemporary architect about whom I knew nothing. The only reason I knew his name was there was a paper on one of his houses at the Society of Architectural Historians conference in Vancouver.

My colleague enthused mightily about the late Mockbee, an architect from the Deep South who started up an organization affiliated with the Auburn University school of architecture, called the Rural Studio. The Rural Studio was (and is) an ongoing project that takes students for a semester out to rural Alabama and has them live in a poor community as prelude to designing a house for an impoverished family. The house is then constructed from found and recycled materials.

Damn, that sounds like a great project. The Rural Studio is now on the blogroll and I hope you'll take a look at some of the houses they've built. Used rubber tires and strawbale construction -- maybe it's only because it's rural Mississippi that they can get away with it, but I would LOVE to see some actual innovation in urban architecture like that (even if it's only on the suburban end of the spectrum).

Did I mention FLLW's work with Cooperative Homesteads, outside of Detroit, featured "rammed earth" construction? Yep, the whole structure of the house was basically sand, clay, and water rammed into set forms. After it was set, it was to be plastered and painted, and the floor covered with linoleum.

Affordable Ann Arbor

2005-06-16T13:34:00.000-04:00

Since Murph got the ball rolling for a fairly serious and hopefully lengthy discussion of how to advance the cause (and reality) of broadly affordable housing in Ann Arbor, I'm obligated and eager to respond.

First off, for the newcomers, let me distinguish between the ideas of "affordable housing" and "broadly affordable housing." Affordable housing has generally been used to mean housing for the poor. The term affordable housing, employed by the federal government, means housing that costs 30 percent or less of a household income, whatever that might be. I say "broadly affordable housing" to encompass that idea -- a variety of housing types, of which one or more can be had for thirty percent or less of whatever level of income. Meaning there is decent, desirable, and affordable housing for the working poor, grad students, young professionals, middle class service workers, long-time residents, realtors, physicians, and retirees.

By "desirable," I mean meeting several, but probably not all, priorities that a particular resident wants. #1 on my personal list of priorities (after affordability) is proximity to urban amenities. I want to (and fortunately do) live close to campus, to the CBD, and to the AATA transit center. Others may want a yard, a large bedroom, or to have few or no roommates, which I have to skimp on -- that might be nice, but they're not important enough for me to live in one of the townships. Some goals like a big yard and urban proximity are almost diametrically opposed; unfortunately, Ann Arbor is too big a town to be able to fulfill such a priority. "Decent" should be pretty clear to everyone -- no structural, ventilation, heating/cooling, mold, insulation, etc. problems with the house.

In addition to Murph's list of tools for discussion, I suggest two of my own -- the development of neighborhood centers away from the CBD, and the creation of several development interests (featuring non-profit developers).

Neighborhood Centers -- It's a mite unfortunate that such a big university grew up in Ann Arbor, because the city has been too small to support it. That is the heart of the problem in Ann Arbor -- there wasn't enough stuff or people here a century ago to build or create businesses, etc., because it was a pretty sleepy little town. As a result of those small town roots, there is still a "small town" feel that some people like to talk about, even though the city is now more than 100,000 people. There are few tall buildings, the central business district is a couple blocks in size, and there are few major employers besides the University -- Pfizer and ProQuest are distant seconds. Because of this smallness, there really seems to be just one set of concentric rings from downtown. Things are most dense in the middle and become less so as you move farther away from it. There are no walkable satellite areas that spring up when the downtown is developed. Thus, all the amenities and walkable stuff is in one central area, meaning if people want walkability and access to amenities, they all want to live near the same place. If we developed neighborhood centers where there were restaurants, shopping and entertainment, say, a mile from Main and Washington, people would be happy living there, too, relieving some pressure on the near-downtown housing market. As it stands, Main St., State St., Kerrytown and South U. are too small and too near each other (I consider them really all part of the same central area) to diffuse the desire for downtown housing.

Varied development interests -- Ann Arbourites have frequently lamented the prominence of private development interests in preparing for the future of Ann Arbor. Pretty much every NIMBY obstruction employs the "developers want to bulldoze OUR TOWN and put up THEIR BUILDINGS" rhetoric. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons. First, developers have ALWAYS done the building in the history of American cities. The only notable exception was called urban renewal. Nearly every building in Ann Arbor (except most campus buildings and a handful of government ones) was built or enabled by a private developer, a speculator, or a small-time entrepreneur. This includes many of the houses -- that's why many legal descriptions for lots are in "Matthews' Annex no. 1" or something like that -- a developer bought the land, platted it, and graded the streets. Anyway, despite the need for private developers in Ann Arbor (now that the locals are gun-shy, we're recruiting out of town developers to do the deed; THAT'S irony), they shouldn't be the only game in town. We need to create non-profit development corporations to start developing the housing that the private market has been neglecting and that has stagnated over the last two decades of stifled growth and development. Let Shaffran Bros. build the condos for 450k a unit; one or two non-profits will take their affordable housing subsidies, along with other public funds and grants, and start planning and building its own units. I am SURE that, with a reduced profit motive and good planning, such a group could win public support and could have an impact on the housing market, all while creating greater density and a more sustainable city.

UPDATE: Next discussion post here.

Urban Oasis' Furious Five

2005-06-15T20:29:00.000-04:00

1. Recent Pittsburgh Post articles have highlighted the rapid loss of farmland to single family residences at the fringe of the city’s urbanized area. Locals lamented “you can’t fight city hall” while township executives admired their bottom line, temporarily flush from new construction. Little do they know that in 20 years they’ll be trying to talk the city and first ring suburbs into helping bail them out of financial and social crisis.

2. The Washington Post from a few weeks back detailed that the city’s booming housing market involved half of DC home purchases over the last 5 years having been bought with interest-only mortgages. For some, this will certainly pay off, as the federal government isn’t getting any smaller and Washington’s housing stock may be unparalleled (except maybe by Boston) in its age and quality. But while this bubble may not burst, it will surely spring a leak in the coming years. As serious as the oil peak for us doomsdayers? Not quite, but it's up there.

3. Sam Bass Warner characterized the finely-grained urban housing form of suburban Boston as “The Weave of Small Patterns.” He meant that the small-scale speculating and homesteading in the city’s streetcar suburbs, taken together, demonstrated the individuality and variety of individual owners and builders in a large system of suburbanization. Driving through Washington DC’s many neighborhoods Sunday afternoon, it seems that this same weave of small patterns breeds street activity. Working in the “lonely financial zone” as I do, even with some mixed use, the city block-sized buildings do not generate enough activity to make street life interesting. My earlier screeds on the lameness of DC are amended to recognize that I work in one of the worst areas in DC in this respect.

4. Two non-academic goals I’d like to achieve by the end of my graduate program. A. Help establish a non-profit housing corporation to develop affordable housing in Ann Arbor (particularly for students, but as a start to making Ann Arbor broadly affordable). B. Help build the Ann Arbor Community Car Cooperative into a viable transportation option for Ann Arbor. Both of these fall within the scope of my New West Side and Ann Arbor Alliance work.

5. Recently, I was awarded a research grant from the UofM Center for Non Profit Management to study the partnerships that several cooperatives formed with Frank Lloyd Wright to build residential and recreational communities in Michigan. Cooperatives, I may have mentioned, became rather popular ways to deal with Depression-era economic problems and to aid in the modernization of rural areas. Rexford Tugwell, the genius behind Greenbelt MD, prior to directing the Resettlement Administration served as undersecretary of agriculture. Due to his influence we have many of the ag coops still functioning today. Anyway, this surge in cooperation continued into the 40s and led to the formation of several groups who contacted FLLW. The architect was coming out of a period of dormancy and disgrace and was promoting his ideal of Broadacre City. He began working with cooperative groups to design and help develop Usonian communities as a part of his Broadacre vision. The two communities in the Kalamazoo area constitute the largest concentration of Usonian homes in the world. I will be studying 5 Michigan coops. Look for an exhibit on the UofM campus in April.

Please note the term "Furious Five" unabashedly ripped off from the Daily.

People can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent.

2005-06-02T20:33:00.000-04:00

"fourfteen percent of all people know that."

If anyone has read this USA Today article on gentrification from 6 weeks ago and cares to comment -- particularly if you've read the scholarly article in Urban Affairs Review -- please do so. Basically, Lawrence Freeman, a Columbia urban planning professor, claims people aren't displaced any more by gentrification than there is normal turnover in a poor neighborhood.

It reads like bull to me. Freeman acknowledges "succession," where the rich move in after the the poor move out, but doesn't acknowledge that the normal inflow of poor is blocked by rising home values. That's gentrification, too. Why such a narrow interpretation of the word could catch on -- or would be allowed to stand -- is beyond me. I've got to check the UAR article tomorrow.

The system is down. The system is down.

2005-06-02T19:59:00.000-04:00

On the lighter side of things, more than a dozen slashings and stabbings at D.C.-area nightclubs prompted the City Paper to run the Nightlife Survival Guide. Not the joking guide of The Onion, this article offers serious advice for when someone draws a knife on you.

1.Skip the dodgy clubs. Go square dancing.
A foolproof tip, if one that will be totally ignored.
2. Scrap the macho routine. Play it cool.
"In hindsight, Rodekohr figures he shouldn't have pushed [his assailant] back." Because the pushee's response was to stab him.
3. Don't get too snockered.
I'm not sure if there is another reason to go to a club, except to grind on some knife-wielding maniac's girl.
4. Watch out for shady types who touch themselves.
Not there -- they mean to feel if their knife is still there.
5. Expect to get cut--even if you see it coming.
Great.
6. Don't go for the knife or try to pull some Jackie Chan shit.
Try to pull some Chris Tucker shit.
7. Fend off incoming strikes with your (outer) forearms.
"It'll be bad," Franco notes. "But you won't be incapacitated." No comment.
8. Suck in that gut and back that thang up.
ie, don't let your attacker get a good shot at your heart or your genitals.
9. Fight back with makeshift weapons.
aka run like shit.
10. Stop the bleeding. Put your feet up. Wait for help.
11. Get a lawyer.
To sue the club for bad security; don't worry about the lax policing and the insanity of getting stabbed in a dance club.

I don't think I'll be heading to Dream this weekend, but if I'm up for a wild stabbing for the 4th, I know where to go.

Baltimore, City of Angels

2005-05-30T17:12:00.000-04:00

Foolishly leaving the Orioles-Tigers game at Camden Yard yesterday with the Tigers down 6-1 (they came back), I found my car's battery to be dead because of another error earlier in the day -- I had left my lights on (it doesn't "ding.") The streets of the Mt. Vernon neighborhood (Paca and Saratoga), about a mile away from the stadium, were nearly deserted because there seemed to be very little housing in the area -- it seemed to be all Monday to Friday retail. I stumbled upon a gas station and asked if they could help me in some fashion.

The clerk there was initially brusque but called over his "aide," Stanley, who turned out to be not an employee but rather a homeless person who cleaned windshields and ran errands for change. They pledged their help and, despite the sinking feeling I had, in less than half an hour I had gotten a jump and was happily on my way back to the DC area. It turns out that this gas station (I think it was open 24-7) was pretty much the social center of the neighborhood. Both the clerk and Stanley the helper knew about every other person who came to fill up. They scared up some jumper cables from a guy who just left them because he was on his way to work (he would pick them up later) and talked another Samaritan into giving me a jump. All this for five bucks so Stanley could buy a chicken box for dinner. In this whole episode, several people let me know that this was a much better solution than calling a towing service for a jump, which I would probably have to pay a hundred or more dollars for weekend help. Stanley also suggested I pour some Pepsi on my battery terminals and give them a going over with a wire brush to combat corrosion, sage advice affirmed by another local who helped in the process. Two other people who were sitting on the sidelines asked me if someone was helping me and if Stanley was having any success tracking down some cables.

There were some signs that this somewhat derelict area was getting some redevelopment money, but I really hope they don't just wipe the slate clean. Maybe it's cliche to echo Jane Jacobs' lessons from Boston's North End, but this turned out to be a really great place and a rewarding experience for someone still working to overcome the lingering suburbanite's fear of "slums" in the city.

If anybody tries to tell you Baltimore isn't a great place, you punch them in the mouth.

Making the Second Ghetto

2005-05-22T18:27:00.000-04:00

The Washington City Paper, the city's weekly alternative paper, has a touching story about the depopulation and destruction of one of the city's projects in favor of a HOPE VI development. Yes, you read that right. The Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg Dwellings (no photo available) are coming down and, contrary to our received wisdom about modernist housing projects, the tenants were reluctant to go: it was their home.

The Hope VI program is based on new urbanist principles and a mixed income arrangement. The theory goes, having a lower concentration of poverty in an area; a more street-friendly, walkable urban form; and a combination of renting and ownership will promote a greater sense of community and will help alleviate the problems associated with large-scale housing projects.

This is interesting to me on a number of levels. First, because the architects, Torti Gallas, are a successor to Cohen Haft and Associates, the group I am studying for my research assignment in Greenbelt. There, Cohen Haft produced 2900 units (of 5000 planned) of modernist, garden apartment buildings. As I noted, they are going to be phased out and demolished in favor of a DPZ new urbanist community. I'm currently reading David Rusk's Cities Without Suburbs, a book on both annexation and alleviating the concentration of urban poverty and racial segregation. I think this Hope VI project will do the neighborhood wonders and it will aid the city as a whole, but it is only a finger in the dike of the city's real problems (and there are new ones coming).

This article demonstrates the often unseen costs of redevelopment and relocation of housing projects. Hope VI projects always result in a net loss of affordable units, so while everyone is displaced temporarily, some (most?) are displaced permanently. That this project will decrease the concentration of poverty is certainly a goal we are aiming for. However, DC must be INCREASING total units in order to keep the city affordable (and we are approaching the point of no return, as I have discussed earlier). DC is so expensive, several of my colleagues at work and a notable portion of DC workers actually LIVE in Baltimore (an hour or so away by commuter train), where it is still affordable. This is great for Baltimore (on one level), but simply shuffling people around from wealthy to gentrifying to formerly destitute areas is no solution for the future of a city or a region. I have the same complaint here as I did about attempts at reinvigoration of Benton Harbor (site of summer 2003 race riots) -- if it's just guilty white suburbanites moving in, NOTHING is achieved for the poor blacks and Latinos who get moved around. Jimmy Carter came and gave a lecture some time over the winter of 2003-04 in Benton Harbor (in advance of his Habitat for Humanity blitz) in which he basically said "Hey, Benton Harbor, clean up your garbage." His message, I think, was a softer version of Bill Cosby's recent rap -- if you want to be mainstream, you've got to act mainstream and act like you don't want to be poor. I think this could more effectively be achieved by bringing some jobs to black Benton Harbor (retail, industrial, and professional) instead of toughlove speeches.

Arthur Capper was a Kansas governor and US Senator at the turn of the twentieth century, who established a foundation to promote the care of disabled children, by the way.

Here Comes the Rain Again

2005-05-20T07:54:00.000-04:00

Destruction of Detroit's Madison-Lenox hotel has begun. This is tragic in so many ways, but is also appropriate for Detroit. For years -- decades even -- municipal and regional mismanagement (among other things) has been destroying the city that Detroit once was; now they are destroying the evidence that Detroit ever was an important and vibrant city. The building will be demolished for a parking lot.

The 1998 implosion of the downtown Hudson building was a similarly foolish demolition (causing millions of dollars of damage to the People Mover) and the Book-Cadillac is another goner. These were certainly the best buildings in the state, and some of the best buildings in the country when built. Hell, even now. Take a look at the fortunately extant, contemporaneous Union Guardian Building and disagree. [BTW, the Guardian Building figures into the annexation story below, which I will share some time]. As Murph has mused, perhaps it's time we scaled back our ambitions for a full-fledged Detroit renaissance. Perhaps Detroit would be more likely to make a comeback as a city of 500,000 and 80 square miles, rather than its 950,000 and 138 miles of area. Perhaps the demolition of these historic -- not merely historic, but uplifting, LANDMARK -- structures is just the first phase of jettisoning the ballast of Old Detroit.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

2005-05-18T21:24:00.000-04:00

Accustomed to the concrete curbs of Michigan and the Midwest, I was surprised and dismayed to realize that Washington DC curbs are, in fact, of the old-timey, granite variety. Dismayed not so much by the choice of materials as the shape of the curb, which is not rounded, because I was flying over my bike's handlebars after foolishly trying to pop the front wheel over the "curbstone" yesterday. Granite curbstones and brick gutters predominate in the District of Columbia, in stark contrast to the poured concrete I have known for most of my life. Curbstones are long, rectangular blocks of granite basically adorning the edge of the poured concrete sidewalks of the District. I would wager that they are more durable than concrete (they don't seem to crumble), but they much more frequently heave or otherwise separate from the sidewalk than do concrete curbs. There is evidently a robust granite curbstone industry on the East Coast that deals in cutting and finishing curbstones for refitting cities on the seaboard.

As it turns out, the curbstone figures in business lore much like the 18th century coffee shop Lloyd's of London: the American Stock Exchange, now part of the NASDAQ-AMEX, was originally an outdoor organization known as the Curbstone Brokers. This was a group of men who traded stocks on one of the corners of Wall Street; it was one of several competing stock exchanges. While the largest then and now was the New York Stock Exchange, it required a minimum number of shares to be traded in each transaction. The Curbstone Brokers would sometimes auction off single shares at a time. In addition, the smaller exchange had less stringent rules for the value of companies to be traded through their exchange (these general traditions continue to this day, with the NYSE being for larger, more established companies and higher volume and the NASDAQ-AMEX generally for smaller, newer companies). In 1919 the exchange moved indoors (several decades after the NYSE) and was known until 1953 as the New York Curb Exchange.

Next stop, Coopersville!

2005-05-14T22:15:00.000-04:00

Thinking I had been too harsh on DC, I set about looking for some DC blogs. You will note my new favorite blog on the blogroll on the right-hand side of the screen, "Why I Hate DC." First up on the reading list is this post on transit-oriented development from several weeks back, "Sm*rt Gr*wth."

In other news, my tepid, uninformed enthusiasm for Mies van der Rohe has taken a tumble after visiting the MLK library in DC Friday.

Someone at the fringe of my memory asserted Mies was so successful because he tried to solve so few problems. By this they mean that his designs didn't address normal architectural concerns like reconciling pedestrian circulation with the need for, say, seating in a lobby. In avoiding so many issues, he avoided doing the wrong things and risking bad designs. I had only a foggy inkling about what this meant until I visited the library: there's nothing going on. It's like a building of four pavilions, just the ceiling and the walls. There's no program to speak of in the lobby and the Washingtoniana room, where I was reading microfilm, is like a big warehouse. I feel nothing for this building except when looking at it from the outside. The building is evidently being neglected and there's a rumor going around that the city would like to demolish it and sell the land to a developer, as it's very near the new MCI Center where the Wizards play. So goes architecture in DC.

Towards a New Architecture

2005-05-13T21:34:00.000-04:00

Since making a trip up to Sault Ste Marie in March, I have been thinking a lot about wind power. Wind, our friends at AWEA (American Wind Energy Association or something like it) tell us, is caused by air being heated in different ways by the sun heating flat land, or water, or varying terrain. The Soo has all three in spades, and Portage Rd. was a veritable wind tunnel while I was staying at the Ojibway Hotel.

Portage Rd., I should explain, is the main tourist street that runs by the Soo Locks. The Locks are the US Army Corps of Engineers' solution to the rapids on the body of water between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, the St. Mary's River. The locks are necessary for freighter traffic on the Great Lakes, bringing iron ore from Minnesota and the UP down to Gary, Indiana, among other things.

Wind power comes about when wind propels a blade that turns a turbine; in the past this energy has been used to mill things or to pump water (like Frank Lloyd Wright's famed windmill "Romeo and Juliet.") Now it can serve as an adjunct -- if not an alternative -- to coal or to nuclear fuel.

Driving home from the Soo, I was thinking what a boon it would be if the city could start producing much of its own energy. There is certainly enough wind there to make it worth their while. Additionally, I had been thinking about why nearly every modern windmill looks just like any other. There doesn't seem to be any reason to except perhaps economy. It is my thought that architects have not been involved in designing windmills, only engineers, leaving us with a very plain product. If an architect could get involved in such a project, I am sure he or she would come up with a more creative design for the 'mill (pedantic though it may be). I would wager that the Soo, in this hypothetical situation of mine, would benefit both from the self-sufficiency of sustainable power AND from the attraction of creatively designed windmills that were both functional and aesthetically appealing. Being in DC as I am, I am going to have to convince someone at the AIA to give this a thought. Architecture is a draw for big cities; why not the double attraction of sustainability and architecture?

EDIT: The slogan I should copyright immediately: Wind: isn't it clear?

The Souls of Black Folk

2005-05-12T21:52:00.000-04:00

The racial situation here in DC is an odd thing. It's not exactly like Detroit, though both are quite segregated. In the D, whites are sprawled about the metro area where the jobs are. The city is mostly black and the suburbs are mostly white, by far (and the farther out you get, the truer it is). Whites don't have much need to go into Detroit, so they don't. However, in DC EVERYONE comes into the city every weekday; ALL the jobs are in DC. The city is no less segregated, though, as census information indicates. Black and white work side-by-side, but the DC twist is that blacks are largely in unskilled and low-level positions. Basically, whites are in jobs that require college or advanced degrees; blacks are in those that don't. This is a generalization, but based on my observations, a legitimate conclusion to draw. Look at this map and think about the above again.

Look again at the map and see how the NW part of DC is so white. Georgetown is at the western extreme of the city -- the older city that was here before George W. laid out his idea for the nation's capital. As I mentioned, Georgetown is very upscale and was probably always white. The last 10 years, though, a wave of gentrification has been bleaching the city, block by block, from west to east. I wonder if, in two decades, we will have a white urban core and a black set of suburbs. In the area I work, west of the new convention center, there are several condo buildings going up, starting in the 300s. While I look forward to the reintroduction of residential activity to the area, how is this supposed to address the clear equity problem? It seems to me there is a structural education problem -- primary and secondary schools need to be getting their black (and Latino and Chinese, etc.) students into 2-year and 4-year colleges, and those colleges need to be partnering with the federal government to diversify the skilled positions in DC. Or maybe DC already has a sizable black middle class and they just live out in suburbs like the white middle class.

Either way, I've got to walk 10 blocks or more from work to get a good cup of coffee from a place that isn't Starbucks or Cosi. In fact, there's a coffee shop closer to my apartment (a Starbucks) just inside the sprawlway than there is to my office in the middle of downtown DC (the Cosi). What gives?

Tomorrow a New World

2005-05-11T22:48:00.000-04:00

Finally -- a neighborhood in Washington DC that doesn't suck: Dupont Circle. Metro center, where I work (near the new convention center), barely even caters to the business/office crowd. My coworkers are actively praying for a Starbucks to move into the neighborhood. Georgetown, which I thought was going to be cool, turns out to be the city that Ann Arbor wishes it was: a main drag (M St) of 2 and 3-story buildings that house the crappiest mix of gift shops, upscale clothing stores, and hair-and-nail salons since...ever, I guess. I'd say it was worse than Main St. in Ann Arbor, but at least Main St. has Espresso Royale. It took me a good hour of wandering to find a cafe with free wireless internet access. Jesus. I've since found this guide, along with this one, but it seems like nearly ever frigging corner should have a coffee shop and that coffee shop should have wireless internet, if my experience in Portland and Ann Arbor is any guide.

Larry Kestenbaum's enthusiasm for DC density is way off the mark. While it has some great housing stock (literally every house here is about $50,000 of renovation away from being the most beautiful row house since...the one next door), the modest heights are contributing to sprawl in the surrounding counties. As soon as you cross the Key Bridge into Virginia, the buildings shoot up from the 2-story jobs of Georgetown to 15 or 20-story buildings that economics dictates. Nearly everyone I work with is priced out of the city and lives in Maryland or Virginia -- and these are professionals making 80-100k a year, frequently with spouses doing the same. Throw in the need for federal approval of the city's budget and you have a good old fashioned clusterf**k.

So anyway, I'm living in some hellhole in Alexandria Virginia, but only temporarily. The hour-each-way commute isn't doing it for me, so I'm looking for a place in the city starting June 1 or thereabouts. God, I hate the suburbs.

This summer I'm working on a study of a huge apartment complex in Greenbelt, Maryland. Greenbelt, you might recall, was the brainchild of Rexford Tugwell, an econ professor at Columbia who became part of FDR's Brains Trust. Tugwell conceived of the Resettlement Administration, part of the Farm Security Administration, as a means of moving farmers off of unproductive land and moving low income urbanites into planned suburban communities. Tugwell was really a visionary of the value of planning (favoring Garden City ideas) and also strongly espoused cooperation as a means of helping the poor help themselves.

Greenbelt was originally about an 880 unit community of modernist row houses, opened in 1937. It was a make-work program to give people construction jobs during the Depression, as well. After the Lanham Act was passed in 1940, another 1000 units of row houses were built by the Federal Works Agency and housed war workers. The term "Old Greenbelt" refers either to the original 880 homes or the combination of the Depression homes and the war homes as distinct from everything that came afterwards (it's a decent-sized community, its own city east of DC and College Park, MD). The original development was purchased by a cooperative formed for that purchase and continues today as Greenbelt Homes, Inc. I'm studying Springhill Lake apartments, a private garden apartment development of 5000 units. It's slated for demolition in favor of a community designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk. The demolition is unnecessary, as the buildings are in good shape and home to a surprisingly diverse population that will be displaced -- first by the demolition and construction; second by the exclusion of the poor inherent in a name-brand development.

My job for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS, a New Deal make-work program for architects) is to document the history of this community over the next 12 weeks and write a series of reports that will eventually be accessioned to the Library of Congress. For more background, check out the Greenbelt Museum, ably curated by Jill St. John, a fellow Michigander.

The hazards of new fortune

2005-05-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

A front-page story in the Detroit News today addressed the growing ridership of mass transit in Detroit.

<
While only 2 percent of Metro Detroiters commute by bus, officials say a variety of factors, including newer buses with easier access for wheelchair users and bicyclists, is boosting the numbers.

They also acknowledge the system is attracting more people like Alger.

"Surely gas prices are a part of it," Dirks said.>>

This, along with the recent hemorrhaging of cash by Ford and GM (along with their bond issues being downgraded to junk status) are all related, more or less demonstrating what pessimistic prognosticators of varying stripes have claimed for some time: the era of cheap oil and the lifestyle it enabled is over. As I said during one of my lengthy and pedantic comments during Fishman's suburbia course, we will begin to see a new model of "haves" and "have-nots" based upon which cities have most aggressively prepared for the end of sprawl. That some of Detroit's suburbs have begun this process is a hopeful sign--though, as I discussed yesterday, Detroit's got a longer road back than most.

Anyone who has bought an SUV in the last 5 years is going to start feeling it, if they haven't already, and the utterly myopic auto companies that thought it was a wise business model to cater to the most indulgent and capricious whims of the last two generations (25 to 50 year-olds) are reaping what they sow.

The question for Michigan and SE Michigan in particular is, are we ready for a post-Big 3 future? The answer, for the most part, is "no."

Nature's Metropolis

2005-05-05T22:38:00.000-04:00

Detroit. Robert Fishman gave a lecture on the city this semester during which he showed a slide of a residential street in the Motor City that was indistinguishable from an image of a 75 year-old rural road. A two-story house, slightly overgrown shrubs, somewhat sagging porch roof, and unimproved land behind and to either side of the house. But this was in what used to be the country's fourth largest city (now 9th or so). It is almost as if nature is reclaiming the city of Detroit.

(UPDATE: Detroit has now fallen to the 11th largest city and 5th largest metro area.)

As people discuss city government (too big and bloated, they say), so it is with the geography of Detroit. The city has about 950,000 residents (and falling) and about 138 square miles within its boundaries. There is nary a walkable neighborhood in what used to be called the "City of Homes." The myriad problems of the city are compounded by its sprawling urban form. The city itself is sprawling.

In an article I am writing, I argue that the problem of urban space in Detroit -- and more specifically, the division that Eight Mile Rd. represents -- goes back to the era of annexation. From 1916 to 1926, Detroit nearly tripled its size (to more or less its current boundaries) chiefly due to real estate speculation.

The city, you will recall, was in an unprecedented economic boom due to growth in industrial production, number one being automobiles. Many people were moving to the city from elsewhere for jobs and even more were moving from inside the city to the city's fringe to escape the chaos of the urban core. This demand for detached single family houses was anticipated by real estate developers who bought up farmland and subdivided it for resale. In Detroit's case, they would provide improvements such as graded roads, sidewalks, and even a water system to attract people.

When residents moved, they would call for annexation into the city, at times being prompted by the developers. They wanted more city services like better water, sewer, and paved roads, not just gravel. Developers wanted to rid themselves of responsibility for upkeep and to move the ring of demand farther out. The residents would vote to annex, and the city of Detroit would have to pick up the tab for more services. In 1923 the city got into a serious financial bind because they did not have enough revenue to cover their expenses and they had borrowed to their limit through bond issues. John C. Lodge and the city controller called for an end to annexations, but the outward movement kept apace.

In 1926 there was a state legislative amendment (which I'm still researching) making more annexation almost impossible for Detroit. From then on there were no more annexations, though the city's population continued to grow for another 30 years. Now that the city is under a million residents, it has become a major obstacle to revitalize neighborhoods because they are so desolate and spread out. Detroit has never been a dense city in the 20th century and that lack of density will continue to stifle recovery.

But I'll still go there for baseball games.

Origins of the urban crisis

2005-04-28T23:00:00.000-04:00

After watching the thesis presentations of several M.Arch students at Michigan this week, in addition to several other studio crits, I am not optimistic about the future of our built environment. How does a cliche become a cliche? By architects' taking a narrow and self-serving object for their work.

One thesis investigated new ways of using vinyl siding on the detached single family residence -- how plastic can be used to create new types of porches, sun rooms, and so forth. Unfortunately, she did not acknowledge that the reason we have vinyl siding is because it looks like wood siding (sort of), except that it has lower maintenance requirements. Its introduction and adoption were in response to our long-time understanding of what a house looks like -- four walls, a pitched roof with asphalt shingles and maybe a dormer, lapped clapboard siding or brick, and a front door in the midde of the facade. I don't think you can expect to alter consumers' use of siding significantly unless you alter their conceptions of houseness.

Aside from that there was a lengthy comic strip for a thesis and a set of models and images for another questioning architects' received ideas of scale that took about 5 minutes, literally, to explain. I am incredibly skeptical of any "thesis" that can be presented in 5 minutes. Fortunately, one member of the commentary panel took the student to task, acknowledging what I felt, "Maybe I'm not getting it, but I can't see that you've told us anything about architecture." She stumbled in her answer and offered that the project had helped her become more aware of scale in her own life. This may be a valuable outcome, but I object to the notion of this as a "thesis."

Only a very few projects acknowledged the surrounding built environment in the cases where they (gasp!) designed a building at all. The antipathy of architects vs. planners and the objects of their professions (see My Architect for a great illustration) is alive and wll. During my recent trip to Vancouver, we met with Arthur Erickson, an architect who had spent decades advocating densification and citywide planning and who had also designed some of the best buildings in the city (and province). On the day we met him, the Globe and Mail named him one of the 10 most important people in the history of British Columbia for his architecture and his urban vision. Sadly, he is an incredible rarity and I don't see that kind of broad vision coming from today's students.

History is more or less bunk

2005-04-24T20:35:00.000-04:00

With the winter departure of Ann Arbor's Historic District Coordinator, things are not looking good for preservation in Ann Arbor. Historic districts are frequently associated with anti-development stances in this city, but I think the historic districts have an important role to play in future development of Ann Arbor, difficult as that may be to reconcile.

First, we should recognize the importance that historic district ordinances have played (both in Ann Arbor and in other cities) in preserving the frequently better-built and more attractive architecture of the past. The buildings on Main Street and State Street and the houses of the Old West Side and Old Fourth Ward are testament to the foresight of residents some 25 years ago when development pressure would have torn them down or "modernized" them into a crappy state that we would surely be regretting today. At least part of Ann Arbor's vitality can be attributed to its ease of walkability, preserved during the years America was gutting its downtowns.

Now, we should reconsider and even reaffirm the importance of legal protections of historic buildings today. Considering most of what has been built in this town in, say, the last 30 years, and even the last ten years -- is there anything built recently that can match the architecture and urban attitude of buildings now one hundred years old? There is not. When we preserve or adaptively re-use old buildings, we are not merely holding onto the past; we are maintaining buildings that are better suited to our community uses, that are more comprehensible to our eyes, and that better promote the kinds of lives we want to live. I submit anyone look at the new Life Sciences buildings and the Biomedical Research Building (Venturi, Scott Brown, architects) and tell me they would rather have that in their community than something like the Natural Science building (Albert Kahn, architect). Both were designed for modern biological research purposes. One is attractive; the other is not. One makes a pedestrian feel good about walking near it, the other only has room for cars. One has grass and landscaping around it, integrated into a thoughtful mall and other, similarly styled and scaled buildings nearby; the other offers sheer surfaces and wind tunnels to force anyone back inside who even thought about walking around outside. Let me also point out the LSI complex is turned inward and from the inner "courtyard" or whatever one might call it, does not offer visual connections to the rest of the Michigan campus. Anyway...

That said -- current blocks to development in historic districts (including, notably, accessory dwelling units) have served to keep cranking property values -- taxes, mortgages, and rents up sky high. This is ludicrous and only leads to a backlash when city employees and average joes are unable to afford living in Ann Arbor.

Property owners in historic districts and members of neighborhood associations MUST come together with student representatives, development interests and local business owners to negotiate compromises to provide for development in Ann Arbor. The future of the city (20-40 years) are too important to be taking self-interested, principled stands on any particular projects. People are complaining about the two houses on the Glen Ann block being lost to new development. These rentals should be donated to a community interest group and moved elsewhere in the city. These houses really are remnants of a bygone era, when the university had about 8,000 students and faculty probably lived there. The notion that that block is an historic district anymore is ludicrous, what with the BioMed building looming stories above, along with the Power Center a block up, and the old gas station on the corner. This block SHOULD be redeveloped into a set of six-or-so story complexes. However, the city SHOULD mandate that the houses be moved and the building designs be of a sympathetic design (NOT to the ugly BioMed building).

There is a place both for preservation and urban development in Ann Arbor. Indeed, reconciling the two are essential to the city's future.

A Force of Nature

2005-04-20T16:14:00.000-04:00

I had the good fortune of stepping out of my lame-ass orientation seminar today so that I could go to an MUP round table with Huron Valley Sierra Club president Doug Cowherd. Cowherd came in to talk for an hour (that turned into 2 hours) about the HVSC and the plan for the Ann Arbor Greenway.

Not having had any contact with Cowherd until today, I expected something different from what I got. The bottom line on Cowherd is that he is smooth -- polished to a deep glow, really. Unfortunately, I think that popular characterizations of him, while they simplify his message and position, are mostly accurate. He came onto the planners (6 in the room, plus me, I recall) right off by presenting the HVSC's message as more or less equally valuing urban densification and peripheral greenspace. "Wow," I thought, "isn't this guy on our side?" He then claimed that unavoidable economic forces would bring density to Ann Arbor; his agenda was simply to promote a higher quality of life in the face of this coming development. He went on to say how he/HVSC was in favor of walkable neighborhoods and density and challenged anyone in the room to name a development HVSC had shot down. Of course, no one could name one. An unproductive Dickens Woods example followed, which he fairly skillfully parried.

The thing is, that is not the way these things work. Cowherd pointed out that the HVSC has no staff and has about 4000 members, about 80 of whom are active in their three-county area. He made it seem like the HVSC was the Davidian voice of the people with a little sling shot against the Goliath developers. The reality is much like my own neighborhood association, Old West Side. I am a dues-paying member, and I get about one email a month (if that) from the OWS leadership, along with the Old West Side News. There is nothing going on. However, there is a flurry of communication every time a NIMBY issue (eg the Greenway) comes up, and people who have some identification with the group (perhaps because of the OWS News) jump to action for their team. I suspect it is the same thing with the HVSC. The HVSC doesn't have much of a heirarchy or bureaucracy, but they have a base that Cowherd loves to whip into action when he sees something he doesn't agree with. On one level, it is good -- this is how grassroots activism is supposed to work. However, Cowherd is being disingenuous about his and the HVSC's position and agenda. He whips people into a frenzy, be it the OWS or the OFW or the other three groups he said he had been talking to over the last week or two, and THEY are the ones who jump in front of the cameras and boo at meetings as "accidental activists." And the HVSC's hands are clean.

At this point I interjected that I didn't buy his assumption that densification was inevitable, and in fact the county was expecting its population to increase by about 25 percent in the next two decades, while Ann Arbor was only planning to grow by 2-3 percent. I further went on to say that with such demand for the area, if only 2-3 percent growth were the case, Ann Arbor prices and property values would continue to rise in their current fashion. He challenged me to name a project that had been shot down. I responded North Main condos. He said name another. I responded (incorrectly) 828 Greene. It was an attempted shoot-down, but it passed. He said there were 200 sites downtown that he felt could be sensitively developed to 3-6 times their current density, but chose not to name them. I hit him harder on the "unavoidable densification" point, which he tried to explain away.

Later, when he was promoting a green-spacey, transit-oriented, walkable environment (with photos), I asked him how the buildings in his photos (which he claimed were from the national SC Web site) were different from the Corner House Lofts, which he had opposed, the one project he acknowledged opposing. The were really remarkably similar, from the brick veneer to the green awnings over the sidewalk. He got defensive and said he wasn't an architect, so he couldn't say how they were similar or different. I responded that he had opposed the CH Lofts on their design and detailing and height, not on their structural or material merit; he said CH Lofts weren't sensitive to the historic neighborhood; I said, not to the OFW, you mean? He said, no to the historic State St area; I asked him if the abandoned Olga's building that it replaced was more historically sensitive to the State Street area. He responded that the city should have forced a better design or waited for one. This contradicts his apathy towards zoning, even form-based guidelines, which could have helped improve the design. (BTW, I agree it could have been done better, but it is in fact almost EXACTLY in line with the physical vision he was putting forth using Denver and Oakland as examples).

He then went on to explain how pretty much every official in the city was in bed with developers, from the DDA to the planning commission to the city council. Long story short, he made it seem as though the developers really ran the town. I agree with him in part -- Realtors and developers are too powerful. But I have always thought that, and I don't necessarily think we should demonize developers, as SOMEONE has to do the building that we all want (or claim to want).

Anyway, he was clearly polished and had been through this several time before, and it seem like he had done his homework, because he knew a lot about pretty much every project we talked about. I was a bit surprised, because I think he was the most locally knowledgeable person in the room; the MUP students no doubt only spend a little time on local issues and have to think theoretically, regionally, nationally, even globally, while Cowherd probably spends his free time talking and thinking about the latest Ann Arbor project.

He bashed the media a couple times, saying the AA news, the Observer, and some other print source was also in bed with developers, in that they got advertising from them and he didn't feel that they reported truthfully on him.

We went around and around; the planners tried to talk about zoning as the key and he downplayed its importance, saying the politicians would subvert it anyways. Cowherd lectured us about the evils of sprawl, the subsidies for sprawl, the blah blah blah that seemed to be part of his standard stump speech and was really wasted on us -- preaching to the choir, so to speak. I think he could have gone on for both hours without letting us speak once, so enthusiastic was he to talk.

We eventually addressed the Greenway, which in his vision was a connected greenspace that, with the DDA's three sites, could be a location for local festivals, walking, biking, etc. I asked how the greenway would work on the railroad tracks, which only have a few feet on either side for "green space." He didn't really address that, saying that we could put up fences, and I think he wanted to say that there was enough on either side to make it functional. I've got to give him points for at least pushing something like this that could potentially be a community asset. However, we disagree on an essential point -- the railroad is no place for a greenway.

He also claimed there was no market for mid-level downtown residences, based on the BDW roundtable from last year (AAiO referred to it 6-24-04, though it's no longer online). I claimed he misinterpreted the article, as the developers were saying you can't develop mid-level (150-200k) residences because land values and built-in costs were so high. There clearly is a demand; you just have to look at a certain way. The reality is that students by and large would rather live in an affordable apartment than an expensive old house. Some would rather live in a house; I would give up my front porch if I could live on William and Fourth with a decent view. The vacancies in the houses would eventually make it more sensible for houses to actually serve as single family residences instead of apartment houses (which they can only do because students more or less have to live near campus and a house can MAKE money if it is rented out, while above a certain point homes are just too expensive for families to buy anymore), meaning houses in the OWS and the OFW would be occupied by families, meaning there is a market for more downtown density -- both renting and owning. I don't think I'm going out on a limb here with this theory.

I certainly wasn't the hero of the discussion, though it may seem like it on this blog; I just remember my own points best. That said, I asked why the HVSC, if urban densification and protection of peripheral green space really were proportional goals, didn't spend as much time promoting its "200 sites" for development vision as it did its greenway vision. He said that, since the HVSC was traditionally a pro-greenspace/endangered species/nature-oriented group, he had to respond to the desires of his constituency -- he was an elected president, after all. This was another disengenuous response, I feel. He leads the organization; he should admit it. If he feels that densification is as important as greenspace, as he implied at the outset of the discussion, or if he feels that it is important, whether or not he puts it on the same level as greenspace, he should demonstrate that by action. He has not; therefore, we can conclude that he does not actually mean it (ie actions speak louder than words). He knew whom he was speaking to and tried to tailor his message to us. I guess it remains to be seen who bought it.

Bottom line, Cowherd is enthusiastic about the Greenway and cynical about city officials. He made himself seem like the one guy in this town sticking up for the little guy (who is actually a yuppy making 100k a year). He must be reckoned with, though I think his vision for Ann Arbor is not the right one. Unfortunately, I think his real agenda regarding downtown and the city is in a zero-sum position with my (and others') vision of densification and fair-share growth.

Back from the brink

2005-04-12T01:04:00.000-04:00

Last night I returned from a conference in Vancouver, BC, location of the continent's highest residential density. Vancouver has long been known as a "terminal city," owing to its location at the end of the Canada Pacific rail lines, as well as the accompanying phone lines and roads that followed. The city has been able to reposition itself as an international hub with a great deal of neighborhood vitality. It has not been without its challenges -- losses in the manufacturing sector, gentrification, and business sprawl, to name a few.

However, I was reminded daily of how great city life is -- each morning I got down to the lobby of our obscenely fancy hotel and was faced with numerous options of rewarding ways to spend my time, all within easy access. Breakfast...coffee...bookstores...running by the water...walks through city neighborhoods...architectural photography. That was off the top of my head and all visible from within a block of the hotel. More to come, along with some photos.

A step in the right direction

2005-02-11T14:28:00.000-05:00

The historic district commission approved renovations and alterations of 327 S. Main last night (where Wilkinson Luggage is now). They include a redesign of the entrance and facade windows, but more importantly, an addition of a 4th floor and code upgrade for the dormant 2nd and 3rd floors.

This is an idea I had been toying with for a while, but wasn't sure if it was structurally possible without putting in an expensive steel frame to support the new floor(s). It sounds like Wilkinson is just a wood frame building with brick veneer, but if it works, it works. I thought it was a great design and decision by the HDC, as it can allow for several more businesses in a building that was formerly just one retail establishment. One drawback is that the great entrance will be lost in the redesign, including the two glass displays on either side of the door, so it will not be as street friendly. However, I think it will allow for more foot traffic and greater activity in the area. Additionally, the creation of new space in the CBD (for whatever purpose, but particularly residential use) will be good for Ann Arbor in the long run. It offers more commercial and residential options, helps keep rents reasonable by keeping pace with demand, and helps reduce sprawl by doing so.

It's really too bad Wilkinson Luggage is moving out to Scio Township, though -- they're only feeding the sprawl monster (and I harbor my doubts that such a move will sustain the business after 100 years in the 327 building).

Urban renewal

2005-01-27T19:07:00.000-05:00

The University of Michigan regents approved demolition of the Frieze Building yesterday in order to make way for the new North Quad residence hall/academic building. This is a terrible error the results of which we will be lamenting for decades to come. The following is a letter to the editor of the Michigan Daily I wrote today:

***********
To the Daily:

The university is making a short-sighted error in deciding to raze the Frieze Building (and possibly the Carnegie Library). The need for more university housing is clear and the decision to locate it on State St. is a wise move for urban development.

However, the attachment exhibited by preservationists and former Ann Arbor High students in defending the Frieze is indicative of a broader effect of buildings upon the community. People simply respond to the physical connection to the past and the invocation of tradition that the Frieze offers -- that is what the revivals of the classical style are about. The university will be unable to replace the Frieze's grandeur with any new design, no matter how functionally effective, and will lose the ability to make that connection to the people who live and work there.

Why are the oldest buildings on campus the most popular? Because the stability and continuity of tradition that revivalist architectural styles like the Law Quad's Gothic Revival or Angell Hall's classical columns make people feel that they are continuing an endeavor nearly 2 centuries old in Ann Arbor and more than 2 millennia in the western tradition. Why are the LS&A building and North Campus buildings so often reviled? Why was the hideous undergraduate library given a coat of brick veneer a decade ago? Because most expressions of modernism quickly end up looking dated, while historical expressions frequently get better with age.

Save the facade of the Frieze and incorporate it into the new building. The metaphor of combining tradition with an ongoing effort of improvement and the physical design issuing from the pencils of competent architects will be worth the extra effort and cost.

Dale Winling
***********

As I wrote on annarborisoverrated, the preservation of the facade can be reconciled with urban development. In fact, if the recent designs on campus are any indication, the existing building is more urban-friendly than any new design will be.

"Two regents, Katherine White, D-Ann Arbor, and Andrea Fischer Newman, R-Ann Arbor, had voiced concerns that the architects should examine the feasibility of saving a portion of the Frieze building, but they did not raise the matter on Wednesday. After the vote, Newman said, she is now assured that there's no way to build modern facilities while saving part of the old building.

"U-M staff members say the costs would be too great, and the existing building's load-bearing corridor walls and ceiling heights would hamper the new design too much." (AA News)

This is misleading. The new portion of the building would not be built on top of the old building (like setting a heavy stack of books on a sandwich, if you will). The sandwich would be carefully cut from the crust and peeled away. Then, the books would be placed where the sandwich was with the crust seemingly wrapped around it -- the new building would have its own new (or greatly augmented) foundation.

The Ann Arbor News reports the program for the building is "precedent-setting in how it combines students' living and learning environments." I'm skeptical of living/learning environments on a large scale, but it's no wonder the price tag has been put at $137-142 million:

"High technology will play a big role in connecting students to people from across the world. A student may be able to have breakfast in a cafe where foreign-language news is shown on TV, then go to a foreign language class where students in other countries participate through video-conferencing.

"A more experimental idea is to install a 'video wall' in an alcove of the building. U-M could help other universities across the world install similar devices. Then a student in Ann Arbor could see and speak with a student in another country."

If there's a bigger waste of money, I haven't yet found it. The AIM, email, and cell phone phenomenon has clearly illustrated that people are no more literate or better spoken when technology is thrust upon them to facilitate communication -- really, they are less so. This will be a huge waste of resources and a squandered opportunity.

Mr. Mayor, WTF?

2004-12-23T20:52:00.000-05:00

An exchange between me and Mayor John Hieftje (sounds sort of like "heaved-ya"):

Dear Mr. Mayor --

I am a new resident of Ann Arbor living in the fifth ward. This summer and fall I have been following in several print and online publications what seems to be an ongoing conflict between the permanent population and the student population. While the proposed couch ban is the most prominent example of this tension, denied and delayed proposed developments targeted at increasing density (and serving the student population) are examples of perhaps more important instances of this ongoing opposition between town and gown.

That there is some animosity between homeowners and the student population needs no further argument; it is clear to anyone who lives in the city. I am interested in ways of solving this problem. The 2000 US census indicates that more than half the units in the city are rentals and more than a third of the population is between 20 and 34. This, of course, would indicate that anywhere between a fifth and a third of the city's population is made up of students.

My question to you, Mr. Mayor, is why, despite the prominent and enduring interest of students in the city's development (as a group they are always here and are getting proportionally larger as city growth stagnates and UM enrollment swells), are there no students or student advocates on the city's planning commission? Students certainly represent an important group "having an interest in the growth and development of the city," as the planning commission's bylaws state.

Does it not seem reasonable to appoint, in your capacity as mayor, a student interested in the city's growth and development to the next vacancy to the commission? The education and experience that graduate students (some of whom have a great deal of experience in community development), senior undergrads, or student advocates offer could only serve to promote dialogue between thegroups. (I remind you that graduate students in particular are frequently persons of rather long-term residence in Ann Arbor during the course of their degree programs). Such dialogue can only bring students and landowners together in promoting a common vision for the future of the city.

I think it has been and will continue to be a major challenge for your administration to deal with these tensions and I strongly urge you to consider appointing someone with student interests in mind to the next commission vacancy.
--
Dale Winling
106 W. Madison
Ann Arbor

***************************

Hello: Thank you for writing on this issue.

You are correct, there has been friction between neighborhood associations and students on certain issues for as long as anyone can remember. As a long time resident and observer I believe it is probably less intense now than it has been in the past. From what I have seen it occurs in every city that is home to a major university.

Nearly every time I speak to student organizations I make a point of letting them know that the city has over 50 boards and commissions and yet, I get very few, if any applications. The "Cool Cities" task force is one exception, several students applied last year and they were appointed however, some have already left. Outside of the cool cities task force I believe the problem has to do with the fact that most boards appointments are for 3 or 4 years and they meet year round. In the case of the planning commission they meet nearly every Tuesday night and there are sub-committees. This probably keeps undergrads from applying.

I have appointed graduate students to the planning commission. In fact a graduate student enrolled in a joint program with the Schools of Natural Resources and Public Policy just came off the planning commission. I would be happy to appoint another qualified graduate student at some point. At present, I do not believe there is one in the file. Last week I did meet with someone who just graduated and who is interested in a future appointment.

Let me also note that graduate students have been involved in policy making positions in city government at least as far back the 1980's and one served two terms on City Council in the late 1990's.

A couple of other points that I may be able to clear up: The city of Ann Arbor is certainly not "stagnated," it is one of only two of the larger cities in Michigan that is adding permanent residents and it has a growing tax base. It has the most vibrant economy and the lowest unemployment in the state.

Over a year ago I created and appointed a task force to look at how the city might increase density in the downtown area and the city is in the process of working through the plan recommended by the task force. I am not sure what developments you might be referring to that have been delayed or denied but we have approved a 900 bed privately owned residence facility adjacent to North Campus that has been held up by the University. This will contain 125 beds that will meet affordable housing criteria.

When it comes to housing, the University is by far the greatest contributor to any shortages that may occur from time to time in Ann Arbor. The last university owned residence hall was completed in 1968 and yet thousands of students have been added since then. Even the recently announced plans for a residence hall on State will not contribute "new" housing to the city as it will be used to house students while existing halls are remodeled over the next 12 years. Private developers have made it known that they will build and run residence halls with no capitol expense to the University. They only need land to build on and they will pay the University for the Real Estate. Unlike the private sector in the city, the University has an abundance of land.

The "proposed couch ban" came out of the Fire Department, it was not proposed by Council. I am not now nor have I been a proponent of regulating porch furniture.

I certainly agree that students make up a vital and important segment of the population in Ann Arbor and they contribute greatly to lifein our city. Ann Arbor continues to win awards as one of the great places to live in the U.S. and I am certain that this would not be so were it not for the presence of the University and all it brings to our community, including of course the contribution to the public dialog made by students.

Thank you again for writing and for your interest in these issues.

John Hieftje
***********************************
Dear Mr. Mayor,

Thank you for your response.

First, let me suggest Richard Murphy for consideration for the next vacancy on the planning commission. Richard is a graduate student in urban planning and is a thoughtful and committed advocate on urban issues. He can be reached at murph@commonmonkeyflower.net. Please also consider me for future vacancies on the historic preservation commission. I am a graduate student in architectural history at the university and I can provide any other needed information upon request.

On the issue of the city's growth, it does not seem to be prepared for (or perhaps even willing to take on) its share of the 25+% population growth the county is anticipating by 2020. However, I was at the Edison Center to hear the residential task force's report and was pleased with the recommendations. I would find the city's prospects for harmonious growth much better with a student advocate on the planning commission. Finally, two notes: I was referring to the proposed 828 Greene development and the North Main condos as dense/student projects that have been shot down recently. Also, I don't think the university is under any obligation to house students except as part of its educational mission. Simply assuming the burden of NIMBY neighborhoods is no reason to invest millions of dollars in a project. This is, of course, a matter for debate.

Thank you and good day.
--
Dale Winling

Back in Action

2004-11-10T09:06:00.000-05:00

Since Brandon linked to my site, I will get back to updating it. Thus, you will find some regular activity here in the future. Starting tonight.

A new word for the Urban Oasis lexicon

2004-07-05T23:20:00.000-04:00

Check it out.

Word of the Week Archive
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/New-Words/040124-studentification.htm
studentification noun [U]
the social and environmental changes caused by very large numbers of students living in particular areas of a town or city

‘Students have officially been identified as the new scourge of Britain’s towns and cities in a study blaming “studentification” for a string of social evils … They include destroying respectable neighbourhoods by driving out families, triggering rat infestations, causing vandalism and forcing the closure of corner shops in favour of tatty burger bars and cheap off-licences.”
(The Observer, July 2002)

The massive expansion of higher education in Britain over the last decade has given rise to a new piece of terminology. Studentification refers to the process of social, environmental and economic change effected by large numbers of students invading particular areas of the cities and towns in which popular universities are located. Studentification is consistently viewed as a negative concept, used in the same context as phrases such as ‘student ghetto’. It describes the rapid conversion of shopping and residential areas to suit the student market, such as the proliferation of take-away food outlets and cheap alcohol retailers, and the conversion of larger residential properties into so-called ‘HMOs’ (houses in multiple occupancy). Studentification has social and economic consequences also, illustrated by the rapid decrease in school class sizes as families move out of such areas, and the sharp increase in house prices as landlords create a property boom.

Though originating in Britain, studentification has also recently been adopted in American English to refer to similar problems arising from the over-population of many US ‘College Towns’.

Background
The term studentification was coined by analogy with gentrification, a term used in the 1960s to refer to a middle-class invasion of areas which were formerly thought of as run-down, thereby causing the displacement of many working-class families. Among the first to use the term studentification was Dr Darren Smith of the School of Environment at the University of Brighton, who in 2002 undertook a groundbreaking study of the phenomenon in the Headingley area of Leeds. Smith argues that, with appropriate planning strategies, studentification could in fact have a positive impact in the regeneration of particularly undesirable areas.

Though the verb gentrify exists, there is as yet no substantial evidence for an analogous verb studentify or participle adjective studentified.

Irrational exuberance

2004-06-03T22:36:00.000-04:00

Here are several emails sent out to the Cool Cities group whooping it up in response to the 100,000 catalyst grant from the state:

K'zoo wins Cool Cities grant; Money will fund move of Northside metalworking school
http://www.mlive.com/news/kzgazette/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1086189846291010.xml

"Yay!
And to add something else Cool to all of this, Art Hop is listed as a Cool City case study. You can read about it here http://www.coolcities.com/whatyoucando/casestudies"

"President Bailey asked me to convey to everyone how thrilled and
proud everyone at WMU is over this !! How COOL !"

"Congratulations to one and all. This is BIG!"

and my favorite:

"A Smartshop metalworking school and art gallery---How cool to live in
such a progressive City! I am constantly amazed and delighted at what
comes out of Kalamazoo---and to think, not too long ago, our slogan was
"Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo!"--now, there's no question. Kalamazoo
is definitely on its way!

Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this Grant!"

Listen everybody: Simmer. Down.

Let's look at the last lines of that Gazette story:

"'The awardees are people who have leveraged their dollars,' said David Hollister, director of the state's Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

He added that the administration's intent is to create something lasting, 'not just something for a couple of rinky-dink cities to hang out a shingle and say, 'We're cool.''"

Oops. Sorry Dave. I'm ambivalent on metalworking (it had totally passed under my radar until yesterday), but I'm more than a bit skeptical of the anticipated impact of this project. I'm going to take a look at the old and new site of the metalworking school and share my analysis in the next couple days. And though the governor has emphasized arts and culture, I can't help but think that a metalworking TRADE school would have more of an impact on the community, providing economic development and urban redevelopment, than a metalworking ART school.

For the record

2004-06-03T10:05:00.000-04:00

I will try to update this blog on a weekly basis (approximately).

All that glitters...

2004-05-24T12:16:00.000-04:00

Sterling University, the newest student-oriented housing complex, is coming together on Drake Rd., north of Main. This complex is about 2 miles north and west of campus, and is set to open for the fall. Students should be dreading it. The latest development in sprawl housing, SU looks to be a slightly upscale version of the types of developments that have sprung up like mushrooms "around" WMU in the last 3 or 4 years. I use "around" in quotes because these developments are up to 3 miles away from campus and generally intensify west side traffic problems and the campus parking nightmare because they pretty much mandate auto ownership.

Let's look at the pluses and minuses of this project:

Pluses:
1. It is very near Hardings, Panera, and other W. Main retail establishments.
2. There is plenty of parking for residents.
3. It's in a pretty quiet area, adequately separated from most commercial developments.
4. It will have high speed internet and other community amenities.

Minuses:
1. Bad/narrow condition of Drake ensures a big traffic headache for getting to school.
2. The community amenities will probably be pretty crappy (as they generally are in such developments).
3. It's set up as a "rent your bedroom, share the community space, live in isolation" type of arrangement.

As a living experience, I'd wager Sterling will be adequate -- everyone gets their own bathroom, and the rooms are spacious. However, its relationship to the larger Kalamazoo (and Oshtemo Twp., where it is actually located) community is really crappy. There are scores of bedrooms being built at this site and the strip malls, bars and other problems part and parcel to far-flung developments won't be far behind. There are no sidewalks in this area (across street from red pin), pretty much precluding pedestrian access to everything on Main.

One of the problems is that Sterling University is a national corporation that focuses on university communities. They are based in Houston and since they are not attuned to the local communities in which they build, they do not provide the most sensitive plans for integrating their development into the community. This is evident in the Kalamazoo example, where any new bedrooms should be built EAST of campus and not WEST.

The problems of sprawl, parking, traffic, obesity, poor campus culture, and strain on city (and twp) infrastructure are only exacerbated by developments like Sterling.

What gives?

2004-05-24T11:52:00.000-04:00

The hiatus in this blog has a two-fold cause: I've been lazy and I've been away.

I was away for a week at an architecture conference in Pennsylvania. The annual meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum was held in central PA, focusing on the architectural traditions of the Pennsylvania Germans. While the tours were interesting, as was staying in Harrisburg (the state's capital), for me the most interesting part was hearing Thomas Hubka's paper on working class housing 1900-1930. Hubka is an architect by training, but does substantial historical research (his Big House Little House Back House Barn is a must read for architecture and material culture historians). In this paper, he discusses the emergence of a national consensus of the detached single-family residence as the model home development. Homes of this type were developed in kits by Sears and promoted heavily in home and architecture magazines of the period. The national housing census, however, indicates that while the prescriptive literature offered a standard message, the housing that was actually built did not conform 2/3 of the time. This disconnect implies an interesting disconnect between the coalition of housing industries and actual homebuyers. Hubka's intended project will eventually include analysis of 10 cities from around the country.

2004-05-03T12:35:00.000-04:00

More on the 2001 Student Housing Task Force:

Good ideas that were not agreed upon by the members and thus not promoted:
1. Commuter lots should be built away from campus for commuter students; a bus shuttle should provide transportation between the commuter lots and campus.
2. WMU should build more on-campus housing as its student population grows.
3. Additional areas for campus commercial businesses should be planned near campus.

*********

1. This commuter lot is a terrific idea. It should go West of Drake Road on KL Avenue. That way, it could take advantage of the existing bus route that already serves Jefferson Commons and the other stupid housing complexes out there. This commuter lot should have a sticker that costs something like 50 to 100 dollars, making it VERY attractive for anyone who lives more than about 2 miles away. Also, because the K-Metro buses don't run on Sunday, the Commuter pass should be as good as a W sticker on Sundays (I can't remember if W stickers are enforced or not on Sundays) so people can go to the library or other campus spots without filling the meters. There HAS to be a big disparity between W stickers and the C (commuter) stickers so that people are forced to make the right decision. There also NEEDS to be good bus service (maybe even 10 minutes per bus on that route) so that it is convenient to use the commuter lot. This could cut down daily traffic by the hundreds, if not more.

2. On-campus housing has been abandoned across the US in the last 30 years, and I'm not sure why. Of course buildings cost more than they used to to build, but that hasn't stopped any other construction. I think there is still a market for affordable on-campus housing. Some services need to be consolidated (like dining halls), and WMU could even provide something like apartment life with few of the institutional services (like a dorm computer lab or library or game room) on campus. Dispense with the RAs and just have a building manager/advisor. I'd wager this is something like what the Goldsworth apartments are like as well as the Stadium Drive Apts. It would reduce pressure on the neighborhoods and increase activity on campus. Naturally following that would be...

3. Commercial business on campus. It is incredible to me how little there is to do on and near campus. I came to WMU from the University of Michigan, where literally within 2 blocks of your classes you could find a half dozen restaurants and coffee shops, 2 movie theaters, and 2 or 3 bookstores (good ones, not textbooks). Everything is out on West Main or on Westnedge or far down on West Michigan and it pisses me off. The university could be raking in dough from leases on real estate if it would only start exploiting the potential demand for campus retail services. Pretty much anything close to campus is good and busy -- Bilbo's, Rocket Star, Coffee Works, and the 2 or 3 other on- or near-campus businesses.

And make no mistake about it -- these businesses are suffering because their connectivity to campus is poor. From the library, let's say it's a half-mile to three-quarters of a mile to Rocket Star. You walk past McCracken, cross the street and pass the Henry Hall parking lot, the open Bernhard Center lawn, the parking garage, the open football field and those tiny houses, then finally you reach some more real buildings and get to Rocket Star. It's annoying and psychologically daunting to have to traverse unengaged through block after block of open space.

However, if, instead of a parking lot, you walked by an academic building, then the Bernhard Center and met a friend or two, then continued on past a row of clothing or book or music stores on your way to Rocket Star coffee shop, you would have a much more engaging, stimulating, and enjoyable walk to get coffee.

Maybe, instead of walking with our eyes on the sidewalks yapping into our cell phones at people similarly walking (or worse yet, driving) at the far corners of the campus, we might look up at the people coming in and out of those shops and smile at them or say hi. The coffee shop would certainly be better served by having some sympathetic businesses around it to attract a greater and more diverse clientele (diverse in their retail ambitions, not necessarily diverse in the ethnic sense, eg someone who wants a new jacket and something to drink, or someone who wants to buy a book and sit around and read it for an hour, or someone who just wants a sandwich).

I say again, the possibilities are manifold and -- I think -- pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it. It is an ongoing frustration that nothing ever seems to get done about it.

2004-04-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

I'm reading the City of Kalamazoo's 2001 Student Housing Task Force report. It was formed to look at a zoning ordinance that pretty much restricted students from single-family housing (Zone 8) areas, with the exception of 170 houses that were "grandfathered" in. Well-intentioned, the Task Force doesn't seem to have achieved anything: the upshot is that the committee "agreed to disagree." The Task Force met 7 times over the 2000-2001 academic year.
*****************
Chief recommendations:

1. Existing ordinances should be consistently and aggressively enforced by the municipalities and there should be zero-tolerance policy for nuisance violations and underage drinking, and tickets should be issued to violators.

2. Ongoing Dialogue should continue between the City of Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo Charter Township, Oshtemo Charter Township, WMU, Kalamazoo college, neighbors, students and others. A group should meet two or three times each academic year to discuss community/student issues and to follow up and monitor the recommendations of this task force.

3. A brief pamphlet should be developed which describes the rights of tenants and landlords, and which also contains information on local regulations and contact telephone numbers and web sites for more information. Landlords should be required to give this pamphlet to every tenant upon signing of a lease. Each tenant should be required to sign a statement which states that they have received and read the pamphlet.

4. WMU police should assist the City of Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo Township by responding to off-campus nuisance complaints (e.g. noise, trash, etc.).

5. The City should adjust its trash pick up schedule and add more "big trash" pick up days in student neighborhoods round move-in and move-out times. Free public dumpsters should be placed in student housing areas during move-in and move-out times.
*****************************

Let me tell you in no uncertain terms -- this is some pretty mealy-mouthed crap.

1. That's decent, but does it really need to be said? "DPS, do your jobs." I also take issue with the recommendation that noise ordinances should be aggressively enforced in student neighborhoods. The standard should be different for student neighborhoods.

2. Ongoing dialogue -- whoop-de-do. Monitoring these wimpy recommendations? That'll effect some change.

3. The pamphlet idea is a start. However, it is JUST a start in reality, but it is the most concrete recommendation offered here.

4. That's a pretty decent idea: having WMU essentially share the cost of the student problem.

5. Trash pickup during move-in/out is fine, but is that really a solution to the problem? It's a superficial fix.

Two statistics from studies quoted in the report are interesting: in the fall of 2000, there was only 2% vacancy in student housing in Kalamazoo. 5-7% was quoted as normal, meaning there was a big supply and demand problem (this was before Jefferson Commons, University Club, The Arboretum, and Sterling University). I think it's still a problem in another fashion. Those developments only put stress on the poorly developed W. Michigan Avenue and West Gateway to the university. Limited housing options near campus breed problems with traffic and parking and campus planning, already in deplorable condition. The university and city should be developing affordable housing near campus (preferably east of campus) and should be making the city/campus more walkable and bikeable.

The second statistic was quoted by Bob Miller: about 90% of freshmen have cars on campus. This is mind-boggling to me; I had thought it was much lower, like 50%. The wealth of this nation is incredible. I don't think I am ever going to listen to another complaint about tuition or fees. 90%. That is ridiculous. They should be outlawed. The automobile, while necessary to the early years of Western State Normal School, has become one of the chief obstacles to the development of a pleasant campus and robust student culture here. The university, stuck in a 1950s and 1960s mindset, has neither provided for its expansion (administratively and physically) nor accommodated the problems that neglect of its physical design has wrought. This is an ongoing failure of management, and it distresses me. WMU should not be kowtowing to consumeristic 18-year olds; that it does is a significant measure of its leadership.

2004-04-28T20:49:00.000-04:00

Over the next several weeks I will be intermittently posting some of my columns from my tenure at the Western Herald, the student newspaper at Western Michigan University. Here is one of the most relevant and trenchant.

***********************************
Ill-planned WMU campus leaves much to be desired

By Dale Winling
Opinion Columnist
January 28, 2004

It's time to do something about this ghost town.
As I see it, WMU's main campus has only one thing wrong with it -- it is poorly laid out with ugly buildings that offer nothing to do while you are here. Even bigger than budget problems, this is the university's chief challenge to growth and intellectual and social prosperity. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is fairly straightforward. It is so obvious, in fact, I wonder why the university has not done anything about it.

Perhaps the chief evidence of administrative neglect of the campus is the Bernhard Center. Formerly a student union in the heart of a growing university, it is now a feeding trough in our corner of the fast-food nation. Outside of offering food to gobble on the run, the Bernhard Center -- what should be the very epicenter of student communication, engagement and leisure -- offers a couple crappy arcade games and a sign saying that the bowling alley closed 2 years ago. What gives?

Almost as troubling, this university of more than 20,000 on-campus full time students is essentially devoid of pedestrian traffic after 5 p.m. There simply is no reason to stick around once class is over. The businesses that are here suffer, and the businesses that should be moving in locate instead on West Main Street, West Michigan Avenue and Stadium Drive, pretty much all west of campus. Students bolt after class, hopping into their cars and going somewhere not so lame. Those of us who seek a robust campus community curse, kick the tumbleweed from our path and huddle in solitude at the library when it is still open.

Why? The blame for campus lameness -- and accompanying student apathy and disengagement -- lies with the administration. It has supported a policy of western expansion and sprawl that represents the cutting edge of 1950s thinking. The University Club, the Arboretum, and Hunters Ridge off of West Michigan Avenue are all apartment complexes financed by the WMU Foundation and managed by a local company. WMU is no longer housing its students on campus, it is trying to move them into Oshtemo. The vaunted College of Engineering and Business, Technology, and Research Park was located on open green space -- one of the largest green spaces in Kalamazoo -- rather than redeveloping existing industrial brown fields downtown. Let us not ask why the university has fled from undergraduate education to economic development (though it has); let us ask why the university seeks to drain people and resources from the heart of the university and the central business district. Let us ask how the university hopes to become a research university -- now we surely are one in name only -- when there is no incentive, no reason to stay on campus and research and do lab work and read academic journals in the library (and there are hardly any books there anyway)?

There are a few hopeful signs. Though the old Discount Den is no more, there is a new 24-hour coffee shop down near Bruno's and the university is redesigning the east and west entrances. It's a start, but nowhere near the kind of changes this university will require to be able to match the top university towns in the state, region or nation.

The university must take the following steps if we are to have any hope of a vibrant campus:

1. Build eastward. Horace Greeley died more than 125 years ago; let us no longer abide by his famous edict, "Go West." Develop and encourage student housing east of campus -- replace and renovate the filthy and aged housing stock of the Vine neighborhood and build any new developments (including dorms) directly between campus and the central business district. This will strengthen a city/university connection, promote retail opportunities that serve both town and gown and reduce the sprawl we seem to be hell-bent upon.

2. Build a university district. Every university's got one -- except WMU. Any one who has walked down Grand River Avenue in East Lansing or State Street or South University in Ann Arbor knows what I am talking about. Places to eat, to buy clothes, to buy CDs, to drink beer, to drink coffee. It is really disheartening to have to go away from a college campus to do anything fun.

I will even tell you where to put it -- the strip of land between Solid Grounds and Kinko's on West Michigan. Orchestrate a land swap with K-College or better yet, bring them in on the project. Bulldoze those six tiny houses that are holdovers from the 1950s and have no business being there, and you have 200 meters of commercial frontage. I guarantee you franchisees, independent businesses and investors would step over their mothers to get a shop in the new hot spot. This would instantly become the busiest place on campus, would yield big profits and would also attract townie dollars -- it's even got a parking garage right next door. Better still, WMU could work out an agreement with K for the smaller school to use our athletic facilities -- it would take some coordination but would help alleviate our athletic budget woes and would get K some top-of-the-line facilities.

3. Eliminate all parking inside the main road that rings the campus except the parking garages. WMU is already way too spread out -- use these lots for our new buildings. As one campus wag noted, "WMU needs to learn they can build up and not just out." All parking should be contained in garages built outside the main ring road including some underground levels to ease the eyesore factor of parking structures. "WMU doesn't have a parking problem," Bob Beam and Bob Brown like to say, "we have a walking problem." Not so. Students will walk if they know there are no closer spots. Make sure there's plenty of parking spots with good access from the ring road, just don't put them right next to Sangren or Faunce or Schneider Halls.

4. Finally, most controversially and perhaps most important of all -- eliminate freshman parking passes. This measure would immediately make all freshmen pedestrians. Five thousand customers for local businesses on weekends. Five thousand people who do not leave Kalamazoo every weekend for someplace better. Five thousand people who are not clogging up access roads to the campus. Five thousand people who form the heart of the campus environment and contribute to the revitalization of the WMU community. It is worth the political battle and any loss of mobility for jobs would be made up for by job creation in the immediate campus vicinity.

The WMU campus, as it stands, is no good. Our planning over the last 100 years has been atrocious, and student groups and the student government fight apathy and disengagement at every turn. The time to act is now -- WMU, in the coming years of even more outrageous tuition and even greater competition between universities to attract students, must take these steps to improve its campus before we once again become a four-day-a-week commuter campus. Students spend $227 million in Kalamazoo County each year, WMU claims in the latest fact book. I ask this question of the administration -- wouldn't it be nice if they spent some of that on campus? Give us a reason.

Dale Winling, a Western Herald opinion columnist, is a graduate student from Kalamazoo studying history.

2004-04-26T20:24:00.000-04:00

I was both peeved and pleased on my campus run this evening, as so often happens at WMU and in Kalamazoo. Having been blocked from driving north on Howard St. between Stadium Drive and W. Michigan, I did a little investigating and found that there is no reason for Howard to be blocked off there. Why this traffic interruption cannot be staged throughout the summer instead is beyond me. Moreover, why Howard, a boulevard in this area, cannot have its southbound lanes split into single two-way lanes to preserve traffic routes near campus is likely due to some mental deficiencies on the part of city traffic engineers, rather than actual malice towards WMU students and residents of the Arcadia neighborhood. I hope.

I was pleased to see several international students playing soccer in the park/field next to Stadium Drive apartments. Good to see some thought went into planning the complex and grounds, and that it actually offers opportunity for recreation. Several residents of our building on Redwood (in the Knollwood neighborhood) last year played cricket in the parking lot, which was interesting though puzzling -- Knollwood park was just a couple blocks away.

2004-04-26T12:54:00.000-04:00

I like college towns. Not because I like restrictive -- even punitive -- zoning, sky-high rent for run-down rooms, or being awakened at 7:30 am on autumn Saturdays by debauched tailgaters; rather, these uncomfortable realities represent the confluence of multiple historical trends -- forces brought to bear on municipalities and institutions that are looked upon in American society as the very apex of economic, social, and intellectual mobility. And I am nothing if not narcissistic, so I like to write about my own experience.

Kalamazoo, my current home, and Ann Arbor, my once and future hometown, are fascinating places dealing with budget problems, ambitious universities that care little about damage collateral to their expansion, and the Pandora's box of "cool."