Modeshift

I’ve been writing for the New York Times since February 1981, covering all manner of people and places and events. Most recently, much of that work has focused on interesting real estate developments around the country. The latest article, featuring the University of Wisconsin’s work to construct a new entrance corridor on the east side of campus, was posted and published today:

MADISON, Wis. — A century after it was first proposed, a broad pedestrian corridor that will serve as a new gateway to the University of Wisconsin here is close to its final form.

A seven-block pedestrian corridor links the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison to rental apartments and businesses.

The corridor, called the East Campus Gateway, includes private developments, university buildings and two public gathering places, one owned by the university and the other by the city. A recent burst of construction has given students a new services center and a shopping mall geared to their needs called University Square.

And, in a city with a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent, hundreds of new rental apartments are filled with both students and town residents.

“The idea was to create a new front door to the university,” said Gary Brown, the director of campus planning and landscape architecture, and one of the two university staff members who played central roles in managing the recent construction.

Pieces of the seven-block stretch from Regent Street to Lake Mendota were installed episodically over the decades, including the Memorial student union (built in 1928) along the lakeshore that has long been one of this capital city’s favorite warm-weather gathering spots; a public square one block off the lake; and a collection of campus buildings dating to the 1950s and ’60s.

In the last decade, university architects and administrators, working with Madison’s planners, have been more purposeful. Prompted by trends in urban design that emphasize closer ties between retail stores and cultural institutions, open space, recreation and stronger neighborhoods, the university and the city developed a more definitive construction plan. When it is finished, the 2.45 million-square-foot project is expected to have cost nearly $500 million.

Beyond that aesthetic consideration, four blocks of the gateway are completed, including the latest project, an 81,000-square-foot addition to the university’s Chazen Museum of Art that opened in October. Projects under construction on the remaining three blocks include a hockey center, to be called the LaBahn Arena, and a 104,000-square-foot meeting center and student dining facility. Both are scheduled to open next year.

“We wanted to link where people lived, and where they were coming from, to where they needed to go,” said Julie B. Grove, the university architect and project manager, who worked closely with Mr. Brown.

See more.

– Keith Schneider

As the dimensions of the mortgage crisis both expand and get clearer, a new picture is emerging of a nation in pain that simultaneously is coming to new conclusions about what it means to be safe and secure in America. For the first time since post-war federal policy ganged up on cities to promote suburban expansion, cities are rebounding in remarkable ways and suburbs appear to have reached some kind of new limits to growth. The evidence of this profound shift is easy to find if you look.

First, here in Michigan and across much of the country, the towering growth in homeforeclosures is hitting the newest suburbs at least as hard, and in most cases harder than it is striking the state’s cities. Foreclosures in West Bloomfield and Birmingham are occurring at the same or higher rates than the rate of foreclosures in Detroit and its older suburbs.

The same is true, according to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, in Florida, California, Colorado, Georgia and other states.

Cities meanwhile are attracting new residents and new wealth, so much so that vast tracts of the urban landscape in cities as different as New York and Salt Lake City, Boston and Denver, Seattle and Knoxville, Chicago and Atlanta, and dozens of others, are being completely rebuilt.

This is a remarkable transformation. For most of my life cities were places to dismantle, not build. I was a kid in the 1960s when city officials and U.S. housing administrators teamed up to tear down much of White Plains, N.Y., my home town, as part of the federal urban renewal program. An elegant network of narrow streets and historic offices and walk-ups was replaced by Houston-like boulevards. A windowless mall was built near the center of town that became one of the most dangerous places to shop in the whole state. White Plains gradually came to its senses and slowly began to replace the urbanism that was removed, and the city is experiencing its own economic and cultural renaissance.

Chicago, too, is undergoing more than $1 billion in new housing, retail, and commercial investment along south Michigan Avenue, an area that encompasses hundreds of acres of old warehouses, storage buildings, and light industrial facilities. Boston is building a new city above the Big Dig. Los Angeles is rebuilding Grand Avenue. New York is planning 45 million square feet of homes and offices above a rail yard along the Hudson River.

A third bit of evidence is the popular clamor for modern transit. Grand Rapids recently won federal approval for a new rapid bus system, and as much as $29 million in US support to build the 10-mile line, which could be the first rapid transit line built in Michigan since early in the 20th century.

Northern Virginia is planning to build a new streetcar line, which would join a growing number of other streetcar systems, including operating lines in Portland and Kenosha, Wisc. And Atlanta is considering a new streetcar line along its famous Peachtree Street.

What appears to be occurring in the United States? Time-wasting, costly, energy-inefficient, land-consuming, and obsolete exurban patterns of development are taking new forms. The institutions that supported the old patterns are grievously injured. Citibank today announced a $23 billion write off connected to sour loans in its mortgage business. The American auto industry continues to shrink. Developers are going bankrupt, among them Levitt and Sons, which built the first auto-dependent cookie cutter suburb after World War Two, New York’s Levittown.

Coming up in their place are builders of new transit systems, designers of new green housing and LEED certified office buildings, and the entrepreneurial high tech businesses popping up downtown in small places like Traverse City, and big places like Charlotte.

Don Chen, the very sharp founding executive director of Smart Growth America, announced late last year that he was taking a position with the Ford Foundation. Interesting move for a canny advocate and non-profit executive with the sort of keen entrepreneurial instincts to take an eight-year-old organization from a Washington-based start-up to a national leader in new designs for development. Smart Growth America has a $2 million annual budget and a 10-member staff that includes a former Democratic governor of Maryland, and a former editorial writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This week Smart Growth America announced that Geoffrey Anderson (see pix), who directed the smart growth program at the Environmental Protection Agency, succeeds Don as executive director.

The choices made by both men seem plainly apparent. How the organization and the movement it fosters will fare is less so.

The role of non-profit founder and executive director unfolds in evolutionary stages that generally occur in two-year time frames. The first two years is all youthful energy, rapid response, program building, strategic choice, and instinctive fundraising. The next two are generally consumed with hiring, training, coalition building, program expansion, and a more formalized program of donor and foundation development. The next two are consumed with the limits of growth, more intensive fundraising, the start of moderate staff turnover and replacement, and the installation of administrative procedures designed to make operations more efficient, but sometimes don’t. And then comes the really hard work of sustaining programs, budgets, board relations, coalition partner relations, formal development programs. By year eight, non-profit directors tend to get so immersed in the administrative and fund-raising programs, and so distanced from the principles and values that prompted them to start their organizations, that they begin to wonder what happened. Year eight, in short, is a long time in the life of a non-profit director and often the time of greatest peril in a non-profit’s development.

When an institution as stable, prestigious, and well-funded as the Ford Foundation comes knocking it’s easy to understand why a talented guy like Don Chen would respond.

Overseeing a government program is the other end of the spectrum. The working environment is stable to the point of being calcified. The sense of adventure and accomplishment comes from distributing grants to capable organizations that produce solid work that attracts some (but not too much) attention. Program directors like to hire good people. They are challenged by treading paths through the administrative and Congressional briars that don’t leave too many nicks. They build relationships in and out of government, in and out of Washington. They speak at the right conferences. They become expert in policy and national practice. If they stay long enough, as Geoff Anderson has, they get recognized as significant leaders in the field.

I’ve worked with Don and Geoff for years and know them well. Both are experienced, knowledgeable men who are capable managers, fair with their staff, and generous with their time. But here is the big challenge: Can the organization and the new director sell the goods?

There is no doubt that Smart Growth America and the other gold standard public interest organizations that focus their work on the consequences of growth have made an effective case for seeking changes in public and private investment that make places better. They’ve developed the ideas that have resulted in building communities and neighborhoods fit for the 21st century that are more economically competitive, use less energy, reduce congestion, invest in transit, curb pollution, establish open spaces, and provide housing opportunities for people of every income level. Smart growth is a set of policy and investment tools proven to work in more than 40 states.

The question is whether the Smart Growth movement can command these ideas and build the strong coalitions that translate them into policy and investment practice at the federal level, where the real money lies. With the exception of the transportation funding bills of the 1990s, which produced more rapid transit, the Smart Growth movement has been less successful in changing the old spending priorities for highways, housing, natural resource protection, and urban investment at the federal level. It will take a powerful alliance of untraditional allies at the grassroots — advocates for halting global climate change, improving housing, strengthening labor, transit advocates, and metropolitan business and neighborhood groups respected by both parties — to convince Congress and the White House to break with convention and alter how and where federal money is spent.

Geoff Anderson has the inside government experience to know where the pressure points lie, as well as the earnest temperament to build the coalitions to press for new policy. But it’s not clear whether he has the political instincts to step outside the safety zone he understood so well as a government manager, or the entrepreneurial energy to simultaneously lead a staff, develop new programs, and serve as the chief fundraiser. If he does, Smart Growth America will take its place among the nation’s truly influential public policy organizations. If he doesn’t, the young group will gradually decline. A lot of us out here in the provinces wish him the best in his important new venture.

Two reports from different suburbs across the country indicate new kinds of pain for homeowners and communities.

The first, from North Carolina, describes the outbreak of violence, fear, and break-ins mounting in new suburbs north of Charlotte. Home foreclosures prompted by the subprime mortgage mess prompted owners — local and out-of-state — to abandon properties in what the Charlotte Observer called “starter” subdivisions, where homes generally are priced for less than $150,000.

While downtown Charlotte neighborhoods improve, as they are in other big cities, new suburbs fade and at a speed much faster than city neighborhoods declined in the 1960s and 1970s.

The other report comes from Antioch, IL, a suburb of Chicago, where one of the region’s largest developers declared bankruptcy in early November and abandoned work at the Clublands subdivision. “Streetlights aren’t installed, roads aren’t paved and half-built homes stand as stark symbols of the builder’s financial woes,” reports the Chicago Tribune.

The subdivision was slated to contain 960 single-family homes with prices from around $240,000 to $410,000, said the newspaper. “An 8,000-square-foot clubhouse also was to be built, along with swimming pools, tennis courts and other amenities.” Only a third of Clublands’ homes have been completed.

According to real estate listing services, there are nearly 41,000 homes for sale in Detroit and its three neighboring counties — Wayne, Oakland and Macomb. That’s more than twice as many homes on the market as in 2004, when the housing slump started in southeast Michigan. Moreover, it takes an average of six months to sell a house in metropolitan Detroit, and prices have slipped 15 percent to 3o percent, depending on where the home is located. Realtors I spoke to last week said that the Detroit market is still nine months away from reaching bottom. 

Similar woeful trends exist in other troubled metropolitan housing markets in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida. But Philip Langdon and Robert Steuteville report in the current issue of New Urban News that even in these tough market times homes located close to rapid transit lines, and homes built in new walkable neighborhoods are holding their value and still selling well.

Langdon and Steuteville cite statistics from the Washington metropolitan region, which is served by the Metro rail system. “In close-in, high-density Arlington, Virginia, which is served by Metro rail, prices in mid-2007 were up 20 percent from a year earlier,” and home prices in Washington itself were up five percent, “whereas most other jurisdictions in the region slipped.”

Dallas also saw a similar trend with home sales in new traditional neighborhoods. ”Bill Gietema of Arcadia Realty Company in Dallas-Fort Worth said his firm’s two active TNDs “are outperforming their submarkets” (competing subdivisions in the same trade areas).” they report. “One of the TNDs, HomeTown, in North Richland Hills, is selling at “about a 10 percent slower velocity” than before the downturn, Gietema said, but in light of the overall market, that’s considered a healthy performance. “Competitors have closed down their models,” he noted. “We’ve stolen everybody else’s share.” The other TND, Capella Park, on the south side of Dallas, is “outselling competing neighborhoods five to one,” Gietema said.”

Not all new urban neighborhoods are faring so well, report Langdon and Steuteville. But enough are to make the point that buyers, especially young professionals and baby boomers are seeking something much different than a new home on a large lot distant from the city. The New Urban News report is consistent with what I’ve found in the last year during visits to Seattle, Portland, Knoxville, Chicago, New York, Washington, and Salt Lake City to write about metropolitan economies and real estate for The New York Times. In each of these metropolitan regions the downtown market for new and existing homes is stronger than the market for new and existing homes in surrounding suburbs. And the market is strongest in neighborhoods closest to rail transit stops.   

Michigan is at a distinct disadvantage in taking command of this trend. The state does not have a single metropolitan rapid transit system, though Grand Rapids is edging closer to building either a light rail or a bus rapid transit line. Every housing market in the state is taking a pounding with the exception of the market along the Lake Michigan coast close to Chicago. Sales of vacation condos and single family homes have been stronger in and around New Buffalo than anywhere else in Michigan or the Great Lakes region, according to regional realty statistics. 
     

If you’ve had the chance to visit America’s big cities, you’ve no doubt noticed that almost without exception they’re pretty terrific places to be these days. The revival of America’s big city downtowns and neighborhoods, the development that’s occurring in the inner ring suburbs, all portend something very useful to the nation’s well being in this century. The prosperity that’s occurred in American cities represents one of the great achievements in the United States in the last decade.

Today, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program launches a multi-year initiative, the Blueprint for American Prosperity, that urges candidates in the 2008 presidential election to not only take note of how American cities secured their well-being, but also that the nation would do well to mimic those steps. Making places better involved protecting natural resources, investing in transit and other infrastructure, promoting housing, curbing sprawl, securing institutions like museums and universities, improving public safety, conserving open spaces. It also involved welcoming and providing opportunities for young entrepreneurs, and prompting civic excitement. 

“The assets that matter in today’s global and knowledge economy are innovation, infrastructure, human capital, and quality places,” according to the Blueprint’s developers. And what’s good for cities is great for the country. “The top 100 metros take up just 12 percent of our land mass but make up 74 percent of our college graduates, originate over 80 percent of all patenting, and therefore generate 75 percent of the nation’s GDP,” said Amy Liu, the deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program. 

The initiative’s launch marks the 10th-year of the Metropolitan Policy Program, one of the great idea laboratories in urban affairs. The director is Bruce Katz, a former Clinton Administration housing official and the winner of the Heinz Award for Public Policy.

Whether presidential candidates take note of the Blueprint is far from certain. They should.

Among the important helpings in the data feast that Mr. Katz’s crew fed to reporters today was this chart outlining how critical metropolitan health is to every state. In Michigan, for example, the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing metro regions account for 56.5 percent of the state’s population, 60 percent of all jobs in Michigan, and $247 billion in annual economic activity or 66 percent of state GDP. 

Even in Michigan, which has the highest unemployment and the largest state budget deficit, metropolitan regions are holding their own because they’ve developed and embraced a new development strategy.  Health Hill in downtown Grand Rapids, which in the 1990s grew for the first time in 40 years, is the scene of $1 billion in new medical research, training, and patient facility construction, the largest such concentration of health-related construction in the United States.

The Economist magazine last week reported on signs of revival in Flint and Saginaw. Ann Arbor, which also grew in the 1990s, is engaged in an intense civic conversation to establish a new rapid transit line that links the city with Detroit and to build new housing and offices downtown. The Traverse City region has undertaken a two-year, $1.3 million federally-financed transportation and land use study intended to draw up a multi-county plan for guiding development and building transportation infrastructure over the next generation. Several of Detroit’s inner ring suburbs – Ferndale, Royal Oak, Birmingham, to name three – have raised and invested resident taxpayer dollars in schools, central business districts, parks, housing, and transit to stabilize neighborhoods and attract new residents downtown. 

Similar far-reaching growth initiatives are occurring in nearly every other metropolitan region of the country. Last November, for instance, voters in Salt Lake County, Utah approved spending $45 million to protect open space. Residents in Salt Lake and neighboring Utah counties also raised the sales tax to add 23 miles to the 19-mile regional light rail system that opened eight years ago, and to double the length of a new commuter rail system set to open next year. When the construction is finished by 2015, the Salt Lake City region will have spent roughly $3.1 billion to build a 45-mile light rail system, and a 88-mile regional commuter rail network, the West’s second largest regional rapid transit system next to the 172-mile system that Denver is now building.

In Salt Lake City itself, equally impressive projects have occurred. The city was one of the first in the nation to require municipal buildings to achieve the highest standards of energy efficiency. It allows owners of energy efficient low-emission cars to park for free. The city enacted zoning and permitting changes to encourage much more dense downtown neighborhoods, and to discourage strip malls. Salt Lake City also constructed a public library that is a showcase of technology and architecture, and is doing everything it can to support a downtown construction boom that is adding a light rail extension, millions of square feet of new energy efficient retail and office buildings, and more than 1,300 new homes.

In Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley has instituted a wave of growth measures that fostered a cultural and economic revival unmatched by any city in the Midwest. The Daley administration has planted 500,000 trees, is putting up the most energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive municipal buildings in the country, has agreed to provide developers with much faster permits if they construct green buildings, and instituted a $600-million-a-year program to repair neighborhoods and city parks. The showcase of Mayor Daley’s program is Millennium Park, a 24.5-acre, $475 million expanse of lawn, wild-grass prairie, sculpture and gardens that joins the fast-growing neighborhoods along Michigan Avenue to Lake Michigan. The park is credited with prompting construction of more than 10,000 new units of downtown housing.

Chicago’s transformation has been striking. Indeed, when the results of the 2000 census were published, the magnitude of what Chicago accomplished became clear. The city’s population increased by 112,000 people, the first time that happened since the 1940′s. Chicago’s downtown neighborhoods grew by 16,000 residents during the 1990′s, according to the Metropolitan Policy Program. The city’s median income increased 12.6 percent in the 1990′s, 2 percent higher than the median incomes of the state or the six-county metropolitan region.

In the Pacific Northwest, Seattle (see pix) has developed new zoning provisions to reduce the vehicle population in an increasingly jammed downtown. Earlier this year, the city established an ordinance that requires its Transportation Department to give walking, biking and transit equal priority with cars and trucks before it improves existing streets. The directive is leading to more bike lanes, wider sidewalks and fewer car lanes, thus making room for rail lines and buses on some of Seattle’s major streets and boulevards.Seattle just completed a master plan intended to sharply increase the number of miles of bike lanes painted on city streets, or bike paths separated from traffic. A pedestrian master plan is in development. The city is also reworking its parking policies. Last year, Seattle eliminated a provision that required a minimum number of parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of new construction. It is possible now for new buildings in several downtown districts to be constructed without any parking.

And Seattle is developing alternatives for its residents and workers. A 2.6-mile, $49 million streetcar line that serves downtown opens in December 2007. A 15.6-mile, $2.3 billion light-rail line that links the city’s center with the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is scheduled to start in 2009. Today, Puget Sound residents vote on a $10.8 billion transportation bond measure, more than half of which is devoted to improving public transit. All of these initiatives have helped to make Seattle one of the most popular and prosperous cities in the world. Over the next 15 years, the city’s population is expected to grow to 680,000 by 2022, about 100,000 more than in 2004, and Seattle will generate 84,000 new jobs, 50,000 of them downtown.

Two items caught my eye today. World oil prices reached $93 a barrel this week, which is why gasoline at the Wesco down the road is $3.07-a- gallon tonight. The other news is the announcement on Monday that city leaders in Oregon want to dramatically expand the number of neighborhoods served by Portland’s spectacularly successful streetcar.

The two developments are related, of course, because as fuel prices rise the sanity and fuel-efficiency of streetcar lines makes ever more sense. 

Dallas opened a 2.8-mile streetcar line in 1989, and since then eight cities have built new streetcar lines, including Memphis, Little Rock, San Francisco and Tampa, all serving growing numbers of riders using restored cars or replicas.

Portland, which opened the first section of what is now an eight-mile loop in 2001, was the first to use modern streetcars, designed and built in the Czech Republic.

A new 2.6-mile streetcar line is scheduled to open in Seattle in December; a new line is to open in Washington in 2009; and a four-mile line is to begin operating in Tucson in December 2010. Miami, Columbus, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Missoula, Grand Rapids and some 70 other American cities are studying the feasibility of opening lines, according to Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit transit research group in Oakland, Calif.

Not since the turn of the 20th century, when metropolitan regions built elegant urban-rail networks, which were later dismantled, have streetcars generated such intense interest, according to the American Public Transportation Association, a Washington trade group.

Much of the reason lies in what happened after Portland decided that a streetcar, operating on fixed tracks and sharing the right of way with cars, was not only a new option for getting from one end of town to the other, but also a boon to developers as a new rail corridor for building homes and offices downtown. The Portland region also has a 44-mile network of light-rail lines, using faster and larger cars, that runs through the center of the city to the eastern and western suburbs. An 8.3-mile, $575.7 million extension is under way, scheduled to open in 2009.

John Carroll, a local home builder who is on a committee that oversees the streetcars, told me earlier this month, ”All I can say is that the stars lined up the right way for Portland. The Portland streetcar demonstrated that the city was serious about developing downtown at a time when the core was much quieter than it is now. Our last seven or eight projects have been within a block, block and half of the streetcar line.”

The city-owned streetcar line, which cost $100 million to build, has helped sweep in $2.4 billion in new commercial and housing development, with 7,248 new housing units, according to city statistics. A former vacant railway yard and grimy light-industrial sector on the line’s northern end was transformed into a hip area called the Pearl District. On the other end, industrial ground along the Williamette River has become the South Waterfront, a neighborhood of high-rise condominiums, town houses, offices, parks and a tram with spectacular views.

Although riding the Portland streetcars now seems like a logical step to urban prosperity, getting the line built took 11 years of promoting the idea.

A major task included convincing residents that pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers and streetcars could co-exist in the same right of way. Miami, which plans to open a line in 2012, put the problem to rest by producing videos of Portland streetcars as they operate without a hitch, and posting them on a Web site, miamigov.com/MiamiStreetcar/pages/Videos.asp.

Another challenge was raising money. Portland financed its line almost entirely with local taxes.

Two years ago, Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Portland, convinced his colleagues in the House of Representatives to approve a new funding provision called Small Starts in the federal transportation bill to help pay for the line. This year the program is providing $100 million for building streetcar lines and bus rapid transit systems. Portland wants to use $75 million in Small Starts money to partly finance a 6.7-mile, $146 million extension of its streetcar line.

Portland’s streetcars carry nearly 10,000 passengers a day, almost four times the number it anticipated when the line opened, said Rick Gustafson, executive director of Portland Streetcar, the nonprofit corporation that operates the line. “There’s no question that we are part of the combined investment over the last 20 years that produced the infrastructure that made it possible for people to park their cars and turn Portland into a walking environment,” Mr. Gustafson said. “When you create that, amazingly enough the market responds.”

According to the Portland Oregonian, about 140 miles of the city’s busiest streets show potential for new streetcar routes. Streetcars could make more neighborhoods resemble the popular retail corridor along Southeast Belmont, built originally along a streetcar line in the early 20th century.

I visited South Bend earlier this month to join a group of students from Notre Dame and several more of the nation’s best universities who held the first Congress of the Students for New Urbanism. The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, it turns out, was an apt choice for the gathering. Notre Dame reframed its architectural curriculum several decades ago to concentrate on traditional neighborhood and urban design, one of the few architectural schools to do so. When a group of nationally-renowned architects stepped away from the land-consuming, oil-soaked, dispiriting strip mall and subdivision design juggernaut to form the Congress for New Urbanism in 1993, Notre Dame was waiting for them. The weekend conference  not only featured the ideas and energy of young architectural students fully aware of the need for their skills in a coming age of transformational change, it also focused on several presentations that made clear how central the practice of New Urbanist design and planning has become across the United States.

One important measure of the New Urbanist influence is the market, which increasingly looks to traditional neighborhood and town designs to meet buyer expectations and solve some of the long-standing economic, environmental, and cultural challenges faced by communities. New Urbanist town centers, housing developments, and commercial districts are under construction in at least 40 states now. The South Lake Union neighborhood in Seattle, once an underutilized light industrial sector, is redeveloping along a traditional urban street grid with homes and shops and offices mixed together, and served by a new streetcar line scheduled to open in December. Harbor Town in Memphis, a city that has attracted nearly 10,000 new downtown residents in recent years, and which also boasts a baseball district featuring hip streetlife and mixed residential and business uses, is another of the formative projects gradually changing how American cities redevelop.

Both Seattle and Memphis, and so many others — Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Charleston, Atlanta, Grand Rapids, – benefit from what James Kunstler, the movement’s chronicler, said was the “the most valuable things that the New Urbanists recovered along the way: the knowledge required to create a human dwelling place with a future.”

Another measure of New Urbanist influence is that two national architecture and planning firms, Torti Gallas and Partners (based in Silver Spring, MD, and Los Angeles) and Looney Ricks Kiss (offices in 7 cities nationally) embraced New Urbanism as central to their business strategies. Both have emerged as very large multi-dimensional players in American design and development practices.  

J. Carson Looney designed much of Harbor Town, which started in 1989 and was one of the first large mixed-used new urban developments in the United States. Torti Gallas has amassed a similar collection of important projects. It just won a $250,000 contract from Ocean City, Miss., to develop a master plan for an area hammered by Hurricane Katrina along Biloxi Bay. The firm’s designs have collected a showcase full of awards from the Congress For the New Urbanism, the EPA, and other organizations. One of their most recent honors is the Governors’ Smart Communities Award for a mixed-use affordable housing project in Tacoma, Wash. A principal, John Torti, spoke at the weekend conference and is a graduate of Notre Dame’s architectural school.

As the new narrative of the 21st century unfolds, there is so much for architectural students to worry about — peak oil price shocks, global climate change, soaring population, flat personal incomes, financial market turmoil, diminishing government wealth, scarce natural resources. But the skills they are developing also offer some measure of hope. The walkable, beautiful, energy-efficient, land and resource-conserving, culture-enhancing places they are poised to design and build offer so many of the solutions.

Illinois, our neighbor to the west, has been doing a lot of things right of late for its residents, environment, and economy. It makes a Michigan resident a bit jealous. The Center for Neighborhood Technology and Bethel New Life, for example, convinced the Chicago Transit Authority to rebuild rather than tear down the elevated Green Line in the 1990s, helping to promote the revival of the city’s West Side. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley turned a tree-planting campaign into a full-fledged green economic development strategy that not only helped Chicago become, arguably, the most beautiful city in America but also among its fastest growing and most prosperous. Lots of great Chicago organizations were involved included the Metropolitan Planning Council and its A list dynamic leader, Mary Sue Barrett (see pix).

Now comes the state General Assembly and state Senate, which last month approved The Green Neighborhood Grant Act, an experimental economic incentive to encourage developers to build healthy, energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, walkable, beautifully designed new neighborhoods. In becoming the first state to approve a LEED-ND incentive package Illinois had some very big 21st century ideas in mind, according to Mandy Burrell, the communications associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ms. Burrell told me that the Legislature is seeking next year to provide three builders of sustainable LEED-ND developments grants of up to 1.5 percent of their total cost. Of the three projects that qualify for the grants not more than one can come from Chicago. Legislators expect to encourage the construction of 300 new households in Illinois, said Ms. Burrell, and more than $944,400 could be redirected annually into the state’s economy because of the money that home owners will save in energy and vehicle expenses alone because of where they live. 

Other interesting forecasts:

• A family living in a LEED-ND certified neighborhood stands to cut annual costs by $3,148, due to savings from their well-designed, energy-efficient homes, the easier access they have to transit, jobs, schools, and recreation - meaning they won’t spend nearly as much money on cars. 
• LEED certified developers also earn more for their homes, and buyers gain higher resale premiums, according to a number of studies and realty assessments.

Jennifer Henry, who manages the LEED-ND project for the U.S. Green Building Council, said she knows of no state other than Illinois that has adopted  publicly financed incentives for LEED-ND. And while the pilot project is small, the consequences can be huge.

You may recall that the LEED idea itself, promoting better design through environmental sensitivity and energy efficiency started small. But in certifiying standards for green design LEED had the effect of creating a market that never existed previously. The LEED idea is now written into zoning standards and building codes. Cities, like Chicago, compete to be the place that has the most LEED-certified buildings. Neighborhoods that promote walking rather than riding, energy efficiency rather than profligacy, healthy living rather than conventional toxic design just make sense in a world of higher expenses and scarcer resources, space, energy, and time. And Illinois, right here in the economically scarred upper Midwest, was the first to get there.  Nice work Illinois.

Late on the Friday night before the Memorial Day weekend, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Michigan reached agreement with Democratic Governor Jennifer M. Granholm on a very temporary fix to close an $800 million state budget deficit. The deficit, for those who might be unfamiliar, is what happens when what the state earns in tax revenue doesn’t keep up with what it spends on programs. Next fall the crisis worsens when lawmakers look down the raw throat of a $1.8 billion deficit.

“Some people might say that the agreement makes things worse,” said Governor Granholm in an interview last week with Michigan Public Radio. “They’re right.”

There are reasons to sympathize with our governor. Ever since she took office in 2003, Granholm has faced the nation’s largest state budget deficits. Their cause is two-fold. During the 1990s Michigan’s Republican Governor John Engler, and the Republican-led House and Senate engaged in a program of tax cutting that steadily diminished the percentage of personal and business income that Michigan paid in taxes. Then came the acceleration of energy, land, and living costs, globalization, and declining incomes across the country. The state’s manufacturing sector, which has lost over 300,000 jobs since 2000, went into free fall, further reducing income and sales tax revenue. The result is that over $4 billion in revenue has drained from state coffers since Granholm was sworn in. As recently as the 2004/2005 fiscal year, Michigan earned $9 billion in general fund revenues. In fiscal 2007/2008, it is expected to raise $7 billion in general fund revenue. Michigan now has 52,299 state employees, fewer than at any time since 1973, when the state’s population was 9.1 million or 11 percent less than the 10.1 million people that live here today. 

But if you’re getting ready for me to take a swipe at those tax-cutting Republicans, forget it. The governor and her Democratic allies, who are pressing for tax increases to balance the budget, have just as much responsibility for producing Michigan’s budget mess. Both sides are tangled in the heavy ropes of partisan and ideological conflict. 

There’s a way out — collaboration around new ideas — that is proving successful in the prosperous regions of the country and ought to be just as useful here. There’s nothing new about this approach, other than how well it works at the state level in California, Maine, and North Carolina, and in metropolitan regions like Denver, San Diego, Albuquerque, St. Louis, and Chicago. Those of us who’ve engaged in intense public disagreements over highways or new Wal-Marts, farmland conservation, windmills, natural rivers, and downtown development also know that the resolution often accompanies proposing a better idea. An alternative to the status quo. A vision that makes sense for its time and can generate common ground.

The problem with Michigan’s budget standoff, now in its fifth year, is that neither side has agreed on such a vision. Republicans want to keep cutting programs they don’t much like, including environmental protection, health care, and the union-dominated public school systems. Democrats want to spend in those same programs. But if you look at most state-financed programs, you see very quickly that, with few exceptions, they are meant to ensure the continuation of ideas that fit the 20th century, not the 21st. Put another way: As long as Michigan’s state government defends its authority to spend on the programs it’s financed over the last 35 years, it really won’t make much difference for ensuring prosperity for the next 35.  

Transportation’s $3.4 billion budget is heavily weighted to building and maintaining roads. Under 10 percent of the budget is devoted to public transit and not one penny is focused on regional rapid transit, which has proved so successful in igniting economic development in Washington, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Portland and nearly 30 more cities since the late 1980s.

The state’s $113 million agriculture budget includes $3 million to promote Michigan farm products for global markets, and next to nothing to promote local food networks, which have far more capacity to generate higher incomes for food producers and processors, not to mention the ability to help preserve the state’s farmland and rural beauty, both important ingredients to prosperity in the 21st century.

A year ago the Michigan Land Use Institute, Michigan State, and the Upjohn Institute collaborated on an economic study that found that if Michigan growers increased the amount of fruits and vegetables they sold in local markets the shift could increase net farm income by $164 million, or nearly 16 percent. As farm families spend this new income, the study shows they could generate up to 1,889 new jobs across the state and $187 million in new personal income from those jobs. In other words if Michigan spent a little — a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year for technical support and capacity building — it could gain as much new income and as many jobs as it now tries vainly to do by spending tens of millions unsuccessfully in trying to attract new manufacturers. 

The Department of Labor and Economic Growth, the principal economic development agency, spends 48 percent of its $1.3 billion budget on job training, and 9 percent on commissions, boards, and its own staff. But there isn’t any money devoted to the proposed Airport City that lies between Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Willow Run. The proposed new urban region of 450,000 residents and 350,000 new jobs takes advantage of the global reliance on air transport, the advanced manufacturing base, and the $1.3 billion a year in research grants earned by the three big universities in southeast Michigan — Wayne State, Michigan State, and the University of Michigan. The budget agreement reached on May 25, in fact, cuts $166 million in state support for higher education in 2007.

As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I could do this all day.” The point is that as long as lawmakers are defending turf and ideology, Michigan loses. The vast pool of financial capital managed by our state lawmakers is being used to operate obsolete programs and support old ideas about growth and prosperity. The Michigan Land Use Institute published a report in 2005, “Follow The Money,” that identified $10 billion a year in state economic development funds used for schools, highways, universities, research, and other programs. 

Michigan doesn’t have a shortage of money, as Democrats argue. The state’s budget is $43 billion annually. Michigan has a shortage of ideas, vision, and willingness to collaborate. So long as the state’s budget is devoted to building more roads not regional rapid transit, promoting farm products in the farm-killing global commodity markets, subsidizing sprawl in rural areas, selling state forests and other assets at bargain prices, and cutting funding to higher education in the knowledge economy, we all lose. Unless Granholm and state legislators develop a prosperity plan and the programs to carry it out that fit the 21st century — programs that promote fresh local foods, rapid transit, energy efficiency, environmental protection, housing and urban neighborhoods, and access to great schools — it doesn’t matter how much money the state spends or doesn’t spend. The existing programs neither buttress the present nor prepare for the future. They do, however, ensure that Michigan’s standing in the world will continue to diminish.