Interview with New Colonist's Editors

Interview with Eric Miller

The main and most competitive routes for the PRR and its competitor, the New York Central were between New York and Chicago. The New York central had the advantage early on with a better route into New York--the place every Northeastern railroad needed to connect to. Altoona was just a place on the line where they built and repaired locomotives to traverse the Allegheny Mountains. New York and Chicago were the places people and things needed to get to--the real sources of Altoona's existence. I wanted to go and see them and how they were different. That wanting to know what made cities grow, sustain themselves, and prosper has been a primal interest throughout my life. I also wondered what Altoona would have been like if it had continued growing.

2) You rightfully see transit practices as factors that strongly influence a city's form and its level of civility. Do you consider transit practices to be the paramount factor in urban sustainability, or are they secondary to, say, compact mixed-use neighborhoods, which inherently require less transit?
The question here is does "sustainability" allow for growth? Transit is important in determining how a city grows. If you are looking at a population area, rather than a city, and have growth as a given, then transit is important for sustainability because its development will help use land efficiently. Within a city, transit is important primarily for determining density. Compact, mixed-use neighborhoods do not require less transit, however. Modern people are mobile and have many different jobs and interests during their lives. To think they will stay in one neighborhood for any significant part of the day, let alone part of their lives, is an unrealistic notion. Neighborhoods can be dense and include mixed-uses, but transit must be in place for any city to work.

3) You grew up in Pittsburgh, more or less, and now live in San Francisco, but are always getting ready to return to Pittsburgh. Most people would consider this a sign of insanity, including, to judge from their correspondence, many people from Pittsburgh itself. Why are you considering a return to your much-maligned hometown?
This indeed is the million-dollar question. It is an easy one to answer, however. San Francisco is set up as somewhat of an urban ideal. For me that means there is less to do and less potential for me to make a lasting impact. I want to learn from San Francisco and go back to Pittsburgh, and the mid-Atlantic industrial belt at large, and help to bring about positive urban change.

4) How does Pittsburgh stack up against The New Colonist's sustainability indicators? How does San Francisco?
Pittsburgh, despite the hype, does terribly poorly on transit. Many of its neighborhoods are walkable, but the transit doesn't connect them to each other. Further, there is a mis-match of busways and light rail that keeps the system from operating efficiently. It also doesn't have many people coming in to replace the ones who are going. San Francisco comes closer to being in line with the ten characteristics than any other city I know outside of Manhattan. It could, however, make more room for people with lower incomes.

5) What must Pittsburgh do to make itself a more livable and more attractive city? Likewise, San Francisco?
Pittsburgh needs to attract immigrants, develop more light rail, regulate gyrations in (if not simply lower) property taxes, continue development of its waterfront, entice residential construction downtown, and stop the promotions: let the city and real progress sell itself.

San Francisco needs to free up areas for massive, taller residential and commercial development. It is too expensive. The city is made up of the homeless and those who live paycheck to paycheck trying to afford the rent, or live very comfortable because they bought property a long time ago. The only way to lower the price is to increase the supply, and the only way to go in most places is up. Most of the city is underdeveloped, but because the system favors the long-time resident, and because of a misunderstanding of economics by the renters, there is tremendous opposition to development.

6) Given that great changes must come about in these as in most cities in the US, do you feel that change is more likely to come about through an enlightenment of the professional and governing classes, or from grass-roots agitation, or a combination of the two? Different changes come through both. I think the physical changes are more likely to come about through an enlightenment of the professional and governing classes, though the term "class" is a terrible one you must have picked up in South America. We are all a governing class in a democracy, eh? If you are talking about "developers" when you talk about a professional class, yes. They are more likely to bring about more change once its started because they have the hammers and the bulldozers. I think it is possible grassroots activism could eventually bring about more transit and better transit, but transit more than anything needs to be put forth as the arteries around through which the cities' blood flows. In most cases, it should happen first by the "governing" classes--that means "the government" for those of you in Orange County. With transit in place, developers are more likely to develop to take advantage of it the same way they take advantage of highways in the suburbs.

7) Left to themselves, most developers seem hell-bent on creating nothing more than endless malls, office parks, and bedroom suburbs. Do you think that, in the near future, the private sector will be more likely to bring about the changes you see as beneficial to the city, or will the people have to cajole their government representatives into guiding private development along healthier lines?
The private sector is already doing it. Suburban retail development is already maxed out in many cities, and retailers are looking to "expand in." In one tier of cities the people who live there are aware and vocal enough to know developing a mini-mall downtown isn't a good thing. So, as happened in Pittsburgh recently, there is enough grassroots action to stop mega-suburban-style developments downtown. Big retailers like Target are discovering that sensitive development works. They are using technology to make it work--for example, escalators that carry shopping carts in multi-story stores. These profit footprints that are being created in American cities today will be copied with cookie cutters by developers the same way developers copied Debartelo's mall outside Youngstown decades ago. They just want profit--it is up to people and the government sometimes to give them an urban model that can profit. Once they have it, they will gladly continue to use it over and over. Until that model is there for sure, citizen activists and government officials need to continue guiding it along those lines.

8) Many colleagues of Joel Crawford, author of "Carfree Cities," suggest that the best thing to do would be to buy an entire neighborhood (one piece at a time if need be) and develop a model pedestrian city to showcase the benefits of the modern urban village concept. Do you think that's feasible? And if so, do you think it advisable?
No. no. no. no. no. no. This is what "redevelopment authorities" do when they want to destroy something. It is so important for buildings in neighborhoods to have different owners. In my opinion, it would not be an ideal urban village if it were all controlled by one developer of a government. Many different people owning small parcels of land is needed for a healthy living environment. Besides, we have many models of a modern urban village already. It would be less expensive to build one from scratch on a brownfield, though that would only be ideal if you sold off parcels or lots to individual owners.

9) Can a city be too big or too small?
It can't be too big. It can only be too small if it likes being small. A city is an economic unit and therefore must strive to grow, to be bigger. A city is the PRIMARY geographic economic unit. An economy can't be too big.

10) You've been around a lot. If you could live at will in any of the cities that you know well, without any concerns other than your own pleasure in life, which on would you choose?
New York.

11) If you could give one piece of advice to the mayor of San Francisco, knowing he would be required to follow it, what would that be?
Hah! The Mayor has had his hands tied for years. You could require him to follow my advice and someone else would require him not to follow it. If he could do anything and I could give him one thing to do, I would say build the regional transit center today. Since I have full faith and confidence that is already happening (cough), I would say repeal the requirement to provide one parking space for every new unit of housing.

12) What do you hope people will remember about you three generations from now?
That I made things happen.

Interview with Richard Risemberg

So I started off as a tree-hugger, but I always loved the things that urban culture gives us: art, music, literature, philosophy of the kind of complexity that I enjoy can develop only in a social support structure. And cities themselves are a form of art. I learned this when I went to Paris in 1982 and saw that a city could be both bustling and relaxing, could be full of eye-level detail, of small amenities that facilitated human contact, the "intimate anonymity" that architect Hillel Schocken speaks of. Los Angeles, especially at that time, was very bland; even San Francisco is undecorated compared to Paris, and has it easier anyway because it's smaller and is by the sea. Paris is, effectively, in Kansas, and is a capital, the New York and Washington DC of France combined, yet consists of a thousand small towns packed together around subway stops. Very rich, very efficient; it opened my eyes to the value of cities.

2) What are your favorite things about Los Angeles?
The light, the wind from the sea, the Mediterranean expansiveness. The city breathes as the sea breezes ebb and flow. And after sunset the hills become jewelled gateways to the velvet darkness of twilight.... Socially, the diversity, the acceptingness of the town, the cultures, the food.

3) What frustrates you about Los Angeles?
The unremitting banality of many neighborhoods, the way it kowtows to developers who build retail agglomerations that turn their backs on the streets. Its dependence on the automobile. The inwardness of people who live inside metal boxes most of the time, insulated by glass and steel and canned noise.

4) How do you think the average American perceives LA? The average European? The average Mexican? How does it mirror reality?
The usual clichés. The average American thinks we're either slick-haired lawyers with cell phones, illegal gardeners, or drag queens. The average Mexican thinks of us as a good place to work, especially since his uncle who came four years ago has a connection for him. Europeans seem to think of us as Hollywood, a beach, and bad food. It's all true, of course, but there's so much more.

5) How long have you lived in LA and how has it changed during that time?
I came here forty-seven years ago when we still had a vestigial public transport system. Then it was gone. Now we're getting it back and it works pretty well. The architecture has, thank the gods, moved beyond the shoebox modes of modernism, although, like Gehry's work, still tends to present accumulations of emblems rather than to form organic spaces people can use. It's a much livelier town, though it still tends to go to bed early. It's not New York but it's growing up.

6) Without going over the ten characteristics one-by-one, how do you think LA stacks up in terms of possessing those characteristics?
Of course LA is, as Dionne Warwick sang, "a great big freeway," or a parking lot, to be more accurate. There's a lot of blank gray space here. In The Grove, a new pseudo-Euro pedestrian mall, the biggest and most imposing structure is the parking garage. Most arterial streets outside of the central city are too wide for humans to cross comfortably. And the city is economically segregated to an awful extent.

Transit is getting much better as more rail goes in and the bus system's overhauled, and, as I said before, street life is improving: there are restaurants and cafes and coffeehouses everywhere. I have coffee nearly every morning in a revolutionary Latino coffeehouse in the middle of a poor Armenian/Thai ghetto by a transit-oriented development where I catch the train to go home. There are some restaurants that open till 2 or 4 am. There are people walking routinely all day and night in some neighborhoods, including the one where I live. I'd say LA gets a "C," with a "B" for effort.

Racial segregation still exists, of course, but the situation's improved greatly; most workplaces are thoroughly integrated and many neighborhoods are too. My own neighborhood is about 1/3 each Asian, black, and white, with a few Latinos. Of course, LA as a whole is mostly Latino, and there are still large black, brown, yellow, and white ghettos. That's diminishing rapidly, but only at a certain level of income. In other words, the middle and upper classes mix racially (except in some parts of the Valley), but poor still live in ghettos.

7) Given that, why do you still live there?
Why do people let their kids live through the teen years? It's just starting to come into its own. I'd like to see how it turns out. And sometimes life is almost unendurably beautiful here, when the twilight is falling gently over the shoulders of the people walking past on the sidewalk below, and the lighted windows across the way warm the sky....

8) What cities you have visited come closer to having the ten characteristics or being an ideal urban living environment?
San Francisco, Paris, Manhattan, parts of Buenos Aires...however, they all pander too much to cars, though none so abjectly as LA.

Phoenix, Salt Lake, though, and most newer cities in the US are much worse....

9) On a typical day, what do you do and how does where you live affect what you do or how you do it?
Wake up, look out my big living room windows at the dawn world, the people walking to the bus stops or their cars...I take a bus/train combination to work, look at the faces, sometimes talk with folks. Stop for coffee before work, always drink it at the coffeehouse, never "to go." Come home, cook, eat by that big window, work some more. Often go for a walk after dark, to the Farmer's Market or to meet a friend for coffee.

If I lived in many other parts of LA there'd be no place to walk and enjoy it: too much separation of uses, block after block of shuttered houses whose denizens go home and stay home after work, watching TV, as you can tell from the blue flickers on the curtains. In my neighborhood there's public life nearby and neighbors on the streets. I bump into folks I know all the time.

10) What can LA do now to shape its future? How far out are we talking?
More transit, more transit, more transit, especially rail transit. New zoning laws to permit--hell, to encourage--mixed-use neighborhoods. Instead of minimum parking requirements, maximum parking limits, for new buildings. Require the main entrance of any commercial establishment to front on the sidewalk of the largest street it borders and to be open whenever the establishment is open. Start depaving; put in more underground transit and turn wide streets into narrow ones, filling in the space with apartments, gardens, shops, and squares.

As to "How far out are we?," I'd say about thirty years with luck and diligence. We'd need a lot of redevelopment. It's already happening, a bit at a time, but there are too many recent buildings that you couldn't feasibly tear down till they're more advanced in their life cycles, even though they're an insult to their users. (A thirty-year-old building in LA is ancient.)

11) What lessons can growing cities learn from LA?
How expensive it is to rebuild the good stuff forty years after you've thrown it out. Save what you've got in transit and quaint mixed-use neighborhoods, they're bargains now, and build places worth living in now when it's cheaper. And build for people, not for ledger books. That's the long-term investment.

12) What is your favorite book, most recently read book, most admired person in your neighborhood, and what should your tombstone read (not that 50 is old)?
I most recently read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed," about low-wage work in America. Very good. I don't have a single favorite book...I love "Moby Dick" and the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which I've read several times; of modern books I much love Ethan Canin's collection, "Emperor of the Air."

My neighborhood is too full of admirable people for me to single one out. That's one reason I live here.

I think it's not quite proper to write your own epitaph, but maybe this would do:

"He loved life and died happy."

As it should be for us all.

The New Colonist

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