Suburban Dallas is not a place I expected to find myself. It's not a search for who I am I am referring to. Rather it's this sort of awareness about where I am. Right now I am sitting above a circle that surrounds a parklet in a place called The Colony, a Dallas suburb not far from Plano, Texas.

Arriving at night and looking out the hotel window, I didn't quite know what was outside. I could see a circle, but it wasn't clear if I was looking at a tarp, parking, or a park. To my delight when the sun rose I discovered it was indeed a grassy knoll.

This particular knoll hasn't been here long, appearing sometime after my GPS map was created. It looks from the small screen as if I am driving through a field when I turn onto several of the roads here.

This knoll isn't designed as a town center as such an area would have been purposed for in 19th Century. It seems to be more of a buffer between commercial and residential areas. Sidewalks enter from the outside and spiral inward, ending at a sculpture wall and tiered area that looks as though it could be used as an amphitheater.

Across from the hotel, actually there are two hotels here, sits a large cluster of condominiums and townhomes. Behind them sit larger single-family houses. Between the houses and the hotel 90 degrees to the right are several commercial buildings, mostly unoccupied. Ninety degrees to the right are empty lots waiting for buildings of one sort or another to grow once the existing commercial spaces are filled.

Behind the hotel is a highway, elevated enough to block sight of the businesses on the opposite side. The highway is a toll road, one that can be avoided by traveling on the local roads on either side of it, in a design not unlike, but greatly expanded from, an urban boulevard.

Most of what's here hasn't been here long. Comparing it to what was built a few decades ago, it's undoubtedly an improvement. The houses built today are generally on smaller lots and closer together than they were in 1950-1990. The notion of public space, though it may be primarily a buffer has re-entered the consciousness of planners and developers. Yet the sustainability, though that word may be over-used, is suspect. Minor modifications could, in theory help The Colony become a self-sustaining community in that services could be accessed with minimal travel, but the distance from employment centers is so great and public transit non-existent, a rise in fuel prices could make living here difficult in the not-too-distant future.

We all know it's easier to build here on a blank slate than it would be to re-build the earlier suburbs closer to Dallas, yet those are the ones with the skeleton of public transit infrastructure, and the ones that logically should become more dense and walkable transit villages with access to the employment centers of Dallas and Fort Worth.

I will continue to add images to the slideshow below.

Eric Miller on 02.26.10 @ 03:46 PM PST [link]  

A few maddening facts about free parking and how it becomes a sort of abuse of community:

• Ninety-nine percent of U.S. car trips begin and end in a free parking space.
  
• The average automobile is parked 95 percent of the time.
  
• Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest.

From Streetsblog.org, in a piece by Noah Kazis entitled: Fun Facts About the Sad State of Parking Policy.

Richard Risemberg on 02.24.10 @ 05:38 PM PST [link]  

From Transportation 4 America, a press release summarizing the disbursements of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (or, inevitably, "TIGER") grants program:

The Obama Department of Transportation today broke historic ground in unveiling projects chosen in a first-ever program to award federal dollars on a competitive basis to innovative projects that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once.

The 51 projects announced under the TIGER grant program, funded by $1.5 billion included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), meet a broad array of challenges, including:

• Bridge replacements in Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Indiana that can support multiple modes of travel;
• Port and freight-rail projects to spur economic growth in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Ohio;
• Modern streetcar construction to support vibrant urban corridors in Tucson, Dallas, Portland and New Orleans and light rail in Detroit;
• Innovative highway funding and operations in Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, South Carolina and Arkansas;
• Bicycle and pedestrian networks in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and a complete streets project in Dubuque, IA;
  
• The long-awaited rebirth of New York's former Penn Station as Moynihan Station.

To read the entire press release, see the T4A site, or find the full document at the USDOT site in this very large PDF file.

Of the fifty-one projects funded, eleven expand support for rail freight, thirteen underwrite bridge and highway repair projects, and twenty-two fund "livability projects are aimed at giving Americans more choices about how they travel and improving access to economic and housing opportunities in their communities," including urban rail transit and bicycle infrastructure. (The full, detailed list is in the PDF.)

A significant step forward for a traditionally hidebound agency historically dominated by motoring interests.

Richard Risemberg on 02.18.10 @ 05:05 AM PST [link]  

The New York Times today ran a long, musing post by Timothy Egan looking at some exurbs in California's Central Valley that are decaying even as they finish building, now that the "irrational exuberance" of the latest housing bubble has been replaced with quite rational despair.... He asks, in part, "What will these places become?"

His answer seems to be "More growth":

"Yes, huge developments are empty, with rising crime at the edges, and thousands of homes owned by banks that can't unload them even at fire-sale prices.

But through it all, the country churns and expands, unlike most other Western democracies. That great American natural resource--tomorrow--will have to save the suburban slums."

Apparently, just a lower-priced version of the same land-wasting, soul-crushing pattern of cookie-cutter pretention....

I suspect otherwise, and wrote a comment:

What will filling these houses anew bring about? More oil dependence, more taxes wasted on asphalt for dazed residents trapped in their cars for hours each day just to buy bread or get to their McJobs....

"Half acre lots for all!," means no community, no sense of neighborhood, no caring what goes on beyond the wall...it also means all the burden of socialization and socialbility falls on the shoulders of an already weary family...or is given over to the television set.

The cities of the future will be real cities: dense, high-quality housing in neighborhoods that don't trap you in your car; places like San Francisco, yes, or like Paris (twice the density of New York, but you never feel it); those places will survive, not just because they use energy more efficiently, but because they nurture our souls.

There's a reason that property costs more in San Francisco than in some vague lost walled suburb: the life there is more worth experiencing. The market says so with its pricing!

Want to make it affordable? Then just build more of it! More San Franciscos, more Portlands...not more zombie uncommunities where empty calories console the empty lives.

Real urban living: what humanity has been striving for over the last 5,000 years.

What should these particular dying suburbs become? What they were before: farm fields. You do have to eat, don't you?

Read the article (and, if you have all day, the many comments) on the New York Times: Slumburbia.

Richard Risemberg on 02.11.10 @ 06:12 AM PST [link]  

Snow has left a half dozen cities in the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast paralyzed. Watching video clips on CNN.com and elsewhere, we're shown families in large suburban homes trapped for several days without access to the world beyond their driveway. Without a car, the basic necessities of food, medical care, etc. of life are out of reach.

My sister lives at the end of a cul-de-sac outside of Pittsburgh. It took more than a day for a plow to come through, but even when it did, there's no where for the snow to go at the end, except in a big pile that blocks someone's driveway. In Pittsburgh the same problem of no where to put the snow exists, but at least in many neighborhoods one can set out on foot.

Faced with relocating to suburban Texas, I found most of the suburbs have the same lack of access to basic necessities without a car. Several feet of snow in Dallas is not a likelihood, but snow isn't the only thing that can limit mobility. The price of fuel will likely continue to rise, and even without natural disaster, access to food, entertainment, medical care, etc. will become more limited by the cost of travel.

Today new communities are being built to be more walkable, but in most cases the commercial components are still not there. In many cases that's because the density is still too low to support pedestrian-oriented retail. It's important to begin to change this and to adapt existing communities to have access to amenities within a short stroll through rain, sleet or snow.

Eric Miller on 02.09.10 @ 04:07 AM PST [link]  

Allison Arieff, writing in the New York Times, explores a new methodology, developed by Nicholas de Monchaux as "Local Code," for using GIS (geographic information systems) to discover, catalogue, and re-visualize abandoned streets and lots in our cities and reclaim them for environmental and social mitigation of ills caused, very often, by excessive paving and unintelligent development in the first place. Says Arieff:

"Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It's time we gave this some thought."
--R. Buckminster Fuller

That quote is 40 years old, but I continue to be amazed by the extent to which we haven't begun to address the problem Fuller highlighted. There's a staggering glut of empty space around the country right now, unused space that's not doing anyone much good.

[...]

The era of massive, expensive, centralized projects like the Big Dig in Boston has passed. "Now, with the ability to model dynamic systems, we can show a much more decentralized collection of resources could provide greater benefit. If, in the 19^th century, it was a biological metaphor that fueled the creation of Central and Golden Gate parks, the idea that a city needs hearts and lungs to grow, there’s now a networked metaphor. The city is a dense network of relationships. The best way to provide infrastructure is to not go in with a meat ax but to practice urban acupuncture, finding thousands of different spots to go into."

Indeed, this article elaborates on a new way of exploring urban structures that could make the redevelopment of our cities into living territories that nurture, rather than degrade, both the people who inhabit them and the earth they stand upon.

Read the entire article at the New York Times: Space: It's Still a Frontier.

Richard Risemberg on 02.04.10 @ 09:51 AM PST [link]