urbanSTL

Parking Craters: Scourge of American Downtowns

Whether parking craters are formed due to the meteors of 20th Century bad policy, a city's erosion of manufacturing or housing, the abandoned scraps leftover by freeway building or just plain unfortunate luck, they absolutely destroy sections of city downtowns and make the environment more inhospitable and unattractive for livable streets. In these areas there is virtually no street life.or vitality. You'll find little greenery or open space. In hotter cities the heating of the asphalt and parked cars make the air oppressive. It's hell on earth. It is a parking crater.

What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving?

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/ ... ng/372089/

Over these past six car-free years, I've developed a zero-tolerance policy on drinking and driving for myself, and that in turn has colored my perspective on the kinds of cities I'd ever be willing to live in. There are tons of great reasons to choose walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods and cities over places where driving is more or less required—the environmental impact, the cost, the nightmare of traffic jams—but for me, the number one reason is that I like being able to have a few drinks and never having to worry about driving.

And I don't think I'm alone.

Short blurb on how a few people can turn around a city:

The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle

http://www.fastcompany.com/3031544/hit- ... ed-seattle

In 1979, Seattle was the last place you’d think to find a growth business. It had more in common with today’s Rust Belt than Silicon Valley--its economy centered on a declining manufacturing base and the lumber industry. The Economist had labeled Seattle the "city of despair" and a billboard appeared saying “Will the last person leaving Seattle--turn off the lights.’

So what changed? Two Seattle natives decided to move their 13-employee company there in 1979 from Albuquerque. The two natives were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And the company was Microsoft.

So one thing that has always annoyed me when I visit other popular cities is that many people seem to think that just living in the "IT" city makes up for a ton of things that negatively affect quality of life. For instance, I met a girl while traveling once who basically said something along the lines of "I have to live with 5 roommates on half your income in the ghetto but my life is better than yours because I live in New York City" and I was just blown away at how ignorant that is. We have to get the word out across the country that you can start and live a good life in St. Louis. The Atlantic did a few articles recently on "Where Millennials Can Make It" http://www.citylab.com/special-report/w ... n-make-it/ and I was a bit sad that we didn't get the free publicity.

Young and in Debt in New York City
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/reale ... -home.html

For young people, moving to New York City hasn’t made much mathematical sense for decades. The jobs don’t pay enough, the internships don’t pay at all, and the rents are prohibitive by any sane standard.

But now add a new economic fact of life to that list: soaring student loan debt. More students are taking out bigger loans than ever before, and in the last 10 years alone, education debt tripled, reaching over $1 trillion. A record number of college students are graduating knee deep in a financial hole before they begin their adult lives.

The suburbs around Washington, DC are rapidly urbanizing:

The Colossal Expectations of D.C.'s Newest Metro Line
There's not much riding on the Silver Line except the future of the American suburb as we know it.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/ ... ne/372423/

The current plan for Tysons, adopted in 2010, envisions 100,000 residents and twice as many daytime workers by 2050. In mid-May, the county's Board of Supervisors approved a proposal by Capital One, which already has a 26-acre campus in Tysons, to build a new 470-foot-tall office tower. When finished, it will be the second-highest occupied structure in the region, after the Washington Monument. More critically, it will be close to the McLean Silver Line stop. Fairfax County has said it wants at least three-quarters of new development planned for Tysons to occur within a half-mile of one of its four Silver Line stations. Another 45 million square feet of construction is planned for the coming decades, one of the largest construction projects on the East Coast.

A New Portal to Pair Eager Developers and Underused Properties

http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/06/a-p ... rs/372722/

A new venture called OpportunitySpace aims to make it easier for developers to find potential investment opportunities—and for residents to figure out who owns the distressed or vacant properties in their communities.

According to CEO and cofounder Alex Kapur, OpportunitySpace is an "information-rich marketplace that enables real-estate development and investment in place-based projects." The website uses data provided by cities to populate a map, which shows users information about properties at a variety of levels.

"The missing link between plans and people who invest is that communication layer," says OpportunitySpace vice-president and cofounder Cristina Garmendia. "You don’t know what you don’t know."

The Triumphant Return of Private U.S. Passenger Rail
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/ ... il/372808/

Beginning in 2016, All Aboard Florida will run 32 departures a day between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, with service extending to Orlando soon afterwards. With a maximum speed of 125 miles per hour, the trains will complete the 240-mile journey in less than three hours. In South Florida, around the three initial stations, the company will develop 4.2 million square feet of real estate. In Orlando, the terminus will be located at the airport and connect to a new commuter rail line at a sparkling, state-funded $215 million transportation hub.

How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West
But the key question remains: Will metro residents give up their cars?

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/ ... st/373222/

In the center of the metropolis, the Beaux-Arts façade of a grand old railway terminus, finished in robin egg-hued terracotta stone, is cradled by the daring swoop of a canopy of brilliant white Teflon. On one of eight tracks, a double-decked passenger train has stopped to refuel. A few hundred yards away, German-built light rail vehicles arrive from distant parts of the city, pulling into a downtown of soaring condo towers and multifamily apartment complexes. Beneath the feet of rushing commuters, express buses pull out of the bays of an underground concourse, and articulated buses shuttle straphangers through the central business district free of charge. A businessman, after swinging his briefcase into a basket, detaches the last remaining bicycle from a bike-share stand next to the light rail stop, completing the final leg of his journey-to-work on two wheels.

An out-of-towner could be forgiven for thinking she'd arrived in Strasbourg, Copenhagen, or another global poster child for up-to-the-minute urbanism. The patch of sky framed in the white oval of the Union Station platform canopy, however, is purest prairie blue. This is Denver, a city that, until recently, most people would have pegged as an all-too-typical casualty of frontier-town, car-centric thinking.

Denver gets it.

I've been traveling to several cities in the mid atlantic over the last couple of weeks and just went back to Richmond, where I went to school for several years at VCU. I think it is shaping up to be a model for what an urban university should look like and how it should meld into neighborhoods around it. I thought so much of it that I felt the need to report back here on what they're doing well and what our local universities can learn.

The area has changed so much for the better that its almost unrecognizable compared to a few decades ago. I'll start with the street views:

http://goo.gl/n9ncHf
VCU has taken over an entire stretch of historic mansions along Franklin street and turned them into administrative buildings. Years ago, they were much more run down and I could no longer find a single example of a boarded up building on that street anymore.

http://goo.gl/1ueYTe
On Laurel, they've built a parking deck with ground level retail. The northeast corner is slated to become a residential highrise.

http://goo.gl/2E2dZM
This is the old streetview of some empty storefronts along broad street. They've all now have been entirely filled in with either commercial or repurposed as VCU classrooms. VCU buildings have filled in where there were gaps in the street wall. I was very impressed that the street wall continued along the main street here for nearly as far as the eye could see.

http://goo.gl/FsTNs9
They built a new highrise to complete a corner of highrises around the central lawn of the university

I snapped some pictures of stuff that was happening thats not updated on street view yet:

http://i.imgur.com/gYStqw3.jpg
Haha, I remember this corner. It was a parking lot with some sort of nightclub behind where the now chipotle is. I saw a man get shot in front of the building where the Noodles and Company is now. Big change.

http://i.imgur.com/Dll92t5.jpg
This is an example of some of the modern VCU construction. Builds up the street wall. Street level student support offices. Actually not too different from what "The Standard" will look like I suppose.

http://i.imgur.com/cJccDFF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tFWqmGV.jpg
Further down the street, another school highrise is going up. This was built on another parking lot.

http://i.imgur.com/ggWAz0I.jpg
It goes right up to the surrounding townhouses, contributing to the street wall.

http://i.imgur.com/nWmUQBN.jpg
Further down the street, another VCU building is going up. I wanted to show off the mural though. VCU has a top ranked arts school and the city and property owners freely invite the students to paint the city so murals like this are everywhere.

http://i.imgur.com/2sri2LT.jpg
Another mural just down the street.

This is in no way an advertisement for VCU or Richmond but in a lot of ways, I am very envious. I remember that city having an identical reputation to St. Louis back in the 90s for being dangerous and blighted. I remember seeing empty storefronts and boarded up homes as far as the eye could see. It has now entirely reversed, particularly around the college campus. It has dropped off the crime lists. Its now considered one of the best places to live. I talked to one of my old professors and she said that "we realized about 10 years ago that everybody under the age of 25 apparently wants to live in NYC so we set out to build a little piece of it here." I was talking to a student randomly about how everything had changed and he said that "yeah man, Richmond is now gentrified as f*ck." I shed a tear thinking that I couldn't yet say the same about St. Louis.

The major differences are that it developed a strong urban state university during this time and that it never went through the mass demolition and urban renewal that we did. I really think we shot ourselves in the foot with that one but we can't change the past now. Richmond is half the size of St. Louis and it behaves as if it were a big city. Its developing like it will be twice its size in 30 years. I'd say the majority of that has been the city and the state deciding to plop down a university with 30,000 students and an urban mission and letting time take its course.

In summary, I think our universities and leaders could learn a lot from what VCU has contributed to Richmond. Don't get me wrong, I love STL and I think SLU, WashU, UMSTL, and Harris-Stowe have and continue to do a lot of good for the city and metro; but they are not massive urban state universities and don't quite play the same role. St. Louis is still waiting for its version of VCU.

A well written and in depth article from the NYT on what has been happening in Detroit recently. It seems like Dan Gilbert has set out to make Quicken into the anchor/savior of Detroit.

The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/magaz ... troit.html

In downtown Detroit, at the headquarters of the online-mortgage company Quicken Loans, there stands another downtown Detroit in miniature. The diorama, made of laser-cut acrylic and stretching out over 19 feet in length, is a riot of color and light: Every structure belonging to Quicken’s billionaire owner, Dan Gilbert, is topped in orange and illuminated from within, and Gilbert currently owns 60 of them, a lordly nine million square feet of real estate in all. He began picking up skyscrapers just three and a half years ago, one after another, paying as little as $8 a square foot. He bought five buildings surrounding Capitol Park, the seat of government when Michigan became a state in 1837. He snapped up the site of the old Hudson’s department store, where 12,000 employees catered to 100,000 customers daily in the 1950s. Many of Gilbert’s purchases are 20th-century architectural treasures, built when Detroit served as a hub of world industry. He bought a Daniel Burnham, a few Albert Kahns, a Minoru Yamasaki masterwork with a soaring glass atrium. “They’re like old-school sports cars,” said Dan Mullen, one of the executives who took over Quicken’s newly formed real estate arm. “These were buildings with so much character, so much history. They don’t exist anywhere else. And it was like, ‘Buy this parking garage, and we’ll throw in a skyscraper with it.’ ”