Tell 'em good luckIt’s the beginnings of a preference in land use that hopefully will reduce the sprawl trend.
Are local developers asking for it?
Developers are not really asking for it yet. That’s why we don’t want to impose it on anybody, because it’s a very conservative market out here in the middle of the country. A lot of the homebuilders in particular are very risk-averse after coming out of the recession, those that are left.
Warning: Eliminating parking mins might make your city too nice, spur development, reduce rents. The U of Illinois is concerned surface parking lots will get snapped up which they would like to put campus buildings on someday. They should hire SLU as land banking consultants.
CityLab - An Unusual Objection to Less Parking: It Will Make Our City Too Nice
CityLab - An Unusual Objection to Less Parking: It Will Make Our City Too Nice
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/0 ... ce/406096/“The key thing to remember about a fix like this is, I'm convinced, it’s the most cost-effective thing a community can do to improve itself through planning,” he says. “The positive effects are so large and the cost to the public is absolutely zero.”
Fayetteville Flyer - Fayetteville eliminates minimum parking requirements
http://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2015/1 ... uirements/“Right now we have about three parking spaces in the city for every car,” said Alderman Matthew Petty at Tuesday's council meeting. “Whether somebody is parked there or not that land is being used,” he said,” adding that there are “higher and better uses” for the property.
Strong Towns is focusing on parking this week with the culmination being how even on Black Friday many lots aren't full. Check it out.
http://www.strongtowns.org/blackfridayparking/
http://www.strongtowns.org/blackfridayparking/
The Atlantic - How to Decimate a City
Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ms/416892/
Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ms/416892/
A great example of how cities have made themselves house-poor by spreading out.
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016 ... -new-pipes
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016 ... -new-pipes
Is helping this family fix their (I would call extravagant) driveway helping someone in need or socializing their poor decision? Personal responsibility?
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/5- ... /78326456/Chierek's homeowners insurance already denied him, it doesn't cover landslides. He's waiting on repair estimates for the 180 feet impacted but figures the cost will be possibly around $30,000.
Calgary Herald - Nenshi: We're finally going to stop subsidizing sprawl
http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/column ... ban-sprawl
http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/column ... ban-sprawl
STL should do this. Greater Des Moines Mapping the Dollars and Sense of Land Use
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/? ... 8a7c9846e2
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/? ... 8a7c9846e2
WaPo - ‘White flight’ began a lot earlier than we think
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... -we-think/This is how you get a city like Ferguson, Shertzer says, with its predominantly white police force and predominantly black population. That odd pattern reflects more recent waves of white flight out of that struggling St. Louis suburb.
- 9,563
^ not sure if its flight or reshuffling of the deck before WW2
The Atlantic - The Role of Highways in American Poverty
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ty/474282/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ty/474282/
Quartz - Megacities, not nations, are the world’s dominant, enduring social structures
Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided. Today cities have become the world’s dominant demographic and economic clusters.
As the sociologist Christopher Chase-Dunn has pointed out, it is not population or territorial size that drives world-city status, but economic weight, proximity to zones of growth, political stability, and attractiveness for foreign capital. In other words, connectivity matters more than size. Cities thus deserve more nuanced treatment on our maps than simply as homogeneous black dots.
http://qz.com/666153/megacities-not-nat ... ctography/
Google parent Alphabet looking to partner with cities... "the division of Alphabet is putting the final touches on a proposal to get into the business of developing giant new districts of housing, offices and retail within existing cities.
The company would seek cities with large swaths of land they want redeveloped—likely economically struggling municipalities grappling with decay—perhaps through a bidding process, the people said. Sidewalk would partner with one or more of those cities to build up the districts, which are envisioned to hold tens of thousands of residents and employees, and to be heavily integrated with technology."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabets-n ... 1461688156
Hopefully the people at City Hall are aware of this and are pursuing hard. We definitely have areas (even downtown) that would benefit from this.
The company would seek cities with large swaths of land they want redeveloped—likely economically struggling municipalities grappling with decay—perhaps through a bidding process, the people said. Sidewalk would partner with one or more of those cities to build up the districts, which are envisioned to hold tens of thousands of residents and employees, and to be heavily integrated with technology."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabets-n ... 1461688156
Hopefully the people at City Hall are aware of this and are pursuing hard. We definitely have areas (even downtown) that would benefit from this.
Bloomberg - Want Economic Growth? Try Urban Density
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/ ... he-suburbs
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/ ... he-suburbs
NYT: A New Map for America
Socially and economically, America is reorganizing itself around regional infrastructure lines and metropolitan clusters that ignore state and even national borders. The problem is, the political system hasn’t caught up.
The problem is that while the economic reality goes one way, the 50-state model means that federal and state resources are concentrated in a state capital — often a small, isolated city itself — and allocated with little sense of the larger whole. Not only does this keep back our largest cities, but smaller American cities are increasingly cut off from the national agenda, destined to become low-cost immigrant and retirement colonies, or simply to be abandoned.
We don’t have to create these regions; they already exist, on two levels. First, there are now seven distinct super-regions, defined by common economics and demographics, like the Pacific Coast and the Great Lakes. Within these, in addition to America’s main metro hubs, we find new urban archipelagos, including the Arizona Sun Corridor, from Phoenix to Tucson; the Front Range, from Salt Lake City to Denver to Albuquerque; the Cascadia belt, from Vancouver to Seattle; and the Piedmont Atlantic cluster, from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C.
Crosscut.com - McGinn: Seattle Times continues phony ‘war on cars’
http://crosscut.com/2016/05/mcginn-what ... r-on-cars/Dudley claims that our economy suffers when we fail to optimize for cars, citing the alleged millions lost to traffic delays. This measurement illustrates just how car-centric we have become. Has anyone measured how much time pedestrians wait for cross signals and then attempted to attach a dollar figure to that? Or how much time bus riders spend stuck waiting for cars to let the bus back into traffic? Or the delays caused to bikers taking roundabout ways to find a safe route?
Why US cities are segregated by race: New evidence on the role of ‘white flight’
http://voxeu.org/article/segregation-us ... w-evidence
http://voxeu.org/article/segregation-us ... w-evidence
The Guardian - End of the road: Uber and millennials help US cities cut car addiction
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- ... ustin-lyftIf all goes according to plan, next year construction will begin on a 30-storey residential tower in Austin, Texas. Nothing new in the daily life of a booming city, except for one thing: the apartment tower will offer no parking spaces to residents.
WUSTL - An architectural twin study - Experimental studio leads to dramatic energy reductions
https://source.wustl.edu/2016/05/archit ... win-study/A six-percent upfront investment reduced energy consumption by 19 percent — and carbon emissions by 34 percent — in a pair of 100-year-old brick buildings. Add solar panels, and those numbers drop to 39 percent and 65 percent.
City Observatory created a statistic called the Sprawl Tax and figured STL at over $2B a year or $1562 per worker.
http://cityobservatory.org/introducing-the-sprawl-tax/
http://cityobservatory.org/introducing-the-sprawl-tax/
Access - Cutting the Cost of Parking Requirements
http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/ ... uirements/A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t be both.
Influx of Younger, Wealthier Residents Transforms U.S. Cities
http://www.wsj.com/articles/influx-of-y ... 1465492762
http://www.wsj.com/articles/influx-of-y ... 1465492762