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Who is Otis White? | Today's column Previous Columns
Flight of the Early Birds One example of the head-turning changes in mobility: People are rising so early to drive into cities that, in many places, rush hour now begins before 6 a.m. The Wall Street Journal interviewed one man who until recently met his carpool at 4:15 a.m., arrived at work at Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport at 5:20 and then ... took a nap. His wife called at 6 a.m. to tell him it was time to start work. (Alas, his wee-hour carpool broke up recently, but he’s looking for another.) Why would someone do this? To beat traffic, he told the Journal. He’s not the only one. “We’ve seen extraordinary growth in the percentage of the population that is leaving home before 6 a.m.,” the author of a recent study of America commuting patterns told the newspaper. How much growth? About half of all new commuters since 1990 travel in off-peak hours, before 7 or after 9 a.m. This is changing the way a lot of businesses operate, starting with public transit. Washington’s Metrorail system now starts up at 5 a.m., a half-hour earlier than it did two years ago. Seattle’s Sound Transit commuter trains pull out of the Tacoma station starting at 5:45 a.m. When the line was launched six years ago, the first trains left at 6:20. Other services aimed at commuters are waking up earlier, too. Nearly all Caribou Coffee shops on the East Coast now open at 5:30 a.m., the Journal reported, and the vast majority of McDonald’s restaurants open their doors and drive-throughs by 5. But the lengthening rush hour isn’t the only change. New York’s Metro-North Railway, a commuter service that runs north to Westchester County, then angles over to Greenwich, Conn., recently disclosed an interesting statistic: Fewer than half its riders now board at suburban stations and head into the city in the mornings or make the reverse trip in the evenings. So who’s catching the train if it isn’t commuters headed for Manhattan? Increasingly, it’s people headed out of the city for work in the ’burbs, workers traveling from one suburb to another, and off-hours riders headed for the city for fun. This milestone (49.3 percent now follow the traditional commuter route, down from 65.3 percent in 1984) is “kind of a benchmark that shows what has been building over the last several years and demonstrates the way the region is changing: more job growth in the suburbs and more diverse commuting patterns,” one urban researcher told the New York Times. Well, yes, but here’s the twist: The rail service’s ridership is at a 23-year high. So we’re not seeing fewer of the traditional commuters on the Metro-North but rather others who’ve figured out ways of using the commuter service. (Some credit belongs to Metro-North’s management, which has been skillful in marketing to these non-traditional riders.) So perhaps the lesson here is the surprising adaptability of rail transit. Where we once thought of commuter lines and transit in general as good at only one thing — hauling workers from the ’burbs to the city — it turns out they’re good at a number of things. But, hey, that’s probably something your 19-year-old daughter could have told you. Posted October 25, 2006
Winning the War on Pigeons In a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine, writer Jon Mooallem explained what’s new in the age-old battle between city dwellers and the birds that bedevil them. For most of our history, Mooallem wrote, Americans have used a single strategy against pigeons: Kill them with shotguns or poison. But that has fallen out of favor in recent years for two reasons: First, we’ve grown queasy about such things, and, second, it doesn’t work. (The city of Basel, Switzerland, started systematically killing its estimated 20,000 pigeons in 1961. Twenty-five years later it had killed 100,000 of the flying pests and, when it called a halt to the carnage, still had 20,000 pigeons.) The reason killing doesn’t work, Mooallem said, is that pigeons breed prolifically, particularly when given the time to do so. And what gives them the time for such things? Readily available food. Pigeons eat about an ounce of food a day, and if they can find that ounce in a single serving, they’ll spend the rest of the day hanging out with other pigeons, and, well, you know ... nature takes its course and little pigeons are the result. If food is harder to come by, they’ll spend most of the day looking for it, and there’ll be fewer little pigeons around. So the trick is to make food less readily available. (More on this later.) There are other things property owners do to rid themselves of pigeons and their droppings (25 pounds a year, on average). They mount spikes and electric shock panels on ledges, hang fake snakes and owls in trees, even blast the birds with noisemakers. Some of this does frighten the pigeons, but the end result is that they move from your building to somebody else’s. Which is why the pigeon-removal program that Basel eventually tried is so important. In 1988, a biologist convinced the city government to put up 13 pigeon nesting areas around the city, places pigeons were actually welcome to roost. In these places, when the birds laid eggs, volunteers and employees reached into the nests, pulled out the eggs and replaced them with dummies, so the pigeons wouldn’t lay more. In four and a half years’ time, Basel culled its pigeon population by half. This is exciting news on the war on pigeons, and cities around the world have tried similar tactics. But here’s a twist that Alfred Hitchcock would have loved: The pigeon nests were a charade. Yes, pigeons did roost there and their eggs were removed, but as Mooallem learned in his reporting, the numbers roosting in the nests were small. So what really caused Basel’s pigeon population to decline? As the biologist who conducted the Basel program explained it to Mooallem, the meaningful part of the program was a public-education campaign against feeding pigeons. The city-maintained nesting areas were put up to convince pigeon feeders that the city would take care of the birds, and they didn’t need to. It turns out that many people who feed pigeons do so out of some kind of psychological need or compulsion. “Most of the pigeon feeders are in some way crazy,” the biologist told the reporter. A few could be swayed by logic, others by intense public disapproval, but others needed to know that, if they quit scattering bird seed or bread crumbs on the sidewalk, the pigeons would still be OK. In time, the pigeon feeders of Basel stopped feeding the birds or died out. Thanks to the public education campaign, younger ones didn’t take their place. And without handouts from humans, the pigeons of Basel had to work harder for their food and had less time for dating. Ergo, fewer pigeons. Posted October 24, 2006
A Matter of Market Share Whatever the reasons, the decline is real. Statewide, California schools lost 10,000 students this year, the first such decline in a quarter-century, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. Farther north, in Seattle, city schools lost another 400 students. The school system is closing seven schools next year and may close three more, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Why the rapid decline? “We just don’t have as many kids in the city as we used to,” one Seattle school official told the Post-Intelligencer. One reason: The cost of housing is running off families with children. But that’s not the only reason public school attendance is slipping. Seattle has one of the highest rates of private-school attendance in the country, about one in four school-age children. So it isn’t just a declining market that’s shrinking the public schools, it’s a loss of market share. You can see similar dynamics at work in affluent Santa Barbara, Calif., up the coast from Los Angeles. Over the last seven years, 400 students have left the public schools there. Declining population? No, Santa Barbara’s population is actually up from 2000. But something has changed over the years: Housing prices have skyrocketed. The median home price is now approaching an incredible $1 million, and that’s changing the demographics of the county. As one observer told the L.A. Times, “You have rich people who don’t have kids and poor people living two or three families in a house.” And, inevitably, the poor are minorities, in this case Latinos, and as their children enter the public schools it is touching off white flight, the newspaper said. In the elementary schools, for instance, 70 percent of students today are Latino and only 25 percent are white non-Hispanics. (Countywide, 37 percent of residents are Latino.) Public schools, then, are subject to two forces pushing down their numbers: major demographic shifts accompanied by fear and prejudice. By themselves, school systems can do little about either. But they shouldn’t be bystanders to their own decline. What school systems can command is the quality of the education they provide and the choices they offer parents and students. And here’s a lesson from the world of business: There are companies in flat or even declining industries (dial-up Internet connections, steel manufacturing, etc.) that grow by increasing their market share. Perhaps that, then, should be the measure of schools in places like Seattle, San Francisco and L.A.: Not whether enrollments are growing, but the share of school-age children who attend the public schools. If the market share is increasing, we can be reasonably sure that the schools are doing something right. And if the demographics shift and kids return to these cities, public schools will grow once more. Footnote: But what about prejudice? Schools can’t overcome that, can they? In many cases, they can. The hopeful thing about prejudice is that, with some exceptions, it’s not absolute. That is, if offered enough benefits, most people can put aside their qualms and work with other groups. Public schools already offer cost as a benefit, of course, but there are others they could offer: choice, excellent programs, a secure and welcoming environment, etc. If made skillfully, such enticements are enough to win over most parents who are fearful or even mildly prejudiced. Posted October 23, 2006
When Skyscrapers Migrate Talk of air rights is already popping up in Philadelphia, where a developer announced plans recently to knock down a three-story building in a fashionable neighborhood called Spring Garden and build a 40-story condo tower. But as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, he had hardly made his plans known before he received a letter from the owner of a 17-story building on the same block: We own the rights to develop above your building. In other words, the letter said, when the developer bought the three-story building for $1.8 million, he bought only the land, the structure and the right to develop things from three stories to the ground. Starting at the fourth story, the development rights belonged to someone else. This will obviously end up in litigation, but it raises a question: Why would you want to own development rights atop someone else’s building? There are three possibilities: You want to build something there yourself one day, you want to stop anyone from ever building something there, or you think eventually somebody might want to build a tall building on that site and you’d like a piece of the action. Air rights cover all those possibilities. In New York, air rights are commonly sold above squat, unglamorous things that, with some careful engineering, could be happily hidden beneath a larger development. Examples: highways and rail yards. As long as the construction upstairs doesn’t interfere with the trains or cars in the basement, governments are usually happy to sell air rights to developers. It’s like found money. That obviously doesn’t apply to the building in Philadelphia. Most likely, if the air rights really were purchased in 1976, as the letter claims, they were bought to prevent anything from blocking the views from the 17-story building or, if anything were to be built there, compensate the owner for taking away the views. Why is this important? The most surprising land-use trend of recent years is the popularity of very tall condo towers and the resulting migration of skyscrapers away from their expected places downtown and into nearby neighborhoods. The views from these towers are their greatest assets. Hence, the coming introduction of air rights sales to cities across the country. Posted October 20, 2006
One Answer to the Question that Haunts Smart Growth Background: If you pay attention to smart-growth controversies in big cities, you know the drill. Developer proposes major new mixed-use development, with condo towers ranging five, 10, 15 stories above neighborhood scale. Neighbors hit the roof, demanding the buildings be shortened. Their argument: The towers will flood the area with new people, there’s not enough parking as it is, the streets are too narrow. Hence, the development will turn our nice neighborhood into a nightmare of congestion. City officials are torn in these situations. They want smart growth — density, mixed use and all the rest — but can’t figure a way around the problems associated with density. If the new residents drive to work or the grocery as the old-timers do now, then, yes, they will clog the streets. The answer is that, somehow, newcomers and longtime residents must be persuaded to walk rather than drive, but how do you make that happen? And what about the things that are beyond walking distance, the weekly trips to the supermarket, say, or the daily one to work? How do you convince people who own cars not to use them as they do now? Charlie Hales has part of the answer: a “pedestrian accelerator.” Hales is a former city commissioner in Portland, Ore., who helped create just such an accelerator, the Portland Streetcar, in 2001. (He now works for an engineering firm that sells this solution around the country.) At first glance, the streetcar seems like overkill. By 2001 Portland had lots of transit, including a well-used light rail system and buses, all of which are free in the downtown district. What could a streetcar possibly add? This is where Hales’ concept of the pedestrian accelerator comes in. The streetcar’s purpose isn’t to bring people in and out of the central city — that’s what light rail does — but rather to move them around faster and farther once they’re there. Hales uses analogies: Streetcars are like moving sidewalks in airports; they’re like a “slingshot” for pedestrians “that lets them go a mile and not just a quarter mile.” Need groceries, a hop to work or just want to spend the afternoon at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland? No need to drive if you live in a neighborhood served by the streetcar. Just walk a few blocks to the comfortable, enclosed shelters (many of which have LED signs telling you how long until the next streetcar arrives), ride downtown, then walk a block or two to your destination. But we told you the answer to our question is difficult and complicated, and it is. Building a streetcar line isn’t enough; the solution requires that officials think of their cities in entirely new ways. The most important, as Hales says, is the concept that “the pedestrian is the first-class passenger.” Therefore, transit and, indeed, the entire built environment (sidewalks, streets, crosswalks, parks, retail, office buildings) must be reoriented to making walking such a joy, who wouldn’t want to stroll a few blocks on each end of a streetcar ride? In other words, streetcars don’t work in isolation. If you install one without the pedestrian complements (sidewalks, crosswalks, store entrances that greet foot traffic), it’s like building a high-speed computer without the software. Impressive, but doesn’t do much. Tampa, Fla., tried the piecemeal approach with its downtown streetcar; it didn’t work. Likewise, allowing a major mixed-use development to go into a neighborhood without a plan for getting newcomers and old-timers out of their cars doesn’t work either. So here’s the full answer: Smart growth requires a long-term commitment by many parties (city officials, developers, business owners, residents present and future) to a new vision of the city, one that seeks in every way possible to making walking a joy. How long does it take to reorient a city around this vision? If Portland is a measure, about 30 years, which is how long it has been pursuing the idea of the pedestrian as first-class passenger. Footnote: But what about the original question: How does a smart-growth project, even one with a streetcar and pedestrian improvements, help existing residents? Answer: By removing the most valid objection — “it will overwhelm our neighborhood” — it allows advocates to focus on the benefits of mixed-use developments: the added retail and job opportunities, improved public safety and beauty. Oh, and there’s that shiny new streetcar and all the new sidewalks, now available for longtime residents to use. Posted October 19, 2006
Cheap Sushi, Anyone? There are at least three surprises in the store that Wal-Mart is opening on Atlanta’s Howell Mill Road. First is the store itself, which isn’t hip just on the inside but on the outside as well. It sits below street level, has parking on the roof and is relatively small by Wal-Mart standards at 150,000 square feet. (The really big stores are 200,000 square feet.) Second surprise: It’s in a rapidly gentrifying inner-city neighborhood, not the kind of place you’d expect to find a store that boasts of always low prices. Third and greatest surprise: It was welcomed there by a neighborhood organization, the Northwest Community Alliance. Wal-Mart’s spokespeople are pointing to the Atlanta store as an example of the chain’s new-found sensitivity to big-city tastes. “We used to say, ’Here’s the battleship gray box,’ and that’s it,” a corporate official told the Journal-Constitution, “but as we move into cities, we’re building stores that fit the needs of the neighborhood.” The company even has a name for its softer side, the newspaper said: the “store of the community” strategy. Nice story, but not quite right, the neighborhood association’s chair said in a recent e-mail. While praising Wal-Mart for living up to its commitments, Mike Koblentz wrote that the ideas behind the Wal-Mart on Howell Mill Road came from the Northwest Community Alliance and the developer, not the retailer. “Our goal was to help engineer the most urban Wal-Mart in the country, whether Wal-Mart wanted it themselves or not,” Koblentz wrote. Result, he added: “We have helped create a prototype in our own backyard.” But why would neighborhood activists want a Wal-Mart in its midst? According to Koblentz, they didn’t. The developer’s original plan was for a traditional big-box shopping center. In negotiations with the neighborhood organization, the developer changed its plans from strip shopping center into what Koblentz called “a modern, mixed-use urban center.” (Judge for yourself; you can view the development’s Web site by clicking here.) But who would be the anchor tenant for such a center? The original ideas were Costco and Target but, Koblentz said, “it turned out [that] worker-friendly Costco was not so land-use friendly.” That opened the door for Wal-Mart, about which neighborhood leaders had qualms — not just for its cookie-cutter designs but employee pay and other issues. Over the course of negotiating with the Bentonville, Ark., company, though, neighborhood activists and the developer came to focus on the things they could actually influence, which were design and merchandise offerings. What they found in Bentonville wasn’t unreasonableness as much as misunderstanding and a bureaucracy that was slow to learn. The Northwest Community Alliance “knew all along that our deal would also benefit Wal-Mart, but we also understood that it would take them longer to get the concept,” Koblentz wrote. Eventually, though, Wal-Mart saw the light. There’s an important lesson to be learned here. Yes, Wal-Mart is opening a different kind of store with an unexpected mix of merchandise, and that’s nice. But the larger lesson is that neighborhoods, developers and retailers need not be at war with one another. Think of how differently things would have turned out had the neighborhood not found common ground with the developer, or Wal-Mart not been willing to listen to the neighborhood’s seemingly exotic ideas. It would have been, well, like the usual Wal-Mart urban experience: nasty, long and brutish on all sides. The question for Wal-Mart, then, is this: Have you learned the right lesson from the store on Howell Mill Road? Posted October 18, 2006
Taken for a Ride The reason, said the Center for Housing Policy, which supports affordable-housing efforts: Transportation takes up a far greater share of family budgets than most people appreciate, particularly if the family has a modest income. How much do families with incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 a year spend on cars and transit? In many places, more than on housing. By tacking on 12 miles or more to their commutes, these families almost certainly spend more getting to work and running errands than they save on housing. “Even if you save a couple of hundred dollars a month on your mortgage, it doesn’t nearly outweigh the cost of the cars you are driving,” one of the study’s authors told the Washington Post recently. (You can view the report, titled “A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families,” by clicking here.) So where are the loads the heaviest for these families? Not surprisingly, in areas with expensive housing, not enough public transit, or both — places like San Francisco (where housing and transportation eat up 63 percent of working-class budgets), Atlanta and Seattle (61 percent each), Anchorage, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C. (60 percent each). But as the report makes clear, what families spend on housing and what they spend on transportation vary greatly from metro area to metro area. The places where transportation comprised the greatest portion of working-class budgets: Kansas City, Mo., Pittsburgh and Tampa. (each 33 percent of family budgets). The place where transportation took the least: New York (24 percent). Where is housing the greatest portion of a working-class family budget? Of the 28 metro areas surveyed, San Francisco was the hands-down winner. There, families of modest means spent 35 percent of their income on rent or mortgages. (Los Angeles was second with 32 percent.) The most affordable places for housing? Pittsburgh (22 percent of family budgets) and St. Louis (23 percent). Footnote: It isn’t just the trip to work that eats up so much of a family’s budget. The exurbs are by design driving communities, so even a trip to the supermarket usually involves a lengthy trip, which adds to the overall cost of living there. Another reason long commutes are a bad deal: Cars are such poor investments. As one observer told the Post, “A three-car family puts a lot of money into depreciating assets, instead of into mortgages and college educations.” Posted October 17, 2006
Put Everything on Trial First, though, about Drucker’s advice to corporate executives. It’s not hard to understand why it’s hard for companies to rid themselves of bad investments. It’s human nature to be overly optimistic about such things (“If we just put a little more into the turkey-on-a-stick operation, I’m sure we can turn it around”), we’re loath to admit mistakes, and all but the most insensitive executives hate layoffs. Still, it’s critical, Drucker said, that businesses know what they’re good at and what they’re not. So he offered up the following test for executives: “Every product and every activity of business begins to obsolesce as soon as it is started. Every product, every operation and every activity of a business should, therefore, be put on trial for its life every two or three years. Each should be considered the way we consider a proposal to go into a new product, a new operation or activity — complete with budget, capital appropriations request, and so on. One question should be asked of each: ’If we were not in this already, would we now go into it?’ And if the answer is ’no,’ the next question should be: ’How do we get out and how fast?’ ” This brings us to local government. Every city offers services and subsidies that, if it had to do over again, wouldn’t. Maybe the service made sense in earlier years but doesn’t now. Maybe it’s still a good service but local government isn’t the right provider. Or maybe it was always a lousy idea but was accompanied by very persuasive advocates. How does a local government shed itself of these losers? Local officials will tell you it’s not so easy. Services and subsidies build constituencies that, over time, become skilled at guarding their slice of the budget. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for inaction; in fact, it’s an argument for systematically placing all services and subsidies on trial. After all, the antidote for special interests is principled decision making. You can see the need for rational thinking about such things in San Jose, Calif., where local officials are wrestling with requests from two long-subsidized arts groups for bailouts. The city has already poured tens of millions of dollars into these groups, building venues and providing annual subsidies. Now, the San Jose Repertory Theater says if it doesn’t get a $1 million or greater loan from the city, it’s shutting its doors, and the Mexican Heritage Corp., says it could use an additional $700,000 as well. Predictably, this has city officials tied in knots. If the groups fold, what will the city do with the buildings? What about the long-term strategy of building the arts in San Jose? And what about all the money the city has already invested; would taxpayers understand if the city just walked away? Maybe this is where Drucker’s notion of a principled exit strategy comes in. Take a deep breath, San Jose. Ask yourself this question: If we were not already subsidizing these groups, would we do so today, given what we know of their present situations? If the answer is no, then the next questions are easy: How do we get out and how fast? Posted October 16, 2006
Not Just for Children Anymore The competition is most obvious in the close-in Virginia suburbs, places like Alexandria, Fairfax County and Arlington County. Example: There was a flare-up in Arlington County this year over plans to turn a volleyball court into a playground. 20something adults who played on the courts got up a petition to stop the redevelopment. “We didn’t have anything against the playground,” one of the players told the Washington Post. “We just didn’t want it on top of our volleyball court.” The county eventually worked out a deal to locate the volleyball courts elsewhere. But the real problem isn’t competing uses, it’s scarcity. The densely settled suburbs barely have enough land for children’s activities. They didn’t consider that adults would want to use the same ball fields. But they do, and they aren’t patient with excuses about why the fields aren’t available. “This is a large group of people who are making good salaries, and there are certain things they expect for the taxes they pay,” the chair of Arlington’s parks and recreation commission told the Post. “One of the things ... that is important to them is a place to play sports.” This isn’t a small group. According to the newspaper, the Virginia suburbs are packed with 24-to-39-year-olds, about a third of the population there. That’s a lot of ultimate Frisbee players. Obvious solution: Buy more parkland. Alas, there’s not much undeveloped land left, and what’s available is breathtakingly expensive. Arlington County’s most recent park purchases were between $1.5 million and $5 million an acre. The solution for the time being is to closely regulate the use of ball fields and parks. Part of the regulation: Recreation departments have forbidden adult leagues from adding more teams; there isn’t room for more. Footnote: It isn’t just in outdoor recreation that young adults are make their presence felt. Arlington’s public library recently changed its rule barring patrons from bringing beverages to its computer cubicles. Reason: Adults who are used to drinking Starbucks lattes while browsing the Internet expect a similar experience at the library. Posted October 13, 2006
Only Millionaires Need Apply Background: The city government, the transit agency and developers have big plans for a long-vacant tract of land in downtown Chicago called Block 37. Once a prime location, by the 1970s Block 37 had deteriorated into porno shops, dime stores, pool halls and cut-rate office buildings. In the 1980s, the city bought the land, knocked down the buildings and offered it for development. As these things sometimes do, the revival of Block 37 took a while. (As it waited for the right deal, the city used Block 37 as the site of an outdoor ice hockey rink in winters and a student art show in summers.) Long story short: The city now has a developer (Mills Corp.), and work is proceeding on a giant mixed-use project there. What does this have to do with transit? The Chicago Transit Authority wants to build a station beneath Block 37 that would offer connections to O’Hare and Midway airports. But here’s the twist, the Chicago Tribune reported recently: The CTA is inviting private companies to start a luxury service for business travelers, using special trains running out of the Block 37 station. As the CTA imagines it, a business traveler entering the station a few years from now would have two choices: a regular CTA train to O’Hare for $2 with lots of stops along the way, or a privately run train that costs $10 but offers a first-class experience with no stops. Now, mind you, the luxury train wouldn’t get there any faster, since it would use the same tracks as regular CTA trains. (The luxury trains would stop behind CTA trains in stations but the doors wouldn’t open.) So what would you get for your $8 premium? Nicer seats, luggage racks overhead, electric plugs for your laptop, the opportunity to check luggage at the station and, of course, no hoi polloi filing in and out of the car. In other words, the kind of experience you have in first-class sections of airplanes. And something else: If the service catches on, the Tribune reported, CTA may find a way in years ahead to route the luxury trains around the regular ones so you could get to O’Hare and Midway faster. So instead of 45 minutes to get to O’Hare, the luxury train might take only 25 minutes. (Fares would probably be higher for the faster service, maybe $17, but that’s still cheaper than a cab.) So, who wants to run a luxury rail service? We’ll find out, as the CTA has just announced plans to put the service out for bids. (Better count your nickels before bidding; the CTA estimates the winner would have to invest $64 million in refurbishing cars and other capital expenses. Then there’s the cost of marketing, CTA’s fees, etc.) Still, the agency believes that if the luxury train attracts 1.7 million passengers a year, it would be profitable. “The business plan shows there is a market for this service, and it can be structured in a way that is competitive and financially rewarding for the private sector,” one CTA official told the Tribune. If this is such a smart move, why doesn’t the CTA itself offer first-class service to O’Hare and Midway? It has to do with the public part of public transit, one observer told the newspaper. “It would not ring too true with taxpayers if there is any sense of a lot of public dollars going to well-heeled business people and tourists traveling to the airport,” a transit expert at the University of South Florida said. Posted October 12, 2006
At Last: a Solvable Problem Background: It’s not hard to understand the problem with urban heat islands. Cities both generate and absorb a lot of heat. When scientists look at the earth in infrared photographs taken by satellites, cities look like bright red islands among the cool dark of the countryside. Hence, the name. Why are cities so hot? Cars, subways, factories, power plants and other human activity create a lot of heat, but cities also have lots of hard surfaces — streets, buildings, parking lots, roofs — that absorb and trap heat from the sun. The problem is obvious in the daytime (it’s hot!), but it’s more troubling at night. Reason: Things don’t cool off that much, as the asphalt and concrete radiate heat long after the sun sets. Result: In many places, nights are hotter than they used to be. This is the case in Phoenix, where nighttime temperatures in July linger at 90 degrees, which is unlike what longtime residents remember, the Arizona Republic reported recently. In the desert, summer nights are often cool, as there are few clouds to trap the heat. But in Phoenix, the buildings and streets are holding on to that 110-degree daytime heat and baking the city all night long. But there’s more to the urban heat island than sweltering nights in July. In places like Atlanta, whose downtown is a good 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, the heat island aggravates air pollution, strains electrical grids, places the elderly at risk and is changing the weather. Take rainfall. Scientists have discovered that upwind of these heat islands, there’s often less rain than expected, while downwind there’s more. Together with global warming, it’s the stuff of Hollywood disaster movies. So what’s the way out? Researchers at Arizona State University are researching new building materials that trap less heat than the ones we use now. Some are already known: light-colored roofs reflect light better than dark; pervious surfaces (which let water through) trap less heat than impervious ones; green roofs (planted with trees and shrubs) cool buildings below and around them. Planting trees along streets and creating more green spaces help too. There are some Buck Rogers solutions yet to be developed, the Arizona Republic predicted: photochromic materials that change color depending on the sunlight and, of course, solar power devices that can put blinding summer light to good use. In the end, though, the problem isn’t a lack of technology, but the high cost of these new materials — and governments that simply aren’t aware of the problem or its solutions. In time, the cost of the new materials will almost certainly decline. And as public officials weigh the price of these materials against the cost of electricity, pollution and human health, you might see a rush toward heat efficiency like the one that has conserved so much water in the last 20 years or so. Now, if we could just do something about “Dancing with the Stars.” Posted October 11, 2006
A Sucker’s Bet Cleveland surely needs help. The region is hemorrhaging young people, the city has one of the nation’s lowest percentages of college-educated workers, its economy is sluggish, and its economic development efforts are stalled. Just right, in other words, for a quack cure. Hence, the November ballot features a convoluted amendment to the Ohio constitution that, if passed, would permit slot-machine parlors in Cleveland right away and in four years’ time a second vote on full-fledged casinos. Proponents are peddling their remedy with two arguments: Gambling will be a great economic benefit for Cleveland, and its proceeds will be a blessing to schoolchildren (a portion would go to college scholarships). Sound familiar? It’s the way casinos have been sold elsewhere, from Detroit to St. Louis. Is it true? Well, casinos do produce some construction jobs and, in time, low-paying casino employment. But what about the hordes of people who’ll come from far and wide to plug coins into slot machines and play blackjack? In a few cases, casinos do indeed produce significant tourism. But these are almost always resort cities to begin with (think Biloxi, Miss.), and gambling offers just one more reason to visit. Detroit, St. Louis and Cleveland, it should be pointed out, are not resort cities. But people do patronize casinos, even in Detroit. Problem is, they’re overwhelmingly people who live in the region. The result: In most places, gambling takes money from other, more productive local activities (college funds, home improvements, child support, etc.) and leaves behind huge social costs (gambling addictions, bankruptcy, family neglect, etc.). To be a regional asset, experts say, casinos need to draw at least half their patrons from afar. Cleveland’s won’t come close to that. As one economic development consultant told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “You’re basically just taking money out of the home market.” Posted October 10, 2006
Bottom line: For most places, gambling is a sucker’s bet. It surely will be for Cleveland. Posted October 10, 2006
New York’s Smart Policies New York got serious about water conservation in the 1980s, when it implemented two policy changes that, over time, changed the ways New Yorkers used water. First, it started metering deliveries to apartments and houses. (Amazingly, until the late 1980s, New York charged apartment buildings by their street frontage and number of faucets and toilets, not gallons actually consumed.) Second, it required that construction and renovation projects install water-saving devices, such as low-flow toilets and shower heads. Technology has helped over the past quarter-century. Public restrooms now have faucets that automatically shut off. The latest washing machines use a fraction of the water that older ones did. City management deserves some credit, too. New York has been diligent in recent years about finding and fixing leaks in its own pipes. But the big savings have been a result of smart public policies: the changes in the building code and the metering of residential deliveries. Result: New York uses just over 1 billion gallons of water a day, the least since 1951. And it’s still going down. In the past five years, consumption has declined by more than 5 percent, the Times said. Outsiders are amazed. “If I had to pick a city where that [record of conservation] is true, I probably would have picked one of the Southwestern cities,” the head of the American Water Works Association told the newspaper. In fact, New York does better at saving water than some conservation-minded cities in the West. New Yorkers use 136 gallons a day on average, which is better than Denver (170) though not as good as San Francisco (97). But don’t let the numbers sidetrack you: The point is that New York changed the behavior of its citizens through smart public policies and did so with little disruption and almost no attention. No doubt when the building codes were revised, advocates for conservation were disappointed: Why not mandate that all toilets and shower heads be changed right away? But this is the power of government: Over time, incremental changes can become a powerful force. In fact, you could say, they can become a tidal wave. Footnote: So what about those open fire hydrants, the ones we associate with New York in the summer? In the 1970s and earlier, children opened hydrants on hot days so they could play in the torrent. Well, kids still open hydrants but they don’t get the torrent anymore. New York installed shower caps on its fire hydrants so children could cool off with a thrifty spray rather than a wasteful gusher. Posted October 9, 2006
Up, Up, Up Background: The original San Francisco Centre was opened in 1988 with a Nordstrom department store as its centerpiece. The expansion, opened in late September, tripled the mall’s size to 1.5 million square feet, adding a Bloomingdale’s among other stores. As shopping malls go, that’s big, but not that big. The King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia has 2.8 million square feet and also features a Nordstrom and a Bloomingdale’s. But San Francisco Centre is hardly your average mall. It’s on downtown San Francisco’s Market Street between the Union Square shopping district (Saks, Neiman Marcus) and the city’s convention complex, Moscone Center. And it’s tall. The two buildings containing the expanded mall are eight and nine stories. More: The expansion is into a building that once housed a beloved old department store called the Emporium. (An Emporium trademark: It opened each day with a bugle blast.) So here’s the question: Can a major shopping mall make it in a big-city downtown, in a historic rehab that demands shoppers ride escalators over eight or nine levels? Even the owners of the mall admit it’s a gamble. “Most American consumers, save for San Francisco and Chicago, aren’t really attuned to vertical retailing,” an executive with the Westfield Group told the Los Angeles Times. “Even New Yorkers tend to not shop vertically unless they are in a department store.” What’s the big deal about shopping on multiple levels? Think about how most suburban malls are laid out. You put a Sears on one end, a Macy’s on the other, and people walking back and forth discover the little shops between. Vertical malls are more difficult, since you can hardly ask Bloomingdale’s to take the upper floors. (Major tenants want to be on the ground level.) “The challenge with vertical malls has always been getting the foot traffic flow worked out to attract people to each level,” a retail consultant told the Times. “Otherwise, you have significant dead zones and poor performance.” The answer in San Francisco seems to be to dazzle shoppers with design, which is why the historic building was so important. Developers saved a glass dome that was part of the old Emporium store and used it to draw people upward. (To get a sense of how this works, you can view an animated “fly-through” of the mall by clicking here.) How well this mall does has implications for other big-city downtowns. San Francisco Centre hopes to become a retail destination, a place for shoppers tired of the same old suburban mall experience. If pricey retailers arrayed vertically in a dazzling urban setting makes San Francisco Centre that destination, expect to see others like it around the country. Footnote: Land costs dictate that major retail in cities be vertical. They dictate something else: limited parking. San Francisco Centre expects 25 million people a year to pass through its doors but has built no additional parking for these shoppers. This is partly because of land costs, partly because San Francisco discourages more parking structures and partly because the mall is located at a major transit hub. (You can walk directly from the mall into the Powell Street station, serving BART and Muni trains. Across the street, the cable cars turn around for the trip up Nob Hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.) But will shoppers really catch a train for a day of serious shopping at a mall? We’ll see. Posted October 6, 2006
The Quirkiness of Local Politics If you’re thinking that there must be more to this story, there is. Herold is an information-technology worker who placed his name on the ballot for Kolb’s seat before he got a new job with a local insurance company. The new job is so demanding, he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press recently, there’s no way he could serve on the council. But as it turned out, he got the job after the July 20 deadline for withdrawing from the race. Not a problem, Herold thought. There were three candidates in the Sept. 12 primary race for Kolb’s seat, so Herold passed the word to friends and supporters: Vote for someone else. But that’s when Herold, a first-time candidate, learned about the quirkiness of local politics. Despite his efforts (“I tried my best not to get any votes,” he said), Herold placed second in the nonpartisan primary with 186 votes, 31 more than the number-three candidate. This was hardly a tidal wave of support (there are more than 30,000 voters in Blaine; as usual for low-interest primaries, few voted), but it was enough to send him and Kolb, who finished first with 472 votes, to the general election. Now Herold is really worried. What if, in some bizarre twist, he’s elected against his wishes? He can’t withdraw his name, the Pioneer Press explained, because state law offers only two ways off the ballot at this point. “A., I’d have to die; B. I’d have to move out of the district,” he told the newspaper. This is to prevent incumbents from recruiting fake challengers, who withdraw before the election. Hmm. OK. But if Herold wins, surely he can’t be obligated to serve, can he? No, but it would force a special election, which city officials estimate would cost $30,000 or more. “That’s the last thing I want because it would cost Blaine money,” he said. His solution: Step up his campaign to elect his opponent. This is such an odd proposition — begging people to vote for your opponent — could it actually be a winning strategy? In other words, the Pioneer Press reporter wanted to know, is this in fact a brilliant maneuver to get elected? “This is absolutely not a campaign tactic,” Herold replied. “I really don’t want to win.” Posted October 5, 2006
Constant Headache or Raging Crisis Dealing with the homeless is unpleasant and expensive, and, unfortunately, doesn’t get much easier even if you’re successful. But here are the choices: Do it right and at least the problem becomes manageable in time. Or do it wrong and end up like Groundhog Day, with the same crisis over and over again. So who’s doing it like Groundhog Day? Los Angeles, where thousands of homeless people camp out in an area known, inevitably, as skid row. L.A. has so mismanaged its homeless situation that it threatens to undo the otherwise promising revival of downtown. The bottom line is this: Los Angeles must create enough shelters or permanent housing to take these people off the streets. Once it has done so, it can enforce laws against sleeping on sidewalks or vacant lots. But the city would rather not spend the money to be successful, so it has skipped step one (create the housing) and gone straight to step two (lock up the sidewalk sleepers). There are two problems with this approach: First, it is far more expensive to use police officers, courts, hospitals and jails to move the homeless off the streets than it is to offer them shelters, food and addiction treatment. Second, courts have said it’s against the law to arrest people for sleeping in public when they have no other place to go. So, L.A. is busy building the housing it’ll need for the homeless, right? Of course not. Prevented from outlawing sidewalk sleeping, the city actually considered regulating it. The mayor, police chief and the ACLU worked out an agreement that would have allowed homeless people to sprawl on the sidewalk between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., as long as they stayed more than 10 feet from doorways and didn’t block the entire walkway. Seriously. The L.A. city council rejected this nutty idea after downtown residents and businesses howled in protest. Still, the council seems uninterested in doing the hard work that would actually solve its homeless problems, so expect to see L.A.’s skid row nightmare repeating itself over and over again. Which brings us to a city that has done most things right, Philadelphia. Philly has built enough shelters and provided sufficient services to dramatically reduce its downtown homeless population. But even so, it has noticed the number of people sleeping outdoors creep up in recent months. (The homeless population, 376 in early September, is tiny by comparison to L.A.’s, but still up from earlier this year.) What’s causing the rise? Downtown officials aren’t sure but think it could be the result of do-gooders (college kids and suburban church groups, for the most part) staging public feedings. And this gets to the heart of what makes the Philadelphia approach work: It doesn’t engage in charity. Services for the homeless, including food, are earned by good behavior, which means taking medications, living in shelters, visiting job counselors and so on. The do-gooders are short-circuiting the system. ”They think they’re helping when they’re not,” one downtown association official told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Food should always be connected with the opportunity to get help. They enable people to remain on the street. It’s enabling people to remain addicted. We are not helping ourselves as a city if we encourage and enable these [homeless] camps.” If so, you end up on skid row in L.A. Posted October 4, 2006
Where Rents Are Cheaper in the CBD Today’s question for the class: Which office building usually commands higher rents for comparable space, a downtown high-rise or one out in the suburbs? Most people would guess the downtown building, and in most cases they’d be right. But not always. In some places the bargain office space is downtown. Assignment for tomorrow: Write a three-page essay on why this is so. OK, just joking about the essay. But it is true that in some cities, you can find on average cheaper class A space in the central business district than in the suburbs. Examples of cities with “downtown discounts,” according to a recent study by Richards Barry Joyce & Partners, a Boston real estate firm: St. Louis, where rents are 19 percent cheaper downtown than in the ’burbs; Oklahoma City, 16 percent cheaper; Phoenix, 12 percent; Kansas City, Mo., 11 percent; and Detroit, Nashville and Philadelphia, 6 percent each. This is not the case everywhere, of course. If you want an office in New York’s Midtown Manhattan office district, expect to pay 135 percent more than in the suburbs. Other cities with premium downtowns: Boston, 80 percent higher; Toronto, 74 percent; Washington, D.C., 55 percent; Montreal, 39 percent; and San Francisco, 33 percent. Even Los Angeles’ undersize downtown commands a 15 percent premium over rents in the suburbs. What’s the difference between the discount downtowns and those where landlords get a premium? Discount downtowns appear to have some combination of slow regional growth, high downtown taxes, inadequate transit, bleak streetscapes or just bad buzz. That’s not a perfect answer (Phoenix and Nashville are fast-growing regions, and Philadelphia has a fully developed transit system and a well-maintained downtown), but each of the ailing center cities does appear to have two or more of these factors. And the “premium” downtowns? Good buzz, nice public spaces and convenient transit play major roles, an executive at Richards Barry Joyce told the Wall Street Journal. “These are all areas that evoke prestige and provide superior high-quality public transit, are generally considered safe and all seem to contain inviting pedestrian-friendly public spaces,” he added. Hey, wait a minute. What about supply and demand? Maybe the premium downtowns just have lower vacancy rates, and it’s scarcity that’s pushing up rents. Umm, no. That doesn’t seem to explain it. As the Journal pointed out, Chicago’s downtown vacancy rate is 16 percent, but buildings in the Loop command big premiums over suburban locations. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate in downtown Charlotte, N.C., is 5 percent, but rents there are about the same as out by the interstate. Footnote: Philadelphia notwithstanding, transit seems to be a key factor in bolstering downtown office markets. Stands to reason: If the only way of getting to and from work — or around town during the day — is by car, why drive all the way downtown? Interstate locations are more convenient, and parking is usually free. Posted October 3, 2006
Services Rendered Lots of bad things can happen if you own a bar and a fight breaks out. You or your employees could be hurt. Things might be broken. Other patrons could be scared off. And if you live in the Cleveland area, you could get a bill from the cops for the cost of breaking up the fight and hauling off the brawlers. In fact, a bar in the suburban city of South Euclid got just such a bill recently, for $271.25. The Madison Avenue Bar and Grill is, it appears, a handful for the South Euclid cops. According to the letter accompanying the bill, police had been called there 13 times in the previous six months for noise complaints or brawls. And since South Euclid passed an ordinance in July instructing police to bill bars for the cost of police services if they’re called there more than twice in a year’s time, it means it’s pay-up time for the Madison Avenue Bar and Grill. (The latest incident ended with four people arrested, four more cited and two in the hospital, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.) Does this seem like a peculiar policy, billing bars for brawls? Actually, it’s not that odd. A number of Cleveland suburbs have similar ordinances. (Some also bill homeowners and apartment complexes that generate excessive calls.) And this is part of a larger national trend toward paying for public services with fees rather than taxes. (A number of police departments bill people in wrecks for the time cops spend writing up accident reports and redirecting traffic. And it’s common for municipal EMT crews to bill victims for emergency care.) In this instance, the aim isn’t to generate revenue, South Euclid officials say. Rather, it’s to prod bars to do a better job of managing their patrons. “It’s holding them accountable for the actions of their clientele,” one official told the Plain Dealer. Here’s how it works: When the cops visit a bar because of a complaint, they write a warning letter to the owner. After two letters, they send a bill based on the number of cops who responded, the amount of time they spent and whether they used any resources (bullets fired, nightsticks broken, etc.). If the bill isn’t paid promptly, it’s added to the bar’s property tax bill. The warning letters usually work. A city official in Euclid, which is, well, north of South Euclid, told the Plain Dealer his city has sent out 17 warning letters to landlords since passing its ordinance in May, but no bills. Many owners say they’ll take care of the problem tenants. “We’re getting good response,” he added. Posted October 2, 2006
Kooky Ideas It’s time to call these mindless property tax-limitation schemes what they are: a libertarian version of rent control. Here’s the irony: Like rent control, they end up punishing the ones they were intended to benefit. And along the way, they throttle cities. How are property tax limitations like rent control? Let us count the ways. First, they’re aimed at a particular, politically powerful group: homeowners in the case of tax limitations, urban renters for rent control. Second, they shower subsidies on these groups. Tax limitations do so by sticking others with the tax bill (commercial property owners, renters, second-home folks, new homeowners, etc.), rent control by taking money from landlords. Third, like all subsidies, tax limitations and rent control create distortions in the marketplace. By subsidizing some renters, rent control forces landlords to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Some find ways of pushing out longtime tenants, since the longer a person has lived in a rent-controlled building, the less he pays as a rule. This defies the usual logic of the marketplace, which is that businesses love longtime customers. Other distortions: It forces owners to turn apartments into condos, even if they’d rather be in the rental business. And seeing what a lousy business renting is, developers don’t build new apartment buildings. End result: The supply of apartments grows so tight that it traps families in units they’ve outgrown (they can’t afford to move to more suitable apartments) and newcomers can’t find places to live. Something similar happens with property tax limitations and the housing market. As with rent control, tax limitations tend to benefit longtime homeowners, and therefore trap them in their homes. Even if an older couple would like to downsize by moving to a condo or townhouse, they can’t. They’d lose their tax benefits. And newcomers, who have to pay for the tax breaks of longtime residents, often can’t afford the high taxes that come with home purchases. Under tax-limitation schemes, governments are loath to allow new housing to be built. Reason: Localities hold out for land uses that pay their way, such as offices, apartments, industrial and retail. In time, then, communities come to the conclusion that they just can’t afford any more homeowners. Final way tax-limitation schemes are like rent control: They make housing scarce and, therefore, unaffordable. It’s no accident that the nine of the 10 worst markets for housing affordability are in California, home of Proposition 13. Rising fast on the unaffordability lists: Florida, which has had a brain-dead tax limitation scheme called “Save Our Homes” since 1992. This kooky law hasn’t saved any homes; it has simply made them unaffordable. In the end, then, homeowners as a group do not benefit any more from these tax-limitation schemes than do renters under rent control. Oh, a fairly small group does: People content to stay in one apartment or house for decade after decade. For them, the rewards of rent control or tax limitations are huge, and they are fiercely protective of their subsidies. But just about everyone else loses, including cities. Newcomers and young people are the lifeblood of communities. By rewarding a small group of old-timers — indeed, by cementing them in place — we make it harder to attract the ones we need the most. Posted September 29, 2006
What Comes After Incorporation? There has been a surge of municipal incorporations in the past decade or so, mostly in fast-growing suburban areas. After a city is formed comes the hard work of creating a government, bolstering the tax base and building a reliable set of public services. And then what? If new cities in the Seattle area are a guide, next comes the search for distinctiveness. The region created a slew of cities in the 1990s, most of which have done well on their own. But once they’ve passed the survival stage, the fresh-minted cities want something else, the Seattle Times reported recently: “an identity.” “It’s almost a premature midlife-crisis question of ’Who am I?’ ” the city manager of suburban Newcastle told the newspaper. There seem to be two things at work here. One is the competition for residents, businesses and visitors, the other is a desire for neighborliness and local pride. “If you just create a bedroom city where people take off their hat and sleep, then there’s no community,” the mayor of Kenmore said. And there have been successes in this search for distinctiveness, the newspaper reported. Issaquah has created an annual event called Salmon Days, which draws 150,000 visitors for two days every year. Kirkland has a reputation as a place that appreciates art, thanks to investments in whimsical public art. Redmond, of course, has a high-tech image, thanks to its largest business, Microsoft. But other places are still searching for things that will set them apart, the newspaper reported. To find these things, cities are convening public visioning efforts or simply searching through local history. When they locate something that sets them apart, they often try to incorporate it into public spaces or town squares. Why the sudden interest in distinctiveness? “For a long time, cities yearned for the Wal-Marts and the McDonald’s, all the quote-unquote modern-day conveniences,” one planning expert told the Times. “Now that we have them and see what they mean to our community landscapes, we’re realizing we need something different. We want our authenticity to show itself.” Rough translation: Once we get what we want, we want something else. But unquestionably, there’s value in being different. In a region of shiny new suburbs, businesses and affluent families seek the one with the buzz. “Pretty much everyone’s got rivers and mountains in Washington [State],” the mayor of Snoqualmie said. “The question is, how do you set yourself apart?” Then there’s the feeling that, in their newness, affluence and growth, these places have not done a good job of nurturing connectedness. By creating distinctive public spaces, leaders feel, they can bring their citizens closer together. “There have been so many people who’ve moved up here so recently that there’s no city spirit,” one resident of the new city of Sammamish told the Times. “Maybe with a town center and the [city hall] going in, maybe people will rally around the center more.” Posted September 28, 2006
An Idea Whose Time Has Passed Sometimes consensus in a metro area shifts suddenly and radically. What seemed reasonable yesterday looks outrageous today, and what was ludicrous a few years ago is now conventional wisdom. Example: The dramatic shift in opinion in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area about transportation. Until recently, the car wasn’t just king in the Tampa Bay area, it was king, queen and commoner. There are some woebegone bus systems around the region, but hardly anyone who could afford otherwise takes them. And there is an ill-conceived trolley in downtown Tampa that operates more as a tourist attraction than a serious mode of transportation. That puts everyone else in a car. So when a local highway authority proposed this summer building a 120-mile toll-road “beltway” around the region, it seemed perfectly in line with reality. Tampa Bay’s highways are congested, toll roads are in vogue, so let’s lay some pavement! And on the day they announced it, authority planners thought they had a sure thing. “Every elected official and every staff member at all the agencies we have talked to have been supportive,” the authority’s planning director told the Tampa Tribune at the unveiling. But in no time the proposal started hitting walls. The first was Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, who told the Tribune, “Mass transit is really the future of our community. There can always be another roadway that could be built, but building new roadways isn’t cost-efficient anymore.” Others weren’t even that charitable. Some elected officials lashed out at the tendency of highways to produce sprawl, particularly perimeter highways. And environmentalists noted that the proposed road ran through sensitive lands, including well fields that supply the region with its water. The business community, too, was cool to the idea. Over the last year or so, business leaders have come to share Mayor Iorio’s belief that building more roads is a waste of money and that only transit, including some kind of regional rail transit, could actually solve the region’s congestion problems. “With the growth of this area and the amount of traffic that we’re going to incur over the next 10 years, we have to find alternative ways to get people from point A to point B,” one leading developer told the St. Petersburg Times. Within weeks, the beltway proposal was so completely in retreat that state legislators were proposing that its sponsoring authority be replaced by a regional transportation agency that could build transit as well as roads. (It wasn’t just the ill-timed beltway project fueling discontent; there was also an uproar over how the agency was hiring outside legal counsel.) A commissioner from suburban Pinellas County said he doubted the authority was competent to build a major highway. “I don’t know if they are capable of doing what they proposed,” he told the Tribune. So perhaps it’s not surprising that by mid-September, the authority was trying to spin its beltway proposal as actually good for transit. Why, the toll road could feed motorists into park-and-ride lots, where they could hop on trains to the city, the agency’s executive director told Tampa city council members. “What we’re talking about is a connectivity network,” he proclaimed. To their credit, council members did not laugh out loud, but they certainly weren’t buying this line. Nor was Mayor Iorio. “The beltway doesn’t really reflect our current commuting patterns. It tries to create new commuting patterns,” she told the Tribune. “Our plan [for rail transit] is about connecting to the region’s employment centers.” Posted September 27, 2006
Column archive by subject and metro area Travis Foster illustration
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