Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 07/28/2008 (p.m.)

• Old vs. New: Extreme Edition | weeasssuburb

  Dan Bertolet of Seattle-based blog “Huge ass city” spent some time visiting Medfield, Massachusetts (where I gather he was raised). He temporarily renamed his blog “Wee ass suburb.”

  This particular entry looks at two houses — one, the Dwight-Derby house from 1621, the other a 2005 “Extreme Makeover” McMansion. Throughout, I’ve found Dan’s entries really intriguing, but didn’t comment. Today, however, someone commented with “Who gives a flying f*ck about Medfield,” which prompted me to post a comment. Click through to read. I do give a flying f*ck, I guess.

  tags: dan_bertolet, hugeasscity, weeasssuburb, medfield, beverly, massachusetts, comments, history, urban_development

Hugeasscity has me thinking about Victoria’s Centennial Square (again)

(Note: might add some links/ photos later, but no time now — written on the fly…)

Dan Bertolet of Hugeasscity hits all the right points in his discussion of what makes a good urban plaza.  He includes a “wow!” photo of Seattle’s Garden of Remembrance, which, with its relatively steep grade, allows for steps oriented in such a way that they provide “natural” seating for people who want to “watch the action on 2nd Ave.”

This got me thinking about Victoria’s own piece of urban misery, Centennial Square: it’s very rarely used, and it’s really badly designed.  There’s no reason to be in Centennial Square, which was built by deleting a street, but didn’t replace the street with any reasons for people actually to cross the square.

What follows are my ruminations on Centennial Square, which won’t be of much interest to anyone not familiar with Victoria or the Square, but here goes.

If you’ve ever put on an event at the Square, you’ll know that a big chunk of it lies in the shadow of the old 3-story City Hall, a protected heritage building.  This is the “south-east” part of the Square.  Shadowing from City Hall makes being in that section of the square really uncomfortable, particularly since dank shade isn’t especially welcome anyway in a climate which never gets very hot, even in summer.  What this suggests to me is that this particular plot would be ideal for another building — although I can hear the howls of outrage should any section of City Hall’s north facade be covered up by a new building.  But there might be ways to work that problem, perhaps by incorporating the facade into the interior of an open-to-the-public glassy building.  At any rate, my hypothetical structure would have to be really low-rise, so that the sun could penetrate to the north of it.  A structure built on the edge of Douglas Street would, however, be able to draw more pedestrian traffic, and therefore bring people into the Square itself.

The Square’s north-east section gets full sun (when it’s out), but that section is taken up by one privately-owned lot, plus a string of ugly (and mostly empty) “arcaded” venues (offices, dead shops, dead restaurants) facing into the Square, which are also part of an increasingly decrepit city-owned parkade from the sixties.  The parkade is on the list of structures slated for removal/ replacement.  Douglas Street to the Square’s east is for the most part a thoroughfare, with lots of bus stops, but few reasons for pedestrians to linger on that strip of the block.  To the west, there’s the Royal McPherson Theatre, and the north-west has the new CRD Headquarters building, which isn’t set snug to the north-west corner, but unfortunately is set back quite a ways, with yet another large-ish and hugely underused “plaza” at the corner of Fisgard and Government Streets.

Thinking of Bertolet’s observation, that the Garden of Remembrance provides a vantage point for people- and action-watching, I started to wonder where you could sit in Centennial Square to do anything similar.  The answer?  You can’t.

The Square is resolutely and stubbornly inward-turning: it presents a slightly walled and therefore slightly elevated patch of truly useless lawn with one big tree in the middle on the east edge (Douglas Street).  (For a great aerial shot, see this flickr photo by thebugs.  South is at the top of the photo, north at bottom, east on the left, west on the right. The pink building near the center is City Hall; to the right you can make out the Square’s fountain; directly to the north of City Hall, you can recognize the grassy patch with its lone tree.)

There’s nothing to see from the open grass patch, as it opens up on a part of the block that people hurry along since there’s absolutely nothing to stop for except the bus stop.  And I don’t know about you, but watching people wait for the bus is really seriously depressing.  Vistas to every other street are blocked off, with only two small “enticements” to glimpse some street action on the south-west and the north-west sections.  They’re not bad, but neither are they enough.
Consider, however, that the parkade on the north edge is supposed to come down (in the bottom part of thebugs’s photo), and that perhaps the city could acquire the privately-owned lot on the north-east corner.  There has been talk of replacing those buildings with some kind of new central library and civic auditorium, but let’s think about how that corner might also be worked to create a view cone on to the Hudson project now under renovation (not visible in thebugs’s photo; it would be in the lower left hand portion: part of the roof is visible).  Once it’s fully built out (a conversion of the Hudson Bay department store into condos, plus 2 high-rise towers also for condos and shops), this project, which is a truly large undertaking, should inject a tremendous amount of life into this northern edge of downtown.

It’s just a thought, but:

• if a glassy “civic” structure were built next to City Hall on its north (because no one wants to be in that dank spot anyway, so you may as well put a building there instead),
• and the parkade on the Square’s north were replaced with something much better (a library, a civic auditorium),
• and the private lot on its north-east were acquired, too, then:

It might be an opportunity to reconfigure the Square so that the Douglas Street frontage finally gets some “built interest,” while a clever view cone is opened toward the north-east, which opens onto the Hudson.  The Hudson is in itself a magnificent structure from The Bay’s grand old department store days that literally deserves a view point.  And furthermore, the Hudson will be a potential river of interest-producing activity worth watching once it’s finished and its ground-floor shops are open.  Plus, seen from Centennial Square, the new view would be of a corner, not of a stretch of interest-bereft Douglas Street.  Where things come together (corners) one  usually finds more interesting to see.

Diigo Bookmarks 05/19/2008 (a.m.)

• “Pay your voluntary carbon taxes: Move into the fashionable high-rise city,” by John Barber (globeandmail)

  Barber’s article links the ideas expressed around the demise of suburbs due to rising fuel costs, the benefits of densifying the cities (by building up, not out), and discussions around carbon taxes. “Meanwhile, the free market is applying its own time-tested solution to the problem of overconsumption, with salutary political as well as social consequences. Hillary Clinton never stooped lower than when she promised a summer ‘gas-tax holiday,’ joining John McCain in the promise. Barack Obama never looked better than when he condemned it.” One answer? Live downtown, preferably on a public transit line.

  tags: globeandmail, toronto, carbon_tax, urbanism, cities, condos

Suburbs, food deserts, and old-fashioned delivery trucks

As it happened, Christopher Hume’s follow-up story today in the Toronto Star on the Leslieville big-box debacle, Wal-Mart and the city an uneasy mix (which I blogged about here), made some points that coincided nicely with a story by Shannon Proudfoot, which appeared in yesterday’s Province (Vancouver), about food deserts in cities: Suburbs cause ‘food deserts’ in cities; People stranded in low-income neighbourhoods have little choice.

Let’s start with food deserts in cities. From Proudfoot’s article:

The migration of supermarkets to the suburbs has left some Canadian cities with “food deserts” in their most vulnerable neighbourhoods, according to new research that counters previous studies suggesting that phenomenon wasn’t happening in this country.

Residents marooned in these grocery wastelands — usually those who can least afford it — have no easy access to stores that stock fresh, affordable food, researchers say, forcing them to pay inflated convenience-store prices or eat junk food.

These conclusions are based on 40 years of data, and researchers found that the situation is getting worse, with “the poorest neighbourhoods …the most stranded.”

“If you think about a single mother with limited income without a vehicle — if you can’t hop in your car and drive to a supermarket, you must shop locally,” Gilliland says. “You’re going to be buying your groceries at local convenience stores.”

That forces people to pay an average of 1.6 times more for groceries, he says, perpetuating a financial “downward spiral” for those already in a precarious position.

Better-off urbanites are turning to Zipcar services (car sharing services), which they then use to make those big runs to the suburbs (and the big-box discount stores):

Now they use Zipcar for day trips out of the city or bulk-buying missions that are more convenient and budget-friendly.

“If you work during the day, get off and want to do a grocery run, the buses would be packed and I couldn’t imagine having to carry that many groceries on a bus for your entire family,” MacPhee says. “It really does come down to convenience.”

Proudfoot concludes with the researcher’s advice that city councils must boost population density in cities so that grocers will locate there, too.

But if the grocer is also a retailer like Wal-Mart, that can be a real problem for urban cores, as Hume’s article makes clear. This is where Hume’s common-sense suggestion to bring back the delivery truck comes into play. As he points out, it used to be the case that no self-respecting city person lugged home tonnage from a shopping trip …because the delivery guy would deliver your goods to your home within hours.

So, if you’re going to put a big-box store into a downtown, get rid of the acres of surface parking for individual cars, get public transportation in, get people to walk or bike in, and let the delivery trucks do the delivering again. The money saved on all that parking would surely pay for a small fleet of vans that ferry goods to their purchasers.

In Toronto, the opposition to this suburban monstrosity with an ocean of parking lapping up prime urban real estate is fierce. But Hume then adds:

One wonders how different the response would have been had SmartCentres announced that it intended to build the city’s first no-parking mall. Sounds ridiculous, but maybe not, on second thought. Already there’s a mall in San Francisco that has no parking. Why not Toronto?

From here it’s a short hop (’cause you’re not driving, see) to the idea of the delivery truck:

Then there’s that revolutionary concept known as the delivery truck. Remember that? There was a time when the big stores – Eaton’s and Simpsons – all had their own fleets. In those days, few shoppers even considered schlepping home anything larger than a breadbasket. And let’s not forget the IGA on Danforth at Pape, which to this day has no parking on its premises.

Clearly, the time has come to bring back the delivery truck, and Eastern Ave. could be a perfect place to start. Of course, the Wal-Marts would have nothing to do with such a concept, but being Toronto’s first green shopping centre, Wal-Mart wouldn’t be wanted anyway.

Shoppers would walk or cycle to the centre, make their purchases, then walk or cycle home. The goods would show up later. Now that’s convenience.

“We think delivery is a great idea,” says Smith, who also points out that, “this is a huge evolution for us. None of us has a lot of urban experience.”

The return of the delivery truck could also address the problem of “food deserts” in urban cores. There is enough density already if you include the people who can’t afford to drive to the store.

Here in Victoria, several of our core and downtown grocers deliver for free, same day, if you shop before noon or 2pm and your order is over $25. The liquor stores (non-government, that is) figured this one out, too: right below Market on Yates (”Your uptown downtown grocery store” is, I believe, their slogan) on View Street there’s Harris Green Liquors, which not only delivers, but takes orders for home delivery over the phone. Cheers, eh?

Above: Market on Yates delivery ad as seen on the website.

Left: Harris Green Liquor Merchants delivery truck.  They also use a regular       car…

More thoughts on economic development, land use, zoning, quality of life…

…courtesy of further reading in Robert L. Bish’s Local Government Organization in the Capital Region (and continuing somewhat from yesterday’s entry).

Bish is concerned with explaining the need for and importance of economic development in the region, which is a necessity for Victoria since it relies for over half of its property tax revenue on businesses, and which is necessary “if children of citizens already here are going to have challenging job opportunities in the region instead of having to migrate elsewhere.”(p.30)

What I find especially useful is how Bish explains the linkages between land use/ zoning regulations, coupled with other restrictive regulations, which together can conspire to retard economic development. Bish writes that the following factors influence economic development: “quality of local services, especially transportation and public safety, the regulatory structure, especially zoning and land use regulation, taxes and (indirectly for business owners and their employees) schools and the attractiveness of residential neighbourhoods. These are primarily manageable by smaller local governments except for taxes, where provincial and national government policies also play a role.” (p.25)

We could say that many of these relate to “quality of life” issues. But zoning regulations directly impinge on economic development, which certainly influences quality of life. As Bish puts it,

First, many municipalities in the capital region have the practice of zoning most land into its existing use–and to do so some have hundreds of zoning categories. This means that every significant change in a business land or building use requires a rezoning process, which not only adds time and cost to the process but creates considerable uncertainty with the politics of the rezoning. Several municipalities also have very strong policies against any kind of home based business. These policies on zoning and home based businesses may have a benefit of providing community input on every land use change but they are policies that make business creation, change and expansion more costly. These policies, however, do not require a regional government to change. They do not even require that all municipalities have more business friendly land use policies. They are, however, important enough to merit review in the region if economic development is to be promoted. (emphasis added) (p.25)

Not a week goes by that a resident doesn’t rant in a letter to the editor or at a neighbourhood association meeting about the”evils” of “spot rezoning.” Council is accused of bending over backward for developers, being spineless, selling the “community” out, etc. Yet as Bish points out, the need for rezoning is built into the very fabric as it exists. If you don’t rezone (call it spot rezoning or whatever), you will ossify land use — and retard economic development.

Bish continues:

The second area where individual municipalities play an important role is in their setting of variable tax rates. The B.C. municipal practice of setting business tax rates two or more times higher than residential tax rates (in the capital region the average multiple is 2.76) has made property taxes for businesses in B.C. some of the highest in North America, while residents enjoy some of the lowest property tax rates. Of course one should not be terribly surprised at this result as there are many more residential voters than business voters. That does not make the problem go away, however, and when combined with close to the highest marginal income tax rates in North America, high corporate income taxes and a capital tax, the capital region is not a tax friendly environment for businesses employing skilled professionals. Most of these tax disadvantages are beyond municipal control, but that makes it even more important that municipal governments fix those policies they are responsible for in areas of land use and local business regulation. It also makes it important that the capital region advertise its strongest asset: a diverse range of small municipalities providing attractive options for different lifestyles in a beautiful environment. This is the quality that may offset high provincial taxes to attract the high income professionals that businesses require to the region. (emph. added) (p.26)

Again, clearly it’s the council’s job to create favourable conditions for economic development, yet when they do (and are called to the mat for “spot rezoning”), some people complain how they’re “favouring” developers, and they usually pipe up (and puff up) enough to convince others, who follow the piper. It seems that many people don’t understand that we can’t live off lotus leaves — we have the “strongest assets,” but we also need to attract more vibrant businesses that can pay better wages than the hospitality or service industries pay.

Victoria is now in significant trouble because our downtown is overrun by people who are not “just” homeless, but who openly use and deal in drugs, who shoot up, smoke crack, tweak in broad day light, and make a career of begging for “spare change.” Key areas are festooned with groups of a dozen or so, many with (stolen) shopping carts laden with various possessions. The Province closed mental health facilities years ago, kicked people out, and seems willing to provide free needles (and now free pipes to crack smokers), but cannot find the will to fund detox facilities or asylums, nor is the justice system willing to stop the revolving door model we use for criminals (thieves, dealers) here.

In other words, the Province “downloaded” the responsibility for the mentally ill and the addicted to the municipalities, which don’t have the wherewithal to deal with this huge issue. So, in turn, the municipality has effectively “downloaded” this problem to individual citizens — not only in the sense that we are supposed to step up with private donations (and private resignation), but also in the sense that our shared public spaces are in part thoroughly destroyed. The private individual is suffering the costs of this “downloading.”

And it, in turn, is destroying what Bish calls our — downtown Victoria’s — “strongest assets,” one of which our own ability to believe in this place.

Cities do it (land use) better

Here’s a “must read” piece by Edward Glaeser, just republished in the CEO for Cities blog, The Greenness of Cities, and first published in the New York Sun on January 30/07. It explains why, from an environmentalism perspective, it’s far better to build highrises (and use land efficiently) than to oppose development (and force development into other areas, which typically don’t have the efficiencies in place that cities do).

How I wish that every board member of Victoria’s own Fairfield Community Association and James Bay Neighbourhood Association and Vic West Community Association would read this piece. I’m naming these groups specifically for their extreme NIMBYism, which they wield over the city’s core. Wedded to some obscene notion of a city forever preserved in aspic (which, if it’s kept up, will kill our city), they retard progressive development by defending what they consider Victoria’s “character,” “quaintness,” and “charme” (yes, with an “e” at the end — it’s all so veddy veddy English, don’t you know?). They do not understand what a city is or what it needs at all, and to shore up their inability to understand, they refuse to understand that Victoria is a city. “Their” Victoria is denial made manifest. The real Victoria suffers because of this.

Since they don’t understand the real Victoria at all (having no understanding of cities), they therefore fight development not just in their own neighbourhoods (for which they could be forgiven), but also in the city’s downtown (for which they cannot). The James Bay Neighbourhood Association is a particular thorn in my urbanist side, since this group insists on arrogating to itself areas that any sane person would recognize as belonging to downtown and having nothing to do with James Bay. But, as in all power trips, the more “authority” you can claim, the better your chances of inflating your importance.

They fight tooth and nail against any development that exceeds the city’s insanely arbitrary (and niggardly) height limits or that transgresses density limits established in a bygone age (the fifties?) when land was cheap. And they cling to strange fantasies, for example, that all of Victoria could do well with buildings kept to 6 floors — “like Paris,” they dreamily say, conveniently forgetting that their romantic notion of a low-rise Paris was born at the expense of massive expropriations and the destruction of the medieval city by Baron Haussmann in the 19th century. If anyone proposed anything remotely similar today, they’d be institutionalized. They also forget that those 6-story Parisian behemoths sit on land parcels approximately one square city block in size, hence the possibility of creating nifty enclosed courtyards for the residents. Given our comparatively tiny city lots (ranging from 9,000 to at most 15,000 square feet), it’s impossible to make the numbers come out right unless you go tall.

Oh, and how I wish that our supposedly “Green” city councilor, Sonya Chandler (who hasn’t been seen or heard from since she became a mother some months ago), would read this piece. Sonya — from Vic West, incidentally — who balks when a concrete high-rise proposal comes before council, because (in her mind) anything that isn’t “small” isn’t “green.”

How I wish the luminaries and wanna-be politicos from the various community associations, who think they have what it takes to lead a city and who plan to run for council seats, would read Glaeser’s article. I shudder to think what will happen if some of the Waynes or Dianes or Cornelias or Tims actually were to get elected next year: they, with their punitive attitude toward developers, with their firm belief that development is just another way of being a pervert (especially if the new building isn’t in some Disney-esque faux heritage “style”) and that it must be brought into line, ladies and gentlemen!

And what is this article I want them all to read actually saying?

Here are some key excerpts (pay attention, Sonya!):

If the environmental footprint of the average suburban home is a size 15 hiking boot, the environmental footprint of a New York apartment is a stiletto-heeled Jimmy Choo. Eight million New Yorkers use only 301 square miles, which comes to less than one-fortieth of an acre a person. Even supposedly green Portland, Ore., is using up more than six times as much land a person than New York.

New York’s biggest environmental contribution lies in the fact that less than one-third of New Yorkers drive to work. Nationwide, more than seven out of eight commuters drive. More than one-third of all the public transportation commuters in America live in the five boroughs. The absence of cars leads Matthew Kahn, in his fascinating book, “Green Cities,” to estimate that New York has by a wide margin the least gas usage per capita of all American metropolitan areas. The Department of Energy data confirm that New York State’s energy consumption is next to last in the country because of New York City.

(…)

…the ground troops of the environmental movement haven’t yet got themselves around to being pro-development, even in places, like New York, where development makes the most environmental sense. All of those years of opposing new development have made many activists reflexively anti-growth. Almost every act of neighborhood anti-development Nimbyism, or Not In My Back Yard, gets wrapped up in a mantle of environmentalism. The great problem with being reflexively anti-growth is that development in America is close to being a zero-sum game. New homes are going to be built to meet the needs of a growing population. If you stop development in some areas, you are ensuring more development elsewhere. [emph. added]

Some of my friends in the pro-urbanism camp have used this argument when speaking before council, albeit without the nuance it apparently requires to get through to councilors. As a result, when they now speak at public hearings to remind council of the sprawl in our Western Communities and to argue that highrises downtown could allay this, councilors shrug and pretend the argument is invalid. It isn’t. Certainly we’ll still see more single-family-homes (SFHs) going up in the suburbs, but that’s partly because of our overall growth here. We could — and should — still be doing a lot better in building downtown up, higher and denser.

Glaeser adds:

Good environmentalism requires a national perspective, not the narrow outlook of a single neighborhood trying to keep out builders. As a nation, we need to think clearly about where new housing causes the least environmental damage, and we need to make sure that our land-use policies help that happen. A local approach can do more harm than good because dense areas are rich in protesters who push new housing out to where there are fewer people to oppose it.

If one wrote, “[g]ood environmentalism requires a regional perspective, not the narrow outlook of a single neighborhood trying to keep out builders,” we could apply that entire paragraph to the situation in Victoria. For a perspective on the missing regional approach as it relates to municipal infrastructure funding and our overreliance on property taxes, see my recently published piece in Vibrant Victoria, Victoria’s Choice: to be or not to be …is not the question.

The “local approach” referenced by Glaeser is in our case a “neighbourhood approach” that seems to compound a peculiar political dysfunction of the region: the City of Victoria is a small political entity, but it’s the heart of regional entity of 350,000 people. The problem is that the city is but one municipality — out of 13. Within walking and biking distance are the municipalities of Oak Bay, Saanich, Esquimalt, View Royal, and so on, which have their own mayors and councils …and their own this-departments and that-departments. And so, the councilors — the politicians — in the City of Victoria are unhealthily dependent — to the detriment of the region — on the few neighbourhoods (some of whose organizations I listed above) for their voter base. It’s deadlock: the politicians dare not piss off the neighbourhood activists (who are often the only ones who bother to vote), even when this causes harm to the region as a whole — and certainly causes harm to what is the region’s downtown.

Next month (January 2008) I’ll have an article in FOCUS Magazine, which also tackles the stranglehold of the neighbourhoods over the city. I plan to post it and my other pieces from FOCUS (which unfortunately is not available online) to my blog soon.