Institute without Borders Connecting Divided Places program

Borders are interesting demarcations to consider.  I think about this in terms of planning in the DC metropolitan area, where you have three "states", Maryland, Virginia, and DC, that ought to be coordinating better what they do.

Of course, many other metropolitan regions cross state borders.  And in some places you have multistate agencies like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

At the same time, there is the general city versus suburb issue, in a variety of dimensions.  And the fact that "suburbs" are urbanizing and beginning to offer "urban" lifestyle choices--this started some time ago, beginning with Federal Realty's creation of Bethesda Row in Bethesda, Maryland more than 10 years ago.

There is the issue of the US and Canadian border, a line I used to cross a lot when I lived in Michigan, which borders Canada, and the US-Mexico border, which creates interesting planning issues in states like California, Texas, and Arizona.

And because I have been writing articles about culture based revitalization efforts in Europe and the European Union, I have become a lot more conscious of the "one market" and borderless region that Europe is for European citizens, but also the close proximity of the various nations, and how some metropolitan areas cross national borders, and how the EU is motivated to improve less well off areas is to reduce population migration from poor areas to comparatively wealthy areas.

Also, I attended a program a couple weeks ago at American University on arts-based revitalization in South America, and learned about the Miami Observatory on Communication and Creative Industries at the University of Miami, and how it raises border crossing issues as well.

So the fact that Toronto's Institute without Boundaries has released a call for "curriculum partners," for a new project, Connecting Divided Places, to investigate social, economic, environmental, and cultural divisions in cities throughout 2014 and 2015, seems very interesting to me.

If you have some ideas for projects, you should check it out.

Tomorrow the Maryland MARC "commuter" railroad starts regular weekend service on the Penn Line

This was a long time coming, and has been realized because Maryland increased its gasoline tax.  See the MTA Maryland press release, "MARC Begins Weekend Service December 2013."

There will be nine trains in each direction on Saturday, starting at 7:35am from Baltimore, and 9:05am from DC, and the last train leaves at 9:15pm from Baltimore and 10:35pm from DC. 

The Sunday schedule has six trains in each direction, with a bit too early of cessation of service in my opinion, as the last train leaves Baltimore at 5:30pm and Washington at 7:00pm.

-- Train Schedule, MARC Weekend Service

Note that as part of the service expansion, it would be nice to bring back the one additional late night train that ran Monday through Friday which cancelled a few years ago in the face of the recession-based budget cutbacks.  Before the change, the last train left Baltimore after 10pm, and the last train from DC left after 11pm.

In honor of the expansion, I suggest the following past entries:

1.  Most importantly, based on ideas outlined by Dan Malouff of BeyondDC, in 2006 I wrote a blog entry suggesting the creation of an integrated single passenger railroad system serving the Chesapeake region, which I call "RACER," which stands for Railroad Authority of the Chesapeake Region. 

-- A regional railroad passenger transportation vision for DC, MD, VA, WV and parts of PA
-- Regional transportation planning and fixed rail service
-- Why don't Maryland and West Virginia think about expanding MARC into a true regional system?


2.  This is an interesting one, about MARC service issues and ideas, from when I used to ride MARC to Baltimore when I worked in Baltimore County.

-- The cost of a MARC train and other (service) issues



3.  I really like how the railroad service in Southern California, Metrolink, does marketing.  That level of creativity is missing in the DC-Baltimore region.  I've written about this as part of other entries.

Also the Amtrak Cascades program run by the states of Washington and Oregon, Amtrak California, and the Downeaster service from Maine run by the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority do better marketing and program development than the typical states (and Amtrak).  Although Virginia is actually amongst best practice examples for state-initiated Amtrak expansion.

-- Amtrak service to Norfolk, Virginia launches Wednesday

4.  Speaking of long term implications for creating an integrated and more wide ranging passenger rail system in the region, these pieces discuss some of these issues as they relate to Union Station in DC and increasing its capacity, and improving connections between DC and Richmond, Virginia.

-- this discusses more than the title would indicate, Dual powered diesel-electric locomotive introduced into service at NJ Transit and implications for long range regional railroad planning in DC, Maryland, and Virginia
-- DC Union Station, Master Plan etc.
-- Union Station Master Plan, Washington DC
-- Master planning and DC's Union Station intermodal transportation center 

Flickr image by SoCal Metro.

Stadiums (and arenas) and cities versus suburbs: Atlanta

Image from Ballparks of America.

I guess I was distracted, because in the previous piece I forgot to discuss recent events in Atlanta, when earlier in November, the Atlanta Braves baseball team announced that they are leaving the city and moving to the suburbs, which is counter to the trend -- at least for baseball, basketball, and hockey -- of teams relocating to center city locations.

-- "Stunning news: Atlanta Braves moving to Cobb," Atlanta Journal-Constitution
-- "Atlanta Braves move to suburbs approved," CNN
-- "Like it or not, Braves' planned move understandable," Atlanta Journal-Constitution
-- "The Atlanta Braves' Move To Cobb County Is About Race, Not Transportation," International Business Times
-- "Your daily jolt: The threats on both sides of the Atlanta-Braves negotiations," Atlanta Journal-Constitution
-- "13 Ways Of Looking At The Atlanta Braves' Move To The Suburbs," Forbes Magazine

Note that the issue of sports teams and economic development is tricky.

1.  As discussed in the previous post, at the metropolitan scale, teams don't add to economic activity, merely substitute for other forms of entertainment.

2.  However, stadiums and arenas can contribute positively, at least in some ways, to urban revitalization at the micro scale of a sub-district of a community.

3.  But contribution is dependent on how well the facility integrates into existing urban fabric, if it extends urban fabric in positive ways, and if the scheduling of events is done in a manner that  allows for spending at nearby businesses that aren't directly affiliated with the team.  (For "early" events, people go to the facility directly from work, and buy food from the facility.  Although many sports arenas and stadiums are significantly upgrading their food offer, and incorporating more locally owned firms and brands.)

Like my point about Walmart not really being an "anchor" because their business model discourages customers from spending money anywhere else (except for prepared meals), increasingly sports events are scheduled in a manner that discourages patrons from consuming food elsewhere--at least before the event, but afterwards, except on weekends, people aren't likely to hang around and spend money anyway.

4.  The ability of teams to contribute at the micro-level to local economic activity is also dependent on how many events are held, the success of the team--even the Atlanta Braves, one of the most successful teams in baseball, only ranks 13th in attendance, whether or not the team successfully prevents the locality from assessing admissions taxes on tickets, and how much money the team is able to extract/extort from the locality for building the facility.

I would argue that baseball, which has 81 games in the regular season, and arena-based sports like basketball and hockey, especially if the two sports are offered in the same arena, have greater financial contribution than football--which has 11 games a year and the stadium typically sits empty the rest or the time--and to some extent soccer--soccer has more games than football and the stadiums cost a lot less than football--which should be positive, but soccer is still in development mode in the US compared to the other sports, so there is a limited track record for determining how well teams contribute economically at the sub-metropolitan scale.

5. The ability of teams to contribute positively to cities is in part a function of good transit systems, which allows patrons to get to events without having to drive, which allows more of the area around the facility to be developed, because of the reduced need for parking lots, and creates less traffic problems.

Football contributes less well on this dimension because of the tailgating phenomenon--people coming to the game hours before it starts, and partying-cooking int he parking lot.

The move by the Braves and its implications

The Atlanta metropolitan area is significantly sprawled and car dependent.  Heavy rail transit (MARTA) is not widely used.  While there are urban intensification and revitalization efforts in the city, such as at Atlantic Station and in the vicinity of Georgia Tech and Emory Universities, economic development trends there still favor the suburbs ("Atlanta Braves Prove New Realities In Stadium Decision," gondeee blog).  Organizations, even the main newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, continue to move out of the Downtown and the city.  (The newspaper is now located in suburban Dunwoody.)

Turner Field is seemingly close to Downtown, less than a couple miles away, but is not well connected to the urban fabric, being framed by two freeways and surrounded by parking lots, and is 3/4 mile from a MARTA station--not terribly far, but certainly not connected in the way that AT&T Park in San Francisco enjoys transit service--and is in a neighborhood that doesn't have the same fabric and place value of areas like Wrigleyville in Chicago or Fenway in Boston.

Photo by Mike Kepika of the San Francisco Chronicle. People leaving the streetcars to see a Giants game at PacBell Park in 2005.

Although plenty of other in-city stadiums, such as in Seattle, the Bronx or Queens boroughs in NYC, or even in DC--the area around that stadium is in the midst of redeveloping--don't offer experiences comparable to Wrigleyville or Fenway either.

Note how well San Francisco's AT&T Park integrates into the urban fabric.

SBC Park opened in 2000 as Pacific Bell Park. By far the most breathtaking of the 18 major league ballparks that have opened since 1989, it glories in its tight perch between a big city and a wide-open bay. SF Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.

The Atlanta Braves move follows the movement of other cultural institutions out of Atlanta proper ("Braves move seen as a blow to Atlanta and a signal of a new era," New York Times), and the failure of a transportation and transit sales tax initiative in 2012 (past blog entry, "Failure of the transit-roads sales tax measure in Metro Atlanta"), which also communicates that as far as Atlanta is concerned, and unlike many other US cities, pro-city trends are not positive.

The IBT article cited above asserts that the move is partly about racism.  Atlanta is an African-American majority city (and small in population, 2/3 the population of DC, which is small too) and the fan base for the Braves is mostly white and suburban.  The article points out that while the team claimed that lack of great transit was an issue in their move, they chose a new location with no existing transit connections and a dim likelihood for getting such service.  The Forbes.com piece makes similar points, focusing more on the spatial organization of racial segregation in the Atlanta region.

Other reportage makes the point that the Braves resented how much money--$1.2 Billion--that will go to a new Atlanta Falcons football stadium, and that they weren't offered a comparable package--in part because the city didn't have any more money, and because the city thought that the baseball team wouldn't move out of the city.

Although the reality is that the financing issues are complex.  The Falcons already play in a facility owned by a state agency while Turner Field is privately owned, and tax funding streams are already in place to support the publicly owned football stadium.

Cobb County is likely to provide about $250 million towards a stadium, when the City of Atlanta was likely to provide no more than $150 million

This is important to think about because if cities are going to continue to be extorted by teams in terms of subsidies, and there is no reason to think that this will change any time soon--Congress would have to step in and pass laws forbidding local funding, which will never happen--then they are going to have to make hard choices about which types of projects to fund, and which projects not to fund.

Probably it would have made more sense for Atlanta to significantly invest in baseball and in improving transit connections and the neighborhood around the stadium that could have upwards of 100-110 events each year, versus a football stadium that likely has fewer than 20 events annually.  But because of how the respective stadiums are owned, such decisions couldn't happen as quickly as the Braves wanted.

Interestingly, the NYT piece makes the point that the area of Cobb County where the stadium will be moving to is intensifying and becoming urban in ways that Atlanta isn't (not unlike how Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia and White Flint in Montgomery County, Maryland are changing their spatial organization to become more urban and less car dependent).

Other stadium and arena projects to watch

1.  Richmond.  Is still trying to build a new minor league baseball stadium in the Shockoe Bottom district downtown.  While I think that would be great, the area is constrained physically and a stadium there could pose tough transportation issues.  Plus, the current stadium is owned by the Richmond Metropolitan Agency, a multi-jurisdiction agency and it could be difficult to get the county members to sign off on such a change.

2.  Brooklyn.  The sky hasn't fallen with the opening of the Barclays Center.  It will be interesting to see how things develop there, especially by contrast to the areas around baseball stadiums elsewhere in NYC, which by contrast to similar districts in Chicago and Boston, aren't happening places.

3.  Plus, in Manhattan, the conditional use permit for Madison Square Garden was approved for a 10-year term, not indefinitely, which could lead to a plan for changes in the Penn Station area of the city.  With a new mayor not necessarily as focused on land use intensification, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

4.  Sacramento.  There is opposition to public funding of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, which had been on the cusp of being sold and moved to Seattle.  The team was sold and plans for a new Downtown arena and adjacent development are underway.

5.  Seattle.  One of the funders of a effort to put an anti-funding referendum on the Sacramento ballot was the person who aimed to buy the team and move it to Seattle, which has poisoned his relations with the NBA.  And Mayor Mike McGinn, who was supportive of the proposed move of the Kings to Seattle, was not re-elected.

6.  DC.  Plans to trade land in an off the books transaction to avoid bond funding limits to build a soccer stadium continue to move forward, although are behind schedule.

7.  In "Devil of a Stadium Plan" the Wall Street Journal reported on how Arizona State University in Tempe Arizona is able to trade land that it owns to developers in return for their building the university a new football stadium.

Stadiums and economic effects

I know this is beating a dead horse, but I came across some interesting articles over the past few days that make it worth bringing up.

First are a couple articles in the New York Times, "Giants and Jets, Super Bowl Hosts, Have Already Been Richly Rewarded," about the new MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and "For Vikings, New Stadium Meets Lingering Doubts" about the program to build a new football stadium in Minneapolis.  Both articles outline how much the localities are giving up.  The new MetLife Stadium in particular has greater revenue going to the teams than the split from the previous Meadowlands Stadium.

Second, what is new, as disclosed by the article about MetLife Stadium is more accurate reporting about the economic impact of events like the Super Bowl.  According to the article, the actual economic impact is about one-quarter that claimed by the NFL.  From the article:

The 2014 Super Bowl Host Committee, which was created by the Jets and the Giants, estimates that events in the week leading to the Super Bowl will generate about $550 million in economic activity in New York and New Jersey. 

But many sports economists are dubious, arguing that big sporting events tend not to produce anywhere near the kind of money organizers predict. 

“It’s pretty crazy to think that it has that kind of impact,” said Robert A. Baade, a sports economist at Lake Forest College and a co-author of the scholarly paper “Super Bowl or Super(Hyper)Bole; Assessing the Economic Impact of America's Premier Sporting Event.” 

The study, which looked at 30 Super Bowls, concluded that the N.F.L. routinely overestimated the benefits of the event, while underestimating the cost of putting it on. On average, the economic impact is “one-quarter or less of the magnitude of the most recent N.F.L. estimates,” the study said.

Third, I came across a journal article, "Stadium Architecture and Urban Development from the Perspective of Urban Economics," (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34:3, pages 629–646, September 2010) by German professors, analyzing the impact of architectural distinctiveness as a element of stadium-building, and as a possible factor that may generate extra-normal economic returns.  From the article:

A range of econometric studies suggest that neither major sports events nor related new stadium construction typically have any appreciable effect on income or employment at municipal scale.  ...

Sports administrators and politicians frequently claim that stadia and the sports events associated with them have beneficial effects on the economy. Surveys compiled before the construction or installation regularly demonstrate this. A case in point is the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany, for which various banks, organizations and universities tendered their expertise. Positive effects such as a long-term increase in the number of visitors, the establishment of new industries and so on are claimed for the period following the event, but in most cases the claims do not have the back-up of appropriate data. 

Beijing National Stadium (The "Bird's Nest") at night.  Wikipedia photo.

For distinctiveness to matter economically, the stadium would have to spur additional economic activity

I think it's an interesting point, but I would argue that architectural distinctiveness isn't necessarily going to contribute in extra-normally positive ways, outside of normal events. 

First, people mostly don't travel places to see stadiums.  Second, mostly people visit stadiums as part of their attending regularly scheduled team matches.  Third, most stadiums don't experience a great number of additional events that generate extra-ordinary economic returns, especially overnight tourist stays, etc.

This is pretty much the experience with stadiums and other facilities created for the Olympics as well as the World Cup--not during the event

Therefore, as iconic architecture as an element of what many refer to as "architectural tourism," even distinctive stadiums are not likely to be a long term contributor to scalar changes in local economic activity.

Stadiums do draw economic activity from other parts of a metropolitan area, so specific areas can benefit

That being said, stadiums and arenas can be successful in drawing economic activity from other parts of the region thereby benefiting specific sub-districts and jurisdictions at the expense of others, even though overall economic output measured at the metropolitan scale remains unchanged.

But crappy facilities probably aren't much of a benefit, as they don't spur additional demand to locate proximate to the facility.  Although a study of the FedEx field in Suburban Maryland did find a positive association on housing values ("How Does a New Sports Stadium Affect Housing Values? The Case of FedEx Field," Charles C. Tu.  Land Economics 81:3 (Aug., 2005), pp. 379-395" ).

Do architecturally distinctive stadiums last longer, thereby generating public benefit from lower subsidies overall?

And, where there might be a difference from "architecturally distinctive stadiums" is in how long they last.  Whereas the Giants Stadium was built in 1976 and lasted about 35 years, before it was replaced by MetLife Stadium, maybe distinctive stadiums will last significantly longer.  Although there may be a difference between sports, at least in the US, over the longevity of stadiums and arenas.

Baseball stadiums tend to last for quite awhile (well, not for stadiums built in the 1970s), while football stadiums and basketball and hockey arenas tend to be replaced more quickly.  However, this could be a function of when the buildings were likely to be constructed, with more recent buildings not being constructed for the long term, as opposed to baseball stadiums constructed earlier in the 20th century.

Presumably, a stadium that stays up longer costs less than more frequent rebuilding and replacement of stadiums, and this would be of great value to the public.

Facile reporting on Walmart

There are two elements to Walmart's product mix in their superstores:  (1) food/groceries; and (2) other goods (hard goods like appliances and soft goods like apparel). 

DC, except in a couple areas of the city, is not significantly under-stored in terms of supermarkets, even if there is that perception, although granted this has changed significantly in the past 5 years.  DC is under-stored in terms of the availability of hard and soft goods.

A couple years ago I did a bit of mapping of existing supermarkets in the Capitol Hill and Upper Northwest parts of the city ("Mapping retail trade areas for DC supermarkets"), many months before Walmart indicated that they were going to enter the DC market. 

Both areas have a great deal of grocery store coverage (Greater Capitol Hill has even more now that additional stores have opened on both the north and south sides of the district, with more on the way).

Upper Northwest (mapped at a 3 mile radius of existing large format supermarkets--note that since this map was made, the Safeway at Petworth was shut down and is being rebuilt)


Capitol Hill (mapped at a 3 mile radius of existing large format supermarkets--note that since this map was made, a Giant Supermarket has opened on H Street NE and a Harris Teeter will be opening next year in the Capitol Riverfront district, each will be followed by a Whole Foods)


I mention this because today's Post claims that these areas, both served by new Walmart stores which opened yesterday, are underserved by supermarkets. From "Wal-Mart opens first two district stores":

[Mayor] Gray ... attended the opening of the Georgia Avenue store, ticking off such benefits as reducing 'retail leakage' to the suburbs and the number of 'food deserts.' ....

Near the front of the Georgia Avenue store, shoppers loaded up on $2.50 pineapples and $1.98 cantaloupes in a neighborhood that's long relied on corner convenient [sic] stores, with their canned and frozen goods.

Note that the Georgia Avenue Walmart is located 1.7 miles from the once and future Safeway at 3830 Georgia Avenue NW in Petworth and 1/2 mile from the Safeway at 6500 Piney Branch Road NW.

This isn't a food desert, and people aren't reliant on convenience stores for grocery shopping.

It's not the end of the world, and it is correct to call attention to the greater availability of hard and soft goods as a result of Walmart's entry, but it is sloppy reporting to claim that either Upper Northwest or Greater Capitol Hill are food deserts.

New PIRG-Frontier Group report on continued decline in motor vehicle travel in Top 100 urbanized areas

Today, US PIRG and the Frontier Group released the report, Transportation in Transition:A Look at Changing Travel Patterns in America’s Biggest Cities, which finds that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the nation's 100 largest urbanized areas (an urbanized area is a spatial subset of a metropolitan area, focused in large part on the center city and adjacent areas).

VMT began declining before the recession, and has remained in decline as the economy has improved.  They present data which supports their argument that this is not related to economic or income decline, but the result of structural changes in the economy, behavior, and attitudes.

This is the result of a variety of reasons, ranging from the cost of gas to increased working at home, increased use of transit and other modes, and a decline in car ownership, as well as attitude changes amongst certain segments of the population. 

This report follows others by the organizations (such as A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America’s Future), which have been recommending consistently that local and national transportation policies ought to change in response to changing realities.

Report Recommendations

• Revisit transportation plans. Most transportation plans are based on decades-old recommendations and tend to focus on roadway expansion.  Plans should be re-visioned and more accepting of a new mobility paradigm.
• Reallocate resources to support other transportation modes.  The report starts out with a description of Madison, Wisconsin, and how after their decision to not allow freeways within the city, they invested in developing different forms of transportation infrastructure, including biking and transit, and the use of those modes has increased.
• Remove barriers to non-driving options.  Planning and zoning requirements typically preference automobility.  Although changing these requirements in the face of an automobility dominant planning paradigm and resident beliefs is very difficult.  (Here, I think the report could have been stronger in discussing land use and how urban form shapes mobility choices.)
• Enable innovative travel tools and services. 
• Get better data and make it available.  1/4 of the jurisdictions covered in the report could not provide comparable data, because of antiquated collection methods and/or low priority for data collection.  Note that I think this is an excellent point.  Part of the acrimony in DC over proposed changes to parking provision in new construction has to do with failures of the city planning agencies to collect and present actionable data on parking inventory and how mobility use varies by housing type and proximity to transit.

My reactions

1.  Yes, Transportation Departments have to change.  How we do that in the context of road-dominated paradigms is a challenge.  I am working on what I call my unified theory on how to change transportation planning so that it focuses on achieving high quality mobility and placemaking and quality of life outcomes simultaneously.  But the challenge then is to get transportation agencies to take up the concept.

I thought there was opportunity in one of the states in the area, but now I am not so sure.  And it's not even clear that DC, a fully urbanized "state", even has a sustainability first transportation agenda.  Despite the claims of the DC Sustainability Plan, as Dr. Gridlock in the Washington Post recently pointed out, DDOT's biggest projects are motor vehicle related.

2.  Land use and transportation planning needs to be integrated,  Mostly it isn't.  Probably my most succinct writing about why an integrated planning paradigm is necessary was presented in this 2006 entry, "Comments on Proposed EYA Development at Takoma Metro Station."

3.  Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the agencies tasked by federal law to do transportation planning at the metropolitan scale, for the most part aren't visionary, and don't challenge automobile-centric planning.  There are exceptions, such as MPOs in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia region, Portland, Greater Seattle, and others. (The MPOs serving the DC and Baltimore areas are not exceptional supporters or promoters of sustainable mobility.)

4.  Can scenario planning help to change people's sense of responsibility for the deleterious impact of status quo transportation and land use policies?

Notions Capital shares with us a very interesting article from Public Roads, the publication of the Federal Highway Administration, on scenario planning by the MPO in Southwestern Pennsylvania ("Predicting the Future"). 

Right: scenarios used in planning by the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission MPO.

Mostly people are happy with the status quo and work diligently to maintain it.  Scenarios presented in the FHWA publication Integrating Land Use Issues into Transportation Planning: Scenario Planning make it easier to see the consequences of "staying the course," about which most people seem to be either unconscious or uncaring.

The question is, if the results of the different scenarios presented, and the consequences assessed, will people take responsibility and support changes in policy and practice?

From the Public Roads article:

By using scenario planning software, SPC presented approximately 40 variables as performance indicators for each of the chosen scenarios and showed how those variables would differ depending on the scenario. Working with all 40 variables could become confusing, so the facilitators again gave the partners in the planning process the opportunity to choose which variables were most important to them. The participants selected the following six variables:

• Density of development
• Amount of land developed
• Households close to highway interchanges
• Households close to transit stops
• Regional travel as depicted by regional daily vehicle miles traveled
• Cost for basic infrastructure

 At least with such scenarios, the consequences of staying the course are measurable.  Although the problem with scenario planning is that it is only as good as the scope that the agency outlines--for example in my opinion, the scenarios used in the current DC transportation planning process MoveDC aren't very challenging at all, and don't provide much of an impetus for motor vehicle proponents to consider rethinking their perspectives.

5.  Transportation Demand Management needs to be integrated purposefully with sustainable mobility services.  Typically, such programs are not well integrated into transit service specifically.  As a result, it takes many years, if ever, to fully reap the benefits of the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars invested in such systems.  This needs to change.  (More on this later in the week.)

Film: Human Scale, featuring Jan Gehl

From email:

The IDB Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative and the IDB Cultural Center in the Office of External Relations present:

The Human Scale - Bringing Cities to Life
2012 - 83 mins - Denmark - Color - English - Written and Directed by Andreas M. Dalsgaard)

Wednesday December 11, 2013 
6:30 p.m.
Inter American Development Bank
Enrique V. Iglesias Auditorium
1330 New York Avenue, Washington DC
Free

According to revolutionary Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, if we are to make cities sustainable we must re-imagine the very foundations of urban planning. Gehl and his team meticulously study the in-between spaces of urban life, the places where people meet, interact, live, and behave. How do the spaces that surround us enhance or disturb our interactions with others?

Introduced by Jeff Risom, Partner, Gehl Architects, Copenhagen. The film will be followed by a panel discussion on cities designed for people.

-------

In the interim, we can read Gehl's book Cities for People published by Island Press.

Walmart continued

I was up on Georgia Avenue so I poked around the Walmart.  While workers are still dealing with the outside of the store, so it seemingly appears unfinished, clearly the inside is ready to go.

Walmart opens two DC stores tomorrow

I try to save money when I shop for food.  It means that I buy some groceries at deep discounter Aldi, go to ethnic supermarkets like Mexican Fruit in the Union Market District and Pan-Am International Market in Columbia Heights, clip coupons and avidly scan the weekly supermarket circulars, and I  hesitate when buying food at farmers markets in DC--at least certain markets--because the prices can be significantly higher compared to smart grocery shopping.

Walmart on Georgia Avenue NW in Washington, DC.  Under construction on November 25th, 2013.

So the fact that Walmart is opening in DC tomorrow--they being the source of "everyday low pricing" according to their advertising--ought to be something I'm looking forward to.

I'm not, for various reasons (see the report I co-authored about the Georgia Avenue location here, ANC4B Large Tract Review Report on Walmart, 5/2011).  Also see the past blog entry, "Piling on City Council for Walmart" and the WBJ op-ed, "Temper Walmart Glee with Planning."

The report for our neighborhood's "advisory commission" is mostly focused on urban design--how the building fits within its context--and transportation issues raised by the project.

For the most part, the report didn't focus on whether or not Walmart is "appropriate" or not as a company.  Unfortunately, many people focus on that question, the discussion gets very heated--and cannot ever be resolved because there is no "illegality" concerning their business model--and in my opinion the company and the developers that work for them use this "noise" to avoid dealing with other more substantive problems.  That was definitely the case in DC.

I do regret that the report didn't address customer service questions and to some extent labor treatment issues.

So on the eve of Walmart opening their first two stores in DC, here's some stuff to think about.  Some of which has already been written up in:

- Lessons from Walmart's foray into Washington, DC
- DC pols are so easy to buy: Walmart edition
- I hope for Aspen Hills' sake that Montgomery County is smart enough to learn from DC's planning errors with regard to Walmart's entry
- More research on the economic impact of Walmart
 
Urban design issues.  The biggest misconception about Walmart's new focus on "city" locations is that their entry necessarily means "urban-appropriate" and/or mixed use development choices.  The experience in DC is that Walmart is agnostic about "urban design" and mixed use questions.  If a developer comes to them with a project that is urban and mixed use, and it is in a location that they want to be in, they will say yes.  But at the same time, if a developer comes to them with a site they are interested in, but a project that isn't particularly urban-appropriate, they are fine with that too.

The new mixed use building, including a Walmart, at 1st and New Jersey Avenue NW.

So in DC, two of the five projects that Walmart is involved in are definitely urban-mixed use projects, where the store is on the ground floor or second story of a multistory mixed use development--at New Jersey Avenue NW, which is one of the stores opening tomorrow, and at Fort Totten, a couple blocks from a Metro Station, to be located on Riggs Road NE.  The other stores are not.

Two are part of site plans that have other elements, so could be considered to be "horizontal" mixed use.  But the Georgia Avenue store, opening tomorrow, was designed to not take advantage of the ability to develop vertically.  Sure it will have underground parking and a zero foot setback from the sidewalk, but that's as urban as it gets.  Which is a great disappointment.

Similarly, in Baltimore, a proposal for a Walmart "anchored" project is still generating a great deal of opposition, in large part to the suburban-ness of the site plan and design.  See "Contentious Walmart plan pits Remington groups against each other" from the Baltimore Business Journal.

Interestingly, the proposed design of the Baltimore store appears to be very similar to the DC Georgia Avenue store.  The big difference is that in Baltimore, it will be fronted by a parking lot, while in DC the parking is underground and the building is placed at the sidewalk.





Rendering of the Georgia Avenue DC Walmart


The lesson to other cities is to take nothing for granted about urban design when it comes to Walmart or other big box stores.

Transportation issues.  I do regret that DC did not try to get Walmart to develop a delivery system.  Knowing that you can get your purchases delivered means that you don't feel obligated to drive to the store, which can reduce motor vehicle trips.  The company is doing some transportation demand management measures, installing indoor bike parking, and paying for a bike sharing station at the Georgia Avenue store (and will be for the Fort Totten store, I don't know concerning the New Jersey Avenue store, which didn't require special city planning approvals).

The city could have also done other more important roadway reconfiguration projects for the Georgia Avenue store but ignored the need.

Employee treatment/labor issues/wages.  I didn't oppose the company coming into the city but I am going to be very specific about not shopping there, because I don't think the company treats "average" employees very well.

The Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton is collecting food for employees who can't afford Thanksgiving dinner. The company said this is proof that employees look out for one another. The group of employees who have held national strikes against the world's largest retailer says the food drive is proof Walmart doesn't pay associates enough to survive. The Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, is holding strikes against the chain at stores in Dayton and Cincinnati on Monday, Nov. 18. (courtesy of OUR Walmart)

I wrote about the employee thing in the piece cited above in the summer but it gets re-emphasized by a recent story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Is Walmart's request of associates to help provide Thanksgiving dinner for co-workers proof of low wages? " where workers at one Walmart store are organizing a holiday donation program--for other employees who make very little money.

Product access and selection.  In many retail categories other than food, there just aren't many competitors anymore.  There are traditional department stores, but very few are left generally or in cities.  General merchandise stores are limited too: in the face of competition Kmart and Sears are reeling, while Target manages to succeed.  Plus you have Kohls selling apparel, and in small towns in the midwest, Shopko.  And then you have other category killer brands like Bed, Bath and Beyond or Best Buy or Staples in office supplies, etc.

You just don't have many choices.

Note that Kroger has some stores for their name stores and banners that include soft good sales in a "Marketplace" format.   Plus there is their Fred Meyer division which does this.  And the unaffiliated Meijer Company in the Midwest and HEB in Texas also.  Otherwise, there aren't traditional competitors left.  Increasingly, Walmart is the only "choice" that's available.  At least communities where Kroger and Meijer are active have more choice than much of the rest of the country.

Because DC is understored in many retail categories, especially home goods and apparel, having Walmart will provide more access to a great number of product categories without necessarily impinging on other retailers--at least those located in the city.  Presumably, the Walmart stores in the city will reduce the number of trips in-city residents make to out-of-the-city retailers.  This would reduce trips and increase local sales tax revenues.

Cost savings for consumers.  As far as saving money goes, if you shop smart at grocery stores (e.g., buy certain items when they are on sale) you pay about the same amount as Walmart, and that doesn't take into account (1) deep discount stores like Aldi; (2) ethnic stores; and (3) the competitive price reaction by supermarkets--e.g., Safeway has lowered some prices, like cilantro, to the same price as the ethnic stores, in advance of Walmart's opening.

Greenwashing.  A couple of years ago, I wrote about how Walmart makes their decisions on the basis of business considerations.  This was in response to people saying "Walmart won't make healthy food despite their affiliation with Michelle Obama because the company is bad."

I responded, no, Walmart makes decisions that favor their business, and will sell healthy food for the political and other benefits the same way they treat employees badly to cut down on labor costs--it will make them more money.

The same goes for environmental practices.  They will engage in better practices to the extent that it saves the company money and generates positive publicity.  Hey, that's the way of business.

... even though, a few weeks ago, the Institute for Local Self Reliance released a report, Walmart’s Assault on the Climate: The Truth Behind One of the Biggest Climate Polluters and Slickest Greenwashers in America, about what they call "greenwashing, and "Walmart’s rapidly expanding climate pollution."  Additionally, they criticize the Environmental Defense Fund for taking a lot of money from foundations affiliated with the company ("EDF Sells Green Cred to Walmart for the Low, Low Price of $66 Million," Grist Magazine).

Impact on traditional commercial districts.  The issue of the impact of Walmart on urban markets is tricky, because urban markets are traditionally understored, so they are lacking retail, whereas by comparison suburbs are over-stored. This is definitely the case in DC. So if a Walmart opens in DC, probably there will be less negative impact compared to a store opening in a location with a lot more retail competition. 

However, I have also written about how Walmart's presence changes the mix of stores in a commercial district, from locally owned to chains.  That is what has happened in Chicago's Austin neighborhood, even if the local Alderman doesn't notice ("Chicago politician tells Manhattan Beep Scott Stringer to welcome Walmart," New York Daily News).

Plus, Walmart's business model isn't designed to support other retailers, it's to capture as much as 100% of a customer's discretionary spending on retail.  That leaves nothing for other retailers. 

So it's a misnomer to call a Walmart store "an anchor," because by definition an anchor supports other stores and commercial districts more generally, by sharing customers.  Walmart has no intention of doing that.

So cities shouldn't be aiming to attract a company like this to their commercial districts.  Or at least there should be a commitment to the development and execution of a program to mitigate the expected negative effects.

Bad customer service.  Walmart sales at the level of individual stores continues to drop.  This is a function of two things; (1) a reliance on lower income consumers, who continue to have less money to spend since the US remains in recession and (2) cut backs in labor and the array of products carried, both measures to cut costs, which ends up leading to a great deal of out-of-stocks and other inventory problems (see "Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco" from Bloomberg) which comes back to the customer in terms of "bad service."

More generally, the company doesn't get rated highly for customer service anyway.  See "Who's right about Wal-Mart's customer satisfaction?" from MSN, "Which Retailers Have the Most Satisfied Customers?" from Time Magazine, and "Consumer Reports customer service survey: Walmart rated the worst" from the Chicago Tribune.

Is this a company towards which cities should be focusing their business recruitment efforts?

Photo: J. Emilio Flores for the New York Times.  Protest at a Walmart in Los Angeles, on Friday November 29th, 2013.

From the NYT article "Exhausted Shoppers Head Home, Replaced by the Next Wave":

The shopping season also was the occasion for protests by labor groups and some Walmart workers at stores across the country in an effort to rally support for higher wages, with some demonstrators conducting civil disobedience sit-ins in Chicago, Los Angeles, Alexandria, Va., and several other cities. Our Walmart, a union-backed group, said more than 110 people had been arrested at the demonstrations.

Helsinki and creative industries

The piece on Helsinki, "Helsinki as an example of creative industries driving urban revitalization programs," is up at the Europe in Baltimore project website.  I am writing articles for the website about culture district initiatives in nine different European cities.  (And I am learning so much!) 

The idea is that Baltimore has the opportunity to learn from European culture district initiatives and apply them to the city's three arts districts (Station North, Highlandtown, Bromo Arts District on the westside), although I think the lessons are applicable to other revitalization initiatives elsewhere in the city also.

There are many fascinating elements to urban revitalization policy in Helsinki. There, many of their opportunities are waterfront-related as maritime industry has relocated out of the city.

But because of the country's strong design industries including consumer products by companies like Marimekko and industrial products by KONE and Nokia, serendipitously the city has been able to marry creative industry development with their revitalization initiatives, so that their culture-based initiatives aren't strictly leisure- and tourist-focused.  This is a big contrast to most of the culture-district revitalization initiatives present elsewhere.

At the same time, observationally, they didn't develop this approach from the outset, in part it  emanated from innovative opportunities that developed out of circumstances, and the city, to its credit, was willing to consider and embrace the opportunities as presented, flesh them out with master plans, and created city-owned corporations to carry out the programs.

Wikipedia photo of the Suvilahti complex.
Interestingly, based on the success of the Cable Factory, Helsinki is using the same model in the Sörnäinen district north of Downtown–developing a large creative arts incubator out of an otherwise hard to repurpose industrial complex–through the repurposing of a energy utility complex comprised of nine buildings and two large gasometers (tanks that stored natural gas) into the Suvilahti arts center.

An element of the piece is about how Helsinki was the World Design Capital in 2012, and that this kind of program introduces a revitalization initiative that operates on a global scale, while the other programs considered in article series are either at the scale of the European Union, the nation, or regional.

But the city hasn't limited its willingness to embrace innovation to culture.  They have a lot of other interesting things going on that weren't fully germane to the piece.

1.  An international competition to design a new central library, and their programs to ensure that the library is relevant in a digital future.

2.  Forum Virium Helsinki, a public-private partnership but a unit of the Helsinki government, which develops new digital services in cooperation with companies, the City, and other public sector organizations.  Products are developed and tested with Helsinki residents.  The aim is to create better services and new business, plus to open up contacts for international markets.

+ Living Labs/Helsinki Virtual Village, one of the first 100% broadband wired neighborhoods in the world.

3.  Helsinki’s Restaurant Day, a municipally-sanctioned challenge to government regulation, is a day (now four weekends annually) where anyone can set up a “restaurant” and sell food to the public.  Restaurants can be set up on a park bench, run out of a car, in a house or apartment, or other more traditional offerings.  Restaurant Day started in Helsinki, but now takes place in more than 30 countries.

4.  Helsinki's municipal research office, Helsinki Urban Facts.  They do a great deal of research and publish a four times/year journal on Helsinki issues.  One issue each year is published in English.  This type of self-critical review and innovation unit is for the most part, unprecedented at the level of a municipality, although in the US, some states have equivalent operations such as the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington.

5.  Kulttuurisauna is a public sauna, located on the waterfront in the Kallio neighborhood, created by the NOW Architecture group (“Conversation with Nene Tsuboi & Tuomas Toivonen (Kulttuurisauna),” Brickstarter), as a way to renew Helsinki’s public sauna culture.

Planning is key

I am struck by the importance of visionary master planning and the creation of entities to carry it out.

Whenever I talk about the value of planning, I get a lot of pushback.  Most people think of planning as a top down enterprise, and I have pointed out that traditional planning tends to be pretty static, and that there needs to be implementation built into the planning system (my oppositional method I call "action planning").

But then when I see articles like this, "Franklin School is ideal space for art museum," where Washington Post art critic Philip Kennecott makes an interesting proposal, that the Franklin School building on Franklin Square downtown should become a contemporary art gallery, it makes me think about the point I make all the time, that an RFP isn't a plan.

With RFPs you're stuck with what other people suggest.  That wouldn't be so bad if you could expect great ideas and programs to be generated always by the profit motive.  But you can't.  And that's what's wrong with a lot of the city's efforts in "economic development" using city-controlled land and property.

Lacking a master planning process for arts and culture, let alone visionary planning, the likelihood of Kennicott's idea coming to fruition is remote.

I will write about this more later in the week.  And a piece on Bilbao, which is about this point too, on a much bigger scale, is the next article in the Europe in Baltimore series.

One element typically ignored in housing policy: helping low income families stay in their homes via repair assistance

Rebuilding Together is a national organization, dedicated to providing housing improvement assistance ("critical repairs and renovations") to low income households, via more than 150 locally based programs scattered around the US.

The organization terms April as "National Rebuilding Month" (the organization used to be called "Christmas in April"), and encourages affiliates to focus their service efforts then, culminating in "National Rebuilding Day," held on the last Saturday in April. 

Local affiliates are a mix of either all-volunteer organizations or some with paid staff.  Funds may be a mix of government grants and locally raised donations, depending on the group.  Affiliates with paid staff tend to undertake more projects and do projects throughout the year, rather than just in April.

Last year, collectively they repaired 10,400 houses with the involvement of 100,000 volunteers for an equivalent value of $90 million of output.

In addition to the national conference, RT national also organizes some "national" events. For example, over Martin Luther King Jr. Day Weekend in January 2014 (January 18th-20th), RT affiliates from around the country will join together in working on a slew of projects in the Hazelwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

At the national conference, held recently in DC, RT released a fabulous overview document, a kind of 25-year retrospective, called Meeting Tomorrow's Housing Challenges.

The document is superb, and brings together a lot of academic research on housing practice and policy into one document.

One of the conference presenters was Kermit Baker of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.  He runs their Remodeling Futures Project, which collects data and makes policy recommendations about the housing remodeling industry.

Right: house in the Trinidad neighborhood of DC showing severely deteriorated roof conditions.

His presentation was fascinating in how it contrasted overall housing remodeling statistics with statistics for lower income households.

Most households do one major remodeling project annually, targeting one key element of the house, either a repair or maintenance, or the creation of a new feature.  Annually, the average household spends $2,400 on improvements and $700 on repairs.

Their research finds that a disabled household spends 10% less than the average, senior households 20% less, minority households 30% less, households with houses under $100,00 in value 50% less, and households with under $20,000 annual income spend 50% less.

Households with all of these characteristics spend an average of $500 year on repairs and improvements, less than one-sixth of the national average, and a majority of these households spend no money at all.

These are the kinds of households that are helped by Rebuilding Together. But the demand is much greater than they are able to address.

And it is growing.

1.  Income inequality is increasing and poorer households have a disproportionate need for repairs, especially because the problems of deferred repairs get worse over time.

2.  The housing stock is aging, and older houses require more repair, not less.

3.  The population is aging and older households are the fastest growing segment of the housing market.  Plus as people are living longer, one-half of households 75 years of age and older have disability and access issues.

Clearly, local housing policies need to address these issues more than they do, in addition to how some communities, having more housing than the current demand will support, are demolishing housing stock (Planetizen webpage on shrinking cities), and how programs exist to support the rehabilitation of existing multiunit housing:

-- Multifamily Housing Preservation, US Department of Housing and Urban Development
-- past blog entry, "Deeper thinking/programming on weak residential housing markets is required: DC example, Anacostia"

I also see this as the source of some of the tension and resentment concerning what many people call gentrification.

When I saw the documentary "Flag Wars," about the Olde Towne East neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, how it experienced housing in-migration into a traditionally African-American neighborhood by gay households with the economic means to restore very large and often dilapidated properties, I was struck by the thought that a lot of the resentment had to do with the fact that many of the existing households lacked the means to properly address their repair issues, and in fact were overwhelmed.

People needed help and lacked the money to take on daunting projects.  Sicking code inspectors on them wasn't helping them.

I thought a lot of the resentment could have been addressed through a neighborhood-city project comparable to what Rebuilding Together does.

Holiday gift ideas: part one, memberships and donations

Out of the string of "Black Friday," "Small Business Saturday," and "Cyber Monday," holiday shopping promotions. there is also an effort to develop "Giving Tuesday," as a national day of giving as a focused element of the holiday shopping and giving season--many nonprofits ask donors to give before the end of the year, in part to be able to take advantage of possible tax deductions.

Many people plan to give such gifts anyway, but Giving Tuesday puts a focus on it and aims to get more people thinking about it and donating.

So this is a good time to start thinking about joining groups and giving donations as part of your holiday shopping.

Here are some ideas, but there are other idea sources as well, such as last week's City Paper's Annual Guide to Holiday Do-Goodery.

1.  Membership to a national (advocacy type) organization such as Rails to Trails Conservancy, League of American Bicyclists, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, GreenAmerica, or the National Gardening Association.

2.  Membership to a state advocacy organization such as Preservation Maryland or Futurewise, the state smart growth advocacy group in Washington, the Virginia Bicycling Federation or BikeMaryland.

Or a multi-state/regional group like the Sightline Institute or Ecotrust, both based in the Pacific Northwest, or the Civil War Trust.

3.  Membership to a regional, county, or city preservation, mobility, or land use advocacy organization such as DC Preservation League, the Landmark Society of Western New York, Cleveland Restoration Society, Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, Transportation Alternatives of New York City, SPUR--San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, Gotham Gazette, Chicago Reporter, Municipal Arts Society of New York, Regional Plan Association (New York), WalkBoston, Washington Area Bicyclists Association, etc.

In the DC area we have the Coalition for Smarter Growth.  In Richmond, there is the Partnership for Smarter Growth.

4. Membership in a local history museum, including  state railroad museums and house museums, such as the Detroit Historical Society, Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, the New-York Historical Society or the Museum of the City of New York, the Valentine History Center in Richmond or a regional trolley or transit museum like the NYC Transit Museum, the Baltimore Trolley Museum, or the National Capital Trolley Museum or a local nonprofit cinema such as the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, the Tampa Theatre, or the Avalon Theater in DC, etc.

The Market Street Railway organization in San Francisco publishes an awesome newsletter for members...

And it turns out there is a great friends organization associated with the Gettysburg National Battlefield Park, Friends of the Gettysburg/Gettysburg Foundation.

5.  Membership in local arts museums.  They get a lot of members already, but still.

6.  Membership to a neighborhood organization such as a friends group for a local library or park, a neighborhood preservation group such as the Capitol Hill Restoration Society or Historic Takoma, a friends group for your community library, etc.

7.  Membership in a citywide friends group for parks or libraries.  I am truly jealous of Atlanta's Park Pride park support organization.  Of course, there are local groups too.  Related parks groups in our area include the Anacostia Watershed Society and Potomac Riverkeeper or trails organizations like Catonsville Rails to Trails outside of Baltimore.

8. Membership in other types of local groups doing good things, such as a building materials resale organization like Community Forklift in Prince George's County Maryland or Loading Dock in Baltimore, your local Habitat for Humanity or Rebuilding Together housing development and repair organization, etc. The BRIC arts and media group in Brooklyn is awesome...

9.  Membership in your local public television station, public radio station, or community media outlet.  Despite all their on-air fundraising campaigns which can be bothersome, they do need money, and it's total b.s. that "the Internet" and "cable and satellite television" substitute for these kinds of media resources.  Hell, most of the shows on "History Channel" and "Arts & Entertainment Channel" are reality shows that don't have much history.  We need PBS and local affiliates, public radio, including low power community media, like Radio CPR in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of DC.

A science fiction museum for DC?

According to the Washington City Paper, in "Museum of Science Fiction Planned for D.C.," a group is attempting to create a museum on science fiction in the city, starting with a crowdfunding initiative.

I have to say it reminds me of other initiatives that I've heard about:

- a black baseball museum for the H Street neighborhood that never went anywhere;
- the long delayed Armenian Genocide Museum of America ("Battle over Armenian genocide museum in DC gets nasty," McClatchy Newspapers; "D.C. buildings linked to Armenian Genocide museum to be razed," Washington Business Journal)
- or was involved in (an attempt to create a Capitol Fire Museum devoted to the history of firefighting efforts in the ctiy).


The proposed location of the Armenian Genocide Museum of America has been vacant for close to two decades.  Image of the National Bank of Washington headquarters by wallyg, on Flickr.

DC is a tough place for museums that have to charge an admissions fee.

First, people mostly come to DC to visit the national museums.  They come here to consume the "national story"/"American Memory" and American mythology.

Second, the national museums and monuments don't charge an admissions fee.  So many of the museums that do have to charge a fee, because they are not funded for the most part by the federal government, have a real problem "making it."

For example, the longstanding issues surrounding the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which have been discussed here as have the failures of the no longer extant City Museum.  I haven't discussed the problems of the seemingly well-funded Newseum ("Newseum in DC makes changes as funding falls short"), focused on the news media, which has had a hard time positioning itself in the museum milieu.

Third, people don't usually budget additional time to visit other institutions outside of the typical "national" attractions that are present in DC and Northern Virginia (White House, US Capitol, Supreme Court, National Mall and the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and Veterans Memorial, Smithsonian Institutions and the National Gallery of Art, Mount Vernon--George Washington's plantation, Arlington Cemetery, maybe the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, + the Alexandria and/or Georgetown commercial districts).

This is why the general cultural tourism rule of thumb that "people who are cultural tourists spend more time and money when visiting other places" isn't fully applicable to the local offer within the city that exists outside of the national narrative.

Fourth, so if you're going to do a "museum" in the city, it probably helps to have a topic that leverages the existing/dominant narrative and tourist stream.  The International Spy Museum and the National Museum of Crime and Punishment are both privately owned museums that leverage elements of the national story--plus their ability to garner audiences is probably helped by the fact that one of DC's biggest attractions, a tour of the FBI headquarters, hasn't been offered since 2002, and the CIA doesn't give tours.

A museum on music not a part of the Smithsonian failed ("Music museum to open in DC," Billboard Magazine; "Plans for national music museum come to a coda," Washington Business Journal).  I don't think the Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum does particularly well.  Even the failure of the Planet Hollywood DC location (it might have succeeded if all of its memorabilia was national narrative focused) is relevant.  I just don't see Science Fiction as having enough connection to the DC/Washington National cultural narrative enough to be able to succeed.   

Fifth, interestingly, the US Holocaust Museum is successful and is independent, in part perhaps because it has a great location adjacent to the National Mall.  It would be interesting to study its success as a leveragable lesson.

Sixth, all the more reason to have a comprehensive and integrated cultural master plan for the city.

------
I forgot to mention that it might behoove DC's cultural institutions that charge admissions:  Corcoran Gallery of Art; International Spy Museum; Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum; National Museum of Crime and Punishment; Newseum, Philips Collection; plus the boat ride people; to join in on and create a combined promotion comparable to the City Pass that is marketed in many other cities, such as NY, Philadelphia or San Francisco.

SF's City Pass includes a transit pass good for a week (worth $28) and admission to the California Academy of Sciences; the Blue & Gold Fleet Bay Cruise; a choice of the Aquarium of the Bay or the Monterey Bay Aquarium; and a choice of the Exploratorium or the de Young Museum.

To make a DC pass worthwhile, it would need to fold in a transit pass. I don't know how to do that. In SF, you can just show the pass to the bus driver or station attendant. Station attendants aren't always in the booth at Metrorail stations.

An old letter of mine in the City Paper

I was searching for something else and found this from 2004. Think of this as a historical viewpoint of the opportunity to develop "an arts district" in the H Street NE neighborhood. I'd call it a nightlife district, but not really an arts district.


Heard on the Street
By Richard Layman • September 10, 2004

Chris Shott (Show & Tell, 8/27) and I probably have a lot in common. We’re card-carrying members of the creative class. We’re smartasses. We have high expectations, and we share the belief that many D.C. government initiatives, including the U Street arts zoning overlay, don’t set very high expectations. Where Shott and I probably disagree is about possibilities, creating great visions, and committing to work to achieve such visions.

Culturally driven urban revitalization is hardly a new phenomenon, even in D.C. We can see it especially along the 7th Street NW corridor from Pennsylvania Avenue past New York Avenue, at establishments such as Olsson’s, the Zenith Gallery, and the Shakespeare Theatre’s Lansburgh Theatre; in attractive neon signs in restaurant windows such as Andale’s and Jaleo’s; up the street to the latest incarnation at Ruppert’s; and in the artist studios in back alleys and loft buildings, many of which are now being lost to the real-estate boom and 21st-century urban clearance.

Even if the city government doesn’t try very hard to achieve best practices in the zoning aspects of cultural development, there’s nothing to prevent the Greater H Street neighborhood from setting high expectations and looking to other models and best practices, most often in other cities, for guidance in creating, setting, and implementing our own agenda.

Programs such as the Creative Alliance @ the Patterson in the Highlandtown Arts District and the wide variety of programs in the Station North Arts District, both in Baltimore; the variety of initiatives and working studios in the Penn Avenue Arts District in Pittsburgh; and the Via Colori street-chalking festival in the Short North Arts District in Columbus, Ohio, provide examples of how an arts district can be far more inventive with storefront spaces than the pharmacies, banks, and auto-parts stores that are allowed under D.C.’s pretty weak zoning overlay. Incentives are key. Baltimore provides a best-practice example with property and other tax-incentive programs that are specifically targeted to arts-related businesses and activities. Not to mention Artscape, a great model for an H Street Arts and Humanities Festival.

As everyone knows, real-estate prices, even in the H Street neighborhood, are pricing out artists. One way to address this problem, and to have greater impact besides, is to expand the idea of an arts district into the neighborhood beyond the commercial corridor. A proposed Negro Leagues Baseball Museum on the 900 block of 12th Street NE is in keeping with this idea. Properties along Florida Avenue such as Jimmy’s Tire provide great opportunities for arts-oriented reuses. So do properties in Trinidad, which for the time being are still cheaper than houses in the neighborhood to the south that more and more real estate agents are branding “SoFlo.” (I, for one, don’t favor that moniker.)

Another way to extend the impact of an arts district, and to leverage the presence of the Language Doctors translation service already present on H Street, is to work to improve the public schools in our greater neighborhood by creating a “cluster schools”–type initiative centered on visual, performing, and media arts, design, and language. This proposal would be comparable to but different from the extant Capitol Hill Cluster Schools or the Spanish-language program at Oyster School. Other neighborhood cultural resources that can contribute to this effort include our neighbor Gallaudet University and the possibility of an expanded community library, which could take on an arts-and-culture orientation.

The idea would be to include Ludlow-Taylor, Wilson, Miner, Gibbs, Wheatley, maybe Webb and Maury, and so forth in this initiative. Wilson Elementary already has a well-regarded French program, and the idea would be to expand this concept to the other schools with languages such as Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, German, and more. This could have the happy benefit of adding a more international dimension to the greater neighborhood. (This is in keeping with the history of the neighborhood, which in its first 75 years mixed African-Americans, Irish, British, Scots, Italians, Germans, Russians, Greeks, and a smattering of Chinese and Japanese.)

Another aspect of the arts district concerns the streetscape, façade improvements, and other aspects of the built environment. First, complementing its successful Expressive Signs Project, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities is working out a project for artistic redesigns of H Street bus shelters. Second, H Street Main Street has applied to the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development’s funding programs for H Street façade improvements. Awardees have not yet been announced, but we have our fingers crossed. Third, the D.C. Department of Transportation has planned $30 million of streetscape improvements, with construction anticipated to start sometime in 2006.

Add to this mix the probability of a streetcar/light-rail line connecting all of H Street to Union Station, and then to downtown and Georgetown, which will make getting to H Street much easier for people from throughout the region—giving them one less excuse to skip out on a great performance at the H Street Playhouse or the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

It’s not a stretch to take a chance on the H Street Arts and Humanities Festival. It is an opportunity to shape how people respond to and participate in the arts, both citywide and at the neighborhood level. Check out www.hstreetdc.com/festival if you want to learn more. And I hope that the Washington City Paper will consider taking out a booth.

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Interestingly with the last paragraph, that has definitely happened...

Saturday Nov. 30: Small Business Saturday

Over the past few years, American Express, in the past with the American Independent Business Alliance and other organizations, this year, the National Federation of Independent Business, has been working to position the first Saturday after Thanksgiving "Small Business Saturday" as a shop local event for post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping. 

The Friday after Thanksgiving is known as "Black Friday," for its orgiastic shopping excess in terms of the number of shoppers, special blowout pricing on various items, people lining up hours before the store opens to be able to get exclusive deals, occasional deaths from shopper stampedes, etc.

Small Business Saturday is designed as a complementary event, a recognition that you can't beat chain retailers at price promotions so it's ridiculous to try, and instead repositions small-independent retailers around their strengths--uniqueness and small and more intimate vs. selling the same stuff others are selling and big.

If you get Verizon FIOS, American Express has a special channel, 325, set up with videos and other promotional material on "Shopping Small."

Right: Black Friday line at a Target store.  Image from the Associated Press, 2007.

Last year, because of dismal sales numbers, many retailers opened their stores on Thanksgiving, as early as 8pm, whereas in previous years about the earliest opening was at midnight on Thursday.  See "The Changing Shades of Black Friday" from the Wall Street Journal.

This year that trend is even more pronounced, with stores opening even earlier and more companies participating.  See "More stores opening their doors on Thanksgiving from the Tulsa World, "Thanksgiving shopping a sacrilege for some," USA Today, and "Real reason stores are opening on Thanksgiving" from Market Watch.

From the Tulsa World story:

Up to 140 million people plan to shop sometime during the Thursday-to-Sunday weekend, down from 147 million who planned to do the same last year, according to a preliminary Thanksgiving weekend shopping survey released by the National Retail Federation.

Black Friday will still be the biggest day of the weekend with 69.1 percent planning to shop, or approximately 97 million shoppers.  For the first time for its survey, the National Retail Federation asked if people plan to shop on Thanksgiving, and some 33 million shoppers — 23.5 percent — said yes.

One of the main points of the USA Today story is that retailers are "nervous" because the holiday shopping season is one week shorter compared to last year and consumer spending is still quite stunted so they are trying to get in as much sales time as they can, given the constraints.

Image:  Jacob Langston, Orlando Sentinel / November 19, 2013.

There has been some press coverage of "Small Business Saturday," such as "Small-business Saturday shines at bookstores" from USA Today and "Local shops think big as they prep for Small Business Saturday" from the Orlando Sentinel.

According to the Sentinel article, this year there is a new element to the campaign, engaging local citizens as promoters and organizers to get people out shopping locally:

New for Small Business Saturday this year is the "Neighborhood Champion" program, made up of individuals across the country who have signed up to rally businesses in their communities to promote the day.

The Post Capital Business section did a story last week too, "On Main Street, high hopes for this year's Small Business Saturday."

I can think of many great commercial districts to shop in from Richmond (Carytown) to Philadelphia (Chestnut Hill, Media) and points in between including Downtown Frederick, Maryland, Alexandria, Virginia,Hampden in Baltimore, and groupings of shops here and there.

I'm surprised that more local business promotion efforts aren't centered around promoting local holiday shopping for this Saturday, leveraging the "Small Business Saturday" theme, especially given the "Neighborhood Champion" angle, which is a great way to engage people in local advocacy.

Similarly, community newspapers ought to be jumping on the bandwagon as well, since they are more have traditional commercial districts and independent retailers as advertisers.

Rather than try to market against the sales orgy on Friday, and lose, better to set a different day, which is what Small Business Saturday does.

And the real point is rather than follow the march of the same drummer, be sure to shop some at independent businesses this holiday season, even if you don't do so this coming Saturday, but sometime else during the run up to Christmas.