Eyes on the street + neighborhood stability ratings | When they aren't great public investment in placemaking may be too early

People out on a Sunday afternoon in 2012.

In 2002, DC did one of its first streetscape improvement projects, on 8th Street SE, the Barracks Row commercial district, which is embedded in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. 

At the time it was an early best practice example of this kind of transportation investment in cities as housing purchase preferences opened up to the possibility of living in the city--before people avoided the cities for the suburbs.

It propelled improvement on the corridor pretty fast.  A couple years later I was at a cafe with Rachel MacCleery, then the Ward 6 Transportation Planner, and we were trying to figure out "why".

I realized that rating systems for neighborhoods developed by HUD in the 1970s, a 5-9 point scale, basically A to D/E, some further subdivided into high/low or +/- should be conducted at three scales.  They had been focused on a single rating for the neighborhood overall.

But I realized that this could also be done at the block by block scale, and separately for the residential and commercial sections of a neighborhood ("Systematic neighborhood engagement," 2007, "Streetscape benefits," 2008, "To accelerate commercial district improvement you have to do more than build the one shiny new thing," 2018).

The reason that the investment had high ROI so quickly wasn't strictly because "it was a streetscape project" so that the city wanted to do them all over.  It worked because the residential section of the neighborhood had been healthy for a decade or more.  

At the same time, the commercial district lagged, partly due to the demographics of the bus riders frequenting the area.

8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE is a main transfer point between two primary bus lines, Anacostia/East of the River to Capitol Hill to H Street to Florida Avenue to U Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue from deep SE to Wisconsin Avenue and Friendship Heights in the northwest.

And because there was a lot of public housing to the south.  

Interestingly, once black dominated commercial districts in the city post-1960s still attracted a lot of return visits from former residents so that the commercial districts tended to have visitor demographics that were becoming incongruent compared to the residential mix.

Lots of congregating, a methadone clinic or two, and a junior high right at this intersection.

I realized that by doing a more nuanced evaluation, the results could be used to infuse policy choices, such as when and where to invest.  In short, before, 8th Street SE wasn't so great, partly because of its customer and user base, but also because of some dinginess in the building stock and tired streets and sidewalks.

Investment in the street and sidewalks, complemented I think by facade grants to property owners, as well as independent investment attracted by the changes led to fast improvement.

When the city did similar projects in other areas where both the commercial and residential districts lagged, it looked better, but there weren't significant improvements in business and residential improvement.  

The Barracks Row investment, complemented by new housing development (partly the demolition and rebuilding of public housing which did lead to displacement), brought great changes.

Photo by Georg Stutzenberger.  

Salt Lake.  This comes up in Salt Lake.  A person on Nextdoor put up two photos of a dog sculpture that had been in Warm Springs Park on the city's northwest side.  

It was vandalized, the vandals couldn't figure out how to fully detach the sculpture from its base.  And the city put the sculpture in storage where it remains to this day.

Warm Springs Park is known for the Warm Springs hot springs building, which at its most popular point was known for pools and baths with water piped in from area springs (note to the geologically challenged, springs that are hot are hot because they are on earthquake fault lines).  But the building went dark--spring water corroded pipes and was hard to control (although plenty of other public and private establishments around the county still manage to do so.

There is a friends group trying to revive the building, Warm Springs Alliance ("Bringing Back Wasatch Warm Springs as Salt Lake’s Community Gathering Place," Utah Stories).  And the city has committed some monies to stabilization, but not to restoration.  

To my way of thinking the WSA approach to revival is super flawed.  They say don't bring the pool back because of the hard water issue.  I say, water is the unique selling proposition for the facility.  Without water why bother?

Plus there are programmatic issues.  Salt Lake City proper doesn't run community centers.  It may own the building but the County operates it.  And there is already a community center about two miles away.  

So the Warm Springs site is too close I think for the city and county to be willing to fund and operate a community center.  Would you rather have a four lane bowling alley or a hot spring fed pool?

A U of Utah architecture class did its projects on the building, and they were given the scope of "no water" in the building.  (I don't know why the clinical professor running the class acquiesced?)

Some of the students projects called for restoration of the water pools outside, others ignored the scope and proposed making the building once again a hot springs pool.  I preferred the proposals that featured water and made it if not front and center, a significant element.

The vandalism of the sculpture problem is an issue that comes back to the idea of rating places at the at the block scale.  

The residential neighborhood is fine--except for that road highway that splits the neighborhood, 8 lane arterial that connects to I-15.  So the neighborhood is split by the arterial and by the freeway.  At the same time it also abuts the State Capitol and Capitol Hill, so it's well located otherwise.  

But the land use context of the existing park isn't fine.  Iit's at the edge of the neighborhood so there aren't a lot of "eyes on the street" to help keep "natural order." 

While dog owners continue to frequent the park, there are just a few houses nearby and not a lot of people around.  It's one of many places where homeless people try to camp with all the problems that emanate from it.

The modified rating system is a good way to think about what to do with the site and how to build better connections to reduce nuisance factors.

Rating at the block scale, for a block rated C or lower, I argued you should be wary of putting in street furniture and other appurtenances because of the potential for vandalism and vagrancy. 

Warm Springs Park is not necessarily distressed at least in terms of the neighborhood.  But it is "poorly located" on the edge of the residential section next to that pesky arterial. 

So fewer eyes on the street, more opportunity for bad stuff, especially because the main buildng is derelict.