Virginia Beach municipal workers unions taking positions against transit: see budget as either/or choice

When planning for light rail started in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, the original intent was to have the system connect Norfolk and Virginia Beach, the two largest communities in the metropolitan area, and the home of the largest military bases there.

For various reasons, Virginia Beach opted out of the system, and Norfolk went ahead with it.  Now that the Tide light rail system is operational, it's easier (albeit more expensive to construct) to make the case for the extension of the system to Virginia Beach.  There will be a referendum this fall on the matter and so far it is expected to pass.

However, municipal unions in Virginia Beach are coming out against the light rail referendum, because they see the municipal budget as an either-or choice.  As has been relatively common with municipal budgeting across the country since the economic downturn, Virginia Beach's police officers, fire fighters, and teachers haven't received wage increases.

They want wage increases--and I don't blame them.

But they see the light rail transit system as a competitor for scarce monies available within local government budgets, that if the rail system is extended to Virginia Beach, the local share for construction (as much as 10% of the cost probably) plus funds for annual operations will crowd out the opportunity for wage increases.

So the police union and the firefighters union have come out against the light rail referendum.  The teachers union is likely to do so if they don't see wage increases on the horizon.  See "Virginia Beach to hold light rail referendum in Nov.," "Virginia Beach police groups also say no to light rail," and "Virginia Beach firefighters union opposes light rail" from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.

This is a very interesting development, one that I haven't come across before. 

It's chilling because other than real estate related interests (developers, lawyers, parking), municipal unions tend to be the biggest contributors to the campaign funds for local politicians, so they are major players in local politics everywhere.

Fire fighters union endorsement sign, DC election, 2006.


If municipal workers unions take on anti-transit positions as a matter of course, it will set up some interesting dynamics.

Police unions tend to be "conservative" in terms of who they support politically and they seem to be more focused on bashing "management" than anything else, although it  is always couched as being focused on keeping communities safe. 


Fire fighters are a little less doctrinaire, but in either case these public safety unions care mostly about wages and work rules, always positioned in terms of supporting first responders.  (Even in Wisconsin, Gov. Walker felt empowered to eliminate bargaining rights for non-public safety related unions, but didn't eliminate such rights for police and fire fighters.). 


Teachers unions tend to be "progressive" and progressives tend to support teachers/teachers unions in the face of the incessant campaign by conservatives to demonize teachers as the sole reason for failing schools.

(Note that the transit workers unions too tend to be focused more on their wages, less on the impact that wages and hefty pensions have on current budgeting and fares, and seem to be totally unconcerned with the quality of customer service that their workers provide.)

It would be a shame if self-interest on the part of municipal workers unions led them to take anti-transit positions.  I know the choices I would make if I were to have to choose.

Sports stadium economics

The Oakland Tribune has an interesting article, "Sports economics hinder Oakland."  It's about the relative competitiveness of the Oakland Coliseum area as a place to redevelop and attract sports teams--the Golden State Warriors basketball team recently announced they are moving to the San Francisco waterfront.  It's found wanting because it's not located downtown, but in an area convenient to freeways.

According to the article:

In moving to San Francisco, the Warriors are following in the footsteps of nearly the entire NBA. Of the 22 NBA arenas built since 1992, 20 are in downtown areas, about half of which replaced arenas that were outside city centers.

Baseball has followed a similar trajectory, even though its stadiums require more seats and parking spaces. Since Baltimore's Camden Yards ushered in the retro ballpark era in 1992, most of the 21 new baseball stadiums have been built in and around city centers.

The exception is football, whose relatively few home games and utilitarian revenue sharing policies make it less important for stadiums to be in top markets.

Several factors account for the downtown sports building boom. As governments poured money into reviving downtown areas during the last two decades, they included funds for stadiums and arenas in hopes that they could spur additional development.

Downtown facilities placed teams in much closer proximity to businesses that could pay for new luxury suites and club seating, which now account for about 10 percent of teams' revenue.

"When you had suburbanization, the idea was that rich people were leaving the city center," Zimbalist said. "Now the idea is to be close to the business community to get the corporate dollar, sell more corporate sponsorships and charge higher prices."

In terms of the ongoing efforts by some DC politicians to "bring the Washington Redskins back to DC"--the team has been located in suburban Prince George's County for more than 10 years--the article is instructive in terms of the point it makes about football having less positive economic impact on the local community.

Prince George's County nets about $10 million per year in additional revenue from the presence of the Washington Redskins football team.  But 80% of that comes from a local tax on ticket sales.  Without that tax, the return would be minimal (Md. Weighs Stadium for D.C. United: Study Will Gauge Pr. George's Benefits," a 2008 article from the Post).  More than $300 million was spent on public infrastructure improvements associated with the stadium.

As I wrote in a 2008 blog entry:

Too often government programs and actions are (rash) responses to actions or proposals rather than a proactive decision made in terms of overarching priorities and commitments.

To spend all that public money on a stadium for so little economic return is crazy.

 

To grow and not diminish qualiy of life, DC needs to expand and strengthen how it plans

Yesterday's Post has an interesting article, "D.C.’s growth is fueled by 20-somethings. Can the city grow up with them?," by business reporter Jonathan O'Connell, about the city and how the next stage of accommodating this growth is to focus on retention, as singles become couples and then families, housing and amenities need to be able to accommodate them.

He provides three recommendations for changes in policy:

- develop places, public and private, that can accommodate families
- diversify the housing stock so it can accommodate larger households
- build parks.

Like a lot of armchair analysis (but with the imprimatur of the newspaper), the article fails to address in a more systematic fashion the gaps in how DC does planning, which in turn generates the gaps in amenities, housing stock, and recreation and park spaces (among others) available in various neighborhoods across the city.

One of the points O'Connell doesn't mention is that DC is somewhat accommodating for families, so long as they have enough money to participate in the local economy, and most likely, both parents will have to work.  Most of the new households on our block are fecund (not us)--the one child households are in the process of adding a second. 

This is captured by a report from the Brookings Institution, on walkable neighborhoods in DC, which is discussed in a different Post article, "D.C.'s walkable neighborhoods have a lot to offer, but at a price."  The report finds that walkable neighborhoods have higher levels of amenities, property values, and resident income levels.  Of course, there's that pesky issue of the schools

O'Connell's article doesn't cover new ground so much as it indicates significant gaps in how the city approaches planning, and while it proposes the above-cited "remedies" it doesn't address the more fundamental and systemic problem--failures in planning.

The article also didn't acknowledge that there can be backlash to adding more accommodations "for families" as some people without children will see these accommodations as privileging children at their expense. 

Among other places, this issue has been discussed in two New York Times articles, "Park Slope Parent Trap" (2007) and "At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops" (2005) about how a coffee shop in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago called attention to parents inadequately managing their children and the impact on other patrons.  The Post ran a similar article, "New baby boom fosters culture clash: Parents vs. public spaces," about two years ago.

Taste of Heaven cafe owner Dan McCauley poses at the front door of his cafe next to a sign that reads 'Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when they come to a Taste of Heaven' Friday, Dec. 2, 2005, in Chicago. The sign has become a lightning rod for a larger debate on parenting, namely, who gets to have a say about misbehaving children. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

The need for sector/neighborhood plans.  The revitalization of the planning office in DC under Mayor Anthony Williams, and the focus by his team on economic development, while vitally important to the city's success, was incomplete.

The fundamental problem is that Washington, DC doesn't do full-scale neighborhood/sector planning. That means that at the neighborhood scale, we don't plan for the provision and realization of civic and other amenities in rigorous structured ways. 

(While the city planning office did do "neighborhood" plans in 2001, called "strategic neighborhood action plans," the reports were quite varied, and tended to be very much agency-centric (the DPW picks up the trash, they should address litter, etc.) and not very deep, focused on short term fixes and budget priorities, not long term or structural changes.)

AECOM graphic on the various elements of comprehensive community planning. The red section, not labeled, is the commercial district.

The need for agency master plans for parks, K-12 education, libraries, and transportation functions. The city does do a master plan, called the comprehensive plan, and theoretically has plans for the major services/agencies of the government--such as parks, K-12 education, libraries, transportation--except that we don't have publicly approved plans for those functions, just what's in the Comp. Plan.

While a plan for streets and blocks is a foundational element for any city, it's not enough, in and of itself, to create a great place to live, work, conduct visit, be educated or entertained, and to visit.

And while we still don't have such plans today, ideally such documents would have been in place before the velocity of change unleashed by the Williams Administration.  (Of course, plans produced in the 1990s likely would have been inadequate given that the opportunities the city has been able to realize over the past decade were unimaginable just a few years ago.)

The result is that significant gaps are still present in how the city "stabilizes, maintains, and extends" the quality of neighborhoods and the quality of life for residents more generally.  

DC does have a "small area plan process," but the end product of a small area plan is not a thorough and comprehensive neighborhood plan,  it's more focused on development opportunity management.

Too often, especially with regard to the provision of civic assets ranging from parks, community centers, spaces and programs not currently offered in the city, local transportation, libraries, and the role of schools as neighborhood anchors aren't considered as part of a typical "small area planning process."

The need for impact fees.  For example, the article's discussion of the lack of a "playground" downtown is the result of the failure to do adequate parks and recreation planning in the city and specifically downtown, the fact that most recreation spaces are provided on a private basis, within apartment and condominium buildings, and that parks and recreation impact fees (among others) are not assessed on new developments, therefore reducing the amount of money available for the provision of such amenities, even while the demand for such increases. That's definitely not how they do things in Vancouver, BC.

If we are expecting significant population increases in the city, the transit and amenities infrastructure will have to expand in parallel, otherwise, quality of life will begin to diminish.  A few days ago I drove, making a really bad decision to do so during morning rush, to the factory authorized repair depot to get our lawn mower fixed. It took me forever to get there (Capitol Heights, about 11 miles from where I live). I was dumb because I should have done this at a different time of day.

 

 

But it did make me consider the reality that if DC doesn't significantly invest in expansion of fixed rail transit --and I don't just mean streetcars, but subways too, and not just the proposed separated blue line--that DC's quality of life is going to significantly decline as an already strained transportation system (subways, buses, roads for cars and buses, inventory of available parking spaces, etc.) has to accommodate more population trying to get around.


(Of course, biking is a cheap and easy and fast option for many trips and can end up being a significant contributor to congestion reduction.)


You only need a small increase-decrease in usage (5-15%) to have an extranormally negative or positive impact on congestion.

Washington Post graphic, 2002.  This plan was scuttled in 2003, when WMATA faced a budget crunch, and devolved authority for expansion planning to the separate jurisdictions.  While Virginia went ahead with planning the Silver Line, they did not take any responsibility for the impact of this service on capacity downtown or in crossing over the Potomac River from Virginia to DC.

It's the same with most of the functions of the city--even as we are achieving a critical mass of positive revitalization in many neighborhoods, from Barracks Row in Capitol Hill to 14th Street NW to Columbia Heights to Petworth, and the creation of a new neighborhood along the Southeast Waterfront, anchored by the baseball stadium, and the correction of ghastly urban renewal era errors in Southwest DC, such as with the rebuilding of the old Waterfront Mall and the re-constitution of 4th Street as a through street, plus the forthcoming Wharf development on the waterfront, etc.--if we don't add infrastructure and amenity capacity, as it grows in population, the city will be less congenial.

Expaning planning frameworks so that needs and amenities are planned in a systematic fashion, based on demographics and household types.  This isn't usually done the way it should be.  David Barth of AECOM discusses "triangulation" or the need to talk to at least three different types of groups when doing plans--too often plans reflect the interests of only one group.

So that means sector plans need to deal with singles, couples (gender neutral), families with children,  seniors, etc., and this needs to be extended to general planning as well as for parks, transportation, commercial district revitalization.

AECOM graphic.

Craftcation: business conference for DIY/Crafters

Was this past March, in Ventura, California, and will be repeated in March 2013, also in Ventura.  These kinds of business, entrepreneurship, and capacity development events help to convert hobbies into businesses.

-- Craftcation

Chasing Wegman's is a bad idea for DC

The Washington Business Journal, reporting on DC's foray at this year's retail recruitment conference, the ICSC show in Las Vegas, reports in "Vincent Gray keeps hope alive for Wegmans in D.C." that DC is avidly recruiting Wegmans, the massive, high quality supermarket chain based in Rochester, NY that has been steadily entering the Washington and Baltimore markets with very large stores in the suburbs, for sites at St. Elizabeths in Southeast and the recently vacated Walter Reed Hospital Center on Georgia Avenue in upper Northwest.

Hey, I like cool grocery stores as much as anybody.  For example, the premium Whole Foods Supermarket stores are pretty cool (there aren't any in the DC region), with lots of restaurant type operations within the store, and they even sell clothing.  Wegmans takes that type of store to another level, with indoor seating for more than 300 people, and many "store within a store" specialty areas for cheese, meats, beer and wine, etc.

But Wegmans is a store designed for shoppers arriving by car.  It's a big store, as much as 150,000 s.f., set in a sea of parking.

DC is a city.  Automobile-focused retail is hard to accommodate, because the road network was designed, for the most part, in 1791.   (Roads in upper Northwest and Southeast were designed later, but using the same general design, especially for road width.)

While freeways were added, the queuing area of a typical block is 300 feet, which accommodates about 20 cars/lane.  Adding thousands and thousands of daily car trips to the city's roads is generally a bad idea.

While some retailers, including Target, Walmart (not so much for their DC stores), and others, are developing urban formats (see "Size Matters in Retail -- But Just What Size?" from Advertising Age), according to the WBJ story, Wegmans "does not have a smaller, more urban format similar to ones other retailers such as Wal-Mart have been trying out."

DC should know what it stands for.  The city's new sustainability plan calls for 75% of household trips to be performed by modes other than the car. 

That means making hard choices in terms of land use and economic development, including retail recruitment, so that one hand of the city isn't making decisions that are counter to other stated objectives.

A typical Wegmans.  Image from Fairydreams.net.

In other words, the decisions of the city government should be congruent across the board.

How about approaching Wegmans and working with them to launch a truly urban-appropriate grocery store, including delivery (something I pushed the city to do with regard to Walmart's entry, and they totally wimped out)?

If they aren't willing, don't recruit them.  It's not worth it.  We shouldn't change what we are.  They should either want to be active in our market on urban-appropriate terms, or not.  If not, fine.  Let's move on.

DC should continue to work with grocery stores like Harris-Teeter and Safeway, which are committed to doing stores more appropriately sized and fitted for the urban environment--even if I think they could do much better still (see my op-ed, "Temper Walmart glee with planning" in the Washington Business Journal).

It's bad enough that DC rolled over in every possible way for Walmart, not pushing Walmart to do much of anything in the way of urban design and appropriateness--the places where Walmart is building more urban-appropriate stores, two out of the six locations, is more a function of one developer, JBG, and the fact that they recruited Walmart to be a lead retail tenant in an otherwise mixed use, multistory building.  The other four locations will be, for all intents and purposes, suburban stores, but with structured parking.

DC shouldn't further this bad mistake by recruiting other decidedly anti-urban retailers.

Ironically, Safeway intends to expand their Petworth store as the ground floor tenant of an apartment building.  And they would likely do the same, eventually, at their Piney Branch store, also located on Georgia Avenue, but located about halfway between Walmart and the desired Wegmans.  These are pro-urban decisions. 

Recruiting Wegmans to Georgia Avenue, after Walmart enters in 2013, likely dooms these efforts, and says f* you to a company that has been invested in DC for more than 80 years.
Petworth Safeway rendering, which shows a multistory apartment building above the store.


The rendering of the Walmart Georgia Avenue store shows a single building on a 4+ acre site. The design of the store makes no accommodation for adding housing or other uses to the building and site.

Heritage Foundation op-ed against California high speed rail

Impact of high speed rail service in Spain, California Watch graphic.

Three things that people often fail to properly distinguish in discussions of government spending:

(1) this year's budget, what it comprises, and how it's paid for;
(2) the difference between program (current) spending and investment in capital improvements (paid for now, but with multi-decade return on investment)
(3) the various funding sources (federal, state, etc.) and mandates for different programs.

I think it's fair to say that Emily Goff of the Heritage Foundation mis-represents all three, plus reasons for privatization of rail transit in Japan and the United Kingdom, in the Orange County Register op-ed "State can't afford 'free' rail money" to support an anti-rail argument.

The State of California is projected to have a $16 billion deficit this year (and she uses this number to imply that California is far more mismanaged than JPMorgan despite that firm's announcement of multi-billion dollar hedging losses, which is completely irrelevant to the article--I think Jamie Dimon would be in over his head managing a state government) which is the result of many reasons, some due to restrictions on the ability to tax, and others due, yes, to the disconnect between new economic realities and the conditions under which old program commitments and contracts were made--some things do need to change, to better fit reduced economic circumstances (a/k/a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" especially if you aren't willing to pay for the cake).

But the investment in high speed rail will have a multi-decade payback, and whether or not California makes this investment, it won't have any impact on the state's current account projected deficit for FY13--the high speed rail project will be funded in part by bond money and in part by federal funds.

Chris Nash, University of Leeds, on wider economic benefits of high-speed rail [PDF]

Gines de Rus, University of Las Palmas, on economic effects of high-speed rail [PDF]

Roger Vickerman, University of Kent, on research into economic benefits of high-speed rail/transportation investments [PDF]

Gines de Rus, University of Las Palmas, on benefit-cost analysis of high-speed rail [PDF]

Two other problems with the piece:
1.  Her statements about "privatization" of rail in Japan and the United Kingdom are misleading (but are deliberate, to make the point that "the government" shouldn't be making this kind of investment).

The main reason that rail is private in Japan is that it's profitable, although this in part has to do with how Japanese land use practices maintain dense centers and focus on maintaining investment in cities, and how the rail companies are able to monetize development opportunities in association with the rail system (like how rail transit systems were first created in the US in fact).  

None of this is mentioned in the piece.  Actually, this sets the stage for an interesting conservative argument in favor of privately run transit systems--by coordinating land use and transportation policy, promoting mixed use development, and eliminating subsidies of sprawl and the automobile, rail transit service could be successfully privatized (but still there would have to be government support for the infrastructure probably) because the ridership volumes would be significantly higher.

As long as the competition to transit is deeply subsidized, which it is, it's impossible for transit to function as a privately owned service or without subsidies of its own.

In the UK, rail was privatized for political and ideological reasons, not for business reasons, and for the most part, rail service has suffered for it.  Certainly, compared to continental Europe, for the most part, UK rail service does not measure up.  See this 2001 piece from the International Herald Tribune, "Why privatization of public utilities can be a disaster," which discusses the UK rail experience.

Transit doesn't have to be a government service inherently.  But as long as land use decisions are not made in an integrated fashion with transportation planning decisions and motor vehicle use is significantly subsidized in many ways (the cost of roads, the cost of gasoline, public and environmental health impacts, the cost of military forces stationed overseas, etc.), and the majority of the economic benefits of transit access are gained by other economic interests, privatization of transit doesn't work--it's why transit services had to be taken over by the government. 

2. The new trope going around in conservative circles, related to the general emphasis on "state's rights" and the sentiment that the federal government is incapable of doing anything right, is that transportation planning and infrastructure investment is "increasingly Washington-centered," that "bureaucrats make decisions about projects hundreds of miles away," and that states "know their transportation priorities much better than Washington."  These are all quotes from the Goff piece.

While there is some truth to the point that decisions can be disconnected, at another level the completely ignores the necessity of national planning for transportation.  This is from a past blog entry:

Speaking of exercise, my  thinking about transportation planning generally occurs at five scales:

1. International -- connections between countries.

2. National -- anchors of a national transportation system, current anchors are the Interstate Highway system, the freight railroad system, and airplane travel. We do not have a national passenger railroad network presently.

3. Regional --connections between states or two or more metropolitan areas in a state -- for the most part these don't exist for public transit, except for passenger rail service, but do routinely exist for freight railroad service, airplane travel, and the Interstate highway system, which in turn supports inter-city motor coach (bus) service.

Railroad passenger service with regional scale includes Amtrak's Northeast Corridor railroad passenger service, along with the Amtrak Cascades service from Portland Oregon to Seattle and Vancouver BC, and the Capitol Corridor in California.  Passenger service provided by local rail systems in the New York-Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware region, Illinois-Indiana, serving Chicago, in Southern California, and between Maryland/West Virginia/DC are other examples.

4. Metropolitan -- transit systems like the WMATA subway and bus system in the Washington metropolitan area or the combined railroad, subway, bus, and waterborne transit services in the NYC or Boston metropolitan areas are examples of transit provided at the scale of a metropolitan area, with one major central city at the core.

5. Sub-metropolitan transit systems (in the DC region, locally provided services such as RideOn in Montgomery County Maryland or the Downtown Circulator in DC are examples of services within the subnetwork category of the Metropolitan Transit Network).
--------------------------
At the state level, transportation budgeting tends to be dominated by road building interests and rural interests, so monies are spent on roads, not on making decisions focused on optimizing the use of the most efficient transportation modes.

And transportation planning is not solely a local responsibility although at the end of the day, infrastructure is built and maintained locally. 

Transportation infrastructure is a system that is designed to be integrated, to connect the entire country, to serve a variety of needs, especially freight transportation.

Even the vagaries of local politics and gerrymandering of political districts and sprawl and its negative impact on center cities, the local political environment is focused not on optimizing transportation efficiency, but on maintaining the automobile-focused status quo.

The Heritage Foundation knows this, which is why it uses the bogeyman of the "federal government" to pressure politicians to push the control of federal transportation monies to the state level.

Finally, the reality is that high-speed rail is a 21st century public investment in California's (and ideally the nation's) future, just as the creation of transcontinental railroad service in the 1860s united the country and laid the foundation for a century of incredible success--economic growth, the development of a mass internal US market, consolidation of the nation, tremendous wealth creation--high-speed rail can reset the mobility and economic paradigm for California for the next five decades, not unlike how high speed rail service is changing Spain.  See "Spain's high-speed rail system offers lessons for California" from the Fresno Bee/California Watch.  

It is tragic that such a strong ideological bent focused on negativizing federal, state, and local government activities is being justified to support a failure to invest in the future of the nation.

I don't understand why progressives have such a difficult time making counter arguments (except for the fact of misfeasance in so many instances, from the war in Iraq to government corruption, which I suppose can be hard to counter, especially when the conservatives are so quick to provide excuses for massive business failure, i.e., JPMorgan's failure in London or BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, etc.)

Really cool annual meeting for Richmond VA's Partnership for Smarter Growth: road trip

The Partnership for Smarter Growth is the Richmond area advocacy group focused on smart growth, transit, and optimal decision making concerning land use and transportation policy generally.  Transit-wise, Richmond has a bus system, and railroad passenger service from Amtrak.

Last year, the Hampton Roads region saw the realization of the initial routing of light rail service, the TIDE system, which serves Norfolk, and is intended to be extended to Virginia Beach (a long story that...). 

The service is already significantly exceeding ridership estimates, with more than 7,000 daily riders.  Granted that's not very much compared to a bigger city with subway service, but is seen as an important milestone and indicator that transit can be successful in the Hampton Roads region.

So the PSG is organizing a bus trip to the Virginia High Speed Rail Association's annual meeting this year in this year in Norfolk, to see the service in action. I think they already have a busful of people committed to going.

I think that such a trip makes sense, because coming to a place like DC where thus far we have a subway, but not light rail or streetcar service, is probably overkill, because the Richmond region will never be able to justify subway service (you need 20,000 to 30,000 people/hour for multiple hours during the day to justify the added expense of subway servcie), but they can justify light rail and streetcar service, and the Tide light rail system is a good example of the kind of fixed rail transit service that is achievable in Richmond.

Economic impact of business improvement districts (in San Diego and Canada)

Typically, there are four types of organizations that may be involved in local commercial district revitalization: community development corporations, although cdcs usually focus more on producing housing; merchants associations; Main Street organizations, which link merchants, residents, and other stakeholders; and business improvement districts, which usually are in larger cities, are funded by assessments on commercial property, and spend a goodly portion of their efforts on clean and safe activities, along with property-development-oriented economic development activities.

People usually get confused about what type of organization does what.  The most important things that these organizations do are: (1) marketing the commercial district as a distinct entity; (2) business recruitment and development; (3) streetscape improvement and transportation coordination; (4) clean and safe activities; with funding provided in a wide variety of ways.  Typically, the smaller city and towns don't provide the means to do tax assessments and the bigger cities do.

BIDs usually have the most stable funding source, but tend to be oriented most toward the interests of property owners, because property owners provide the funding support for the organization, and they provide the fewest opportunities for citizens who are not "interested parties" (either property or business owners) to get involved in the activities of the organization.  Lack of citizen involvement can be a particular concern especially because commercial districts are becoming mixed use districts with a goodly amount of residential housing, and BIDs act on business issues in those districts, and residents have limited input into those decisions.

Main Street organizations tend to be more focused on the interests of retail and service businesses, and unlike the BIDs, they work to capture the involvement of local residents, to expand the ability and capacity of the organization to accomplish work.

I've always felt the best possible structure would be to have the regular funding system typically "enjoyed" by BIDs, with the committee structure and community involvement components of the Main Street Approach.

San Diego comes closest to this ideal. 

It has 17 business improvement districts, funded with property assessments, but many are organized like Main Street programs, such as the Little Italy, North Park, and Adams Avenue districts.

Because the programs are up for renewal of their funding stream, a report, The Economic Impact of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in San Diego, was commissioned to determine their impact.  The report found that there is a $5 return for each $1 provided through the property tax assessment.  (Also see this article from the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Study: It pays to have a Business District.")

I haven't worked through the report yet, so I doubt that it has made this distinction between how San Diego BIDs operate versus more typical business improvement districts.

Speaking of economic impact of investment in the coordination and capacity building of traditional commercial districts, the Canadian Urban Research Institute released the report, The value of investing in Canadian DOWNTOWNS,which finds that downtown revitalization is dependent on successful partnership and organizational development.

An example of a big problem with nonprofit organizations: who runs the show?

The Washington Post has a somewhat interesting piece, "A feud over a D.C. park pits one man against his neighbors," on a debacle in the Bloomingdale community. 

Some time ago, the community came together to create a park space on the interior of a block, not unlike how there private gardens are situated in London or with Gramercy Park in New York City, or how there is a movement where people connect their backyards to make contiguous spaces.

Typical of the Post, the article focuses more on what I'd call the personalities and conflicts behind the dispute--an old, somewhat, wacked out African-American resident who was one of the founders of the Crispus Attacks Development Corporation and new, white residents who rehabilitated the space and created a community park space on the once vacant and dilapitated space--rather than the systemic issues raised by the example.

What is more important than that this is about a park is how this article demonstrates problems with how nonprofit organizations are governed and perpetuated. 
Once an organization is created, usually there are very limited provisions for how people are elected to and serve on the boards of the organization.  Community organizations basically manage themselves, purportedly for the community.  For the most part, boards are self-replicating and bylaws don't include procedures whereby people can be nominated and/or elected to the board outside of procedures controlled by the board or staff.

If the organization and the community are congruent with the vision and agenda of the organization, things usually work out somewhat okay, although it's hard for particularly innovative or challenging people to get elected to the board.

If the vision and agenda of the organization is not congruent with the community, it's not a good situation, and short of the government stepping in, there are no effective means to improve the situation on the part of people not on the board.

This has been a real problem with so-called "community" development corporations, but it can be a problem with neighborhood associations and other groups.  I can think of many civic organizations across the city that are disconnected from all but a small coterie of the neighborhood's population.

Technically, nonprofits are overseen by a unit of the attorney general's office of a state or locality, but only in rare situations does the state step in to protect the interests of the public, since community organizations/501c3s are owned so-to-speak by the public.  (Situations that come to mind for me have been in Pennsylvania, with the Barnes Foundation and its relocation, use of the funds generated by the Girard Trust, and whether or not the Hershey Trust has been following the dictates of its founder and adequately meeting the terms of the trust agreement.)

To receive nonprofit designation in DC, certain types of groups, including neighborhood associations and community development corporations, should be required to have democratic procedures for the election of representatives to the boards, so that the groups don't become disconnected from the communities which they purport to serve.

In DC, with regard to the Crispus Attacks Development Corporation, the only way to resolve the situation legally, because the "wack job" is the person listed on the nonprofit corporation's articles of incorporation as the president, is for the Attorney General's Office to step in to resolve the situation.

DC and taxis: need for a comprehensive plan

I've argued for awhile that planning for taxis needs to be incorporated into a community's transportation plan.  Because taxi "management" is seen more as a regulatory function, it's most often treated separately.

In DC, taxis have been in the news for a number of reasons, including an attempt to create a medallion system (since rebuffed) and the related bribery attempts and scandal, the DC City Council's passage of a new law concerning taxis (I think the law was premature, given that a plan for the industry doesn't exist), and how the Washington Post (probably because a reporter got caught in the scrum) reported chaos for cabs at Union Station after the line monitor normally ends his shift ("At Union Station late at night, all’s fare when seeking a cab," "Union Station steps up late-night enforcement to quell cab chaos," and "A new day at Union Station cab queue"). 

And granted the newly adopted DC City Council legislation is focused on significantly improving the quality of taxi service in the city, which face it, tends not to be great.

Flickr photo by WILL1955.

For example, many people don't find DC taxicabs can be relied on to get to the airport early in the morning.  So you know to call Red Top Cab of Arlington.   It's legal for them to come into the city to pick up a fare if the final destination is in Arlington County, Virginia.

That says something very chilling about DC taxi service, for residents especially.

One of the ever present issues concerns the provision of taxi service outside of the core of the city (NYC is introducing a new system of "green cabs" to provide more cab services in areas traditionally underserved, outside of Manhattan, see "A Green Apple Taxi" from the New York Times; and Montreal has shared taxi services in outer parts of the city, which provide near-transit service on a more cost-effective basis), or in the early hours of the day.

Another issue concerns the availability of cabs with disabled-access, and even the shifting of some of the paratransit trips from the higher-cost MetroAccess service to presumably what would be a less expensive service delivered in part by taxis.

You'd think there would be an opportunity in the DC market for a taxicab service providing high quality, advanced services--ordering online/by mobile phone, paying by credit card, etc. --but such a service doesn't seem to be in the offing.

There has been the controversial Urber service ("Uber car impounded, driver ticketed in city sting" from the Post), but it's more of a high end car service and not what I have in mind.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics: parks edition

Graphic of the Parkscore(tm) methodology from the Trust for Public Land.

Newspapers across the country have reported on the release by the Trust for Public Land of a report, Park Score, comparing the provision and access to parks on the nation's 40 largest cities on these criteria:

• how many residents live within walking distance of a park
• the percentage of park space within cities
• median park size
• public investment in the park system
• the number of playground spaces. 

-- "New survey says D.C. among the best in the country for access to parks," Washington Post,-- "Fort Worth rated 24th for parks," Fort Worth Star-Telegram
-- "Seattle ranks 9th for best park facilities," Seattle Times

DC ranked fifth.

That makes me question maybe not the utility of the measures, but their lack of nuance:

Maybe a score system like this is helpful to localities, in raising the bar for quality of service. Maybe not. I think that having DC ranked as fifth best in the country for urban parks will reduce the demand to do better, because the city can argue it's doing fine, even though I would argue that DC's parks, recreation, and cultural planning activities are deficient, and under-serve citizens, and the potential of the city to be a truly great place to live.

DC has some "unique" issues in that many of the city's park spaces are controlled by the federal government, the National Park Service--90% of the city's parks lands are controlled by the NPS.

Local citizens have limited input into the operation of these parks, and the Park Service is significantly underfunded, especially as it relates to the parks and how they serve local, as opposed to national, audiences.

Another problem arises from the fact that the city doesn't have a parks master plan (something that I testified about earlier in the year) but apparently the city is going to develop such a plan in the next fiscal year).  Typically such plans wouldn't provide guidance with regard to the federal parks, but if the city's parks plan doesn't, then resident interests won't be adequately represented when it comes to parks since 90% of the city's park spaces are managed by the federal government.

This really matters.  At a session last week at the American Institute of Architects national conference, someone commented about how DC's significant construction boom over the past decade was not, for the most part, accompanied by any significant increase in park type space. 

This is true and I think in part is the result of the failure to have a parks master plan, but also resulted from a failure to have adequate processes in place for parks, recreation, and community spaces as part of the "small area planning process" (DC doesn't do full-blown neighborhood or sector planning). 

I know this was the case for both the H Street and NoMA plans, where future opportunities to add open spaces in the commercial districts were ignored--not deliberately I don't think, but because the lead planners and consultants didn't address parks issues as a matter of course.  By the time buildings started getting developed, it was often too late to add space back.

So questions concerning "who" provides the park, the services provided, whether or not a parks master plan is in place, whether or not parks plans have high quality frameworks for the types of parks and recreation facilities provider and level of service guidelines aren't covered in the TPL report, and this can "encourage" a failure to dig deeper into the issues that shape local community parks--AND RECREATION--agendas and plans.

Note that the tension between parks and open space provision and space for recreation--passive vs. active parks use--has existed from the beginnings of the US parks movement and the park spaces created by Frederick Law Olmsted, beginning with Central Park in New York City in the 1870s.

This tension definitely exists both within the National Park Service's management of local parks spaces, influences some of the issues concerning the national/monumental parks in the city, and is clearly an issue with the city's parks and recreation department, which is far more focused on recreation than it is on parks.  (This tension is seen in other local communities.  For example, Montgomery County Maryland's recreation department is separate from the parks department.)

The data element "median park size" is somewhat of a concern, especially when you are ranking cities, because the issue is providing the right types of spaces for the area. Neighborhoods and commercial districts in cities have different needs for park and recreation services than are typically provided by a large park, which tends to serve large areas, and has a service profile focused on larger areas of a city (or county).

This is the park space typology from Atlanta's Buckhead Collection plan, which is more focused on the provision of neighborhood/district park spaces:


• Plazas
• Central Gathering Space
• Neighborhood Parks
• Community Greens
• Conservation Parks
• Greenways & Trails
• Historical & Cultural Resources
• Public Art
• Dog Parks


A comprehensive parks plan for a city or county has an even wider range of spaces within the typology, which will be shaped to a particular community's spatial conditions, location within a metropolitan area, and natural resources.  So a plan for Miami will differ from that of Fort Worth or Washington, DC.

I wrote about this in 2008 with regard to the failure to plan more widely for parks and recreation spaces in DC in this post, "Prototyping and municipal capital improvement programs."

And playgrounds are an issue, as was indicated in the TPL report concerning DC.  Many neighborhoods don't have parks close by, so by default, playgrounds at local schools serve--if the school sets up the playground in this way--as local parks. 

Many school playgrounds are being renovated out of community, not school management, initiatives, such as at JO Wilson Elementary School in the H Street neighborhood.

Traditionally, unlike cities such as Denver and New York City, DC Public Schools haven't been very open to making playgrounds spaces for community use outside of school hours.  And some communities have detailed agreements between the school system and the parks and recreation department so that space at the school is available to the public at other times of the day.

Another concern is the provision of shared use paths as part of parks systems, but maintaining access to these assets as part of the transportation network.  This is a constant tension within parks and transportation planning.  The Star-Telegram article quoted a representative from the local group Streams and Valleys, on how if Fort Worth's extensive network of trails were included in the data analysis, then the city would have been ranked higher.

I could go on and on with issues that I think need to be considered for 21st century parks planning.

Some parks plans include cultural resources (including arts) planning, some don't.  I've written about that as it relates to DC quite a bit, these entries cover the gist:

-- Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
-- Arts, artistic production, and culture districts revisited (this entry covers similar themes, but focused on music )
-- The Howard and Lincoln Theatres: run them like the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust/Playhouse Square Cleveland model

And probably no community parks plan includes a wider ranging consideration of "democratic spaces"/spaces for participation in a planning context where most space is provided by the private sector, and communities are economically hard-pressed to operate parks or to add new, flexible spaces that can serve citizens as residents and as participating members of their communities.

-- this blog entry on community building discusses this issue in terms of spaces as well


Public Realm as an Interconnected system, Slide from presentation, Leadership and the Role of Parks and Recreation in the New Economy, David Barth and Carlos Perez, AECOM

Building the city a generation at a time

An article in the Toronto Globe & Mail about Toronto's early 20th century "works commissioner" RC Harris mentioned that he thought of civic building and projects in terms of a generation.

Another article on pedestrian bridges mentions the new Peace Bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, in Calgary

Photo by K-ideas, on Flickr.  The 85-ton bridge drew its share of criticism because of its $24.5-million price tag, construction delays and procurement process.

Recapping new urbanism

The New Urban Transect, using images by Norman Rockwell to illustrate the various zones.

A couple weeks ago, the annual conference ("congress") for the Congress of New Urbanism was held in West Palm Beach, Florida. 

In advance of the meeting, the newsletter Better! Cities and Towns ran a three-part series by Peter Katz on the beginnings of the movement and the development of a relationship with HUD that led to the HOPEVI program which spearheaded redevelopment of public housing projects.  See "CNU at 20: A recollection," "The origins of the Congress for the New Urbanism," and "HopeVI and the inner city."

Interestingly enough, according to Katz' articles, some of the schisms in the movement today over what we might call new suburbanism and the development of greenfield tracts far from urban centers, but with new urban principles based on the Charter of the New Urbanism vs. focusing redevelopment at the core of a metropolitan region, with a focus on "infill" apparently were present at the beginning and still aren't resolved.

Erin Chantry, an urban designer at the firm Tindale-Oliver & Associates and blogger (At the Helm for the Public Realm) attended the congress and wrote eight dispatches related to conference sessions and her reactions. 

Her dispatches are a good introduction to the basic principles underlying smarter growth and well worth a read.

Too early to say what the special election in Ward 5 means: but change is coming regardless

Today's Post has an op-ed, "Putting the 'divided DC' meme to rest," by David Alpert, the publisher of Greater Greater Washington, on how the Ward 5 special election result, the election of 35-year old Kenyan McDuffie, is the harbinger of a reduction in the so-called racial divide in the city.

I think it's way too soon to make that kind of declaration, especially considering how the successful 2006 primary victories by Adrian Fenty for mayor, and Harry Thomas Jr. for Ward 5 Councilmember, were seen as a positive step--the harbinger of change, youth, andthe triumph of people born in the city achieving amongst the highest political positions in the city.

We know how that worked out. 

While many quarters of the city (continue to wrongly) lionize Adrian Fenty as an agent of change, I think the reality is that his policies accelerated the destruction of many parts of the city's school system, and many of the administration's accomplishments were born out of developments and programs initiated by the previous mayor.  And Fenty got a pass on serious contract steering to his friends and the peopling of boards and commissions with his training buddies.  And Harry Thomas Jr. is soon to embark on a 38-month sentence in federal prison for conversion of public funds.

-- Primary election special: losing sight of what matters
-- The "system" vs. "Anybody but Fenty"
-- Thinking about the "uncivil war"

I think it's way too soon to draw conclusions from the election results, especially as there was no exit polling.  My 2010 fears about voting for Vince Gray turned out to have been right on the money.  But the fact that election was called because Harry Thomas Junior resigned after having plead guilty to breaking the law while in office makes the willingness to elect someone new atypical of how people have tended to vote in ward elections.

Judging by the comments of the candidates as printed in newspaper articles leading up to the W5 special election last Tuesday, it seemed as if Kenyan McDuffie was trying to disavow to some extent, "progressivism", as it was seen as a code word for "white" or at least political interests "different" from those typically expressed by longer term residents.  And it's not like his land use and transportation agenda, at least before the election, reflected particularly "progressive" viewpoints.

This reminds me of my early experiences as an activist in the H Street neighborhood.  Compromise was expected to be one way--you were expected to give in, to capitulate--not unlike how Marshall Brown, father of City Council Chair Kwame Brown, was quoted on the subject a couple years ago:

The longtime white population, the people who got involved in statehood, civil rights and environmental causes, thought of this as a black city,” Brown told Fisher. “But the new white voters aren’t involved like that. They want doggie parks and bike lanes. The result is a lot of tension. ... The new people believe more in their dogs than they do in people. They go into their little cafes, go out and throw their snowballs. This is not the District I knew. There’s no relationship with the black community; they don’t connect at church, they don’t go to the same cafes, they don’t volunteer in the neighborhood school, and a lot of longtime black residents feel threatened.”  (from the Post)

That's pretty facile.  You can want an improvement in the city and neighborhoods without going to church.   But there are issues and as I joke with Anwar Saleem, director of the H Street Main Street program, "revitalization is really hard to do in hetereogeneous communities."  Because generating consensus is really difficult.

On the other hand, Bob King, the W5 stalwart known for his connections to the senior constituency, a reliable source of votesfor typically "traditional candidates,  and seen as a reliable member of the ward's traditional political machine--at least one faction of it, since the now cleaved off John Ray faction (John Ray, a former city councilmember, is now a leading lobbyist for various real estate and other interests) supported Wilds--supported McDuffie Delano Hunter, another younger candidate, but one criticized for anti-gay marriage positions (but one who seemed to express reasonable positions on land use and transportation issues, according to a Q&A in the Washington Post) so maybe there are the beginnings of some change in the attitudes of people associated with the machine.

Thus far, compared to wards 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, demographic change lags in W5.

E.g., in W4 from 1990 to 2010 the percentage of African American residents dropped by 20 points. There was a 10 point drop in W5 over the same period.

So it makes sense that legacy political behavior and the longevity of traditional machine politics will be more resilient in W5 until a critical mass of citizens demanding second order change is reached.

The comparatively static nature of DC's black population in demographic terms is discussed in an old paper, "Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change: Comparing Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC," from Housing Policy Debate.  The somewhat inert Chocolate City population gives resilience and instransigence to "old school" political attitudes and agendas.

The op-ed does provide an impetus to consider the future of W5 over the next 10-20 years.  So far, with the exception of more traditional suburban development at Fort Lincoln and the development of a big box shopping center adjacent to the Rhode Island Metro, there hasn't been significant new development in the Ward.

This suburban style shopping center at Brentwood was seen by Vincent Orange as one of his major accomplishments. The center's urban design could have been used to strengthen and extend urbanism, instead it focused on automobility, delaying significant economic improvement in the area. The parking lot in the foreground, abutting the Rhode Island Metro station, is now home to apartments, the construction of which is pictured below.

But that's deceptive.

I think Ward 5 is on the cusp of its own transformation, a significant and quantum transformation, not unlike the point where DC was on the eve of 21st Century, two years into the ascension of Anthony Williams as Mayor, and to some extent, the sidelining of Marion Barry as a significant force in the city.

In the late 1990s, after Anthony Williams was elected mayor, advocates had no conception of the depth and breadth and velocity of the change that was about to be unleashed, as the city exited its period of practical bankruptcy, developers felt much more comfortable about investing in the city, and the willingness of people choosing to live in the city instead of the suburbs--opposite of the dominant residential trend since the end of Ward War II--reached critical mass (assisted a bit by a special federal residential tax credit for new residents).

It's hard for people relatively new to the city to understand what it was like in the 1980s or 1990s or even until 2005.  We didn't think many neighborhoods, including H Street, Shaw and others, were likely to improve any time soon, or even in our lifetimes.  Sadly we didn't have the right planning and policy tools in place to assist us with managing the change that was about to occur.

This graffiti had been painted on a building on 9th Street NW in the Shaw neighborhood, and had been up for years. This photo is from 2006.  Today that area is undergoing significant transformation, which was unimaginable just a few years ago.

W5 is about to experience a great deal of mostly residential development, which will result in the influx of thousands of new residents to the ward.  The ward will be transformed in the process, in ways that current residents aren't likely to be fully considering.  But it's the same kind of change that is has been transforming wards 1, 2, and 6 for the last two decades. 

Just like the addition of housing to downtown is transforming ward 2, and to downtown, H Street, NOMA, and the Southeast Waterfront in Ward 6, and the intensification of land use around the Columbia Heights Metro Station is transforming ward 1, Ward 5 will undergo significant changes.

Ward 5 residents, advocates, and community groups need to prepare for the changes, changes that the city was not able to deal with very well in the last decade because we didn't have an:

• adequate housing policy and plan (although the city did a good job for a time improving the DC Housing Authority, doing a lot of HopeVI residential projects--but at the loss of housing units for the extremely impoverished, and the creation of the housing production trust fund to support the development of affordable housing)
• no parks and recreation master plan
• no system for developing true neighborhood plans (we still don't do comprehensive neighborhood planning)
• a zoning code that preferences suburban style development
• community organizations more familiar and comfortable with dealing with a shrinking, declining city rather than knowing what approaches to use to address changes and opportunities in a city that after many decades of loss, was starting to add population
• and a somewhat outdated "comprehensive plan" (even the new one, approved in 2006, has many gaps.)

Atlas Flats development, Bladensburg Road.

Development is moving to Ward 5 because the choicest locations in the northwest quadrant and in Ward 6 are getting built out. 

The number of people likely to be attracted to living adjacent to transit is not only increasing significantly, but what matters most is the people attracted to this type of housing tend to be different demographically--younger, whiter, more highly educated, likely with better income potential--than many current residents, especially those that have been living in the ward the longest.

This will be the source of contestation for many years going forward--i.e., the point made above about the difficulty of dealing with change in hetereogeneous communities is fully relevant and apt.

Hopefully, Kenyan McDuffie has it within himself to lead "third order" change, and build the capacity of the citizens, community organizations, and civil society more generally so that residents are empowered and shape the vision and agenda. That's a tall order for any politician. Thus far, no elected official in the city meets such a high bar--most are focused on "helping" citizens to the extent that they remain dependent on the elected official, which aids re-election.

In particular, the Rhode Island, Brookland, and Fort Totten Metro stations (the latter served both by the Green and Red lines) are beginning to see significant new transit-oriented development.  (The New York Avenue station is in Ward 6, just south of Ward 5, but the bulk of its impact thus far has been on development in Ward 6.)

The amount of new development that is or will be occurring in Ward 5 areas that are well served by transit will be considerable:

• Bloomingdale and Eckington, mostly the rehabilitation of extant housing and residential turnover, along with scattered infill new development
• housing development at Rhode Island Metro (with housing sites available further up Rhode Island Avenue, the eventual redevelopment of the declining shopping center located at 4th and Rhode Island Avenue, and the conversion into condominiums of many apartment buildings in the area)
• new development at Brookland, currently the "Monroe Market" development and eventually projects on the Subway station site and across the street from it, along with the "Chancellor Row" rowhouse development by EYA on a deaccessioned portion of the St. Paul's College campus
• redevelopment coming to both the W4 and W5 parts of Fort Totten
• the streetcar on H Street will also drive change in the portions of W5 that will have access to it (Trinidad especially) but is also being felt in the development of the now named "Atlas Flats" on the site of the old Sears Department store, which will be a one block walk from a streetcar stop at Bladensburg Road and H Street/Benning Road
• housing being constructed in the Ward 5 side of the "NoMA" district
• and the eventual residential development coming to the now re-termed Union Market.  (The developer's video on the future of the development references images heavily drawn from NYC's Meatpacking district);

or centrally located and close enough to transit, for example, the development of the long since abandoned McMillan sand filtration plant site at Michigan Avenue and North Capitol Street is still in bus-bike range--the station is 1 to 1.5 miles away from most of the site--to be within striking distance of the Brookland Metro Station, especially if the proposed "crosstown" streetcar line between Woodley Park and Brookland ever gets constructed.

(There is also the New Communities program, a local HopeVI type program, targeting the area between K Street and New York Avenue, from North Capitol Street to I-395.)

It's surprising to think, but Ward 5, one of the most reliably "black" wards located north of the Southeast waterfront of the city which separates Wards 7 and 8 from the rest of the city, is likely to become majority non-African-American, within maybe 15 years, because of the one-two of influx of new residents to newly built housing, and outmigration and aging out of current residents.
Rustik Tavern, Bloomingdale--five years ago, that a restaurant in this location would be successful and a neighborhood draw was almost inconceivable.  The cafe across the street had been robbed a number of times, and the commercial buildings were mostly mouldering.