Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Kids These Days

The day that I went somewhere and said "dang kids" was the day I knew that I had grown old. Not that I am that old, but it just means I'd started desiring different things in my older life than that of my childhood. Kid me would probably be off buying packs of baseball cards and candy corn. Today though I can't even muster up the courage to throw down for an xbox 360 to finally play Halo 3.

But I'm not the point where I'm telling kids to get off my lawn like New Urbanist Andres Duany. In an article in the Atlantic in their very cool city section, Andres goes on to do just that:
There's this generation who grew up in the suburbs, for whom the suburbs have no magic. The mall has no magic. They're the ones that have discovered the city. Problem is, they're also destroying the city. The teenagers and young people in Miami come in from the suburbs to the few town centers we have, and they come in like locusts. They make traffic congestion all night; they come in and take up the parking. They ruin the retail and they ruin the restaurants, because they have different habits then older folks. I have seen it. They're basically eating up the first-rate urbanism. They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else.
I'm not quite sure where this came from. It's pretty low to bash on the people who are moving to cities in droves because they want the urban experience. Do we all become angry at younger folks like this at some point? I sure hope not.

Monday, May 17, 2010

The Discussion is Lacking

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This exchange on Real Time with Bill Maher between Chris Matthews and Ross Douthat is the perfect example of why this country is so misinformed. While Chris goes on extolling the virtues of High Speed Rail, all you can hear Ross say is that Amtrak is heavily subsidized. No mention of highway subsidies or other market distortions, just the fact that Amtrak is government run. And no one really fights back. Never mind that most of the time it has to borrow tracks or has a higher operating recovery ratio than any other mode in this country.

Anyway, listen to the exchange and see how the country can be mislead so easily by people that don't discuss things with the facts. I always say this when I listen to people I think might be smart talk about a subject I know something about, but I need to remind myself that if they are this unintelligent about a subject I know about, how much do they know about things I don't know about, and what kind of misinformation am I getting on other subjects?

You can listen here before the flash uploads.

For some reason the embed feature wasn't working. The audio is still at the link above...

Thursday, May 13, 2010

On Gentrification, Supply, and Expansion

Living in the bay area can be particularly maddening. Even if you're working hard and making a good living, you are likely to still not be able to afford a house in the neighborhood of your choice. The reason being its so hard to build anywhere without coming up against NIMBYs and people that already have theirs. Take the BRT disaster where Berkeley rejected even doing the study for dedicated lanes in the city limits. It seems like progress is just a step away but defeat is often snatched from the jaws of victory.

I sometimes wonder why we can't just build more dense housing in employment districts or places where NIMBYs don't exist. There's a huge supply of land in these areas of San Jose with parking lots that could use serious transit infrastructure expansion. But the fact of the matter is that areas that are really desirable and dense are for the most part built out, and since they are built out their cost continues to increase dramatically because people really want to live there and there is a limited supply.

Take for example the Mission in San Francisco. For many years it was a lower income neighborhood known for its culture but over time transitioned. There are still vestiges of this in the compact and livable urban environment, but now the hipsters have come. I'm not sure that's a bad thing per say but we've seen this story before. Certain parties populate an urban neighborhood and then others follow until it becomes upper class, it gentrifies/yuppifies (a good read here on this subject). This end state of neighborhoods is seen as awful for the folks that were pushed out, but it is also seen as progress for the city as buildings get painted and the garden flowers are potted. This very end state of the process or "Starbucks Urbanism" is what becomes the mark of progress for those seeking it.

The problem however I see with this is not the end state per say, but the fact that the process has to happen at all. The biggest issue I have with the gentrification claim is that it can be rendered useless if we actually supplied housing for the actual market for housing. I know this is a claim long pushed by the planners and CNU set, but there's actually something behind the idea that we've overproduced single family housing and under produced urban types. What we've seen in urban neighborhoods with good bones over the last decade or so is a transformation based on lack of opportunity to improve without pushing out the middle.

But I do see a possible opportunity in the massive expansion plans that exist due to the transit space race to improve without pushing away. With multi-line expansion plans in places like Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle, so many stations will be brought on line, the market won't be able to get to them all at once. One of the major benefits and worries of these new transit lines is that they will bring increased property values and push out existing communities. While this will provide better mobility to many of these areas, it's not likely to bring wholesale change to each of them. But it does start to provide opportunities for building housing that starts to change the urban vs. suburban market, without focusing it all on one close in neighborhood such as what has been happening in smaller regions that build transit over the last boom. We'll see what happens, but this is the theory I have.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Bad Design and Money Disconnects

Hey everyone, I realize that the posts on here have slowed to a crawl. I don't meant to neglect them but sometimes life gets in the way. You can find links from me on twitter everyday @theoverheadwire. They are also on the bottom right of the blog. But on to biz:

I've had some tabs open that I really wanted to comment on but hadn't gotten a chance. So if this is old news I apologize:

First off, Kemper Freeman stands to gain a lot of development money from light rail. It's unfortunate that his head is so far up his ass that he can't see the dollar signs and is instead wasting them on lawsuits. No matter, give all those earnings to the lawyers and watch him lose anyway.

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Second, I'm really annoyed at Yahoo's campus design. This is just more suburban crap and instead of creating buildings and a street network that actually form a true urban grid, such that other buildings could form some sort of urban neighborhood around them. This is what is wrong with our employment centers and why they aren't walkable, making it harder to take transit. Sure its better than what was there before, but it could have been used to set off a new way of developing office parks that was sustainable. Great you're next to a light rail line and it looks like a school campus. I still think Adobe is the champ for going downtown.


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Finally. If you haven't seen it yet, the 1906 SF streetcar video is pretty cool. You can find more explanation at Market Street Railway.