Urbanism, architecture, transit, strawmen, etc.

[warwickland]

You can def fit more and carry more groceries with reusuable bags. When I lived in KC and was car-lite I also had saddle baskets on my bike and could fit 4/5 days worth of groceries. It worked pretty darn well. When I just couldnt make it down to Sunfresh I hit up the wild oats at 43rd and Main. I don't think I drove there even one time.

I was also quite the urbanist prick, perhaps i'm paying for it now by having a work area that extends halfway (or more) across the midwest. But I digress.

The main thing a city needs to be less car-centric is a culture change. Maybe the walking city model is only applicable to a small part of the core, but with a bike a lot is possible for a lot of people. I know some people don't see the need for bike lanes, but I think they (and other assorted pieces of bike infrastructure) help nudge those "bikes in the basement" folks, and that is absolutely critical.

[FangKC]

I would have just been happy if the 51 Bus had gone on Mill in front of Sunfresh instead of down Westport Road, and that there had been a covered bus stop. I always thought it was crazy that the closest good grocery store to downtown didn't require a bus stop in front of it (I hated that Apple Market). I wasn't the only person who grocery shopped on the 51 bus. I would see other downtown people on the bus.

[pash]

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[aknowledgeableperson]

A daycare in a residential area ought to be serving the neighbors, not attracting people from far away. If it has no parking, that's more likely.

In theory maybe but that does not happen in practice, for many reasons.
Besides not all neighborhoods have daycare so parents do need to drive kids to daycare.

[KCMax]

A daycare in a residential area ought to be serving the neighbors, not attracting people from far away. If it has no parking, that's more likely.

In theory maybe but that does not happen in practice, for many reasons.
Besides not all neighborhoods have daycare so parents do need to drive kids to daycare.

Its DC though. If you don't live in the neighborhood, you can take the bus, or the Metro.

Minimum-parking requirements are absurd in a city like DC.

[warwickland]

I can't say for D.C. but in most smaller cities with lots of businesses with no parking like even st Louis, there always o

[warwickland]

Damn phone. ...there's almost always on street parking nearby or a spot to drop off. 75 percent of Chicago is even like that.

[pash]

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[KCMax]

How Big Is Your City, Really?

This was made clear to me when I moved to Kansas City, Missouri, last year. Kansas City is not particularly large in terms of population compared to other U.S. cities and has a certain small-town feel. However, after doing a bit of research online, I was astonished to discover that if Kansas City were moved north of the border, it would be a contender for the third most populous metropolitan area in Canada. In other words, the Kansas City metro area has around the same number of people as Vancouver’s. But we don't think about Kansas City that way at all. Similarly, my hometown of Buffalo is more populous than the entire country of Iceland (at least when you count the entire metropolitan area) and yet Buffalo is certainly not on an international stage.

When it comes to population size, we can actually automate this process of providing scale and context for cities. Using a dataset of the most populous cities in the world, I created a simple computer program that embeds a city from one country into the urban population ranking of the cities of a second country....

So Kansas City would be the second-largest city in France. Similarly, many European cities that we think of being incredibly important and central to global affairs are not as large as they feature in our minds. Dublin, Amsterdam, and Brussels are all smaller than Cleveland, for example.

[phuqueue]

That guy makes a pretty elementary observation and runs to precisely the wrong explanation for it. I came to the same realization for the first time when I backpacked through Europe before I went to law school and noticed that metro area vs. metro area, Barcelona is only modestly larger than St. Louis. I don't think it has anything to do with "history-induced inertia," though. I don't think of Barcelona as a world-class city and St. Louis as a typical unremarkable American rust belt city because of "history" (and frankly if history did have anything to do with it, St. Louis should loom a lot larger than it does), I think of it that way because I've been to both cities and Barcelona feels much larger. Why? Probably because, although the metro areas are comparably sized, Barcelona is about 8x denser than St. Louis. The streets there are vibrant and busy, not just in the tourist-packed historic center of town (but yes, definitely there too) but even further out where you just hit block after block of generic 6-10 story buildings of apartments, offices, etc, virtually all with ground-level retail.

Most American cities feel much smaller than they are compared to cities in other countries because they're so spread out. Car culture kills street culture. The author's KC/Vancouver comparison works the same way as the Barcelona/St. Louis one -- Vancouver is also about 8x denser than KC. Vancouver (presumably -- I've never actually been there to speak from experience) is a real city, like Barcelona and even like smaller European cities like Amsterdam and Brussels. They're lively, vibrant, cohesive. Most American cities are none of these things. For all the strides KC has made in the past decade, for all its successes, it's still not "the second-largest city in France" and it probably never will be. The difference between KC and Marseille is basically night and day. And it scales up too -- Chicago and Paris have comparable city populations (granted, Paris's metro population is larger), and no matter how much you might love Chicago you will never successfully argue that it's more vibrant than Paris -- which happens to be 5x denser. If the difference in metro populations appears to give Paris an unfair advantage, swap Chicago out for Los Angeles for a downright laughable comparison.

It is true that many of the big European cities do get a boost in terms of name recognition, public perception, etc for being national (in the case of Brussels, also supranational) capitals -- just by definition these cities will take on much greater importance than KC or Buffalo or Cleveland could ever hope to have. But get on the ground in these cities and look around a bit; they simply feel much bigger and more alive, and it has nothing to do with the fact that there's a national parliament building across town or that they feature prominently in history books. It has everything to do with the fact that these places are real cities in every way that most American cities aren't anymore.

His reasoning does work a little better when you flip it the other way, as in his example ranking Boston as a Chinese city. China has over 160 cities with population of one million or more, and there's simply no reason an American would have heard of most of them unless they were historically or presently socially/culturally/economically significant. "Historical inertia" probably does play the role he describes, but to a far lesser degree than he suggests. He almost appears to grasp this at the very end when he talks about why Europe overtook the Arab world (large cities close together), but he doesn't quite take hold of it and simply say: population density.

[KCMax]

Santorum Takes On Urban America

“Think about it, look at the map of the United States — blue being the Democrats, red being the Republicans — it’s almost all red,” Mr. Santorum said Saturday evening. “Except around the big cities.

“And yet when you look at the economic plan that Republicans put forward, it’s all about tax breaks for higher-income individuals who live in those blue areas mostly.”

Mr. Santorum said his proposal for a zero percent corporate tax rate on manufacturing would bring jobs back to small-town America.

Gee, I wonder why we should focus on urban areas?

[shinatoo]

Over half the people in the US live in areas with a lot of other people.

AMAZING!

[KCMax]

NYT: The New Suburban Poverty

The Brookings Institution reported two years ago that “by 2008 suburbs were home to the largest and fastest growing poor population in the country.” In the previous eight years, major metropolitan suburbs had seen poverty rates climb by 25 percent, almost five times faster than cities. Nationwide, 55 percent of the poor living in the nation’s metropolitan regions lived in suburbs....

Why is poverty soaring in the suburbs? Part of the answer, according to the Brookings Institution, is simple demographics: More Americans live in the suburbs, so there are more poor people there, too. But the recent downturn has also had an outsize impact on suburbs, with the decline in certain categories of jobs and an end to the housing boom that drew many urbanites and immigrants to the suburbs in the first place.

While suburbs have always been more diverse economically and culturally than popular imagination would have it, soaring poverty rates threaten the very foundations of suburban identities, suburban politics and the suburb’s place in the nation’s self-image. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” the midcentury caricature of suburban conformity, materialism and consumption has given way to a new suburban normal of making ends meet, with many formerly middle-class families in detached single-family homes struggling to pay mortgages and utility bills, and to repair aging cars.

[pash]

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[FangKC]

The City does a poor job replacing street trees, and the ones they do often die very quickly. It's probably because they don't install the tree properly, and have a watering source for it. Trees need a lot of water after planting to get started. The other issue is that they often don't have enough room to root. I saw a segment on urban tree planting on Ask This Old House, and their garden expert was talking about this very issue. That cities often don't plant trees correctly, and he demonstrated why these trees fail.

Below is the link to the episode. It starts at minute 13:00.

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/tv/ask- ... 06,00.html

A newly-planted tree requires about 15 gallons of water twice a week for the two weeks, and then once a week for the rest of the season before freeze. The other big problem with new trees is that the City doesn't give them regular nutrients.

Many of the street trees in urban neighborhoods have been cut down, and never replaced. Many times it's because the area has a high number of rental properties, and the landlords don't care about things like that.

Another reason a lot of property owners don't do it is because their gas and water lines run in from the street across the curb-to-sidewalk median. In my case, the water, sewer, and gas lines don't enter the property together, and are far enough apart that I can't really plant a street tree because of root clearance issues. This is especially true in older parts of the city that have narrow lots with houses right up against each other.

Roots from established trees can wreak havoc on utility pipes--especially old water and sewage lines. I was watching an episode of This Old House in Boston, and they had a big expense dealing with a tree that had rooted through a water line, which was leaking. They had to remove the tree, and it cost a lot to fix.

The other reason is weather. Think about when we have a big ice storm and many trees take out utility lines, or fall on houses.

I will use my house, and my neighbor's house as an example. Our lots and houses are virtually identical--both built in 1954. We both have our gas and water lines coming in from the front, and our electric, phone, and cable coming in from utility poles in the back yard. When I moved into this house, there were no trees on the property, and my neighbor had no trees either. There are utility lines criss-crossing in his and my backyards, and they also hang pretty low.

I planted some trees that don't get very big in my backyard one day, and it was difficult to site them not to interfere with the drooping power lines. The power lines don't go to the same side of the house, but both sides, so there are lines hanging across the width of my entire back yard--leaving very little space to plant trees.

I was talking to my neighbor about why he didn't have trees, and he said he cut down the one tree he had in the backyard because a limb broke during that big ice storm back in 2002, and took out his electric and phone line. He said it was expensive to have the tree removed, so he never planted another.

I wish we could have more trees, because the roof of my house is completely exposed in the summer, and the house heats up pretty fast.

See photo below:

The blue lines are the water, sewer, and gas lines coming into the houses from the street. My house is labeled "A". The red lines are the phone, cable, and electric lines crossing the back yards. In addition, if I get Google service, I will have a fourth line coming into the house.

[aknowledgeableperson]

Two items.
One, the city has also cut the budget for tree planting for the past few years, especially compared to 10 to 20 years ago.
Two, at my old house my neighbor had his utility lines buried. Not sure of the cost.

[FangKC]

Today, on Ask This Old House, they dealt with a problem with tree roots growing into sewer pipes. Most roots grow into joints between pipes going out of the house to the street.

Apparently as the ground settles, the joint seals crack, and tree roots enter them looking for a water source.

The problem can be fixed by inserting a sleeve liner into the pipe than seals off the crack.

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/asktoh/ ... 55,00.html

[KCMax]

I was listening to a Marketplace podcast about a neighborhood in Florida that had gone through a lot of foreclosures, so this 14 year old girl began making money by taking the stuff left behind and selling it on ebay. She made so much money, she was able to buy a house that she rents out for even more money. Pretty smart girl.

Anyway, the subtext that they talked about a bit was how the neighborhood had changed quite a bit because of the foreclosures. They talked to neighbors that talked about the "new residents" and how they weren't "like us." I thought it was really interesting, especially in light of this Trayvon Martin case. In the Martin case, from what I understand, the gated community had gone through a lot of foreclosures as well, and devalued homes, allowing for more working class residents to move in. But this "reverse gentrification" led to class conflicts as the older residents resented the newer residents. I wonder how big of a problem this is all over places like Florida and Arizona.

[slimwhitman]

The City does a poor job replacing street trees, and the ones they do often die very quickly. It's probably because they don't install the tree properly, and have a watering source for it. Trees need a lot of water after planting to get started. The other issue is that they often don't have enough room to root.

They often also select the wrong species. Here is a list of the right species to plant in KC. The second page is specific to Street Trees:
http://www.ground-workshop.com/etcetera

Also, The Missouri Dept of Conservation and MARC are working to develop a complete iTree program to encourage landowners and municipalities to plant more trees. See thier efforts here:
http://marc.org/environment/itree.htm