The Star needs to add an urban developement columnist

[knucklehead]

It has been over 20 days since the election and the Star has not done any reporting on light rail costs, ridership and funding in other cities.

I had been under the impression that Yael Aboulhalkah was supposed to be the columnist covering urban development. But looking at his archieve of columns it is clear that isn't his beat. All he seems to write about is politics. And when he writes about politics he is 90 percent negative. Purusing his current columns on the Star's web site shows just what a whiny negative guy he is. He doesn't seem to support much of anything. Just complains alot. The other thing that strikes me as I read his columns all at once is just how superficial they are. Details and facts are not Yael's strong point. Several of his columns deal with a topic in three or four sentances.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascit ... bouhalkah/

Kevin Collison does a fine job as a reporter, but he isn't styled as a columnist and having him do both reporting and opinion columns might cause some to question the objectivity of his reporting. The Star should add a columnist with real experience in urban development issues. You know, someone who actually has some knowledge of what is going on in other cities like Denver, Dallas, San Franscisco, etc.

Abouhalkah is never going to be anything other than a whiny provential rube. Kansas City deserves someone who actually has some specialized knowledge of these issues. 

[dangerboy]

I'm kinda confused...  The stuff you are asking for on ridership, costs, etc. would usually be covered by a reporter, not columnist.  Are you asking for opinion or research?

[knucklehead]

Columnists are allowed to use facts. Indeed, columns without facts are nothing but unpursasive push pieces.

I am not against adding another reporter to the development beat as well.

[bbqboy]

You mean someone like John King of the SF Chronicle-
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... MFG8F1.DTL
  San Francisco Chronicle
The chase for what was or could have been

John King

Tuesday, November 21, 2006


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For the past week I've been reading two books that have nothing in common, except that each one radiates a tenacious desire to know.

One plunges into the backwaters of Shakespearean scholarship; the other is an almost comically thorough survey of New York City's physical changes between 1960 and 2000. One involves words on the page, the other buildings in the air.

But the passion they share is passion itself, and it's the sort of passion familiar to anyone who loves a city like San Francisco. Once you're hooked, you're hooked; the urge to explore doesn't fade. It deepens with every discovery, and is sharpened by each fresh insight.

Landscapes unfold around you, hint at what else might have been -- and the mysteries that remain become more tantalizing still.

In the case of "The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups," what attracted me was the author. Not the Bard himself (sorry, Will) but Ron Rosenbaum, a New York writer who's been a pot-stirring delight on all manner of topics for the past 20 years.

Rosenbaum's quest here is to explore the world of Shakespeare obsession: the people who try to resolve centuries of intellectual or theatrical controversy once and for all. The scholars who debate wording in the three versions of Hamlet (and was there a fourth?) that survive from Shakespeare's time. The ones who write long papers on which version of King Lear's last words capture Shakespeare's intent (but did he make the changes, or did someone else?). The directors who insist on the difference between a "pause" and "a tiny sense break (not a stop)."

"Shakespeare invented something alive, created a kind of intelligent life that survived him," Rosenbaum writes, "... one that will outlive any one of us because a body of work so bottomlessly self-referential will not exhaust what is there to be found and compounded."

It's as if Shakespeare's work forms a city -- one as intricate and beguiling as the oldest districts of England's York or Paris' Marais, twist upon turn and wood upon stone.

That sort of city is a far cry from the subject of "New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millennium" a long title for a big book that costs $100, weighs 13 pounds and contains 1,520 pages. There are even three authors: Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove.

It's a New York of straight streets and tall buildings and ever-high stakes, and the methodical procession from Lower Manhattan to the outer boroughs is like the most informed architectural tour one could imagine. It's also as dizzying as the Empire State Building viewed from directly below: We learn about not only the buildings but the politics of the time and what the critics thought.

Best of all, the authors clue us in on what never happened. That's what pulls me in. The New York we're shown is not a fait accompli, it's a hall of mirrors. There are buildings that were approved but never built and visions conjured up by provocateurs to make a rhetorical point, such as Robert Venturi's hotel for Times Square topped by a 30-story-high clown's hat.

We also get to see dozens of spurned desires -- each one a quest for immortality on the world's best-known skyline, a determined effort to win favor. At Columbus Circle, for instance, the authors dust off no fewer than 21 schemes for the site now filled by glassy twin towers (but not the Twin Towers).

So these books show us two examples of obsession, two different settings, but each one the aftermath of seduction. It's the desire to know all and tell all, with the charged sensations that come when intimate knowledge whets your appetite rather than dulls your interest.

The same holds true for cities.

I grew up outside San Francisco: The city began to reveal itself in my teens, as I would walk to North Beach from BART or drive to concerts in neighborhoods so unlike the suburban tract of my home. By the time I was 24 and married, my wife and I were sitting in a Grant Avenue cafe happy to move to Boston because the city just wasn't the same anymore.

Decades later, I'm lucky enough to be able to know San Francisco and to have a job that lets me try and know it better. I can now see the ghosts: buildings torn down or buildings not built, long-gone restaurants and stores, large-scale visions for places like Mission Bay that never came to pass (corporate towers along canals? Why not? It's the '80s!).

But that doesn't make San Francisco a closed book; quite the opposite. I wonder about the exotic mundanity of a district like the Excelsior that I rarely visit. I send The Chronicle's priceless librarians on chases through the files for the original design of the Transamerica Pyramid (it was even taller). Each empty lot downtown has a hint of intrigue -- will it be filled? And if so, will we see a stab at greatness or a value-engineered letdown?

This sort of curiosity comes with the terrain, just as the passage of time creates an overlay of memories, of incidents and choices for better or worse.

There's a lot to be said for the transience of our age, the skip-stop culture where people sample the globe and let jobs unmoor them from home. Where all the culture you need is contained within your laptop or iPod.

But there's also a lot to say for staying put, for delving in, for having the patience to let time soften and define what you see, even as you search ever harder for what you miss.

Whatever your passion, or place, might be.

Place appears on Tuesday. E-mail John King, who's thankful for the annual drive up the Delta to Sacramento, at jking@sfchronicle.com

[FangKC]

I agree.  The Star does need a urban development columnist.

Kevin Collison does a great job as a development reporter. However, there is a need for someone to be doing commentary / opinion pieces on development, TIF usage, preservation, street-life, retail, neighborhoods, home-building techniques, renovation, etc.

This columnist would be free to offer opinions and criticism and give examples and reports on what has/hasn't worked elsewhere.  He would have to be free from the objectivity of doing direct reportage.

This columnist would need to be part historian, preversationist, architectural critic;  knowledgeable about the urban built environment; and up on mass transit, etc.

Maybe the paper needs two people doing this. One that is more preservation/history oriented and interested in green architecture and ecology; and another that is more oriented towards development; cutting-edge architecture, and business.

This would provide a point-counterpoint aspect to the coverage that is clearly lacking.

The main purpose of such columnists however would be to educate the public on urban issues, development, and make them understand why this stuff is important to them and their city.  Someone who could provide the big picture, and explain to a senior citizen living on the East Side, and a soccer mom in Johnson County, why it's important to them to have a healthy, growing city, and a dynamic built environment that attracts new residents and workers; keeps current ones, and draws in conventions and tourists.

[kard]

Collison does that to some extent on Tuesdays.  He's been growing over the last year, too.  But it does put him in a conflicting spot when offering opinion vs getting people to trust him and offer information.  It would be interesting to get more views from a columnist, but I think most readers in Kansas City wouldn't understand.  And this fellow would have to write a lot about which suburb has greener lawns and which has more realistic plastic deer.

[KC0KEK]

The main purpose of such columnists however would be to educate the public on urban issues, development, and make them understand why this stuff is important to them and their city.  Someone who could provide the big picture, and explain to a senior citizen living on the East Side, and a soccer mom in Johnson County, why it's important to them to have a healthy, growing city, and a dynamic built environment that attracts new residents and workers; keeps current ones, and draws in conventions and tourists.

I'm not sure that that requires a new columnist. The Star has already been presenting a lot of that info via Collison, series such as "Mending Our Broken Heart" and features. Granted, there's a lot going on in the urban core, but enough to fill three columns per week? I could see it working if the columnist frequently also wrote about individuals in the urban core instead of just projects and trends. But then he/she would be treading on the territory of existing columnists, such as Steve Penn.

[Beermo]

good luck with this.

the star needs a lot of things and an urban development columnist is probably low on the list.

they finally hired an advertising vp and a packaging and delivery boss this month. they let the entire janitorial staff at the main building go last week. so...........

something else that bothers me is that the company that owned the star, knight ridder, was bought by mcclatchy in june and now knight ridder doesn't exist. mcclatchy hasn't even shown their face yet and all of our insurance still goes thru knight-ridder, which doesn't exist.

the star has cut or will be cutting everything to the bone. outsource what they can. it wouldn't surprise me if they tried to replace all the pressmen with day laborers. 

the only department i see them hiring for is the advertising department for ad sales people, who btw, work on commission.

for fun go thru the first 4 sections of the paper and count every ad. when your done with that start over and count every story attributed to a star writer. probably not that many. i would bet that over half of the stories in the paper come from sources other than the star.