New Geography

Author: Richard Reep

  • The Good News in Florida’s Bad Times

    By Richard Reep

    2009 was ugly. A swirl of dispiriting events stalled over much of the world this year, and Florida was no exception: state depopulation and tourism decline hit the state’s only two legitimate growth industries.

    Yet the bad times contain within them some good news. This end of an era meant that economic planners might finally turn to productive industries to generate jobs and revenue, just like the rest of the nation.

    First the bad news. For the first time since Florida became a state in 1845, more people moved out of the state than in, as reported by the University of Florida Bureau of Economic Research in August. In other states, this might not be news, but in Florida this has been viewed as nothing short of catastrophic. Growth is one of the state’s two primary industries, and with the last 163 years, growth was taken for granted (1945 saw depopulation as military personnel went home).

    Florida’s other traditional support, tourism, collapsed in 2009, as jittery tourists stayed close to home or went elsewhere in search of vacation. Since growth and tourism were the state’s only economic activity, this pretty much tanked it for the year; without a state income tax, the government is starved for tax money and is taking a hatchet to basic services in an effort to stay afloat. Meanwhile, it’s easy to get a parking space at the beach, hotel rooms are cheap and plentiful for a change, and the weather is as beautiful as ever.

    With private development dead, government desperate for income, and the professional class seeking jobs elsewhere, it will be easy for outsiders to write off the future prospects for the Sunshine State’s towns and cities. On the ground, however, a slightly different story emerges, a stoic sort of acceptance and the glimmerings of a change or two in the individual outlooks of citizens who stay. A few foreboding trends also cloud the horizon.

    Miami, a city not known to shy away from risks, this year replaced its Euclidean zoning code with a form-based code in a grand experiment with the public process. Voters who had enough of corruption and greed decided to endorse a visually appealing future of their city. Whether or not the outcome produces a better city, the 500+ public meetings did spark a badly needed public/private dialogue that should help Miami reshape itself into its new vision.

    Those who do stay in Florida and stick it out are getting more involved. As the outside world stopped supplying capital and residents, a sense of new localism sprang up almost overnight, with people gravitating away from the big brands and status symbols of a once-proud consumerist lifestyle. Sure, many turned to global brands like Wal-mart, but many more are supporting local food co-ops, farmer’s markets, independent eateries, and home industries in an effort to beat the system.

    If restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress (as stated by Thomas Edison), citizens of Florida cities like Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando and Miami are ripe for progress. Consumer culture took a pause, but people still need to eat. Like the rest of the nation, this rediscovery of local goods and services has flowered, upon which a newfound sense of identity is being built through face-to-face exchange without the invisible army of middlemen that our commercial culture has spawned.

    With earnest public debate about the urban future in one of our nation’s largest cities, we can be assured that Florida citizens do care about the quality of life in their community. With neighborhoods spawning local markets and co-ops, we can be assured that urbanites do care about their local producers – and know a bargain when they see one. Both factors will contribute to a citizenry emerging stronger out of the state’s economic turmoil.

    Left to its own devices, Florida may sort itself out. Agriculture and manufacturing, two key industries faintly alive in Florida, have a chance to come back. Affordability and quality of life could lure the right kind of talent and encourage local entrepreneurs. Florida is poised to develop industries with health research and digital media where our lower costs and attractive climate could prove decisive.

    Yet this localist trend and greater attention to fundamentals could be altered by more meddling from Washington. The state returned Washington’s check for a train set not once, but twice, causing a concerned Secretary Ray LaHood to make a personal visit to see what was wrong. After some gentle persuasion – after all, Obama’s nationwide high speed rail vision could easily bypass this state with jobs and cash – Florida’s elected officials quickly jumped back to the politically correct side of the fence, and passed a bill to bring commuter rail to Central Florida. Now LaHood must deliver on the promise to prioritize Florida’s high speed rail construction.

    For the future, if the past is any guide, the upcoming war with Afghanistan could prove a boon to Florida. World War 2 saw an influx of servicemen and women, and the opening of multiple military bases, supply depots, and runways, partly due to its mild weather and partly due to its political stature. By adding this industry to offset its growth and tourism losses, Florida can benefit from the fulfillment of arguably President Obama’s most dangerous campaign promise.

    Doubts about these guns and trains leave more than a few Floridians worried about the strings attached to big brother’s largesse. It would be far more constructive to place more faith on the citizen’s renewed interest in the public process and the individual’s support of localism, two trends that seem destined to stay and become ingrained in our lifestyles. If Florida must accept Washington’s command economy for now, then at least the state will be left with increased transportation options and more exposure to service personnel who just might want to come back to stay after the war is over.

    But the more important work will, in the end, be done locally. If Floridians can capitalize on genuine public/private dialogue, such as happened in Miami 21, then there is a chance the state can pull from behind and surge ahead as a place where the future can still be sunny.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

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  • Will New Urbanists Deliver A Home-Win With Miami 21?

    By Richard Reep

    “A walkable city, more like… Manhattan, Chicago, or San Francisco,” is how The Miami Herald characterizes the future of Miami under Miami 21, the new form-based code adopted on October 22nd by the Miami City Commission. This seems to be the hot new dream not just of Miami, but of all cities struggling under corruption and greed, codes and regulations, with an imagined underground urbanity, yearning to breathe free. Citizens may now expect to see Miami remodeled after cities that grew before the car came, but the lyrics to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” echo in the minds of some: “Meet the new boss…same as the old boss.”

    Miami 21, controversial for nearly four years and over 500 public meetings, met a critical need for citizens who were tired of the corruption and greed that seemed to result in an increasingly ugly, congested quasi-urban nightmare. Planning and zoning regulations, which were originally designed to protect property values, could be reinvented when enough power and money was at stake, and the code enforcers allowed more and more bizarre juxtapositions of high rises among low-scale residential neighborhoods. During the recent condo boom, variances became business as usual for the Miami City Commission and the Mayor. Now that the condo boom is over, it appears that both are rushing in to make amends to voters by passing this new form-based code.

    The code places height limits on neighborhoods similar to the old, Euclidean code, ominously named 11000. But this time around, uses are not segregated; instead, a mix of retail and other uses is intended to encourage increased pedestrian activity and a taking back of some of the city from the car. For citizens, there has been much to like about the arguments in favor of this code. As a result of the change, the pleasant weather that drew so many to the city will now perhaps be enjoyed on the boulevard; fear of shadows from looming high-rises will, according to the plan, now recede a bit. And a more organized, easy-to-understand building pattern should replace the Rube Goldberg-like zoning code full of special exceptions, arcane “bonus” rules, and a process all too easily subverted by tax-hungry politicians.

    With private development comatose, it is a perfect time for many jurisdictions to perform a much-needed overhaul of their development regulations. In the boom-bust atmosphere of Florida, most of the development industry sees this cease-fire as simply a pause to reload, and the Department of Community Affairs – Tallahassee’s growth management gatekeeper – is busy helping developers get ready for the next boom by making the Rural Land Stewardship Areas, a regulation designed to protect rural areas from development, officially optional.

    The American Institute of Architects chapter in Miami proposed to reform the old code, rather than start from scratch, arguing that the new code is complicated, fussy, and inhibiting. Reform of the existing 11000 code never seemed to be an option, and instead the Miami 21 code, written by New Urbanist gurus Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg of DPZ, replaces the old code. Citizens of Miami, when presented with this new code, seemed ready for a change.

    This was an important home-win for DPZ and for New Urbanism in general. Increasingly associated with greenfield prettyboys like Celebration and Seaside, New Urbanism seemed to be losing ground and losing relevance at solving real-city problems. With the support of a massive public relations campaign, New Urbanism has now been given a chance to deliver on its promises of a “a clear vision for the City that will be supported by specific guidelines and regulations so that future generations will reap the benefits of well-balanced neighborhoods and rich quality of life.”

    Arcane spreadsheets, full of formulae and footnotes, have been replaced by transects. These silhouettes of buildings and streets – a sort of cross-section through the city – begin with the way a natural, un-built environment might look, progress to how a rural road looks, and go all the way up to how high-rise canyons might look. Patterning a city on a consensual, pre-approved notion of order is what New Urbanism is all about. There are no surprises – no high-rises in your backyard – but, as some local architects worry, there’s no spontaneity either.

    Walkability is another promise of the new code. Ideas such as transforming blank walls, promoting urban infill development, and lining parking garages with retailers, are all illustrated with magical dissolve images that change ugly parking garages into charming shopping districts. If it were only that easy.

    Transit-oriented development is a strategic goal of the code, creating density clusters that get people out of their cars and into alternative forms of transportation. Buses, bicycles, vanpools, and Miami’s Metrorail are closely interlinked with Miami 21.

    The marketing website for Miami 21 makes it impossible to be against the code. Opposing Miami 21 would be like opposing lifesaving drugs or opposing the blue sky. New Urbanism won this victory because there weren’t any compelling counter-arguments to their basic argument for urban hygiene. And Miami 21 comes at a time when the city has been egregiously abused at the hands of the free market; its citizens disenfranchised and suffering from an environment of ugliness, traffic and congestion.

    As noble as Miami 21’s goals are, however, they are only as good as the politicians in whose hands they will be used. Making new laws, rather than enforcing the old laws, is a favorite activity of politicians who, backed against the wall by irate voters, seek a grand solution. Much harder work will come when developers try to seek waivers against Miami 21, and if the history of Florida is any guide, it is not likely things will change much. For Miami 21 has some inherent costs that will split the haves and the have-nots of Miami-Dade County even further apart than they are now.

    For the haves, the higher cost of development under Miami 21 is already a concerning factor. The code promises increased regulation, and the density transects favor already high-value districts. At the last minute, for example, City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff switched his support to be in favor of a 35-foot height limit in Miami’s MiMo historic district, to the chagrin of property owners seeking higher buildings. Whether he stays on one side of the fence, or switches back at the behest of a developer, remains to be seen.

    In Miami, the validity of New Urbanism’s principles of how cities are regulated will finally be put to the test. By spelling out the city’s form in detail, through technical images, watercolor perspectives, and mock-historical drawings, Miami 21 is illustrating a preordained vision of itself. The public’s trust in its elected officials has been so broken by the recent capitalistic building frenzy that, by consensus, an agreed-upon “ideal city” has been created on paper. Now it is up to the building officials to deliver this vision when the next building boom hits.

    Instead of exploring how to improve the planning process, as AIA Miami suggested, Miami 21 seems to have avoided confronting the planning and process issues that no one seems to know how to solve. Have our cities become so complex that we are unable to manage their growth through the traditional public planning process? An even bigger question is whether the village-planning model at the core of New Urbanism is a valid model? Will it achieve the lofty goals that have been promised?

    Miami 21 will be a fascinating experiment to watch during the coming years. Miami is already known for taking risks: it built an elevated rail system in a suburban, multipolar city and encouraged an international development binge that resulted in a dozen or two empty skyscrapers. Now it has added formal prototyping to its use regulations. As Miami 21 is implemented and tested, other cities like St. Petersburg, Denver, and Philadelphia are following suit, hoping that the increased regulations will be the quick fix needed to assure the public that the civic realm is being cared for.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Report from Orlando: The Spirit Rocks On

    By Richard Reep

    “In hard times, people turn to God or alcohol” jokes Bud Johnson of Constructwire, a database that tracks planning and construction projects nationwide. Johnson, 50, is an industry veteran and has never seen a recession like this in his career. “This is an exceptionally broad-based downturn,” he says, “and Orlando has been hit harder than most in the South, what with your only real industries being housing and tourism.” Both industries have been trapped like mammoths in a glacier as the credit market stays stubbornly frozen in a modern banking Ice Age.

    At the bottom of the glacier, however, the meltwater continues to flow, and bars and liquor stores seem to be thriving. With 10 new ABC stores open this year, this privately held Orlando-based liquor retailer is doing just fine, enabling many of us to stay sane, if not sober, while waiting for The Recovery. The alchoholic spirits are not the only mood-shifting business doing well in these hard times. Sacred space may not be exactly booming, but religious buildings are being built at a more comfortable pace than nearly any other building type in Central Florida.

    “Ecclesiastical architecture is falling at a rate close to that of a paper airplane, while my other building types have the glide ratio of a rock,” says Peter Kosinski, the architect responsible for the renovation of St. James Cathedral in downtown Orlando. With most other projects on hold, including a share of churches, Kosinski Architecture has still seen most of his religious work proceed, despite the Great Recession. Funding largely comes from donations, and for secular not-for-profits cultural outfits like United Arts, giving has evaporated. Spiritual needs, however, seem to be drawing a steady stream of money to expand or add to temples, churches, synagogues, and other sacred spaces to meet a growing demand in the Central Florida area.

    If the credit Ice Age is a part of a great karmatic rebalancing, it was long overdue and has hit especially hard in our overheated, consumer-driven culture. The cynics, who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing, drove sacred space largely underground as new subdivisions engorged Orlando with not a square inch reserved for community worship. Religious uses simply don’t fit the profit model of late capitalism, and while our older neighborhoods are dotted with small, walk-to churches, not a cross can be found in the landscape of most newer developments. To the development industry, collective religious worship represents someone else’s unprofitable land sale.

    Cobbling together 15 or 20 acres therefore became a new art form for many evangelical pastors as the late 20th century saw the rise of the megachurch. These huge, Sunday-traffic-nightmares offer sophisticated audio/visual Christian themed entertainment in an arena setting, a perfect way for many to fulfill their spiritual needs. Others, stuck in these vast residential tracts devoid of sacred space, use the house-church method, gathering in groups of 8 or 10 at a member’s residence, taking heart in what Pope Gregory the Great (an early leader) stated: “The real altar of God is the mind and the heart of the just.” And some do both.

    Either way, the religious needs of the people of Central Florida are expanding, and the sanctuaries, temples, synagogues, and mosques are noticeably busier. The 2-year-old Guang Ming Temple, housing the local Renzai Humanist Buddhists, is experiencing a surge in attendance locally. Temple Director Chueh Fan confirms that there is a strong need for a communal spiritual facility. “We feel the hardship of people right now,” she states. “Although the Asian community here is stable, we have been growing over the last 2 years. And we are a middle-sized temple; there are some much bigger in other states.” Guang Ming offers Dharma classes in Spanish, English, Vietnamese and Chinese, and class enrolment is growing quickly.

    Other clerics, such as Reverend Reginald Dunston, also see a need for more religious-based education, and are planning new schools as well as sanctuaries. “Agape Word Ministry is planning a bible-based school,” he explains, “as an alternative to the schools in the area.” Other pastors, such as Jeff Cox of Salem Lutheran Church in Bay Hill, agree that it is important to expand their offerings to include a religious-based education. Education is the one tangible asset that a community is willing to purchase from a house of worship, and while most religions in America struggle for relevance, their schools remain in demand.

    Christianity, exploding in a pluralism not seen since the Reformation, is especially sensitive to its status as the dominant American religion. While over 4,000 new churches open nationwide annually, another 3,700 close, according to David T. Olson in his 2008 book “The American Church in Crisis.” This is near status quo, despite population growth, suggesting a shift away from collective religious worship for many. Hispanics, traditionally more observant, are building megachurches at a far faster clip than non-Hispanics, pointing to a loss of interest in collective Christianity for the majority of the population.

    Locally then, the house of worship is entering a phase of experimentation as new forms, such as megachurches, are tried; it is discarded altogether by the house-church movement; and it is growing in some religions such as Buddhism, with their new temple, and Judaism, with the construction of the new JCC South Campus on Apopka Vineland Road. The mainline Christian denominations that dominate downtown’s skyline serve less and less as a model for new buildings as malls are repurposed, warehouse buildings are adapted, and more novel programs and designs are tried.

    Hindu, Jain, and Muslim traditions are also represented in Orlando, and generally playing to full houses. The Masjid Al-Haqq mosque on West Central Boulevard on a Friday afternoon was brimming full, with more worshippers arriving by car and by foot. Collective spiritual worship of all forms is clearly a rising force within Orlando, and space on pews, benches, chairs and prayer mats are at a premium.

    Missing from many lives, crucial to others, religion is at an odd crossing in Central Florida’s history. To balance empty pocketbooks, some people are filling their cups with booze but others are also imbibing a perhaps long-delayed return to spirituality. This return, however, is marked by a mosaic of multiple religions, rather than a return to the few mainstream denominations that characterized early Orlando’s growth. If Bud Johnson is right, and this surge in spirituality lasts through The Recovery, Orlando will see a boom in new religious architecture that might make up for lost time, creating a revival in sacred space in the Central Florida landscape.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Florida Drifts Into the Morass

    By Richard Reep

    Regarding Florida’s new outmigration, “A lot of people are glad the merry-go-round has finally stopped. It was exhausting trying to keep up with 900 new people a day. Really, there is now some breathing room,” stated Carol Westmorland, Executive Director of the Florida Redevelopment Association at the Florida League of Cities. Now that surf and sand are officially unpopular, the urban vs. suburban development debate has caught developers and legislators in a freeze frame of ugly and embarrassing poses at local, regional, and state levels.

    In South Florida, Miami’s city commissioners narrowly defeated a move to institute a form-based code on August 7, which would have increased regulation in the most populous city in the state. This code would have rigidly set Miami’s density levels and regulated building form all the way down to the location of the front door. It constituted a surprising hometown defeat for Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, originators of the New Urbanism movement and the prime consultants hired to create the code. Commission Chairman Joe Sanchez, worried about restricting people’s use of property, stated that Miami 21 “exposes us to tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits from loss of property value.” Not ready to throw in the towel, however, the New Urbanists are appealing the vote in two public hearings. “We’re confident that the issues can be resolved,” stated Maria Mercer, who works for DPZ. The commissioners may be worried about lawsuits. The people seem to be even more concerned about Big Brother fussing about their property, judging from the public input on the code’s website.

    Of course, the press has decried this as a vote for “sprawl,” rather than a vote for common sense. By now, the language of growth management has become so riddled with red-baiting words such as “sprawl” posed against lofty ideals such “smart growth” that the public can make no real sense of development proposals anymore. It is easy to see why New Urbanism was so seductive, for it seems to solve every problem once and for all – this goes here, that goes there – and there would be no more debate…unless, of course, the Master Planner made an error somewhere. But, like most consultants, the Master Planner has moved on to the next job and isn’t in charge of living with his plan. If he labels low-cost development “sprawl”, then so be it. And if he deems high-cost development “smart growth,” then so be it. Just like Ramses in The Ten Commandments, “So let it be said – so let it be done.”

    Blackballing suburbs with words such as “sprawl” is dissonant to most voters who, after all, live in these supposedly awful places; likewise words like “walkable urban cores” often conjure up the reality of parking and traffic nightmares. Then there’s something called the marketplace. Florida is becoming less about retirees, and more about families. The much ballyhooed flurry of high-density urban projects doesn’t seem to fit the lifestyle of cars and kids and soccer practice too well.

    Then there’s the other downside of new urbanist growth, which is its cost. Young, single service workers and retirees – a natural market for these urban villages – cannot afford either the pricey real estate or the stiff maintenance fees. On the other hand, Florida’s upwards of about 300,000 empty single-family homes, by the Orlando Sentinel’s count, could provide a natural lure to families, more so than the 65,000 or so condominium units on the market in the state. This so-called “overhang” of 3 to 5 years of unsold inventory only serves to terrify homeowners who remain in the state and have to deal with depreciating property values for some time in the future.

    Clearly more density has been no more successful than the most mindless sprawl. The New Urbanists’ often shrill rhetoric has frightened many planners into pushing density on Florida’s fleeing population. The disaster that is Miami’s downtown and beachfront may be the best known, but throughout the state Florida’s high density developers and landowners are facing foreclosures, fading credit, and loss of business on an unprecedented scale. Those who came late to the party – witness poor Hollywood, Florida, a city which finally got its act together and aggressively redeveloped its downtown – look like empty movie lots. Elsewhere in cities across the state, vast tracts have been razed, rezoned for high density and now lie fallow or unfinished, giving the face of Florida a remarkably post-apocalyptic quality.

    Neil Fritz, Hollywood’s Economic Development Director, is sanguine about the dire straits of his town. “Oh, the urban areas will come back before the suburbs,” he stated recently. But in reality, downtown condominiums are a latecomer to the Florida scene, and are a forced market. They were viable largely because they compared favorably to single family detached dwellings in terms of price and convenience.

    In fact, quite the opposite is likely to occur, with the single family suburb – particularly those located near jobs – rebounding first as people’s natural preference, as it has been for over a hundred years. This might chagrin the New Urbanists, who spent a great deal of effort inventing such earnest fantasies as a “sprawl repair kit”, even though safety, mobility and open space remain deeply ingrained in the American lifestyle. Also, the high-density movement was fed by investors and owners of second homes – rare commodities in this post-crash world.

    Overdevelopment is easy to blame on poor government, which allowed developers to overbuild on credit, but as with the financial crisis in general, there is enough blame to go around. What municipality would not like dense urban cores full of affluent taxpayers enjoying lattes on the boulevard? This dream sadly has turned to the reality of empty storefronts, condos being converted into low-income rentals, or worse yet, empty lots being assessed at their lowest possible taxable value. The fringes of most urban areas continued to be developed at low density, and while they are suffering the same fate as the denser areas now, the effect is less profound since it is more spread out.

    Florida’s government just has no place to turn for more revenue, and relies mostly on property taxes and fees. Its main economic engine is development. Local governments, increasingly unable to pay for services, naturally encouraged density as a way to levy more and more property taxes, largely ignoring the long-term economic viability of specific developments. So-called “smart growth” indeed seemed pretty smart to cities and counties needing the taxes that they believed dense urban cores might someday generate.

    The best hope for Florida lies neither in the God-like precepts of the New Urbanist movement, nor in the hands of the developers, but rather in the hands of intelligent, humanistic conversation revolving around a sense of shared community and deeper values. With the internet as a tool, cities could be encouraging citizen input in advance of a proposal, rather than the old, 20th century tool of public meetings. This conversation is necessary as our legislators and developers dance their kabuki dance around imagined future prosperity. Florida seems to be drifting aimlessly, as no one at the state level seems to be concerned about the loss of population, instead congratulating themselves on creating the next boom.

    The cities and counties of Florida would do well to use this interregnum to retool their public process to give people more access to the right information up front. By allowing internet-based review and participation, people can provide intelligent input into development proposals. Armed with the right information, Americans historically have made excellent decisions, and Florida can become an example in how to better manage its single most important industry. In the meantime, the leadership of Florida would do well to examine the negative connotations of “sprawl” when describing the native habitat of their voters and taxpayers, and examine the consequences of encouraging density for a market that has yet to exist, and may not exist for some time to come.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Live by the Specialty, Die by the Specialty

    By Richard Reep

    Regions have a bad habit of getting into ruts. This is true of any place that focuses exclusively on one industry – with the possible exception of the federal government, which keeps expanding no matter what. This reality is most evident in places like Detroit, but it also applies to one like Orlando, whose tourist-based economy has been held up as a post-industrial model.

    This has not been helped by recent diktats from DC Central Control. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Ephemeral City, among others, has now been branded a Sybaris. Private interests continue to book conferences in Central Florida due to its good value, but the closed circle of federal government has prudishly proscribed the family leisure capital of the world in favor of destinations like Chicago. Central Florida’s chagrined congressional delegation, caught in reaction mode, will fight to remove this ban, but the damage has been done. A cold new era has firmly settled into the Sunshine State’s former playground.

    Since welcoming Walt Disney with open arms in 1964, Orlando proudly built its reputation as a family leisure destination. With over 116,000 hotel rooms, Orlando competes with Las Vegas in both the national and global tourism market. Indeed, Europeans, Middle Easterners, Asians, and Latin Americans make Orlando their playground, and if physical evidence is needed, the exquisitely messy honky-tonk of North International Drive testifies to this reality.

    Many couldn’t fault this strategy – at least until until now. Orlando’s mania for tourism, supported by local, regional and state policies, yielded growth beyond the wildest dreams of this once-sleepy agricultural town at a railroad crossing among orange groves and cattle ranches.

    But in the current economy, leisure can be seen as a waste of time and money. “I think Orlando got put on the list of not to go because of the perception that it is a resort and vacation area,” read a July email from a Department of Agriculture employee to an Orlando conference planner. Business in Central Florida has slowed to a trickle, anxiety is increasing and doors are closing. It seems that Orlando’s tourism bubble has popped with visitorship dropping from a high of nearly 50 million in 2005, to a projected high barely above 43 million in 2009, and while civic leaders are huffing and puffing to blow it back up again, Central Florida’s leisure industry is a shadow of its former boisterous self.

    Corporate trainers, state and local government conferences, not-for-profits, trade associations, and incentive groups still find Central Florida a decent place to hold meetings. Airfare is cheap, the vast quantity of hotel rooms makes for competitive rates. The renewed emphasis on bringing the family along makes Orlando a natural fit for many groups seeking a destination, especially in the winter. They may book rooms in more affordable Osceola County rather than pricey Orange County, but are still a few minutes’ drive from Disney’s front door, the beach, and dozens and dozens of food and shopping outlets. Some hotel owners are even contemplating new meeting rooms to keep up with shifting demand.

    The new mood in Washington, however, does not favor Orlando as a destination. Central Florida may be a good value, but this is irrelevant to the equation, for it is the overriding perception of Orlando that seems to worry our national government’s travel planners. And this perception tells us quite a bit about the real thinking that is happening at the federal level.

    If the new policy were to plan trips only to destinations under the median cost, it would send a message that government does not want to waste money. It might also send federal conferences to destinations in overlooked parts of America that could open beltway eyes to the bleak turmoil enveloping so much of the country, despite the steady drumbeat of recovery news.

    Meanwhile, sellers already know that Washington is really the only game in town, as businesses turn towards grant programs, rebates, and other incentives to backfill lost private sector revenue in goods and services. But if one looks closely at the actual investment pattern, Washington seems to favor the financial market, green energy, and possibly its own future health care program – none of which plays to Orlando’s strengths. This extremely narrow set of interests belies a harsh ideology, as harsh as the ideology it replaced, and as bad for the average citizens of America.

    Yet for all this, Central Florida should share some of the blame. Orlando cursed itself by growing around a single specialty, rather than a diverse set of interests. Favoring theme parks over agriculture was certainly an opportunistic decision, but reinforcing tourism and ignoring all other investment has proved a vast miscalculation. The Sunshine State could have been #1 in solar energy research by now, making it Obama’s darling. So Central Florida, without any other true industry, now grovels at the government’s feet to restore itself into good graces and allow a National Park Service meeting to take place at the Ramada Inn again. It is likely that Orlando will be shut out of this closed circle for some time to come.

    Central Florida’s best hope lies in a recovery of the private sector economy, a regained sense of profitability by corporations, and a renewed faith in the future by individuals. Lacking these now, Central Florida hibernates, its giant engines of escapism in low gear, mothballed, or abandoned.

    One almost hopes The Recovery will be delayed long enough to suffer some sense into the politicians and business leaders who can diversify the economy of the region. After all many of things that attract tourists – low costs, good infrastructure, warm weather – should also lure entrepreneurs, skilled workers and capital, foreign and domestic. You wonder why our leaders have not yet thought of this, or put a plan to diversify into action.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by Carlos Cruz.

  • Confronting Street Art

    By Richard Reep

    Street art has been around since ancient times, with the triple theme of craft, sabotage, and branding. Paris’ “Blec le rat” and New York’s Taki 183 were early pioneers in street art. Today, street art has spread into nearly every city with artists, media, and collectors. Skateboards, tattoos, stickers, and spray paint are but a few examples of the craft of the street. The adrenalin rush an artist feels in executing his work is augmented by the urban thrill of working at night, rushing to leave behind a signature before the police come. The chief aim of most street art is branding, as the artist’s main form of expression is to create a recognizable personal logotype.

    On the street, the city’s public space in general has slowly been eviscerated by our culture of consumption, for it provides an antiquated, nearly obsolete physical format for civic discourse. Long ago proclaimed dead by noted architect Daniel Liebeskind, physical public space has precipitously declined in value to most of the citizens of the city. In its place has risen virtual public space – first television, which was a one-way path, and then the internet, which provides a two-way path.

    Yet physical public space continues to serve as medium of the new Street Art form. Stickers, tags, skateboards, and tattoos are all viewed on the street, offering a means to carry this new art form into the next century. The so-called “cutting edge” artists have retreated into their private studios to conceive their next moves in video or computers, but the street artists have taken over the city.

    The elite artists may inhabit the galleries but street artists proclaim their brand of art as supreme. Globalism is achieved by hard work: Artists like Barry McGee or Banksy are no longer confined to one city; Space Invader, having successfully placed his own particular brand across the face of Paris, now has spread to London and New York, making his own global art tour as a form of civic art.

    Viewing a piece of graffiti at once causes a reaction of fear and a perception of danger. Can anyone claim the same immediate, visceral reaction to anything seen in a gallery or museum? This art form reaches people at such a gut level that it trumps most of the work of other artists being exhibited and discussed in the art world. Street artists use this to their own advantage, and their craft reinforces what McLuhan described so well in his epigram “the medium is the message.” The content of the piece is almost irrelevant; the viewer’s reaction is the same regardless of the tag’s content or author.

    Street art is tied into a larger urban culture, and expresses the visual aspect of this larger milieu. As Western mainstream culture retreats from the street into the air-conditioned, connected bubbles of the suburbs, street art and its culture expands to fill the empty space. The zone emptied by the suburbanites does indeed reek of death, more so today, as public investment in the city dwindles or becomes remarkably predictable or prosaic. Budget cuts in schools, government facilities, and even basic street maintenance presage an ever higher level of decay and disrepair, of neglect and abandonment of our shared space, and those who inhabit this space are simply documenting what they see and returning it back to us. We cannot escape the messages of street art, for they are everywhere, embedded into the context. Some are more overt, and some are covert – only noticed, for example, when waiting for a red light – but they are there, reminding us that there is life amidst the emptiness.

    Graffiti’s barrage of skulls, vacant-eyed cartoon children, and other signs of death and destruction are easy to ignore, but they are telling us something important about the urban environment. The sooner we stop and examine this evidence, the sooner we can begin a process to find common ground, and to seek out a shared vision that does not divide the urban world into an us-and-them mentality. Street art simply puts visual form to the voices we have so long shut out of the urban conversation.

    In Orlando, the trend of giving street artists “permission walls,” or walls where they have permission to paint their work, has tamed and channeled some of the sabotage. By allowing graffiti artists to work with permission, they are free to develop their craft without fear of getting caught before completion, and the artwork becomes a colorful, mural-sized effort to which the artists can point with pride. These permission walls encourage friendly competition between teams, or crews, and there is a sense of pride among them for having created something with great exposure.

    Two permission walls exist to the east of downtown Orlando, but it is the cluster of warehouses at 630 E. Central that showcase graffiti artwork at its best. Artist Robin Van Arsdol owns part of this cluster and has been sponsoring an international graffiti conference for several years, bringing in artists from Europe, the Caribbean, and North America for a weekend of painting at his studios. Driving by his property offers a study in converting urban form into art, and perhaps suggests the visual future of more than one city.

    The graffiti artists have offered a philosophical change-up that should not be overlooked. The conversation about postmodern art seemed to have reached a dead end some time ago; artists
    first threw out figure, then form, then color, then the frame, and then wandered into their process itself as an art form. Graffiti artists begin with the end: their signature, or tag, becomes the art,
    and by using this as the starting point, and the city as their canvas, they unconsciously offer a new beginning to think about the relationship between art and the city.

    We must accept the challenge that graffiti artists offer us. We need to confront this takeover of the physical urban form and push back. Street art constitutes a fresh, interesting language. It is the language of a city that is weak and divided. We must hear what graffiti says to us as a society, and retake our physical urban character as a common, broad place that offers secure, sacred, and special places for all citizens. By ignoring graffiti art, we postpone our treatment of the urban malaise. By confronting it and bringing it into the mainstream, we can better treat our urban condition and improve the city as a dwelling place for the benefit of all.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Urban Backfill vs. Urban Infill

    By Richard Reep

    Wendell Cox recently reported on the state of so-called “urban infill” efforts, and analyzed which cities are experiencing an increase in their density. This report shows some surprising trends. Cities such as Pittsburgh, which claim to be successful at “infilling”, are actually dropping in density, in part because of low birth rates and lack of in-migration.

    What may be the next trend might be called urban agriculturalization or “urban backfill”. In the past, urban infill used to make sense. Where a concentration of people already existed, and where infrastructure was in place, development between existing structures seemed inevitable. With the accessibility allowed by the car, urban infill became a choice among others, including the suburban frontier. Urban infill became, for most cities, a rarity.

    Current attempts to encourage infill over fringe development may be too little too late, as the cost and regulatory environment favors fringe development. Expenditures on public safety rose as building codes dictated an increasing level of safety in urban cores, not just for the occupants of the building, but for the building itself. Driven higher because of the perceived desirability of a downtown, costs soared out of control as elaborate, complex zoning processes meant high fees to a team of consultants necessary to steer projects through multiple public hearings. These generated some pricey computer graphics, but often no guaranteed outcome.

    Aesthetics also have become highly regulated as well, with design boards composed of interested citizens, reducing the design process to design-by-committee. By the early part of this century, urban infill became an Olympian sport, leaving most of an urban area’s empty lots and dilapidated buildings vacant.

    To further burden the urban infill developer, right now a new form of regulation is entering the scene, that of the so-called smartcode which regulates the last untouched part of the exterior of a structure: its overall form. With rigid codes and design staffs, cities can now create for themselves a vision, supplemented with pretty pictures, of the imagined future, where building patterns need to be just-so. An urban infill developer must now adhere to someone else’s opinion of where his front door is, and whether he has a front porch.

    So, in reality, these urban parcels sit abandoned and income-free, with the biggest real estate growth market being in “for sale” signs, as owners try to unload these properties on a greater fool ready to do battle for the cause of urban infill. It is a no-win scenario for cities.

    Back fill provides an alternative below the line. Overlooked spaces are being discovered by many people as ideal for temporary use, and with only a small cost for a license or permit, new marketplaces, street performances, and other people-intensive activities are rushing in to fill the void. Again, a city with any savvy will try to apply a regulatory and fee drag on this activity; fortunately for the citizens, this usually takes a long time, and in the meantime, many cities are acquiring the look of a genteel form of Blade Runner, with person-to-person commerce taking place among the currently decaying and abandoned edifices and infrastructure.

    Still other parts of the city are trying to beautify their abandoned spaces by planting them, sometimes with gardens, figuring lush landscapes can hide the fact that their core is not as desirable as it once was. And still others fence them off, creating a new canvas for graffiti artists and advertising, and returning the abandoned spaces into wilderness.

    All of this belongs to the study of old field succession, which traditionally has been an agricultural science. For urban cores, this approach suggests a new way to reuse abandoned space. Increasingly, agriculture may not belong exclusively to the rural condition, but can be adapted to the city itself.

    In some areas such as Orlando, entrepreneurs have discovered this reverse-flow effect, which has been useful in so many other endeavors. By applying the standards of agriculture to the urban core, interesting and useful businesses are springing up. Near Orlando’s downtown area, for example, Dandelion’s Café is licensed not as a restaurant but as an agricultural kitchen, allowing it to operate under the Florida Department of Agriculture rather than the Florida Department of Health. This freedom does not compromise public safety – people still get sick from food in Department of Health regulated restaurants – but cleverly avoids the intensive state oversight, permits and fees associated with most restaurants.

    In College Park, the City’s empty land has been converted into a community garden, offering small plots of land for rental to surrounding property owners to cultivate produce. This is not a new idea; urban community gardens exist in cities worldwide. But as the current economic conditions squeeze incomes, creative use of outdoor space to reduce the grocery bill has engendered a new microfarming movement, and may have staying power as people rediscover a sense of shared purpose.

    All this creates a new form of development, which might be characterized as urban backfill. Urban backfill projects include any temporary uses of space for food, commerce, or entertainment. These even include temporary sacred places – the streetcorner preacher, for example, and his congregation. Still other abandoned spaces seemed destined for decay: overgrown weeds, saplings, and mice are turning urban vacant lots into true pastoral scenes that provide surrounding buildings with glimpses of unregulated nature.

    Cities can hold off this backfill for only so long. If Twitter can enable a revolution, ad hocracy can certainly enable free commerce and discourse in a democracy. Temporary uses suggest a vitality that cannot be denied or regulated to death, and suggest that cities consider a new way of looking at these spaces. Urban backfill provides an opportunity to reinvent the American city and create economic and social value where now none exists. It can also help establish both a renewed sense of place that can also nurture new ways for a city to evolve organically and naturally.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Downtown Character and Street Performers

    By Richard Reep

    Carmen Ruest, Director of Cirque de Soleil, recently revealed her start as a street performer, or busker, in Canada. The interviewer did not hesitate to contrast this with the current state of Downtown Orlando, which forbids street performers. Eliminating this ban will improve Orlando’s urban consciousness, both downtown and elsewhere, and improve the city in general.

    The Downtown Development Board (an arm of city government) has long stated its mission to promote arts-based businesses downtown. In the nineties, this board even had special incentives for independent creative enterprises to encourage a local arts scene. Only later did the city give in to the temptation to go for the big box retailers, and all bets were suddenly off.

    Meanwhile, street performers continue to provide local color that graces cities of Europe, Canada, and elsewhere in the United States. Often, tales of tourists include encounters with creative street performers that make the trip; willingly parting with some money for a brief but engaging performance can be a bit of spice in an otherwise overstimulating experience. Such spontaneity is not allowed in Orlando, which ranks among the world’s top tourist destinations.

    The street performer connects with the pedestrian in a unique way: not in the safety of the theater, not in a venue where tickets are taken, and not at a scheduled time. Instead, the performer seeks the audience, and gives the performance first, then hopes for compensation. This puts the onus on the performer to be compelling, original, and brief. In short, the performer has got to have soul. There is no better training ground for future actors and entertainers than the street.

    Meanwhile, Orlando’s downtown arts scene is slowly gentrifying, with a variety of galleries and even artist’s studios. On the third Thursday every month, artists and art lovers from Avalon tour galleries up Pine Street, along Orange Avenue to the City Arts Factory, and some are even brave enough to filter up Magnolia Street to Redefine Gallery.

    However, for anyone who has visited other downtowns, this can be a rather antiseptic experience. If Orlando is serious about Downtown as a tourist venue, perhaps the city should focus a little more on the quality of the experience.

    Right now, spontaneity is missing from Downtown Orlando. The notion of public space is founded on the ability of citizens to express themselves within this space, and by encouraging positive forms of self-expression. If Orlando follows this venerable tradition downtown, the city might be surprised to find the benefits may far outweigh any disadvantages.

    Certainly with the city’s budget cuts, the Police Department has more important places to prioritize cops’ time rather than busting illegal street performance. By legalizing this activity, the shrinking resources of law enforcement can be spent elsewhere, thus improving the general safety and security of the city.

    To encourage the art scene, Downtown has instituted Third Thursdays, an art walk that mimics the ones popularized in the nineties in Scottsdale, Arizona and elsewhere. To experiment with street performers, the pathway taken by the Third Thursdays crowd would be an excellent place to start. If the city were to license street performers and monitor the activity along Pine Street and Orange Avenue, it could be a testing ground for this idea. Given the crowd’s affinity for art, street performers could become another attraction in itself. After all, the walk between galleries includes a lot of blank sidewalk time.

    For Downtown Orlando, it is time to fight fire with fire. Disney is successful because it recreates that lost-in-time feeling of walking in an urban environment and encountering balloon artists, saxophonists, mimes, and other characters. But at Disney and other theme parks this is all carefully choreographed and timed. If the downtown folks were to provide a spontaneous alternative, the city would have a new parking problem as people come to experience this. This proposal is not as ambitious as all that; it is simply to try it for the art walk. That’s once a month on three or four blocks. The city might even collect a license fee, and then let them do their thing.

    For lovers of performance art, the City of Orlando has proposed a new Performing Arts venue to be financed by bond money. However, the City’s Performing Arts Center boosters cannot find anyone else interested in funding this huge trophy. There may be some karmatic justice in the relationship between the City’s distaste for street performers and the City’s evaporating dream of a Performing Arts Center. By allowing and regulating street performers, the City might find itself with a newfound interest in performing arts in general.

    The urban consciousness of the city can be measured in many ways, and one way to measure it is how the citizens of the city use its public spaces. Orlando, with its torpid downtown, has little to lose by experimenting with street entertainment. Perhaps this will help the soul of the city come back to life, and create what has always been missing – an authentic sense of place for the region.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • A New Story for Timeshare

    By Richard Reep

    More employment sectors are increasingly migratory and less fixated on a particular place. Many of us are instead working from home, or from places where we prefer – it might be a coffeeshop, or it might be a vacation condo. Housing’s rigid systems belong to the Old Economy.

    Meanwhile, a new form of housing less than 2 generations old has quickly gained ground as a part of the luxury leisure lifestyle of the middle class: timeshare. Unfortunately, during the real estate boom in the last several years, timeshares have been severely overbuilt, and the market is years, perhaps even decades, away from filling this oversupply. This form of housing is based not on real estate mortgages – although one or two companies still practice this – but based upon points. And the genius of the points-based residence is its transportability, which served the vacation market extremely well.

    By applying a points-based approach to primary housing, a developer will be able to take advantage of the increasing percentage of workers that move frequently for their careers. This unchains workers from their mortgages and lawnmowers, and enables the nomadic nature that has defined several segments of our economy where project-based employment has replaced company-based employment.

    Most timeshare developers privately agree: “The party’s over. It won’t be anything like it was, even if the economy comes back. At least not for a long, long time,” confessed one senior developer for an international timeshare company privately. Meanwhile, many of the communities who assumed a vast market of affluent customers need to start asking big questions.

    One of them is to refocus on the quality of places. Gated condominium developments, with little or no connection to the communities where they reside, are a study in self-absorbed lifestyles. Turning these into real homes and communities will require opening them up, integrating them into the local culture and civic life of their places, and making timeshares something other than…well, simply a commodity.

    It will also require some fundamental changes that are overdue in the timeshare industry itself. The points-based system was originally fabricated as a customer-loyalty system. It will need to be adapted to suit a worker wishing the flexibility to travel from place to place and stay for longer periods of time. Perhaps a more ominous dilemma that the timeshare developers have created for themselves, however, is the crushing maintenance fees, running often $750 to $1000 a week or more.

    The credit-backed future dreams of luxury and leisure remain idle, but the physical properties sit on some pricey and fundamentally attractive real estate at ski area bases, golf courses, desert getaways, and beaches. Few may be in the mood these days to buy a bunch of ephemeral points for a vacation, but the same system would serve well any project-based endeavor that assembles workers for an assignment and disbands these workers when the assignment is completed.

    The movie industry has operated on this model for years, and other industries have begun working in this same manner. In the Old Economy, this was rare, and most pursuits encouraged a young college graduate to put down roots as fast as possible: Start a career, start a family, and buy a house. Increasingly, however, entry-level workers have resisted this, preferring instead to experiment with multiple careers, often moving from place to place, sometimes until well into their thirties. In the technology industry, software developers have tended to work on this model, and especially in digital media, the permanent nature of jobs and companies has given way to temporary alliances and co-ops to get things done – the so-called Digital Nomads.

    Yet even as the workforce and its physical plants adapted, the housing industry instead has trudged along its same path, with mortgages or rental property as the two options. It is time for timeshare to fill the gap in between these two extremes and offer this as a third option. At this point, the timeshare industry has little to lose. Market contraction and the loss of its credit foundation have rendered these companies dormant. There needs to be a paradigm shift to recover at least some of these investments and, over time, create long-term value.

    Timeshare developers built plenty of beach resorts, which are still fairly active, but still can be turned into more semi-permanent communities. Their interior resorts – desert, golf, and ski areas – have an even more urgent need for reinvention. A stronger and more stable sense of community, safety and security, and higher quality of life could draw more workers away from the large metropolitan areas, as baby boomers downshift and global corporations onshore their workers.

    All this adds up to an opportunity for a timeshare developer who wants to fill his units with paying customers. When digital media employment is studied, it might resemble the timeshare model more closely than one thinks. Dominated by no one single old-economy company, digital media assignments are often accomplished by a temporary alliance of multiple small studios that work together, then decamp and move to the next assignment. This is a perfect scenario for a points-based housing system. Freed from the chains of the mortgage banks and from the landlord-lease situation, the points-based system enables free flow of workers who enjoy sampling the tastes of different cities and have no real interest in setting down roots, mowing lawns, and fixing leaky gutters.

    Ski timeshare properties in particular are quite ready for this shift in focus. Ski towns were built upon timber or mining town functions. They already have reinvented themselves and need to do this again. If these towns were to partner with their timeshare properties and incentivize technology and research employers, a new story and a new model could revitalize them.

    Marrying this desire to move to more low-density regions combines what timeshare developers do best – create amenity-laden residential communities – with a free-flow form of ownership. This approach is worth a closer look. We need to thaw the frozen residential concepts and look at new models and new stories that are happening in America and elsewhere. By adapting timeshare to the New Economy at this critical point, an industry can be repurposed and a new sustainable housing option can be born.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Life After Sunrail

    With their tails between their legs, Central Florida’s leaders returned from Tallahassee in early May without funding from the Florida Senate for Sunrail, the region’s proposed commuter rail system. This failure to convince the state Senate to fund Sunrail is a major political defeat for the 1.8 million people who were said to be served by this train. This failure now gives Central Florida a chance to recreate its growth scenario from scratch, without relying on commuter rail to cure the region’s ills.

    Blame bad timing: In a low-tax state with a down economy, asking for that kind of money takes nerve. “The loss of Sunrail may…have implications for efforts to reconstruct Interstate 4,” stated Harold Barley, Executive Director of Metroplan Orlando, a publicly funded organization that studies and advocates transportation projects in the region. Barley’s understatement is almost droll, for the defeat signals a significant political loss, years of wasted effort, and a rejection (for the second time) of massive federal startup money. In short, the calculus of Central Florida’s growth must start again almost from zero.

    The leaders now will lick their wounds, but is it really time to ask “what comes next?” Many of the arguments in favor of Sunrail echo the arguments that Wendell Cox devastated earlier in The New Geography. After their first defeat in 1999, the leaders of the region spent ten years convincing themselves of the merits of commuter rail, but without selling the same goods to others in the state of Florida. This region’s population now waits, while the leaders decide whether to sink ten more years into trains, or abandon this dream and begin writing a new story for Orlando.

    It is time to find a growth vision that is viable, and can be implemented within the power of the region’s leadership. Commuter rail’s biggest claim was to take one lane off the region’s only north-south highway (Interstate 4), replacing this lane with trains on an existing track. The track runs like a twisty, bent stick right up through the center of the region, and the track’s original usage as a freight system has been largely passed by the region’s growth. Sunrail’s other claims included significant travel time savings, encouragement of transit-oriented development, and retainage of 20 percent of the region’s federal gas taxes (why aren’t we getting this money now?). These claims will never be tested against reality; meanwhile, many of the smaller towns served by the system are likely expressing quiet relief that commuter rail’s financial burden will not be turned over to them in 2017.

    No doubt, this loss is disappointing to those who envision Washington DC, Atlanta, New York, Boston, or other entrained cities as a model. Yet it constitutes a perfect signal to create a unique vision for Orlando. Unlike the regions mentioned above, Orlando’s economy is shockingly monocultural, devoted mostly to tourism and supporting industries. The most significant way Central Florida can better its future is to attract and retain other forms of employment, rather than build another rigid transportation spine of questionable sustainability.

    Of course, transportation choices can help, but the question of rail seems academic at this point. Diversification of transportation away from a single imagined commuter rail means, for one thing, that the regional bus system should become more effective than it currently is. Lynx currently operates one bus type (huge), and this “one size fits all” solution misses opportunities and makes for slow rides with multiple transfers. Lynx is referenced in commuter rail’s promotional literature, which vaguely promised “enhanced bus service” to feed commuter rail stops. If Lynx was indeed poised to enhance bus service, then that act is more important now than ever. What are we waiting for?

    Instead of a rigid stick up the center of a dispersed, multipolar city, the new wave of commuter transportation might look more like an octopus, which has no backbone and multiple wiggly arms. No backbone means the system may resemble a network, rather than a trunk with branches. Wiggly might mean that smaller vehicles service localized neighborhood routes, and it also might mean that the routes could change depending on development and growth patterns. If either of these sounds questionable from a cost point of view, weigh them against the cost of commuter rail and they will look like amazing bargains. Whether a bureaucratic government agency like Lynx can handle this assignment may also be questionable. Perhaps the solution could involve private services, much like the commuter systems that were born in earlier times – the streetcars in San Francisco, for example – which operated for profit.

    Some will argue that trains are sexy compared to buses, but it is time to look at what really is sexy: having a real choice to commute while saving money. The form of this new transportation system may be electric jitneys, rubber-tired trolleys, or lake-hopping hovercraft; what is more important than form is their functional qualities. The transportation planners, from the federal level down to the local level, need to truly understand the needs of people and respond to them in a more fine-grained way. Diversification may mean trying different ideas until one is found that works.

    Diversification could also mean less transportation. If the goal of a commuter rail system was to take cars off the interstate, then perhaps the leadership could meet this goal by promoting employment-based growth, rather than growth for its own sake. Neighborhoods that support an employment center are what built the region – think Lake Eola around downtown, or Winter Park around Rollins College. Getting back to that will allow density clusters that have sustainable value, rather than be form-based simulacra of antique small towns.

    Density clusters can be positive parts of a city, where residential and employment bases are intertwined, and need not drive affordability up out of reach. Orlando, as an aspirational city, is currently more affordable than most, and the multiple-center model of Orlando never seemed to quite fit the single-spine commuter rail model. Cluster spacing allows for lower-density infill regions which can appeal to both middle class and affluent families. True commuter rail serviced the late 19th century single-center city quite well, but it would be hard to effectively service the late 20th century multiple-center, edge-city conditions of Orlando. With no natural boundaries, the region will continue to grow in all directions, and continue to regenerate itself within the urban centers that collapse and renew themselves through generations.

    Losing a battle could mean winning a war. The Orlando region has for too long been thought of as an ephemeral city composed of theme parks. Losing its commuter rail system will reinforce this perception, but it can also shock the region’s leadership into more profound thinking and action. By taking advantage of this loss, and shaking off the distraction of trains, the region can truly concentrate on diversification of its population and creating a flexible, cost-sustainable, multi-centered transportation system that could ably serve Central Florida’s needs for the future.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.