New Geography

Author: Roger Weber

  • The South’s Big Cities Moment

    August’s tragic events in Charlottesville kickstarted a somber debate about the appropriate way to commemorate the war that gave all Americans their freedom. It also triggered a conversation about whether the south’s legacy of rebellion and independence – with slavery a painful and regretful part of its past – is a legacy worth remembering.

    These discomforting conversations are a reminder that the south’s antebellum past continues to affect it in the present. Beyond civil rights, these impacts are profoundly felt in the south’s continuing urbanization, which is among the most rapid in the country despite occurring largely within the frameworks of cities whose prewar, pre-industrial bones were never suited for the “big city” qualities filled by their northern cousins. Today’s globally-connected southern cities grew largely from antebellum-era towns that were not the commercial or industrial powerhouses of the past, and yet they are growing dramatically anyway.

    The result is a murmuring culture war about the future of southern cities. The media may be fixated on statues, but the real issue is how these cities – thanks to a variety of historical and developmental factors that differentiate them from those in the north – are growing in ways that may not appeal to many planners and local boosters.

    Many of the south’s transformations have been enviable and measurable: between 2000 and 2012 most large southern metro grew by at least 20 percent, with some like Charlotte and Austin growing at more than twice that rate. Since air conditioning became a norm rather than an exception, growth has trended toward warmer climates, with half of America’s population growth in the last 50 years going to the eight states with the warmest climates. Southern cities have been particularly successful in attracting black families, a declining demographic in nearly every large northern city. They have by and large remained affordable, and continue to be attractive relocation destinations for big companies: metro Atlanta, for instance, is now home to more Fortune 1000 companies than vaunted San Francisco.

    The result is a set of increasingly economically significant and connected large cities with ever-larger suburbs and de-centralized economic gravity. Compared to northern cities, southern ones are less urban, less clustered, and less tall, on average with about half the number of skyscrapers per capita as major northern cities, based on data available from Emporis.com. This dispersion reflects their expanding ethnic diversity. Counties that were once entirely rural are now increasingly suburban, and attractive to minorities and immigrants. Georgia’s recent 6th District election in 2017 and Hillary Clinton’s victory in Fort Bend outside Houston reflects this unpredictable new southern political world.

    Planners have celebrated the urban revitalization in many large existing cities in the north, but largely have been less enthusiastic about this continued growth of sprawling cities in the south. In turn, they have sought increasingly to steer their growth in a more traditional northern pattern. Foremost among the goals of these planners is to densify and re-orient these cities around downtowns that have generally never embodied a strong urban character. This has created a number of awkward dualities: the push for walkability in places that have never before been walkable; the push for rail in cities where the density doesn’t support it; and the push for outdoor living in cities where being outside is uncomfortable for much of the year. This push for glassy Chicago-style downtowns does not always come naturally to cities whose strongest urban legacy is that of sleepy tree-lined Georgian mansions, and it has forced cities from Charlotte to Charleston to contemplate what kind of cities they want to be in the future.

    Conventional urban planning is simply not well-suited to the south’s dynamic new urban environments. New urbanism, for instance, while influential in the south, has made its name through quaint town making largely in the suburbs. Typical urban approaches like the repurposing of downtowns back into modern reinventions of what they once were – do not reflect the development, demographic, infrastructural, or character-driven challenges of cites without urban or industrial legacies.

    Now, the south has begun inventing its own new brand of experimental urban development, often heavily fueled by the private sector. In Atlanta, for instance, the public-private development of the Battery and Sun Trust Park is a public-private typology virtually unimaginable in the north. Boldly, the Atlanta Braves major league baseball team uprooted from its perfectly acceptable downtown home to move closer to its suburban fan base; a county without a discernible center delivered on much of the financing, and worked with the Braves to develop, from scratch, an entire new ballpark-oriented urban district to compete with downtown Atlanta and help fund both the cultural evolution and the cash flows needed to sustain the ballpark.

    The Battery was a form of urbanization and regional re-positioning delivered through a single project. Rather than a renewed focus on the urban core through adaptive reuse and infill, all gospel to planners in the north, metro Atlanta has shaped its own new downtown at a convenient juncture in the sprawl. These kinds of large-format development projects that create their own energy and introduce their own anchors are a hallmark of southern city-making, and build upon the “edge cities” idea first extensively written about by Joel Garreau in the early 1990s.

    The most impressive forms of project-driven development have been those where private developers have taken on urbanization efforts too massive for governments. In Florida and Texas, for instance, private developers are trying to implement high-speed rail lines by leveraging potential profits from real estate development around stations as part of the funding package. And Sandy Springs, Georgia received abundant attention in 2012 when it became a “contract city”, the ultimate privatization experiment when it bid out nearly all of its city services to outside contractors. By relying on private industry to take on these kinds of complex development and governance projects, southern cities are trying to avoid the government boondoggles as well as budget and debt ceiling shortfalls many northern cities face. In turn, however, those delivering on the projects have tremendous power over the formation of these cities, while urbanization is rarely happening according to plan.

    Acknowledging the power of these leaps and bounds innovations, some cities are trying to better channel the urbanization through example projects designed to inspire the private sector to develop in a more organized way. In Raleigh, for instance, the development market has been slow to deliver on high-quality urban projects, so in response the City is taking on the challenge itself: its own new City Hall campus may end up being the most powerful piece of modern architecture in the city. In turn, it is hoped to have catalytic potential to induce dramatic change across a downtown smattered with low-rise buildings. In many such cities, there is an underlying belief that channeling the pent-up private development market toward areas where land values are already the highest will maximize tax revenues and fiscal stability, and improve those cities’ urban qualities. Whether it’s a strategy with staying power is yet to be seen.

    There is no rulebook for how urban change is occurring in the south, but there is no doubt it is occurring more rapidly there. The universal themes in southern city-making today are diversification and creativity, ideas imbuing innovation that would be unlikely if they borrowed conventional approaches verbatim from the north. This new creativity on behalf of big steps and bold visions belies many recommendations from nationally-focused planners toward government consolidation and the belief that all new good things must happen through incremental steps in traditional downtowns. Perhaps this new form of southern rebellion will have staying power; much better, and better for its citizens, than the last one.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategies, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He leads the Urban Policy Practice Area for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s City Design Practice and holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include urban finance, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Photo: Thomson200 [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Urban Future: The Revolt Against Central Planning

    In Milton Keynes, perhaps the most radical of Britain’s post-Second World War “New Towns,” the battle over Brexit and the culture war that it represents is raging hard. There, the consequences of EU immigration policy, of planning instituted by national authority, and of the grassroots yearning to preserve local character have clashed together to shape a platform that may set a precedent for whether central planners or local residents will determine the urban future.

    Milton Keynes is unusual for planned cities. Founded in 1967 and having matured in the last few decades, it defies virtually every tenet of contemporary planning orthodoxy. In its day it was a product of Britain’s national planners; despite that, today Milton Keynes drives the country’s national planners crazy. Instead of a mixed-use, dense, transit-oriented bastion of urbanism – the predictable and commonly reiterated goals of many British town planning leaders today – Milton Keynes is exactly the opposite, intentionally.

    A modernist experiment, Milton Keynes was planned to be low-density. It was also planned to be auto-oriented, and suburban. Its houses are large, its buildings do not front streets, and its transportation modes are separated by grade: that is, they are at different heights, with different means of transport often moving at different speeds. This is the antithesis of the now-favored idea of “complete” streets. The town’s downtown shopping enclave is an inward-facing mall – the largest in Britain – with downtown as a whole designed as a business and commercial center rather than a mixed-use playground. Mixed-use development is clustered in the city’s low-density neighborhoods and villages, all on a grid, rather than scattered with the UK’s more favored randomness.

    Milton Keynes was designed to be livable and functional, family-friendly, job-friendly and conducive to convenient mobility. The daily grind, by design, was to bear a closer resemblance to a rural experience than to an urban one. Original advertisements promoted a healthy, carefree lifestyle sheathed in nature, away from the nuisances of the big city. Even the logic of its location, equidistant from Britain’s other large cities, sought convenience over traditional planning rationales.

    To those with a one-track view of what a city should be, Milton Keynes is unrecognizable. To these people, the city is bland, sterile, and without the day-to-day vibrancy that defines cities. In many planning texts it has been written off as a failure, and to many residents of Britain, Milton Keynes is not a preferred destination.

    But in many of the most important metrics that define urban success, Milton Keynes shines. It has virtually no traffic, it attracts lots of families, and it has the highest job growth in the country. Its population has swelled over 20 percent since 2001, over twice the national average, to 255,000 , and its residents ardently defend it. It has built out nearly identically to the original vision, with its millions of trees and lush, anti-urban character earning it the affectionate moniker “Urban Eden”.

    Today, however, Milton Keynes faces ever-mounting threats to the integrity of its original character. Thanks to the consequences of EU immigration policy, which spurred population growth in the UK to a level that exceeded housing construction to the tune of 70,000 units a year, or roughly 50 percent, cities like Milton Keynes are under fire to take up their “fair share” of the difference. Although Milton Keynes was originally developed independently through a long-range loan to the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, the nation’s housing issue led Britain’s deputy prime minister to effectively lift the city’s self-rule in 2004 in a sweeping authoritarian central takeover.

    That move transferred planning authority from local government to a national regeneration authority. The authority promptly set a housing quota for the city based on national targets, and began the task of systematically increasing density, narrowing roads, reducing unit sizes, instilling a transit-oriented ethos, discontinuing the grid, and concocting plans to build new development that directly fronted the street, all at odds with the city’s original masterplan.

    The new ideas reflect tenets frequently promoted by the Royal Town Planning Institute, Britain’s central planning body. The moves reflect what has become a familiar narrative of planner as a high-minded savior and opposition as selfish NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) residents, who lack regard for the broader picture. That Milton Keynes’ defenders are arguing on behalf of a thoughtful vision – one shaped decades ago and misaligned with contemporary planners’ aspirations – is a complicating wrinkle. In contrast to the narrative that the suburbs were an unfortunate accident that have destroyed communities, Milton Keynes’ defenders are trying to save a city that was planned to be suburban and that is successful today, and are defending it by citing affection for its character and sense of community.

    Because of Milton Keynes’ unusual design, traditional NIMBY dynamics have been inverted. In a rare twist on the oft-repeated Jane Jacobs narrative of residents against the planners, Milton Keynes’ defenders are fighting for the planned suburban character of their town: a primary complaint is that the central planners promoting density and mixed-use development lack creativity or an understanding of the bigger picture vision that shapes their sense of place, even though the tactics the planners are employing are often advocated using the same argument in reverse. Far from being ad-hoc selfish obstructionists, the Milton Keynes defenders are well-organized and thoughtful: a group called “Urban Eden” offers a well-composed six-point vision as the baseline for alternatives to the central plans.

    Milton Keynes belies the narrative of a lack of intentionality as a disqualifier for suburbia. More importantly, its future will tell us much about whether creativity and self-determination can continue to exist in Britain at the local scale, and whether the forces that induced Brexit can topple an internal bureaucracy, in addition to an external one.

    While local freedoms may ultimately help cities like Milton Keynes preserve their unique character, additional bureaucracy in the UK must be lifted to solve the larger national issue of housing affordability. In particular, Britain should free the private land development market, which has been effectively nationalized since 1947. Britain’s self-imposed shortage of developable land is the primary reason British housing production is well under half what it was when Milton Keyes was originally conceived. In an ironic twist, if it maintains such strict centralized planning strategies, Britain may continue to choke the character of its cities over the issue of housing production, wielding a national-scale bully pulpit to try to solve a crisis that could perhaps best be solved by eliminating the nationalization of property development altogether.

    Brexit offers a lesson to planners world-wide, with Milton Keynes a creative case study of an alternative to the hegemony of contemporary urban planning. While many planners loathe Milton Keynes, many residents like it, and its demonstrable successes suggest it should be a worthy case study. So many planning bodies are dominated by a singular ideology. Instead, a new era of open-mindedness to local creativity should be embraced… lest Britain and the world rise up to circumvent the planners behind a movement with a nickname as catchy as Brexit.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Flickr photo by Sarah Joy: Double Rainbow, Milton Keynes

  • What the Midwest can learn from the Middle East

    Why is Saudi Arabia suddenly the pit stop of choice for an impressive laundry list of major companies? How is it positioned among the growing number of Middle-Eastern industrial free zones? And should Rust Belt cities like Cincinnati look this way for answers?

    If a nation’s cities are the products of their ingredients, the Saudi Arabian pantry leaves much to be desired, with a grueling climate, a monopolistic economy built on the extraction of fossil fuels, looming regional threats, and conservative social practices that hinder freedoms, especially for women.

    The resulting menu reflects the bleak inputs. Expansive wealth has combined with poor urban design to generate an unsavory cocktail of high-speed pedestrian-hostile highways and walled single-use compounds. Erratic industrial development and heavy utility infrastructure haphazardly dot the desert landscape. For decades, Saudi Arabia’s physical development has emulated American suburbia, prioritizing privacy over community to the extent it’s been organized at all. The nation’s prosperity, driven by oil, yields few private sector jobs. Reform has been slow and modest, and educational advances, primarily for men, have focused on growing computer and technical skills with little attention to intellectual fields.

    But, despite all of its downsides, Saudi Arabia is advancing because it has recognized that oil wealth cannot drive the country forever. Much like America’s Rust Belt, Saudi Arabia is confronting the reality that, in the future, the economy needs to find new drivers.

    To do this, Saudi Arabia committed to developing several new cities designed to generate opportunities for the country’s exploding young population to stay at home. The intent was to invest existing surpluses to develop new and different kinds of economies to fuel the country’s future. This contrasts with the region’s reputation for lavish “living in the moment.”

    Rather than pressing solely for an emergence of finance or innovation that it is ill-equipped to attract, Saudi Arabia has made a tactical decision to leverage its industrial infrastructure, considering the regional advantage of its unique global positioning along the Red Sea at the confluence of busy shipping routes.

    One of these cities, the King Abdullah Economic City, is by some measures the biggest development project in the history of the world. KAEC includes an unusual confluence of many modes of industrial transport, matching a seaport with a rail port and highways connecting the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal into the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Smartly, much of its investment has focused on increasing and humanizing its industrial infrastructure, leveraging the location by luring major industrial and shipping outfits to conduct midstream logistics activities here, midway through their global journey.

    By increasing the attractiveness of this junction to global companies, KAEC is hoping to trade one heavy industry — oil — for a diverse array of others. Unlike recent Chinese megaprojects designed to passively accommodate inevitable increases in demand around existing economic drivers, KAEC is endeavoring to actively spur the organic emergence of a new economy by making the world take notice: first, of the things that Saudi Arabia’s population is capable of handling today, and later, of more cosmopolitan industries that can only thrive once slowly-materializing social advances have taken root. It’s well-understood that, as part of the logical phasing by which most cities historically have grown, short-term industrial growth is the key to driving future gains in white collar fields over time.

    KAEC is also the world’s first publicly-traded city. While growth has been slow, the city has stayed afloat through investment by half of the Saudi population and a rising stock price that over the last three years has outpaced the Dow. Its growth is predicated on continued public buy-in of its strategies; its fortunes are intrinsically tied to national transformations.

    KAEC is one of many industrial free zones that are all the rage in this part of the world. The Middle East is now dotted with hundreds of them, and their power and attractiveness is leading the world to slowly reshape logistics activities around them. The massive economic shifts that these strategic investments have attracted seem by and large to be working. Another economic zone known as Al Duqm is rumored to be high on the military’s list of landing spots for relocating US military operations in the Middle East; it is a site that a few years ago could barely sustain a small fishing village.

    On the other side of the world, thousands of miles away in the heartland of the United States, dozens of cities once buoyed by manufacturing are similarly trying to reshape their identities, among them Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Cincinnati. For some of them, a Saudi-inspired back-to-the-basics industrial approach could be part of the answer.

    Many of these cities have already identified an increased midstream logistics role brought on by the ripple effect of the planned expansion of the Panama Canal. Chicago, the traditional link between the Mississippi River and the St. Lawrence Seaway, is reducing its water-based industrial volumes as it orients its river toward tourism. This further emboldens the ambitions of cities like Cincinnati to take up the slack — it has recently worked to up the profile of its river port from forty-ninth to ninth-largest by merging with adjacent cities.

    A realignment in the nation’s energy transport arteries is also opening the door for smaller inland cities to become energy transport hubs. A decrease in energy from the Middle East, an increase from Canada and the northern United States, and increased local cultivation through renewables, natural gas, and small-scale drilling are broadening the energy transport infrastructure beyond well-established coastal ports.

    As America’s manufacturing profile has shifted, freight transport has remained steady between water, rail, ground, and air modes. As a result, cities that link them are well-positioned as potential logistics hubs. New trends in shipping demands also suggest positive prospects for ports that can accommodate water-based deliveries further inland. Cincinnati is particularly well-positioned, because its proximity to the wide Ohio River makes it more attractive than similar cities on smaller rivers.

    Despite many reasons for cities like Cincinnati to embrace a logistics-based future, obstacles have stood in the way. For one, trends in modern urban design and economic development do not favor industry. Even though manufacturing makes up 35 percent of the American economy, most planning theory has focused on eliminating or reusing industrial sites for dense urbanism, rather than embracing them for industry, taking humane factors into greater account. The latter would be a logical approach, given that many industrial nuisance qualities have been eliminated. Instead, planners have shunned most industrial activity as inherently hostile to cities, even amid a chorus of advocates for an increase in local production.

    Many Midwest mayors have paid lip service to manufacturing, recognizing the need to accommodate the logistics needs of major companies. Simultaneously, however, planners have been empowered to transform large swaths of industrial land into developments full of the urban frills popular on the East Coast. Uniquely positioning cities to spur organic growth seems far less popular than trying to out-duel other cities for a share of millennial and corporate migration to duplicate versions of generic amenities. The limited embrace of industry has come through so-called “innovation districts,” geared at capturing a piece of the creative tech economy, rather than more place-specific heavier logistics.

    Today, many hot spots are emerging that will be barometers of the struggle between the industrial opportunists and the urban development hegemony. In Cincinnati, these battles are subtly being waged over sites like Queensgate, a rare swath of intact industrial land at the precious confluence of water, rail, and highway. Its proximity to downtown has won it attention – and made it a prized trophy – in the strategy struggle between those who want to capitalize on a strategic industrial position and those who want to grow Cincinnati’s urban core. As Cincinnati works to attract companies away from flashier cities, it can do both, by embracing Queensgate’s unique industrial potential as an asset.

    As Cincinnati looks for an answer, it may consider turning to the unlikeliest of case studies. Somewhere between the character of Midwestern cities and those on the East coast, there may be an answer that lies in the Middle East.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Flickr photo by Joel Willis: John A. Roebling Bridge, Ohio River, Cincinnati

  • Techno Fixing the Urban Zone

    In 2008, when Chicago inked a deal to privatize its parking meters, a chorus of groans ensued. To say that the deal was widely panned is putting it mildly. Its detractors say the city accepted too little in exchange for turning over the operations of its parking meters for a near-eternal 75 years to a private company that promptly raised the prices and sued the city. To many, the deal appeared desperate and irresponsible; a prime instance of a city in the red buckling to the ambitions of a private operator and getting little in return except for a pittance of one-time cash.

    The case of Chicago is not unique. While several other cities have flirted with privatizing large-scale city services, politicians who support even many of the best-constructed of these measures have been rejected at the ballot box.

    The argument against privatization has primarily been a financial one. In most cases, it appeared that transferring the development and management of large city networks into private hands would at best yield equally adequate services, but for a much higher price to residents, while creating a barrier to cities’ long-term flexibility. Not long ago the verdict on urban privatization read more like an epitaph. Common sense dictated that city services could best be cared for in public hands. Major movements in city management like New Urbanism’s burgeoning lean urbanism would optimize choices about government decision-making. Public-sector and populist ideas like widespread bike lanes, traffic calming design features, urban farming, and streetcars appeared the best options available for driving future city development, and as the seminal techniques for optimizing livability and resources while eliminating congestion.

    The shame about the damage that the perceived failure of the Chicago deal has inflicted on the reputation of urban privatization is that few have noticed the increasingly obvious relationships between privatization, data, and city services in the period since. Many planners continue to present “livability” and “placemaking” as topics best solved through traditional planning approaches, well removed from the explosion of privately developed data technologies. While keeping their eyes on the ever-coveted fractional percentage gains in bicycle ridership in the cores of the largest cities, they’ve largely missed the more significant transformations around us. The public-sector response to the failed privatization ploys of a few years ago has in many cases been to write off privatization forever.

    But today, the private sector is offering better products. The Smart Cities Week conference in Washington, DC recently highlighted some of these advances, which range from programs to optimize transit systems (in order to speed up services and reduce the need for investment in hard infrastructure), to Uber-style trash pick-up that allows private waste management companies to electronically compete over who will empty a just-filled dumpster quickest and cheapest. Far from the expensive and resource-intensive pipe dreams that many have ascribed to these kinds of technological innovations (thus writing them off as impractical for the coming post-fossil fuel economy), most of these new products seem designed to reduce inefficiencies, lower costs, and minimize resource usage through precision monitoring and optimization.

    Rather than making a key fiscal offering to cities in the form of large, up-front payments in exchange for the rights to take over ordinary city services (a useful tool for paying off debt, but a tough political sell given the high consumer payments needed to make the undertaking worthwhile to the private vendor), the private sector appears to have shifted its commitment towards making the case that technological advances can generate value on both sides of the equation. While the parking vendors in the initial privatization cases were hard-pressed to prove that they were able to offer services even on par with those of the cities’ existing systems, a commitment to research and development in urban scale technology is now allowing private vendors to offer services that are overwhelmingly more user-friendly, more efficient, and more advanced than municipal services.

    Because so much of the private-sector focus has been on optimizing network operations, the notion that private management is inevitably more expensive than city management is fast-becoming obsolete. The question has shifted away from whether a city that receives an up-front payment ends up with a greater rate of return than it otherwise would have, and more toward asking how much value the privatization of a service will create for the city’s residents. While up-front payments may still be juicy bait, the real meat lies in across-the-board cost savings and noticeably better service options quickly coming on line.

    The answer to many of these questions seems clear. Who is going to accept coin-operated parking meters and confusing, impersonal signage instead of interactive, clear, and usable ones? Who will be satisfied with a 10-minute walk to an inefficient transit system if a self-driving car would come to his or her door for a similar price? Why would a city install conventional street lights if a private operator could more cheaply operate energy-efficient sensor-activated lighting that can simultaneously forestall crime through remote monitoring? And who wants to live in a city where conservation objectives are primarily pursued through inconvenient regulations, parking restrictions, and limits on plastic bag usage, when hyper-local smart grid technology can achieve the same savings by automatically optimizing load storage, green roofs, solar, and wind power block by block, all while lowering prices, eliminating losses, and hedging risk through variable city and local networks? Nearly all of these products are already on the market.

    Once city governments and voters realize that the private sector is beginning to offer services that are more efficient, more affordable, more sustainable, and more convenient than even the best conventional optimization practices being pushed today, it’s hard to believe that they will tolerate doing without them. If the newness of such systems also helps attract millennials wooed by ever-fancier gadgetry, then the case becomes even stronger.

    The blind spot the planning profession has often shown to this kind of thinking is understandable and justified. Getting a good description of a ‘smart city’ from the technology industry is an exercise in tooth-pulling. And who really believes that corporate technology firms can make places as livable as those planners that are dedicated to designing for livability? The private sector hasn’t helped itself with years of offerings that seemed designed to bilk bureaucrats out of public money. Luckily, the technological advances are now being paired with better, more creative, and fairer financing mechanisms.

    Hesitation by planners may be a good thing, because it has forced the private sector to begin to integrate the livability principles of urban design. Past perceived failures may give cities added pause, allowing a more thoughtful merge between planning objectives and privately-developed data capabilities.

    But planners best not wait too long. Popular urban advances are increasingly being forged by technologists with little input (or even sometimes with disdain) from planners. Writing off technology and divorcing big data is not a winning formula. As Silicon Valley continues to boom with large-scale, cost-effective advances, the planning profession may increasingly lose power. Enter cities designed by corporate private-sector technologists, and city budgets rescued by the ever-resilient engines of private capital.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Flickr photo by Mark Turnauckas: a smart parking meter in Akron, Ohio.

  • Should the Gas Tax Go Local?

    After approving yet another general budget stopgap for highway construction in July, legislators across the country are acknowledging the obvious: The Federal Highway Trust Fund, the primary pot of federal roadway dollars, is nearly out of gas.

    The fund has been fed for decades by the federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel. But the gas tax hasn’t been raised in 21 years. At the same time, people are driving less, and using more fuel-efficient cars. As a result, federal fuel tax revenues have fallen to just 60 to 70 percent of gross federal highway expenditures.

    The resulting fiscal dilemma has kickstarted a debate among policymakers on how to get the fund solvent again. Simultaneously, it’s also attracted attention from many planners looking for an opportunity to stress what they perceive as the unsustainability of America’s suburban low-density development.

    The core of the argument by these critics is that current infrastructure funding policies do not hold drivers accountable for the costs of the roads. Nationally, gas taxes and vehicle fees cover just half of total local, state, and federal road spending. They contend that if roads had to be paid for directly by those who used them, we’d likely have denser development and fewer cars, and that planning policy should embrace an ambitious course to implement that future through centralized land use regulation and urban design.

    But this approach is neither desirable nor necessary. Instead, there are ways to restructure infrastructure funding to make roads accountably solvent without turning society upside down.

    A first step would be to reduce the enormous control the federal government has over road construction. When first created, the federal highway trust fund was designed to ensure only the maintenance of the national interstate highway network.

    But today, the fund, which accounts for a quarter of all American roadway spending, is used for numerous other projects that can’t be justified as national priorities. As of 2011 20 percent of federal highway spending went to federal priority DOT projects. The remaining 80 percent was divvied out to states and communities via grants, many of them for capital outlays for new roads at the suburban edges of expanding regions. Communities should be expected to pay for these kinds of roads themselves, especially as the number of local projects continues to grow.

    This federal spending has encouraged a lack of accountability at the local level. While it has given the federal government the freedom to address concerns about existing infrastructure projects — since 1990 Washington has reduced the share of bridges deemed “structurally deficient” from 25 percent to 11 percent – it has done little to ensure that local projects will be prioritized responsibly in the future. Instead, cities and states have accrued federal dollars primarily on the basis of marketing, regardless of whether the costs and benefits actually add up.

    Balancing those costs and benefits is a crucial issue because, in the eyes of many planners, auto-dependent suburbanites are getting a free ride while urbanites who drive less are being unfairly taxed. Meanwhile, there is no clear answer to the question of how much people would be willing to pay for infrastructure in order to live at low densities if they were shouldering the costs directly.

    Polling data does little to resolve the uncertainty. When asked, a majority say that they like their commutes, that they would rather drive than travel by other modes, and that they greatly value the positive attributes of living at low densities in detached homes with yards and privacy from their neighbors. This suggests they would be hard-pressed to relinquish the status quo. Simultaneously, however, they also overwhelmingly oppose raising the federal gas tax.

    So where do the public’s priorities really fall? This question could be better answered if more infrastructure were funded locally. Not only would it allow more accountability between those providing the funding and those accruing the costs and benefits, it would more democratically help solve the density issue by letting people vote with their feet. People would be free to choose between the wide-ranging densities and tax rates that compose the many competitive municipalities of most regions.

    There are other benefits to concentrating road spending locally. Foremost among them is that communities and states are better equipped than the federal government to tackle congestion, one of the costliest contributors to road degradation

    Since 1982, the primary federal approach to combat congestion costs through the gas tax has been to redirect an increasing portion of revenues to a Mass Transit Account under the principle of encouraging alternative modes of transportation. It hasn’t worked. Between 1978 and 1995 transit funding increased eightfold, while ridership increased just two percent. And by 2005 Americans indicated they still overwhelmingly rejected transit, even when both driving and transit were available.

    Much of the gas tax has been wasted. The American Public Transit Association reports that about 15 percent of the gas tax is used for mass transit. Roads carry just 51 percent of their own costs. Ports, airports, and parking facilities, by contrast, paid for 80 to 100 percent of their own costs when measured the same way.

    Cutting off the transit syphon would free up significant capital to patch gaps in the Highway Fund. Meanwhile, more effective approaches to reducing congestion could be tackled at the state and local level. These include regulations to stagger travel times and routes, clearing breakdowns more quickly, improving traffic light engineering, providing better traffic alerts, and limiting truck traffic (one of the worst congestion offenders) at certain times of day.

    Most of the public debate has been on ways the gas tax itself could be restructured to keep the highway fund afloat. In addition to simply raising the gas tax, universal tolling and taxing people per mile driven are popular ideas for directly funding roads.

    While popular, such “miles-based” approaches may not improve a roadway system that is a crucial tool for facilitating economic growth. Housing prices in the United States are lower than nearly anywhere else in the world in part because of roads that facilitate cost-efficient transportation between locations more efficiently than places where most residents are dependent on transit. This creates choice in where to live and work, and facilitates ladders out of poverty.

    There are practical concerns as well. When polled, people have overwhelmingly indicated that their primary personal method for alleviating congestion is to take a less direct route to work. Discouraging indirect travel by taxing drivers per mile could actually end up exacerbating congestion, rather than relieving it.

    The way the tax is designed now is a solid middle-ground approach, simultaneously charging users while incentivizing fuel-efficiency. If only the revenues were spent more efficiently, recent dips in Highway Fund revenues due to a drop in driving and an uptick in miles per gallon might be celebrated, not maligned.

    It’s clear that roadway funding needs a second look. And while a more accountable approach would be a breath of fresh air, accountability may not resemble the high-density, high-tax, transit-rich future that some planners assume.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Flickr photo by Neff Conner: Highway traffic jam and construction in Bedford, Texas.

  • Chicago’s Planning Strategy: Hot or Not?

    The City of Broad Shoulders may have two faces, but how will it age?

    This was the essence of the question that the Chicago Tribune was asking in October of 2013 when it urged readers to re-envision the city’s original 1909 plan in a modern context. In the 115 years since, and especially recently, Chicago has become a glitzy glass and steel mecca for Midwest yuppies. It’s also become an unfortunate poster child for corruption, financial struggles, urban violence, and poor schools. It’s a city whose two reputations could hardly be more different.

    To many in the Windy City, the opportunity was a chance to envision a bold new future for the region. In their eyes, the future of Chicago today depends on it becoming a vibrant bastion of international excitement, with a growing population and tourism as key ingredients of new fiscal health.

    Their hopes are based on optimism garnered from a real estate scene in which Chicago’s north side has become one of the hottest locations in the country, and formerly blighted neighborhoods have turned into battlegrounds for gentrification.

    Along with that, through a variety of initiatives, the fiscally strapped city has invested in many white-collar neighborhoods and international attractions, which some have argued come at the expense of the city’s lower-income areas, as well as the city’s older industrial, manufacturing, and infrastructural assets. Arguably the most visible investment – Millennium Park – has been a story of success that is inspiring the subsequent transformation of the Chicago River from a primarily industrial channel into a tourist experience unto itself. It’s part of an approach by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to up tourism and generate tourist industry jobs.

    The strategy of investing deeply in white-collar cultural successes with the hope that the resulting momentum will offset the city’s grimmer challenges is a daring game. There are some reasons to think that parts of it may be working. Over the last decade, for instance, Chicago attracted a rapid in-migration of new residents – by some estimates Cook county gained over 100,000 in-migrants per year.

    But the bigger demographic picture doesn’t inspire optimism. While Chicago gained a substantial numbers of Millennials in their 20s and folks in their 50s and 60s between 2000 and 2010, it was also the only one of the nation’s ten largest cities that lost population overall during the same time period.

    And between 2005 and 2010, despite substantial in-migration, Cook County lost as many as 185,000 residents a year to out-migration according to IRS data, including negative net-migration among nearly every age group, including 20-somethings, a statistic that is particularly eye-popping given the city’s perceived success at attracting people in exactly that age bracket.

    At the same time that Chicago’s Loop experienced a sudden burst as the hottest urban center in the US, the city as a whole still lost considerable ground to the nation’s growing cities. It’s been predicted that in another 30 years the Chicago region will be surpassed in size by at least two different metropolitan areas in the Texas triangle, and, nationally, possibly by more. That’s assuming that Chicago doesn’t lose ground faster than it already has. Moving forward, it may have a tougher time attracting large numbers of Midwestern Millennials, as Rust Belt cities like Cleveland work to keep their talent at home.

    There are additional reasons to doubt Chicago’s long-term ambitions to become a global mecca. For one, the city is a lonely snowman in the age of air conditioning. Between 2000 and 2012 nearly every city in the southern US grew its metropolitan region by at least 30 percent. Even hot growth cities in the North like Columbus and Indianapolis couldn’t match that pace. Since air conditioning became a norm rather than an exception, growth has overwhelmingly trended toward warmer climates. In the last 50 years, half of the population growth in the US went to the eight states with the warmest climates, while the eight coolest states attracted just 3% of that total.

    A second area of concern is that the exponential power of a centralized city has diminished. The city of Chicago is now home to just seven of the region’s 28 Fortune 500 companies. The city of a dominant core and residential periphery is being squashed by the realities of preferences.

    Rather than settle on being the bland and livable capital of the Midwest, Chicago has instead opted to try to wage battle with the likes of London and Rome, and it may have a tough time winning. It’s clear that such worldly ambitions are contingent on growing both residents and tourists.

    The city might do well to begin with a humbler approach that focuses on serving its current residents. The primary things Chicago has going for it are its comparative affordability to other large cities, and the perception that it’s composed of friendly people. These traits are largely antithetical to most megacities. Rather than pursue a path on which it could lose these unique assets, Chicago should capitalize on them.
    In addition to remaining affordable, the city should take easy steps to be more family friendly, a quality it currently lacks because of horrifically high crime and subpar schools.

    Of the city’s out-migration in the last decade, an overwhelming amount was by families, especially from its African American community. If Chicago invested in creating average schools out of its failing ones, rather than closing the bad ones while expanding the great ones, it might retain some of the people who are fleeing the city. Generating even passable middle and high schools alone might be enough to convince companies that adequate talent exists to launch the kinds of job training and manufacturing centers that could start to revitalize neighborhoods in the city’s job-depleted areas.

    It could also zone parts of the city with declining populations more in the way that suburbs do. High density development need not be the only considered path forward. Chicago’s geographic constraints already make it difficult to find spacious low-density housing within a reasonable distance of the center city, so it might help revitalize neighborhoods if low density development were permitted on the city’s struggling south and west sides.

    The city should also consider decentralizing its public transportation infrastructure. Chicago’s core transit system is designed around an outdated jobs model that focuses all lines toward the center of the city. The result is that while overall commute times are fairly low, just 6.3% of jobs can be reached within 45 minutes on public transit.

    Finally, the city shouldn’t lose sight of its manufacturing legacy just because yuppies are moving in. Chicago’s greatest assets include its positioning as an infrastructural crossroads, and this is of great value to industry.

    If it did these few things better, the city might find itself losing far fewer residents, and not relying so heavily on narrow groups of in-migrants. If not, existing preoccupations with international fame may cause Chicago to lose its appeal, while other American cities accelerate faster.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

    Flickr photo by Chris Smith: Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park

  • Cincinnati: Bridging Downtown and the Suburbs

    One of the most contentious under-the-radar mayoral races heated up in Cincinnati on September 10th, with former city council representative John Cranley surging to a huge 55%-37% primary victory over previously presumed frontrunner Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls. The primary eliminates minor candidates; now, both Cranley and Qualls are still alive for November’s general election. Cranley’s huge primary victory is a notable development for planners everywhere.

    Cincinnati, long lumped together with many “declining” rust belt cities, is hot on the trail for “solutions” to cope with its dropping municipal population, along with its gaping budget deficit and struggling competitiveness. Many assumed an easy Qualls victory would spur a continuation of the city’s rampant recent investments in a litany of trendy new planning schemes, seen by some as the key to the city’s future. Down the road, a November loss would deal an unexpected blow that would potentially threaten that future

    These schemes include a citywide form-based code, a $130-million streetcar system, the gentrification of two key neighborhoods adjacent to downtown, and a plan to privatize the city’s parking meters in exchange for a $92 million windfall. All of the ideas have all been initiated under the belief that the city needs to grow its population, and that the key to doing so is to make the region stand out nationally. The presumption that the best way to do this is to invest heavily in the core neighborhoods, primarily downtown, presumes that hoards of new residents, especially young graduates will be lured by the array of hip new developments. With the exception of the parking deal, all of these projects were initiated with significant state or federal grants and tax credits.

    As Vice Mayor, Qualls has been one of the most vocal proponents of these efforts. Her particular affinity for the parking and streetcar initiatives as essential to economic development and maintaining regional competitiveness has been a hot topic throughout the election season because Cranley, her opponent, is opposed to them. By contrast, he’s built a campaign around “jobs and core services” to meet the needs of the existing population. And while he hasn’t objected to all of the downtown redevelopment schemes, he’s much more adamantly backing a approach featuring several highway projects, including a major bridge and a new interchange

    The fight for Cincinnati is important not just because it’s a battle over dollars, but because Cincinnati has suddenly become a guinea pig for the broader redevelopment of the Rust Belt. If the city reverses its primary leanings and chooses to move forward on its current path behind Qualls in the general election, it will become perhaps the foremost national testing ground on whether “Portlandization” is the key to growing regions against national competition by kindling latent demand for dense, urban living to their city cores.

    The real dynamism of the region is and will continue to be well outside the Cincinnati core. City leaders have argued that reduction in the pace of the city’s population decline from at least 2 percent every year between 2000 and 2010 down to 0.2 percent between 2010 and 2011 proves that city living really is the future of the area, they simultaneously seem to miss noticing the rapid regional growth that for several decades has dwarfed the relatively minuscule population changes occurring within the city itself.

    The race to claim victory in the rejuvenation of Cincinnati among the “city core” crowd has now spurred a goal to reach 100,000 new residents by 2023, an aspiration that virtually everyone recognizes as extreme. Never in the city’s history has Cincinnati added more than 52,000 residents in a decade, even in its heyday as a national riverboat transportation hub a century and a half ago.

    Coincidentally, as a region, the Cincinnati area hasn’t added fewer than 100,000 new residents since regional statistics became reliably available in the 1950s. In fact, Cincinnati is one of the fastest-growing Rust Belt areas since 1980. The idea of a need to “solve” Cincinnati’s “decline” is inaccurate; it says far more about the aesthetics of saving the city’s central area and shoring up municipal finances than about a benevolent intent to help the city’s broader regional growth, though the latter is typically the stated motive.

    Even more pertinent to the objective of adding population by luring residents from other cities is the fact that between 2000 and 2010 no city in the nation that lost population regionally gained population in its core city or in its central downtown. There is almost no evidence of any city successfully rejuvenating its region through downtown reinvestment. While Cincinnati (the region) has been growing, adding 100,000 people to the city core would do little to increase net demand for the area that the region isn’t providing for already, and would most likely represent a heavily subsidized “redistribution” of people from the region’s outlying cities and towns. While just as good for Cincinnati’s municipal tax rolls, it’s hardly realistic to link that to any sort of push to lure “the talent that every city competes for”.

    Clearly, the growth Cincinnati leaders are seeking is already coming, and in volumes far exceeding their wildest projections. Unfortunately for downtown’s cheerleaders, people choosing to live have overwhelming chosen the densities best found in the suburbs. And while more choice is of course terrific, the development of a mix of densities and housing options should happen naturally, not as the product of the yearnings by some to increase a city’s dwindling piece of the regional pie for financial reasons.

    Lofty talk of a region that needs dynamism downtown to lure talent from other cities, hence more population to help pay for budget deficits, doesn’t really make sense. The talent that wants to come is already coming — it’s just not coming to downtown, and it’s coming at a rapid (for the Rust Belt) rate. Any downtown investment may lure growth from the suburbs, but is unlikely to lure growth from outside.

    While many would contend that luring growth from a city’s own suburbs is a good thing to combat sprawl and undue “suburban flight”, the situation in regional Cincinnati suggests that there really is a happy density that people are choosing, and that people really do like what they’re getting in the suburbs.

    Cincinnati’s suburban growth over the last several decades has far outpaced population loss from the city by taking advantage of the region’s infrastructural assets: developing along the I-75 corridor north to Dayton, and filling the I-275 loop around the city. Contrary to conventional wisdom, neither the growth nor the emerging densities have been radial. The region’s hubs have become less dense, while the more lightly-populated areas around the highways have become more dense. The average difference in the densities of the region’s many cities and towns is dropping rapidly. In other words, outside of the city core, Cincinnati is settling into a comfortable regional density.

    Uniquely well-served by exurban highways, development has continued at these remarkably consistent low densities. There’s been little pressure on home values, and virtually zero formation of any new “nodes” of higher density, all because high-speed highway transportation to the major job centers is quickly accessible from a huge land area, and Dayton and Cincinnati, the region’s two largest job hubs, are only 45 minutes apart. Commute times have stayed shorter in Cincinnati than in nearly all other cities. Congestion is low by national standards, and the profile of transit use as opposed to other means of travel is virtually unchanged.

    Clearly, adequate room and infrastructure exists: the densities emerging in regional Cincinnati reflect broadly emerging preferences for the future of this part of the country. Coincidentally, they also reflect almost exactly the idyllic utopian idea espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright of one family per acre.

    Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include land use, demography, political geography, economics, freight transport, environmental planning, urban design, and architecture.

    Flickr photo of a Cincinnati bridge by Jim Orsini