New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • The College Town Is Obsolete

    The college town occupies a special place in the American consciousness. Small, leafy, brimming with intellectual activity, preparing tomorrow’s leaders – if we haven’t spent years, dropped off kids, or attended a football game in a college town, we have at least passed through one.

    But nothing lasts forever and nostalgia is not the surest guide to the future. Colleges claim their presence brings great benefits to their surrounding regions. Many conduct studies to quantify these benefits, and several come up with figures in the billions of dollars (you can Google the subject for examples).

    Hundreds of articles proclaim the college town as the retiree’s ideal. You can walk on campus! Take workshops! Audit classes!

    Forbes magazine editor Rich Karlgaard has written extensively about college towns being excellent places to start and run small businesses. Available, affordable, high-skill labor! Amenities! Good coffee and wine! Low cost of living (a place where even I can afford to belong to the country club)!

    And every down-on-its luck town wants to become a college town to attract population, businesses and jobs; they dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley, or at least Alley, by providing just the right mix of public policy and social/cultural atmosphere.

    In fact, college towns are stifling, boring, and obsolescent.

    Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity. Political correctness? That’s not the tenth of it. I’m talking about the stifling of speech, dissent, or any deviation from orthodoxy. Colleges have gone from citadels of intellectual openness to dungeons of intellectual coercion. And in support of what? High ideals such as the canons of Western thought (freedom, liberty, justice, sovereignty of the individual, the inviolability of property rights)? More often, it’s the undermining of the same.

    If this is news to you, you haven’t been paying attention, and you certainly haven’t experienced being flunked for your views (not your scholarship), having your perfectly reasonable points of view confiscated and trashed and/or burned (if they appeared in print), being shouted down, prevented from gaining a hearing, or having your audiences intimidated and threatened, your tenure denied, your application rejected, or your grant stripped.

    [Consult www.Studentsforacademicfreedom.org, or see the film, “Indoctrinate U.”]

    Secondly, for most people college is a waste of time and money. As Charles Murray points out:
    College is not all it is cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors, and grade inflation have conspired to make the term B.A. close to meaningless. Another problem with today’s colleges is more insidious: they are no longer good places for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today’s colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity.

    In fact, the entire American system of post-secondary education is wasteful; Murray calls it cruel and insane. The four years and thousands of dollars you spent in that college town to earn a bachelor’s degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies little and qualifies you for less.

    Advances in technology are also making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Distance learning, remote learning – call it what you will – will doom the college town. The Internet renders the college library unnecessary; CDs and DVDs obsolete the 8 AM lecture; email and other advanced communication capabilities make office hours unneeded. Giving up the trappings of a campus will reduce costs dramatically, particularly in an era of high energy prices. Once higher education is exposed to market forces, the rationalization of education will be rapid and profound.

    Of course college towns will still exist: after all, there are still football, hockey and basketball games. There will just be far fewer of them.

    Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He lives in Los Angeles, edits and publishes the newsletter Growth Strategies, speaks and consults [www.rogerselbert.com]. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1973, missed his graduation ceremony and has yet to return. But he thinks Brunswick, Maine was a great college town.

  • Rx for ‘Residential Renaissance:’ Take Two Years and Ease Up on the Hype

    A big going-out-of-business sign on the Rite-Aid store at 7th and Los Angeles streets tells a bigger tale—a story I’ll call “Hype Happens.”

    The Rite-Aid opened a few years ago with fanfare, arriving at just about the high-point of the hype over the “Residential Renaissance” of Downtown. Rite-Aid set up shop in the Santee Village project, an ambitious effort that saw a developer get plenty of help from various government agencies in order to convert a collection of mid-rise buildings from garment shops to residential lofts.

    The project won plaudits as the latest in a trend that was bound to remake Downtown into a place where folks with lots of disposable income could “live, work and play,” according to boosters.

    Rite-Aid’s arrival appeared to offer a clear signal that the trend would go on unabated. The new, young, and relatively upscale residents of Downtown would need a proper drugstore, after all. It all seemed quite modern for a section of the city where mom-and-pop corner stores were the only option for aspirin or chewing gum, and pharmacies were still just that—not places that offer shampoo and light bulbs and soda to customers waiting for their prescriptions to be filled.

    The hype apparently failed to meet the expectations of the marketplace, though, and now Rite-Aid is leaving.

    Get used to it—but also realize that this is a phase, and there can be some benefits to a slowdown.

    Also keep in mind that Downtown has, indeed, seen a great deal of change with the latest round of residential redevelopment. Much of it has been good, even with the strains that have come as wealthier newcomers bumped into the many poor folks who called the area home long before its latest star turn. Take some solace in the thought that such strains will likely find room to ease now that the hype fading.

    The pending closure of the Rite-Aid, meanwhile, offers lessons to be absorbed by boosters and others. The chain is no stranger to inner-city retail, but you can bet that its executives overlooked a few things on the way to the corner of 7th and Los Angeles, especially in regard to the chances for crowds of upscale loft dwellers filling their aisles. All the gushing press and publicity couldn’t change the fact that the location still backs up against Skid Row, one of the toughest precincts of the city. It still takes a walk of several blocks—through territory that can be pretty scary at night—to get to the next section of Downtown where bright lights and activity provide a perception of public security.

    Add that up and you’ll see that Downtown has not reached the sort of critical mass that matches the “live, work and play” sloganeering. There are pockets of the city’s center that have established an active, commercial nightlife. The Old Bank District centered at 4th and Main—a collection of several residential buildings, a few restaurants, a convenience store, and a DVD shop—comes to mind. For the most part, though, many gaps remain and the larger scene just hasn’t been knitted together.

    Consider the once-a-month Art Walk for a clear illustration of the over-sell of Downtown. The event has inspired an outsized helping of hype even by Downtown standards, getting regular and uncritical boosts from print media, broadcasters and the blogosphere, with reports offering it up as evidence of the success of Downtown’s upscale makeover. The Art Walk does draw hundreds of upscale visitors to galleries at 5th and Main and a few adjacent blocks on the second Thursday of each month. That’s great, but turn the proposition on its head and think about it this way: The Art Walk imports visitors who account for a vibrant sidewalk scene once a month. That’s not “live, work and play.” It’s more like “drive Downtown, look around, and leave.” Check 5th and Main on the other nights of the month and you’ll seldom see anything like the Art Walk crowds.

    Does this render the boosters’ dreams for Downtown dead?

    Certainly not—but expect them to go on hold for awhile.

    The economic turmoil that’s shaking the nation is hitting Downtown, too, and will continue to do so. The city’s center is not some chic pocket of creative energy that’s somehow able to escape the mess.

    So Downtown is in for a tough row to hoe, but there’s also a chance to learn some lessons in preparation for its next phase, which will surely start with plenty of hype at some point in the next several years.

    Perhaps by then our boosters and builders will have learned enough from the last go-round to ensure that the new corner drugstore will still stand tall when the next hot streak comes to an end.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com).

  • Boomers Go Back to College? – A Letter from Pennsylvania

    The “boomers” is a generation born between 1946 and 1964. They gave us the youth culture, hippies, Woodstock, peace movement, women’s liberation, computers, flexible work environments, consumer electronics and consumption on the grand scale to mention only a few.

    Boomers have enjoyed a wonderful economy in the main that has enabled them to build wealth and live middle class lifestyles. They stay fit. They eat healthy foods. They look young compared to people of previous generations at their age.

    But alas they are graying and have reached the point in their lives where choices need to be made about how to continue to live lives that are both enriching and fulfilling.

    There were 78 million boomers in the United States in 2005 according the census data. By 2006, 330 of them an hour were turning 60. Growing older means different choices and greater financial challenges for them. Fidelity Investments estimates that “boomers” on average have less than $40,000 in retirement savings. Few will have traditional pensions. Most of their wealth is tied up in real estate.

    Medical costs will increase by nearly 50 percent as they pass 65. The Social Security Administration estimates that there will be only 2.1 workers for retiree by 2031. This is down from 3.3 today. As a result many boomers will continue to work out of necessity while they seek a simpler and scaled down lifestyles.

    An annual survey conducted on behalf of Del Webb, a developer of retirement communities, found that 36 percent of boomers plan to move when they become “Empty Nesters” and 55 percent of boomers plan to move when they retire. One interesting finding in the study is that, “boomers are twice as likely as those currently aged 59 – 70 to prefer an active adult community that is part of a multi-generational neighborhood.”

    One key question facing empty nester and retired “boomers” may be where can they go to find a quality lifestyle, affordable living, part-time employment opportunities and multi-generational interaction? The answer may well be college towns that proliferate in places like Pennsylvania – a state with more than one hundred institutions of higher education. Many are located in beautiful towns.

    Websites like www.collegetownlife.com provide links to college towns where boomers may consider relocating. At www.bestplaces.net you can compare the demographics of where you currently live to those of a college town. I currently live in suburban Philadelphia. If I were to move to State College, Penn., home of Pennsylvania State University’s main campus, here is what I would find.

    First, I would be living in a town that is six times larger than my current community, but less than one percent the size of my current region. The median age would fall from 42 to 23 years. In my current community, nearly 40 percent of the population is 50 years or older, but in State College only about 10 percent fall into this demographic.

    A lot of things would remain the same in terms of gender and racial mix, but I would have to get use to a community in which 75 percent of the population is single with no children and the number of people who are married drops from 60 percent to 15 percent.

    In my current community the median home prices is $344,000 while in State College it is $235,000. My current cost of living index in 126 while in State it would stand at 100. Average income in my current community is $66,500 while in State College it is $22,500. My school district spends more than $9,000 per student in State College it is a little over $7,500 which reflects real estate taxes.

    State College offers robust cultural activities through Pennsylvania State University. The University has schools of music and performing and fine arts and a number of concert halls, museums, lecture halls, libraries, theatres and auditoriums with near daily attractions and activities. Also, the community is safe and offers a host of recreational activities.

    Pennsylvania State University is the largest in Pennsylvania and adds to the vibrancy of State College, but there are also more than one hundred other college towns and communities in Pennsylvania where “boomers” may find everything they are looking for and more as they transition for work to active retirement and toward their golden years.

    These towns offer everything from wooded rural locations to stylish suburban or urban neighborhoods. They represent a great alternative to those boomers who want to do far more than fade away.

    Dennis M. Powell is president and CEO of Massey Powell an issues management consulting company located in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

  • Back to Basics: The Financial Crisis Requires a Paradigm Shift

    It’s tempting to look at the current financial meltdown – and the proposed bailout – with a Bolshevik mentality. Let’s line up the investment bankers, hedge fund managers up against a wall and spray them with an odorous substance.
    If it were only so easy. Rescuing Wall Street may not solve many problems but letting the investor class implode won’t help many people either.

    What we really need is not a revolution against capitalism, but a paradigm shift within it. We need to move away from fads and quick bucks, and towards productive investment. If we don’t make that shift, the current bubble will simply recreate itself again, perhaps in ill-thought out speculative ventures painted “green” but motivated by the same shortsighted greed.

    Instead let’s stop the whole bubble cycle and get back to basics. That means shifting our investments towards productive activities such as manufacturing and basic infrastructure– and training the critical skilled workers that a ‘real’ economy needs. It means shifting investment priorities by providing incentives for entrepreneurs whose main interest is to build companies, not flip them.

    Over the past decade we have seen a repeated pattern. Americans innovate, start new companies and bring a moribund economy back to life. This takes place primarily in the suburbs and the expanding growth regions. Then the markets heat up and there’s rapid asset inflation. This happened in the late 1990s with dotcom stocks, and more recently in real estate creating a huge wealth effect, particularly in elite cities. Both instances ended with a dispiriting crash.

    Breaking this pattern is an important issue for all of us, but most importantly for our children. America’s robust population growth necessitates rapid long term, and widespread, economic growth. That means moving away from a financially oriented economy to a production oriented one.

    Most Americans cannot sustain themselves trading paper. We also need robust growth in a host of productive industries – energy, fiber, food, manufacturing goods and high-end business services – that can provide decent employment for someone other than Wall Street bankers, well-placed developers and dotcom entrepreneurs.

    For these broader based industries to grow, we need to improve basic infrastructure for moving goods, providing energy and educating skilled workers. American firms in fields from farm equipment and aerospace to textiles still compete with China and India. In an era of high-energy costs, we can drive more of our manufacturing closer to home, if we can provide them with better technological, transportation and human resources.

    Tragically we have ignored both infrastructure and industry. This can be seen from the largest cities to the smallest towns. “One looks back at that map ‘Landscape by Moses,’” writes the noted sociologist Nathan Glazer in looking at the legacy of New York City’s “master builder” Robert Moses, “and if one asked what has been added in the fifty years since Moses lost power, one has to say astonishingly: almost nothing.”

    Indeed, despite the staggering private wealth generated by the stock market and real estate in New York, the city’s public infrastructure has been largely neglected. Its industries are dying and new ones have trouble expanding. There are billions for new stadiums and other elements of Mayor Bloomberg’s “luxury city” but not much for the diverse entrepreneurial firms particularly in the outer boroughs.

    The city controller’s office has estimated that infrastructure spending levels in the late 1990s and early 2000s were barely half of what was required to maintain the city’s streets, main roads, and railways in “a systematic state of good repair.” Subways and rail lines in America’s richest city are frequently shut down after heavy rains due to flooding caused by poor drainage. Brownouts and blackouts, in part caused by underinvestment in energy infrastructure, have become common during summer high-use periods.

    Similarly, California’s once envied water-delivery systems, roadways, airports, and education facilities are in serious disrepair. In the 1960s, infrastructure spending accounted for 20 percent of all state outlays, but as the technocratic perspective took hold in Sacramento, infrastructure spending fell to just three percent of all expenditures, despite the rapid growth of the state’s population.

    Many communities have decided that instead of attending to basic needs, to invest in spectacular new convention centers, sport stadiums, arts and entertainment facilities, hotels, as well as luxury condos. Some have poured money into projects that they think will attract a few big corporate executives with luxury boxes or opera tickets. Others have poured their resources into ways to lure “creative” professionals with edgy museums, jazz clubs and cultural centers.

    These approaches are built around the deluded notion that Americans can thrive simply by being more clever and creative – even more self-fulfilled – than our competitors. China, India, or other low-wage nations won’t be content to concede higher-end economy activity to us. Software design, special efforts, high end legal services, architecture, fashion and even hedge funds all migrate to places where wealth is being created.

    In the coming years, for example, Mumbai, Dubai and Shanghai will employ their enormous wealth – gained in such unfashionable pursuits as writing computer code, drilling oil or making steel – to break into the lucrative businesses formerly dominated by Wall Street, Hollywood or Silicon Valley. You cannot give up productive, wealth-generating enterprises without consequences. Over time this also will hit all but the most elite workers.

    In contrast a policy that focuses both on old fashioned and new, green infrastructure would spur positive impacts on employment across a broad spectrum of activities. We could use new bridges, roads, trains, energy transmission facilities to help resuscitate the Great Plains as well as the beleaguered Great Lakes so they sustainably exploit the natural resources and logistical advantages that made them productive hotbeds in the first place. We can turn our cities, both old and new, into ideal spots for the nurturing of hosts of growing industries by providing adequate skills training, new transportation systems and updated power grids.

    Governments at every level can and should play a critical role in this great project, both in financing physical infrastructure and providing critical skills training. But given the financial realities today, we also need to take advantage of private capital available both here and abroad for such investments.

    So rather than simply rescue Wall Street, or let it hang out to die, let’s figure out how to redirect it. We need to shift incentives away from mindless speculation and the creation of ever more obscure financial instruments. Instead let’s find ways of encouraging investors to make their profits in ways that spur production and widespread wealth creation.

    Joel Kotkin is the executive editor of Newgeography.com.

  • Creating an Authentic Place: Tales from Two Southern California Cities

    What makes a place “authentic”? In places we cherish, we look for something unique and tangible. But personal experience of a place is not merely a product of the landscape and “built environment.” It is also shaped by myths and perceptions.

    As City Manager of two California towns, I’ve grappled with the treacherous crosscurrents of reality and myth, of change and preservation.

    Azusa, California is a working-class suburb where the majority of the population are from the stock of Mexican immigrants over the past century, along with a largely comfortable mixture of the rest of Southern California’s extraordinary diversity. Ten years ago, Mayor Cristina Cruz Madrid memorably described it as “the caboose on the foothill train,” standing in sad contrast to its more affluent middle-class neighbors along the majestic (but often smog-obscured) San Gabriel Mountains. An ambitious effort to shake that image has had mixed results but some very real accomplishments.

    Ventura, California is a beach town with higher aspirations. Its city government promotes it as “California’s New Art City” and aims to be a model of smart growth, environmental sustainability and civic engagement. Ventura’s citizens laid the foundation for this ambitious agenda when more than a thousand of them participated in a citizen-driven “visioning effort” at the beginning of this century. But it remains unclear how deep or widespread the public enthusiasm for these notions truly is.

    Both these towns struggle with distinguishing their actual, imagined and desired identities — and destinies.

    People have lived in Azusa. for six thousand years. Phonetic variations of “Azusavit” were recorded by Spanish padres as the village origin of the native “neophytes” inducted into labor at the nearby Mission San Gabriel. Yet despite this long history, today’s Azusa blends with little distinction from the tract homes, apartments and commercial strips of the thirty other cities that two million San Gabriel Valley suburbanites call home. But it’s making considerable strides in re-anchoring a sense of place.

    The symbolic turning point came in 1995, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a scheme to introduce casino gambling as the panacea to the city’s declining fortunes. Voters installed a new City Council and chose instead to focus on beautifying the sagging Downtown. When the pedestrian-scaled street lamps that were installed were mistakenly painted purple, the Council persevered despite ridicule. Two dozen new businesses made believers out of skeptics. Purple was embraced as the city’s distinctive color.

    Development of new homes sought to attract middle-class homebuyers. Public schools adopted a “no excuses” determination to boost test scores. A rash commitment to plant 2,000 new trees in the year 2000 ended up adding over 3,500 new trees. The seeds of those efforts have flowered in a renewed spirit of citizen volunteerism. Neighborhood improvement zones were launched to “improve all of Azusa, one neighborhood at a time.” An ambitious new General Plan proclaimed “a 21st Century vision for Azusa” as “the Gateway to the American Dreams.” More than a million square feet of office/warehouse/light industrial “flex space” was added, a residential development slated for 1250 homes broke ground and the long-neglected Downtown began to show new signs of life.

    But change is never painless. To some, new development seems to violate the city’s “unique natural, historic and cultural heritage.” There is considerable concern that new structures might be undermining the cherished small town character.

    This has led to a continuing political struggle. Is the new development creating “a distinct identity and sense of place” or altering the community’s existing character beyond recognition? This reflects a deep ambivalence of local residents about change. So much of current development is simply generic “product” that even the value of new investment (and more permanent benefits of expanded jobs, housing and tax base) may seem like a poor trade-off against the loss of the familiar.

    Ventura

    That question is even more clearly drawn in the coastal town of Ventura. The community is officially known as “San Buenaventura,” the name that Father Serra, the legendary founder of the California missions chose to honor Saint Bonaventure, an Italian, but the name also evokes the spirit of a city of good luck. That good fortune seemed to run out, however, with the end of Ventura’s oil boom in the sixties. The city’s historic core declined, even as farmers and ranchers turned to raising largely undistinguished tract homes on the city’s outskirts. After the 101 interstate sliced through, Ventura began a long, slow fade – especially compared to Santa Barbara, its neighbor just 22 miles up the coast which styles itself “the American Riviera.” .

    Like Azusa, Ventura in the last few years has gotten back on track. The once seedy and largely deserted core came back to life – largely thanks to the grit of individual entrepreneurs. The City did back construction of a theater and parking structure, which helped accelerate an indigenous restaurant and retail revival. Then came the “Seize the Future” visioning effort that thrust forward new leadership determined to make Ventura a “national model” for “smart growth,” “livable communities” and “civic engagement.”

    But the push for new investment and “new urbanist” development has run into the same predictable “not in my backyard” response seen in Azusa and many other communities. (link to Kiefer and Bradford NIMBY pieces). There’s much talk about preserving the “soul” of the community. This includes a shifting and even contradictory mix of protecting the town’s laid-back beach town attitude along with its largely unspoiled hillside and ocean views, its stock of old buildings and its quirky landmarks.

    Nothing is more symbolic of this than the debate over the fate of the “Top Hat Burger Place.” The 450 square foot Downtown hamburger stand stood in the way of an aggressive developer’s plans for three-story condos over boutiques. Sentimentalists and preservationists banded together with anti-elitists to insist the stand stay or be relocated at the developer’s expense. Others welcomed the demise of what they saw as an eyesore reminiscent of Downtown’s hardscrabble past and rolled their eyes about claims that the plywood structure qualified as an historic landmark.

    On a split vote, the City Council approved a compromise that donated a slice of a city-owned parking lot nearby as the relocation site for the Top Hat. Given the current real estate recession, it was no surprise when the development project tanked, leaving the apparently ‘recession-proof’ hamburger stand in its current location.

    Now, American Apparel is opening the first retail chain outlet in Downtown. Could this be the harbinger of Ventura’s transformation into another trendy “lifestyle center” of national chains?
    Such concerns are not new. More than a century before Wal-Mart steamrollered old-fashioned downtowns across America, Woolworth’s, Sears and Penney’s created the foundation for a consumer society dominated by giant chains.

    Can places like Azusa and Ventura maintain a special identity amidst the gale force winds of the global economy? Some extreme advocates favor opting out and resisting every change in the landscape even in dilapidated neighborhoods. The other extreme pushes for undermining local neighborhood and district character to benefit out-of-scale real estate “projects” replicating some generic formula, be it “mixed-use town center” or “townhome village.”

    Towns need to find something better than a tense balance between these two extremes. First of all they need to put a distinctive stamp on new development so that it remains scaled to the local character. This is the struggle many cities – including Azusa and Ventura – must undertake if they want both to preserve “a distinct identity and sense of place” in the era of the global economy while remaining vital and economically diverse. They do not have the option of becoming a hermetically sealed stasis town like Carmel, where tourists come to experience an historic theme park of a town. Instead, like most real places, they must face difficult choices about what to retain and preserve – and what to improve and replace. Perhaps the best standard to follow may be to discern what feels like “home” to residents. Ironically, that premium is likely to also attract visitors and commerce that may ultimately threaten that very distinctiveness. But that is a problem that most struggling communities would look forward to grappling with.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • The Smart Growth Bailout?

    One way to see the federal rescue of the home mortgage market is to call it “the smart growth bailout.” True, the proximate cause lay with profligate lending practices. The flood of mortgage money covered the entire country, irrespective of state, regional or local land use regulations. That’s where the similarity stopped.

    During this decade there has been an unprecedented divergence of housing prices among U.S. metropolitan areas. Generally, the difference has been associated with strong land use regulations. Where restrictions are greater, house prices rose strongly relative to incomes. Where more traditional regulation remained, house prices also rose, but only modestly.

    This is illustrated by the change in the Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income). In the more regulated metropolitan markets, it rose from 3.5 to 6.0, a 70 percent increase. In the more traditionally regulated markets, the Median Multiple rose from 2.7 to 3.0, remaining within historic norms.

    Economics teaches that scarcity or rationing leads to higher prices. Smart growth policies ration land for development through the use of urban growth boundaries and prohibitions or restrictions on building on vacant land. In such an environment, higher house prices can be expected.

    “The affordability of housing is overwhelmingly a function of just one thing, the extent to which governments place artificial restrictions on the supply of residential land,” said Donald Brash, governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (the national central bank) for nearly 15 years.

    America has become two nations with respect to housing costs and housing cost increases. Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put his finger on the cause of the difference more than three years ago. Others have made similar findings, such as Edward Glaeser at Harvard, Theo Eicher at the University of Washington and Kate Barker of the Bank of England. House prices have exploded in highly regulated markets, while they have changed little where traditional land use regulations still apply.

    The predictable economic effects have occurred with a vengeance in more regulated (smart growth) metropolitan markets. From 2000 to 2007, the median house price rose an average of $174,000 in the more regulated metropolitan markets with more than 1,000,000 population. In the less regulated markets, the average increase was $12,500.

    The easy money was available everywhere in the nation increasing the demand for housing in most markets. But in most of the nation, housing price increases were modest, as planning systems allowed new housing to be provided at historically competitive prices. For example, in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, the three fastest growing metropolitan areas in the high-income world with more than 5,000,000 population, housing prices changed little in relation to household incomes. Furthermore, from 2000 to 2007, 2,550,000 million people (domestic migrants) left the more restrictive metropolitan markets for elsewhere in the country. That pretty well dismisses the idea that demand was the primary cause of the price escalation.

    Demand, in and of itself, does not increase price. But, when higher demand is experienced in an environment of limited supply, price increases occur. Where there were strong land use restrictions, there were strongly escalating house prices. The restrictions drove prices up because land regulations had reduced the supply of developable land, thereby raising the price. The planners may have succeeded in their objection – slowing suburbanization (or if the pejorative term is preferred, “sprawl”) – but they also created a pricing bubble that made things much worse.

    It is estimated that the overall housing stock owned in the third quarter of 2007 was slightly over $20.1 trillion. If the Median Multiple of 2000 had been preserved, the aggregate value today would be approximately $14.8 billion. Of the $5.3 trillion increase in value, it is estimated that $4.5 trillion of this can be attributed to the 25 metropolitan areas with the most severe housing regulations. This means that 86 percent of the increase took place in areas accounting for only 30 percent of the nation’s population. The other 70 percent of the nation had an overall increase in value of less than $800 billion, or 14 percent of the total “bubble.” More than 65 percent of the higher value occurred in ten metropolitan areas – Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Riverside-San Bernardino, New York, Boston, Washington, Miami and Baltimore. These metropolitan areas account for little more than 20 percent of the nation’s population.

    And just as the highly regulated metropolitan areas led the way up, they now are leading the way down. It is estimated that the house value losses in the more regulated metropolitan markets is approaching $1.5 trillion, while the losses in the more traditionally regulated metropolitan markets are estimated at less than $150 billion.

    None of this is to suggest that smart growth has only negative ramifications. To the extent that smart growth removes barriers to the development of higher density housing or less costly housing where it is demand is a good thing. But the land rationing policies proposed under “smart growth” clearly have reaped a very bitter harvest.

    The end of this catastrophe may be in sight (or it may not be). Housing prices, particularly in the inflated markets, have started to fall. This is true not only in the United States but in other highly regulated markets such as the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

    Yet the bottom line remains: Without smart growth’s land rationing policies, the severe escalation in home prices would never have reached such absurd levels. But the disaster in the highly regulated markets will be with us for years. The smart growth spike in housing prices turned what might have been a normal cyclical downturn into the most disastrous financial collapse since 1929. Now the taxpayers are being asked to bail out the mess that smart growth advocates, no doubt inadvertently, have created.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Atlanta’s Atlantic Station: The Suburbs Come to the City

    Atlantic Station is a new development near the core of Atlanta being built on disused railroad tracks. It combines residential, housing and retail uses and, among proponents of the New Urbanist movement and is often held up as a model for developments to come.

    Atlantic Station is traditionally urban but is surprisingly suburban. On the surface, Atlantic Station appears to fit many of the New Urbanist design criteria. The buildings start at the sidewalk (pavement) line, rather than being behind parking lots. There are no indoor shopping malls. Instead the stores are directly on the streets, reminiscent of old downtowns or the first shopping centers, like Country Club in Kansas City.

    Some of the normally superficial New Urbanism, however, is even more ephemeral in Atlantic Station. For one thing, prime New Urbanist lynchpins — anti-automobile design, pedestrian orientation, transit orientation, paid parking, banning of big box stores — do not apply there.

    Throughout the development there are entrances at the sidewalk level that look like New York subway entrances. As in New York, they go down. But they don’t go down to a subway — that’s well beyond walking distance, across one of the nation’s widest freeways in Midtown. Instead, the stairs — at least 16 such entrances — lead down to a three-story parking lot that appears to be under the entire development. Houston could not have done it bigger or better.

    The architects did not design Atlantic Station from the ground up — they designed it with three levels of parking under the stores, residences and streets. Thus, this “pedestrian oriented development” sits on a foundation of automobile orientation. And don’t think that the parking lots are only below the surface. Virtually all of the tall office and residential towers have a number of floors above the parking lot platform, though to the credit of the architects, they are not obvious.

    Another rather suburban feature is free parking. A staple of current urban planning is that parking should not be free. The opponents of free parking believe that if only free parking were outlawed, people would flock to inner cities and transit. And to be sure, the little street parking provided in Atlantic Station is metered, which means people must pay. But on all of the parking meters there are signs to the effect that two hours of free parking are offered in the underground lots.

    As would be expected in a development theoretically designed for pedestrians, the sidewalks are sufficiently wide. Indeed, the sidewalk on the 17th Street overpass from Midtown to Atlantic Station is more than 30 feet wide (perhaps 10 meters). Yet it is a lonely place and ultimate proof that if you build sometimes they don’t come. There is another pedestrian oriented dimension in which Atlantic Station fails — for all the sidewalks and sidewalk store entrances, Atlantic Station provides a free shuttle bus for travel around the development.

    Toward the west side of the development is a “Millennium Gate,” which the Atlantic Station calls “Atlanta’s greatest monument.” This seems a bit hyberbolic. Millennium Gate is an imitation of the Arch d’ Triumph in Paris, even to the point of Latin inscriptions around the top. One doesn’t need the American flag hanging from the center to realize that this miniature imitation fails abjectly — it is reminiscent of the Paris Arch d’ Triumph no more than the pathetic Eiffel Tower is on the Las Vegas Strip. Something original would have been more appropriate.

    Then there is the general new urbanist problem with affordability. The lowest priced apartments in Atlantic Station rent for $1,100 per month, at least one-quarter above the median rent for the Atlanta metropolitan area. The lowest priced two bedroom residences appear to sell for at least 2.5 times the median house price in the area, except that the median house is almost four bedrooms.

    For all this, Atlantic Station is rather full of itself as visionary, noting that people can reduce their journey to work time by living and working there. The Atlantic Station website notes that “Atlantans spend more time commuting to work than most anywhere in the world.” In reality, Atlantans spend less time commuting than most people who live in large urban areas outside the United States. True, Atlantans spend more time commuting than most people in the United States and that is to be expected with what is close to N underpowered freeway and arterial street system.

    What sets Atlanta’s Atlantic Station off is not so much its unique design as the abandonment of old freight rail yards near the center of Atlanta that allowed it to be developed. The same kind of disuse made Portland’s Pearl District possible, and an abandoned airport made Denver’s Stapleton possible. They are all attractive, in my view, but with an important caveat: such developments cannot be replicated without using large swaths of abandoned land, which is not readily available or through massive condemnation (takings), which only the city of Portland’s radical political machine seems to be insensitive enough to do.

    Yet I would not suggest that Atlantic Station is simply faux New Urbanism. There are some legitimate New Urbanist touches. Although the development sprawls significantly, the housing elements are rather dense — and as in many New Urbanist efforts — also well-subsidized.

    Further, Atlantic Station appears to be urban on a much larger scale than other developments. Its buildings are much larger than in Portland’s Pearl District and its retailing more intense. But that is to be expected in Atlanta, which, in my view achieved world class status some time ago.

    In a sense, Atlantic Station may well reflect one aspect of the urban future in our newer cities. It remains fundamentally auto-oriented (note all that parking) and full largely of suburban-like chain shops. This may seem a somewhat contrived notion of urbanism, but at its core one that accommodates modernity. Atlantic Station does it largely by bringing the comforts of suburban living to the center city.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Searching for Los Angeles by the Gateway Arch – a Reminiscence

    The obsession started before the earthquake.

    I was driving on Manchester Road, and something about the slant of light off the car dealerships, the particular combination of Mexican-food diner/meat market/bank/shoe store/train-whistle-in-the-distance, and the unending nature of my errand was enough to take me back. I was on San Fernando Road, and for a just a split second, I was happy – happy to be in traffic, happy to have the glare of the sun in my eyes, happy, even, to be hopelessly late — because I thought that I was back in Los Angeles.

    I was obsessed with Los Angeles. I had lived there for three years. I started my first real job there as a history professor at Cal State Northridge. My son was born there, in Hollywood no less, right across the street from the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology. But my husband worked in St. Louis, and after my son was born, I took leave from my job and we started family life in St. Louis together.

    I told this story to just about anyone who would listen. Random mothers in the park, random co-workers of my husband, random grocery store clerks, random anyone. I wanted the whole world to know I belonged back in LA. And when there was no one there to listen, I stole moments to look at web sites filled with jacaranda trees and the views from Griffith Park. Motherhood proved readily adaptable to the aesthetic of studied dishevelment followed by the young filmmakers, writers, and web designers of my old neighborhood, and I eagerly embraced it (at least the dishevelment part). When winter came and St. Louis’s farmers’ markets ended, I would grill my husband upon his return from the grocery store. “Are you sure this was the best produce they had? Are you sure you even bought this today?”

    I didn’t just miss the sunny days and the fresh vegetables and our hipster neighbors (although I did miss those desperately, even the hipster neighbors). I missed LA’s problems. I’m a historian of the American West; I have a fondness for the twentieth century. And LA just happens to be THE twentieth-century western city. It’s not just the highways or the cars, although I thought about them too, especially when I was on Manchester Road. When I was in LA, I couldn’t drive to work without thinking about managing the water supply or the way Angelenos had covered over the desert in their yards with bougainvilleas. I couldn’t stop by the hardware store or look at a bus stop or pick up some of that fabulous lettuce without thinking about unionization. I would exit the highway early just to drive through a neighborhood and think about immigration. When my cousin asked why I liked Los Angeles so much, I said without even pausing at the irony: “The people there are so real.”

    So at first it seemed like more obsession, and no one was having any of it. When I proposed that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to line St. Louis and Los Angeles up side-by-side and compare them – to look a little harder for that bit of LA that I thought I had seen on Manchester Road, virtually no one heard me out.

    My mother: “You must remove LA’s weather from your browser’s start-up page.”

    My aunt, distastefully: “That sounds like a blog.”

    My husband, who saw just the faintest echo of an earlier obsession with my home state of New Mexico: “Not everyone measures success in terms of proximity to mountains.”

    For those who knew me, this was just one more ploy to get back, if only in my imagination, to the city that had, with its smog and its traffic and its astronomical housing prices and its gross inequalities and its devotion to surface appearances and its unrelentingly bright days, won my heart.

    For those that didn’t know me, it just sounded weird. “This must feel really different,” said the grocery store clerks and the mothers at the park and my husband’s co-workers and the teachers at my son’s day care. “Oh, no,” I would say. When I first fell in love with LA, I had heard the urban historian Greg Hise lecture on how Los Angeles was not the great urban exception, how it actually had great similarities to Pittsburgh and St. Louis. ST. LOUIS!

    “St. Louis,” I would say when anyone gave me the slightest opening, “is a combination of neighborhoods like LA. It has the same public transportation problems, a large Catholic population, a history of racial segregation and a deracinated downtown.” I didn’t actually say deracinated.

    When I started looking, I found more parallels, large and small. Prominent Armenian populations in both cities, a history of fraught public education, both were once part of Spanish territory, both had an elite oddly fascinated with itself (“What high school did you go to?” ask St. Louisans. “Are you in the industry?” say Angelenos), and a similar wackiness in small corners of each city – the drag queen in a wheel chair I once saw in Hollywood; the cigar-smoking elderly man who jogs near Forest Park.

    But there must have been something about the exercise that seemed kind of pathetic. “What’s wrong with St. Louis?” asked my friends from elsewhere. “Nothing,” I’d rush to tell them. “It’s a great town — Forest Park is awesome; there are good restaurants; we can walk to the art museum AND the zoo AND to work AND to day care all from our apartment. It’s a great city for kids. It has a world-class symphony.” “So what’s wrong with St. Louis?” they’d say again. “Nothing,” I’d say, “It’s just…this will seem melodramatic, but it’s just that I don’t feel fully awake here.”

    It seemed best to let the idea drop. Sure, cities are more than climate and topography, and there might just be a few scraps of St. Louis that shared whatever magic I had found in LA, but it did seem kind of silly. I let it go.

    When my husband tried to wake me, I could feel the shaking. “What is it?” I said. “An earthquake,” he said. “hmmm,” I said. “What do we do?” he asked. I wasn’t fully awake, and I didn’t want to be. I thought about getting up. For a St. Louis earthquake? “I don’t know what to do here,” I said and went back to sleep. But the next day, everyone was talking about it — the grocery store clerks and the teachers at my son’s day care, and my husband’s co-workers. “Did you feel it?” “The epicenter was in Illinois.” “It was a 5.2.” “Is this common?”

    It’s not common, but it wasn’t the first time either. There are earthquakes in St. Louis. I had known that already, but this one made me think again. Maybe there are other similarities, things I had come to consider distinctly LA, when really they were things places shared.

    I decided I would go looking for Los Angeles right here in St. Louis. I don’t know what I will find. Maybe something about what it means for people to live together in a city. Maybe something about the homogenization of America. Maybe something about why we’re willing to call some places, but not all places, home. I know it makes little sense to go looking for Los Angeles where it is not. I do, after all, know where it is. I’ve been there before. But I’m fully awake now.

  • A New Model for New York — San Francisco Anyone?

    From the beginning of the mortgage crisis New York and other financial centers have acted as if they were immune to the suffering in the rest of country. As suburbs, exurbs and hard-scrabble out of the way urban neighborhoods suffered with foreclosures and endured predictions of their demise, the cognitive elites in places like Manhattan felt confident about their own prospects, property values and jobs. So what if the rubes in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa and Riverside all teetered on the brink?

    Now only a deluded real estate speculator — or a flack for Mayor Michael Bloomberg — could deny that the mortgage crisis wolf is now at Gotham’s door. Having underwritten and profited obscenely from the loans that launched the crisis, Wall Street is now reeling from the collapse of several of its strongest linchpins, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, while Merrill Lynch has become little more than an annex to Charlotte-based Bank of America. AIG has been forced on the federal teat and other giants, even Citibank, could be next.

    With perhaps tens of thousands of high-paying jobs about to evaporate, and with them the rich bonuses that fueled Mayor Bloomberg’s grandiose vision of a “luxury city,” New Yorkers should brace themselves for hard times. Bloomberg’s brave talk about media, tourism, bioscience or the arts making up the difference should not be taken too seriously. In reality New York has never been more dependent on Wall Street than it is today, in large part because most other middle class sectors, like manufacturing and warehousing, declined massively over the past seven years.

    As a result, nearly one out of four dollars earned in New York — although accounting for less than five percent of all jobs — are tied to the financial sector. Overall job growth has been slow in finance, and stood well below historic highs even at the crest of the boom, and are now dropping radically. This means, as a result, a group of relatively few big earners are more and more important as overall employment in finance declines.

    Tourism certainly cannot make up the balance since it is a notoriously low wage sector and may soon be subject to a major decline in visitors due to higher airline prices and a growing downturn in Europe. New York has a decent bioscience sector, but Gotham is far as dominant here as in finance or media. There’s strong competition from a host of places, notably St. Louis, Houston, Boston, San Diego and Silicon Valley.

    So where can a plutocratic Mayor look for inspiration for the future? He may not like it but arguably the best model for New York may be San Francisco. More than any American city, San Francisco epitomizes one possible future for American urbanism of the “luxury” variety.

    The parallels between San Francisco and underlying trends in New York, and to some extent Chicago, are striking. Like New York on a smaller scale, San Francisco was once a corporate headquarters town and a powerful financial center. But starting in the 1980s and 1990s that all started to change. Corporations fled for the suburbs, or got merged with firms located elsewhere. It started with the exodus of Crocker Bank. In 1998 its most important company, started by an Italian immigrant in the city, the Bank of America, fled to North Carolina. Like New York, it has flushed away virtually its entire industrial sector and lost ground as a port.

    Yet through this all, San Francisco managed to reinvent itself. First it anchored itself to Silicon Valley, becoming the playground, advertising and media center for the nerdistan to the south. Then, after the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the city fell back on its intrinsic appeal as a place, relying largely on tourism and its ability to attract high-end residents.

    This discreet charm has allowed San Francisco to enjoy a reasonable economic comeback, not so much as a corporate or economic center, but as a high-end destination for the nomadic rich, the culturally curious and the still adolescent twenty and even thirty somethings. Many of this last group have strong skills sets and remain a powerful asset to the city.

    You can see the changes just by walking the streets. Three decades ago, when I worked in the City, San Francisco was still in large part a city of suits and blue-collar workers; today it’s black-garbed cool and casually elegant. There are more wealthy residents and decidedly less minorities, even Hispanics, and ever fewer children.

    This pattern could represent the future — and even the present — in parts of New York and even on the fringes of Brooklyn. We have seen that the “baby boom” in Manhattan does not last much past age five. When Wall Streeters lose their ability to pay for nannies, summer camps, private schools, etc, many affluent families may not be able to hang out that long.

    But then again there are those residents there will not lose their jobs. These include those tied to “luxury” industries, media, and non-profits. Not to be ignored also are the growing ranks of trustifarians, wealthy people living off their parents or grandparents’ labor. These are not the prototypical New Yorker on the make, like Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street,” but they have spending power, connections and often political influence.

    None of these groups are likely to disappear because of a mere trifle like a financial system collapse. These are committed denizens of the urban pleasure dome, content either to live minimally or (for the time being at least) pursue such generally non-remunerative activities like working in the arts or making documentary films.

    Of course, cities like New York and Chicago, also likely to be hard hit by the securities industry meltdown, may not be able to live as richly in hard times like San Francisco. Parts of Manhattan and Manhattanized Brooklyn might endure a metropolitan recession, but it may be tougher on the mostly minority, poor and working class residents who inhabit the outer reaches of the outer boroughs . These residents will suffer from the inevitable cutbacks in city services as well as the loss of retail, hospitality and construction jobs.

    In contrast, “The City,” as San Francisco likes to be known, is both small, compact and surrounded largely by affluent, low-density suburbs. It effectively has no real analogue to the outer boroughs. To see the dark side of America’s urban reality, you increasingly have to go east across the Bay to the crime-infested streets of Oakland, where the once proud dream of civic renaissance appears to be slowly fading.

    Of course, New Yorkers may reject this vision of their future. San Franciscans, have long prioritized joie de vive over imperial visions. In contrast, New Yorkers derive much of their civic self-esteem from their city’s role as the “capital of the world.”

    But if New Yorkers want to keep this slogan to be more than a marketing jingle, they will have to transcend the lame “luxury city” zeitgiest. Spending nearly four billion on new sparkling sports stadiums, and even Bloomberg’s media mastery, won’t get it done. It will take hard work, a commitment to infrastructure and broad-based job growth.

    It’s hard to know if New York still has the stomach for this kind of hard work. As someone whose familial roots in the city span over a century, I hope so. New Yorkers are a resilient lot, as they have shown many times in the past. But if they have lost their appetite for hard struggle, well, they can always consider becoming the next San Francisco.

    Joel Kotkin is Executive Editor of NewGeography.com

  • Sports Complexes: Economic Prosperity or Pompousness?

    In the heart of downtown Indianapolis lies a recently constructed monolith, the envy of other cities aspiring for new digs for their NFL football team. Lucas Oil Stadium has 63,000 seats and features a retractable roof allowing for comfort control during Indiana’s fickle fall weather season. And for those urban enthusiasts in the crowd, when open, the roof provides a captivating view of an Indy skyline that in years past was barely visible to the naked eye.

    Many of the state’s residents though are asking why a new sports venue was built in Indianapolis. In fact, one only needs to take a drive along I-65, the main interstate bordering downtown, to get a taste as to why this issue keeps surfacing. Namely, if you look directly across the street from Lucas Oil Stadium, you’ll see a much larger structure that appears to be in relatively good condition. While many have confused it with a large spaceship, Indiana sports enthusiasts know it as the infamous RCA Dome.

    Home of the Indianapolis Colts for over 15 years and the site of numerous NCAA basketball regional and national championships, the RCA Dome has in many ways come to symbolize Indianapolis’ distinction as the sports capital of the world. The “Dome” also reflects Indiana’s lore and history as the hotbed of high school basketball, having served as a venue for annual state tournaments, including the highest attended game in our nation’s high school basketball history.

    So part of the argument among Indiana residents is that the RCA Dome was more than adequate (it actually has a larger seating capacity than Lucas Oil Stadium). The other gripe has been the cost: $720 million to be exact, financed by a nine-county food and beverage tax that passed in 2007. In other words, many of the state’s residents are footing the bill.

    Advocates for low taxes would certainly argue that building the new stadium was a pompous act on the part of city leaders, interested in only the local economic and financial implications. The argument can also be made that the stadium only benefits a small segment of Hoosiers, as many state residents, struggling to make ends meet in today’s tepid economic times, can’t even afford to purchase a ticket to the game, let alone a hot dog and parking.

    Indianapolis is not alone in terms of public outcry regarding new sports complex projects. The San Francisco 49ers are currently exploring a move to a yet-to-be built new stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., a city embedded in the ever prosperous environs of the Silicon Valley where money continues to flow like “milk and honey” despite the dot-com bust of several years ago. Recently the Santa Clara City Council put off a public vote on a whopping $916 million stadium initiative for at least a year in order to assess funding options as well as to allay environmental impact concerns raised by local residents.

    In the state capitol of Sacramento, where legislators have spent months grappling over an exploding state budget deficit, the talk of the town for months has been the proposed arena for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings–a movement championed by renegade owners Joe and Gavin Maloof with the support of opportunistic NBA commissioner David Stern.
    Caustic battles have ensued between supporters of the Kings who believe the sports franchise is vital for the city’s economic vitality and state voters who have been historically hostile to taxes for private sports facilities. The latter concern has been further fueled by the Maloof brothers who as millionnaire owners seem willing to cough up only a pittance of the new construction investment.

    Then there is Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, who led the construction of a new shopping complex next to Gillette Stadium that at $300 million ended up costing as much as the stadium itself. Decked out with a football museum, four-star hotel and spa, restaurants and cool stores, “Patriot Place,” as this complex is affectionately named, aspires to provide year round pedestrian foot traffic as a major dining and entertainment destination.

    As the aforementioned examples highlight, there are certainly arguments that can be made against these sorts of expenditures, particularly during uncertain economic times for cities and counties. I would also argue that there may be strong reasons for constructing these sports complexes in terms of the boost they can provide to the economic and social prosperity of an area. Indianapolis is an excellent example of this in terms of branding itself as America’s premier sports city. It is clear that the city’s efforts to attract sports buffs from far and wide is vital to the sustainability of its local economic engine.

    The Colts are not the only game in town here: Indianapolis hosts more Olympic trials and NCAA basketball finals than any other city in the nation. It is also the home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, a franchise that plays its games in yet another downtown sports venue–Conseco Fieldhouse. There are also the Indianapolis Indians who play in one of the finest minor league baseball parks anywhere. And not to be overlooked is arguably the largest sporting event in the world, the Indianapolis 500. Mark Rosentraub a Professor at Indiana University, estimates that the speedway generates $36.5 million in state and local taxes annually. It should also be noted that the track is privately owned and races occur without public expenditures beyond local law enforcement.

    So what’s the verdict? A study by Dennis Coates, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County sheds some light on the “economic prosperity versus pompousness” argument. First of all his research reveals that there is little evidence that large increases in economic impact, particularly in income or employment, ensue from the construction of new stadiums. He does say however that Downtown stadiums are likely to have larger benefits than suburban stadiums.

    As I see it, this latter point is the magic behind Indianapolis’ efforts to promote sporting events as an economic catalyst — that outside of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, all of the sports facilities are located in the downtown, central district. The evidence is clear that sports venues in the “Circle City” continue to generate loads of foot traffic and activity in downtown Indianapolis, from the bustling Circle City Mall to burgeoning crowds in downtown restaurants and music venues. One could in fact argue that all of this economic and community vitality in the city’s urban core would have made America’s preeminent urban activist Jane Jacobs proud and maybe even a frequent visitor to the city for a hot dog and a game.