Casey Jaywork: Anatomy of a NIMBY→

Seattle News:

“The language is apocalyptic; the tone, desperate. “Cancer,” “canyons of darkness,” “anguish, hopelessness, and loss.”

But these aren’t war-zone dispatches, nor recollections of a natural disaster. They’re public comments from a Seattle City Council’s land-use-committee hearing held earlier this year. It was there that aggrieved homeowners walked up to one of two smooth wooden podiums in City Hall’s Council chambers to vent the vexation they felt as they watched their communities “being torn apart” by development, as Capitol Hill resident the Venerable Dhammadinna put it.

“Elderly homeowners, the gay community, older women, and families are no longer welcome,” she told the Council, referring to the city’s mixed-density residential areas. “Our neighborhoods are shadowed by tall, bulky buildings. Gardens are being cemented, trees cut down. Those who can’t carry their bags of groceries up and down the hills are not invited into this dystopia.”

The testimony was so consistent—or redundant, depending on your position—that a drinking game could have been fashioned from the proceedings: Take one shot whenever someone said “neighborhood character,” two for “transient.””

An interesting article of Seattle redevelopment dynamics and politics. I was struck by the sameness of the issues across many places.

T.R. Goldman: A Subdivision that Reduced Car-Dependency→

POLITICO:

“Evanston was failing as a suburb, so it reinvented itself as a mini city. Now the city of Chicago wants to follow its lead.

At first glance, downtown Evanston, Illinois, doesn’t look revolutionary—just another gentrifying urban core with the obligatory Whole Foods, the local organic sustainable restaurants serving $14 cocktails, the towering new, high-end luxury apartments filled with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. The booming downtown feels increasingly hip; this summer it was featured as a “Surfacing” destination in the New York Times Travel Section. “I have everything here,” says Joanne McCall, pausing one evening on her way inside Sherman Plaza, a soaring, 26-story condominium building. “The post office, the dry cleaner, the movies, I work out upstairs, the Whole Foods is over there, the hair dresser over here. And the Uber thing is getting big here.”

It takes, in fact, a few extra minutes in the neighborhood to realize what’s different—and what’s missing. Downtown Evanston—a sturdy, tree-lined Victorian city wedged neatly between Lake Michigan and Chicago’s northern border—is missing cars. Or, more accurately, it’s missing a lot of cars. Thanks to concerted planning, these new developments are rising within a 10-minute walk of two rail lines and half-a-dozen bus routes. The local automobile ownership rate is nearly half that of the surrounding area.”

A thorough article on how a city was redesigned for the benefit of citizens rather than for box stores. The article speaks of transit-oriented development, and it should be noted that the term meant mass transit, less car parking spaces, allowance of beneficial high density, and a major zoning ordinance change allowing mixed use and a focus on public benefits,

Jed Kolko: How Suburban Are Big American Cities?→

FiveThirtyEight:

“Our analysis showed that the single best predictor of whether someone said his or her area was urban, suburban or rural was ZIP code density. Residents of ZIP codes with more than 2,213 households per square mile typically described their area as urban. Residents of neighborhoods with 102 to 2,213 households per square mile typically called their area suburban. In ZIP codes with fewer than 102 households per square mile, residents typically said they lived in a rural area.2 The density cutoff we found between urban and suburban — 2,213 households per square mile — is roughly equal to the density of ZIP codes 22046 (Falls Church in Northern Virginia); 91367 (Woodland Hills in California’s San Fernando Valley); and 07666 (Teaneck, New Jersey).

Other factors played minor roles in predicting how respondents described where they live. Residents of very small cities and towns rarely said they lived in an urban area, even if their neighborhood was quite dense. Residents of lower-income neighborhoods with older housing stock often said they lived in an urban area, even if it was lower-density. Residents of lower-density ZIP codes with lots of businesses sometimes called their neighborhoods urban; so did residents of lower-density, higher-income ZIP codes that are next to higher-density ZIP codes. But, in general, ZIP code density alone gets us most of the way to predicting whether people say they live in an urban, suburban or rural area.”

Density makes a place vibrant. Density makes a city work. Density is the word and our answer to make better communities. Holly Whyte said "we are going to have to work with a much tighter pattern of spaces and development, and that our environment may be the better for it." 

We need to confront the need for density. I've denied and deluded myself that density was not the main issue. I've used words like 'compact', 'vibrant', and 'urban'. What is meant is more people per unit area, as well as mixed use and class. 

Higher density is better for a city. Again, Holly Whyte:

“Density also has an important bearing on the look and feel of a neighborhood. If it is urban it ought to be urban. Most of our redevelopment projects are too loose in fabric. They would look better, as well as being more economical, if the scale were tighten up... concentration is the genius of the city, its reason for being. What it needs is not less people, but more, and if this means more density we have no need to feel guilty about it. The ultimate justification for building to higher densities is not that it is more efficient in land costs, but that is can make a better city.”

— Holly Whyte - The Last Landscape

Higher Density Needs Mixed Use→

Bill Lindeke, writing for Streets.mn:

“I was surprised when I got to my buddy’s place because, though it was in the middle of nowhere, my friend’s house wasn’t a house per se. Rather, he’d bought an attached townhome that was part of a long row of similar complexes in a brand new greenfield development, complete with sidewalks and quasi-porches and a pleasant almost grid-like street network.

Looking out at the sidewalks, I turned and asked my friend, “So where’s do you walk to?”

He looked at me blankly. “Um. People walk their dogs?”

The useless sidewalks in my friend’s strange middle-of-nowhere quasi-urban neighborhood got me thinking, so I started looking around for places where you have relatively urban densities, but no urban diversity. There are lots of these places, and not just in the suburbs. It doesn’t make any sense, but there you have it. Let’s meet some of them!”

We must unlearn what we have learned with our failed suburban experiment.