Category Archives: Change

My New Book “Surprising Design of Market Economies” Just Out

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You can get my latest book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, at your local bookstore or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play etc. In it, I describe the ways that government builds our economy and culture, and argue that these deep structures should be a more explicit part of our public, political conversations. You can read Op-Eds I have written that draw upon the book in The New York Times [How To Get Business To Pay Its Fair Share], and two from Bloomberg View [Capitalism & Government Are Friends and Health Care Will Become a Right, Just Like Water].

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The Future of Transportation, And Thus Our Cities

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The Future of Transportation

Will the auto and airplane reign supreme?

 

By Alex Marshall

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the political scientist Francis Fukiyama caused a sensation with an essay called “The End of History?” It postulated that, with the relative collapse of Communism, the struggle among rival political systems had ended with a permanent victory for liberal, democratic capitalism. All that was left to do was to refine it.

Is something similar happening with the way we get around? Have we reached “the End of History” with transportation? Will the current system of automobile and airplane travel reign supreme’for now and for centuries hence? Or will something new come along to remake our world, as it has in the past?

The context of such a question is this: Since about 1800, revolutionary changes in our transportation systems have created new types of cities, neighborhoods, and housing, while leaving old ones to wither away, or become antiques.

If history is any indication, we are due for another revolution soon. The car and the highway, and the airplane and airport, have been dominant for almost a century. By comparison, canals lasted about 50 years, streetcars about the same, and railroads about a century as dominant modes of travel.

Yet, some people say that the automobile and the highway are so imbedded in our landscape and lifestyles that nothing will ever challenge their dominance. In effect, they say we have reached the end of the historical road.

“It’s hard to imagine a fundamental change because the automobile system is so flexible,” says urban historian Robert Fishman, author of the 1989 history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, and a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “All I can imagine is a better balance with a revival of the train and transit connections that have been so shamefully neglected.”

But, if the past is any guide, we won’t see a new revolution until it is upon us. People, maybe even particularly experts, have difficulty envisioning a new transportation context from within the current one. Fishman, although himself skeptical of any coming big change, recalls the scholar who around 1900 predicted that the automobile would never go far because it couldn’t match the utility of the bicycle.

Hovering over this discussion is a single word: sprawl. Our low-density, car-clogged environment is the product of our transportation system. Highways and airports produce low-density sprawl. Old transportation revolutions, such as streetcars and subways, made cities denser because housing and businesses flocked to these transportation points. If we do have another transportation revolution ‘ the personal jet pack, high speed trains, the humble bicycle ‘ it could make sprawl even worse. Or, it could reconstitute our cities around new transportation hubs.

The Past As Prologue
Six words summarize transportation over the last two centuries: canals, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, automobile, and airplanes. Each mode remade the economy and the landscape. Each was generally adopted only after government got behind it financially and legally.

The canal era started in earnest in 1817, when New York State had the gumption to sell $7 million in bonds to pay thousands of laborers to dig a 350-mile trench from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal, when it went into service in 1825, opened up the entire Midwest to shipping and made New York the commercial hub of the New World. Other states and cities frantically dug their own canals in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.

Spurred in part by these efforts, other cities and states began investing in a new technology’railroads’that gradually replaced canals. The railroad created railroad cities, like Atlanta, and converted canal cities, like Chicago, into railroad cities. With the railroads came streetcars, first horse-drawn and then electric.

Because the first railroad tracks were often laid alongside the first canals, the canal cities tended to prosper even as the canals declined in importance. Economists call this phenomenon “path dependence,” (even as they debate its significance), and it still occurs. New York City, for example, is no longer dependent on the Erie Canal, but its because of the canal that that the rail lines, highways and airports were located in and around the city.

From about 1875 to 1925, railroads were at their peak. Urban palaces like New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station were built and opened, so that millions of passengers could shuttle across thousands of miles of tracks that stretched to every corner of the country. Few riders could have imagined that within their lifetimes, weeds would grow along thousands of miles of abandoned tracks.

Although the automobile dates to the 1890s, drivers were scarce until cities, towns, and states began paving roads’which took awhile. Many of the first roads were built, ironically, at the urging of bicyclists, who needed better roads to use their two-wheel contraptions. The League of American Wheelmen convinced the Department of Agriculture to create the Bureau of Public Roads. This small agency would grow into the Federal Transportation Department.

But better roads did not happen overnight. In 1922, 80 percent of U.S. roads were dirt and gravel. At first, railroad companies lent their political muscle to the “good roads” effort. After all, their leaders reasoned, better highways would get rail passengers to the stations more easily.

After World War I, the automobile and later the airplane, served by publicly funded roads and airports, began to supplant the passenger rail system and its intimate companion, the streetcar.
World War I helped convince government and business that investing in roads was worthwhile. During the war, massive railroad congestion brought on by the war effort forced some inter-city industrial transportation onto roads via trucks. Surprisingly (for the time,) it worked. Soon, states and the federal government began investing more in roads and airports, and less in train service.

As urban historian Eric Monkkonen noted in his 1988 book, America Becomes Urban, governments and taxpayers were the fundamental builders of this country’s transportation systems. New York state built the Erie Canal. Federal and state governments gave away a fifth of the nation’s total land area to the railroads. Congress, at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, financed the Interstate Highway System. Cities and states built airports. Even the New York City subways, although operated by private companies at first, were built with taxpayer dollars.

Each of these transportation innovations’canals, railroads, streetcars, cars, highways, and airplanes ‘ created new ways to live and work, and thus new types of neighborhoods and cities. The banks of Schenectady, New York are still lined with the ornate buildings created during the heyday of the Erie Canal. The streetcar era, which lasted from the late 19th century to World War II, led to thousands of streetcar suburbs, densely populated communities at the fringes of 19th century cities. And of course, the highway and air travel system created the current pattern of low-density sprawl that defines our built environment.

The Next Big Thing
If history is any indication, we are overdue for another change that will change how we travel, and thus change the form of our cities and towns.

“Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that’s now about 100 years old,” says Elliot Sander, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. While some might say this is evidence of the longevity of car-use and air travel, it’s also evidence that we are overdue for a big change. After all, past transportation eras, such as canals to railroads, have lasted from about 50 to 100 years. Then, something new has come along, and created a new dominant transportation system.

What might the next big thing be? Among the possibilities is the nifty Segway, the “gyro-scooter” that enables someone standing on it to point and ride. Or it could be the Solotrek Helicopter Backpack. A user straps it on and rotating blades overhead carry him where he wants. So far only prototype versions exist. Another variation is the Airboard, which hovers four inches off the ground and costs a mere $15,000. Of all these, the Segway actually seems to have a chance to live up to some of its hype.

Maybe the revolution will come in the form of small airplanes. In his 2001 book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, James Fallows, who is himself a pilot, foresees a future where people use small planes like taxis or rental cars for short flights between the thousands of small airports that now are underused.

Rail is another, more likely, option. High-speed rail networks are common in Europe and Japan, and in theory they hold great promise in more densely populated areas of the United States.

The situation now, as is typical in the United States, is a scattershot mix of aggressive policies by some states mixed with erratic federal actions. Various states and coalitions of states are aggressively lobbying to create or preserve high-speed rail corridors, under the assumptions that being in the high-speed loop will be as important as being on the Interstate in the 1950s. North Carolina are creating a ‘sealed corridor’ for high-speed rail across the state; California and Florida have both received Federal grants toward high-speed rail initiatives; The Wisconsin-based, Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, which is a coalition of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, is pushing for a high-speed network with Chicago as the hub. And of course in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is running what might be called its ‘almost-high-speed’ service, Acela Express. Meanwhile though, Congress perennially discusses killing or reorganizing Amtrak and has yet to really get behind any national rail policy, even while some members are quite passionate about it.

The Buck Rogers version of high-speed rail, a Magnetic Levitation train, has been around for a while, but working examples are still few. Demonstration versions exist in Germany, Japan and even Norfolk, Va. But the only real working version is in China. Shanghai has just finished a $30 billion Magnetic Levitation rail line between its airport and downtown. The train reaches 250 mph and travels the 19 miles between airport and downtown in eight minutes, compared to an hour by taxi. Theoretically, Maglev trains, which float above the tracks on magnets, could reach speeds up to 500 mph. Despite generally parsimonious funding, the Federal Railroad Administration is administering a national competition, the winner of which would get funds to build a working maglev line in the United States.

Whether it’s Maglev or a Segway, the challenge in predicting radical change is that by its very nature it tends to be unforeseen.

“We’re very bad at predicting those big discontinuities,” says Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a transportation consulting firm in New York. “It’s like the Internet. I remember in the early 1980s, I visited a friend at Stanford who had e-mail on the early ARPA network. I said, ‘That’s really cool.’ But I never thought about it as something I could do.” Schaller notes that for the last few years, mass transit use has increased faster than highway use. This hasn’t happened in a half-century.

In fact, most transportation planners are conservative in their predictions. “I would not be investing in jumbo helicopters, dirigibles, personal rapid transit systems, motorized scooters, powered roller skates, etc., although they sure would be fun,” says Elliot Sander of the Rudin Center.

Autophilia
To its defenders, the automobile is irreplaceable, no matter what the predictions. If we run out of oil, they say, we can switch to hydrogen fuel cells. If gas prices skyrocket, we can buy smaller cars. If global warming increases, we can reduce emissions. And if our roads become overwhelmingly congested, we will simply build more roads.

“I don’t think congestion will stop the automobile,” says Jose G’mez-Ib”ez, the Derek Bok professor of urban planning and a leading transportation planner at the Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School at Harvard University. “I think the solution to congestion is to spread out more. There’s no doubt that we will have more mass transit in the future, but as people get richer in places like China, are they going to want to drive, and be mobile, and maybe drive SUVs? The answer is ‘yes.'”

“The automobile will continue to be the dominant mode of getting around,” says Mark Kuliewicz, traffic engineer for the American Automobile Association in New York. “Cars may be powered by something other than gasoline, and hopefully soon, but they’ll still be there.”

End of the Road?
But auto travel is dependent on roads. And an increasing number of critics believe that the expanding universe of highways’what historian Kenneth Jackson has called “the Big Bang of decentralization that started in the 1920s’ — has about reached its limit.

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York (where I am a senior fellow), argued in a speech last year at the World Economic Forum in New York that for political, financial, and practical reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build more highways. More and more citizens accept the fact that we cannot build our way out of congestion and sprawl, he said.

Yaro pointed out that highway construction has drastically slowed in the tri-state New York metropolitan area. From 1951 to 1974, the region’s highway system added some 54 miles a year. In the last decade, it has added only four miles per year.

The message is clear, said Yaro in an interview. “I strongly believe that we’ve used up the capacity of our 20th century infrastructure systems, and we’re going to need a heroic and visionary (and expensive) set of new investments to create capacity for growth in the 21st century.’

A key investment would be “new or significantly upgraded intercity rail systems in the half-dozen metropolitan corridors where high-speed rail makes sense.” Yaro is essentially endorsing some version of the high-speed or improved rail networks being pushed in Congress and by coalitions of cities and states.

Smart Roads
Most experts foresee increasing use of high-tech or “smart” technology to wrest more capacity from overloaded roads. In its more elaborate forms, smart technology includes things like imbedding highways with magnets, which would pull cars or trucks along at 100 mph and stop them when needed.

It also includes cars that brake themselves; GPS positioning systems that allow drivers (or their cars) to sort their ways around traffic jams; and computer chips and scanners that allow governments to price highways and charge drivers for using them, with different rates for different times.

The latter, usually called Congestion Pricing, is the Holy Grail of transportation specialists. Although once considered politically impossible, the idea of paying for using roads may now be acceptable to a public searching for a way out of congestion’even it means ending one of the last arenas of egalitarianism, the highway.

Highway space “is a scarce resource, and if it is scarce, we have to manage it. In a market economy, this means pricing,” says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and author of the new book, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Community.

“This will be the first time we will manage the use of the public right of way. In the past, anyone has been able to walk, ride a horse, or use a motor vehicle without restrictions except for traffic control. But this is changing,” says Grava.

By definition, congestion pricing would eliminate traffic jams on any highway or road in the country. But at what price? In recent years in a federal experiment on Interstate 15 in San Diego, drivers paid as much as $8 during peak periods for congestion-free traveling on an eight-mile stretch of highway. At less busy times, prices dropped to 50 cents.

In 2000, transportation planners with Portland’s Metro regional government modeled how congestion pricing would change the region if used on key highways. They found citizens would buy smaller cars, drive less, and live closer to where they work.

With evolving computer technology, drivers could be charged for using even a neighborhood street. This could work similar to Mayor Ken Livingstone’s successful attempt to charge drivers to enter center-city London. Automatic cameras photograph license plates and send drivers a bill. Instituted in March 2003, the plan has already reduced traffic in London by 20 percent and won over many of its initial opponents.

Managing traffic, whether through smarter internal guidance systems in the automobiles or some version of congestion pricing, has the potential to substantially add capacity and efficiency to our road network, say most experts. “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of planes in the skies in the last generation, even though very few new airports have been built,” notes one federal highway official who chose to remain anonymous. “We’ve done it through better air traffic control.” Reasoning by analogy, the official said the ground equivalent of air traffic control, such as automated guidance systems, better traffic information and more pervasive tolling, could wring substantially more capacity out of our current allotment of asphalt.
On The Ground
Whether the future brings simply better cars, or Star-Trek like transporters, cities and towns here and abroad will change as a result. As current transportation systems evolve, cities and towns are evolving with them.

In France, for example, the high-speed train network is producing new commuting patterns. For example, some people are living in Paris, yet commuting to jobs in Tours, a medium-sized city about 150 miles southwest from Paris. On the high-speed train, this journey takes 58 minutes. In New Jersey, suburban rail towns are reviving around improved transit connections to Manhattan. In Atlanta, the excessive highway building of the last few decades has produced both suburban sprawl, and, paradoxically, a revival of inner city neighborhoods as people flee congested freeways.

So what’s ahead for our communities? Yaro and several others see a future in which new transit lines make the suburbs more like the city. This future is not so imaginary. Around the New York region, classic commuter rail towns are reviving around substantial reinvestments in the rail system, like the new, $450 million rail transfer station in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.

Cities evolve in unexpected ways. The introduction of freeways decimated many downtowns in the 1950s, something unpredicted at the time. Houston’s downtown in 1960, for example, had become mostly surface parking lots. But today in Houston, tall parking garages have replaced much of the surface parking, and the downtown is substantially denser. Perhaps in the future, more office buildings will replace the parking garages, and people will take commuter rail service to work. In fact, the city is already building a light rail line downtown.

We could also go the other way. If auto use continues at the same level and personal jets take off as Fallows and some others predict, sprawl is likely to increase. New homes and businesses would spring up around small airports throughout the country.

An unstable mix of government subsidies, technological promise, and private profit will determine what comes next, and this will vary from place to place. Indicators like wealth will not always offer reliable clues as to what transportation systems particular societies will adopt.

Consider the humble bicycle. It’s used extensively in China, which has a very low per capita income, and in Scandinavia, which has a very high per capita income. In Copenhagen, more than a third of commuters use bicycles. The point is that wealth alone does not adequately predict transportation use. You might say that the Chinese use bicycles because they have to; the Danish because they want to.

What Planners Can Do
For the most part, U.S. urban planners work separately from transportation planners. The average state or city planning director tends to react to transportation decisions, rather than to make them. Planners have tended to focus on zoning and land-use regulation, which is often auxiliary to the real work being done by the transportation engineers.

In a better ordered world, land planners would have responsibility for transportation planning, (or supervise those who do it), and urban designers would be directly involved with state and federal highway planning.

We probably haven’t reached the end of history when it comes to transportation. But whatever the future, it would be a better one if we had a broader range of choices. As a country, we have tended to lurch from one extreme to another. In the 1890s, we had the most extensive rail system in the world’and one of the worst road systems. By the 1950s, we had abandoned our extensive streetcar system. Today, we lack a decent passenger rail system but have a great highway system. Like the fiber-optic cable industry and the Internet rage, transportation has proceeded in a boom-bust fashion.

When the next big thing does comes along, let’s not be too quick to abandon proven modes. The past teaches not only that change comes, but that the best societies offer a range of transportation choices, including using one’s own two feet.
END

–Published in Planning Magazine, May 2003

Resources
–Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. www.midwesthsr.org
–High Speed Ground Transportation Association. www.hsgta.org.
–National Association of Railroad Passengers. www.narprail.org.
–American Highways Users Alliance. www.highways.org
–Transportation Alternatives. www.transalt.org
–Surface Transportation Policy Project. www.transact.org

 

The Computer And The City

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Written in 1995
by Alex Marshall

When the computerized letter sorter at the central post office in Washington, D.C., can’t read the handwriting on an envelope, it flips it into a slot where a live person can look at it.

A person in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, the worker sees an image of the letter on a small computer screen, reads the address, and types it into the computer. Back in Washington, a printer spits out a thin black bar code across the bottom of the envelope-which routes the letter to its destination.

The facility in Greensboro is one of the remote encoding centers that the Post Office is setting up around the country. In these facilities, rows of workers will help computers in other parts of the country route letters.

The mechanism is an example of trends that are restructuring the economy of cities and thus their physical face as well. New technology, principally computer related, is allowing companies to get rid of jobs, move jobs out of center cities and consolidate jobs in back-office suburbs.

Various prognosticators have speculated on this trend and the effect if will have on the economic and physical structure of center cities and metropolitan areas. One of the first to put some solid numbers and facts around the speculation is a new report by the federal office of Technology Assessment, entitled the The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America

The 232-page report says new computer technology is leading to further abandonment of downtowns and core cities, and new development on the fringes of metropolitan areas.

In other words, sprawl. “The new technology system is creating an ever more spatially dispersed and footloose economy, which in turn is causing metropolitan areas to be larger, more dispersed and less densely populated,” says the report.

We are in a post-industrial metropolis, the report posits, an era that begun in roughly 1970. Its no longer as simple as downtowns versus suburbs. Instead, old dichotomies between cities and suburbs give way to a more spatially diversified and complex ordering of economic space.

In this new order, some downtown business districts and center cities have thrived, even if most haven’t. In general though, outer suburbs have boomed in population while core cities have stagnated or declined. The Northeast as a region has lost a million manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 1990.

Most recent commentators have focused on the effects of very visible new technology – the personal computer, the modem and the fax machine – and what it will do to re-arrange how people live and work.

Architect Michael Pittas predicted in 1994 (June 1994 Metropolis), that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into “dinosaurs” and “may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it.”

Pittas has redesigned office buildings to allow companies to operate with only a fraction of the usual office space by having many workers telecommute. Because of this work, Pittas was speculating on the end result of a trend that allows the graphic designer in her mountain cabin in Idaho to modem her work to New York.

But even more significant trends on cities and working are being caused by less visible and less publicized technology that is shifting the way entire industries do business, according to Robert Atkinson, who directed the Office of Technology study.

Atkinson spoke not from an office but his home in Northern Virginia. The Office of Technology Assessment, for which Atkinson directed the study, no longer exists. The Republican Congress killed the OTA in a round of budget cuts in 1995. The Reshaping report came out after the office had been killed and Atkinson was speaking on his own time.

Computer technology not related to the personal computer can allow a company to consolidate far-flung offices into a few back offices set up in outer Indianapolis or even India. Many of these workers come from downtown locations, where practicalities forced companies to house relatively non-elite jobs. Because of computers, companies have eliminated many such jobs or moved them outside downtown.

Take the U.S. postal service, said Atkinson. It centralizes human letter readers in Greensboro because it is cheaper than having each central post office, usually located in or near downtown, have its own set of workers.

A variety of unlikely services are still kept downtown, Atkinson said, but this may change as technologies continue to evolve. Banks, for example, still locate check processing facilities near or in downtown, despite the fact that these are low-paid, relatively menial jobs taking up expensive real-estate. Such facilities still need to be near a large central post office, Atkinson said, because processed checks need to be mailed out as quickly as possible. This is both to comply with federal regulations, and more importantly, to gain as much interest or “float” in the few days when the check is between banks.

But new technology like debit cards and check imaging, which promises to replace physical checks with images that are then transmitted from supermarket to bank, mean the use of the paper check is dwindling fast.

These technological changes are not just affecting center cities. The economy of the country is becoming more monolithic. Smaller branch offices or services, like the neighborhood insurance office, that were once marbled through most towns are now being eliminated as computer technology makes them unnecessary.

Some banks now process loans over the phone. Claims adjusters call up policies on a computer and dont need to see policy holders as often in person. Because of this, companies are closing dozens of smaller offices.

The report notes that NYNEX, for example, the baby Bell phone service in New York, once had 133 customer service centers; now it has seven. Aetna now operates 22 underwriting centers nationwide instead of 55. Allstate is going from 28 policy processing centers to just three.

Such trends have huge implications for cities, greater than the ones causes by the growth of personal computers, Atkinson says. There are basically two trends at work.

One is the shift of jobs and people out of center cities and older suburbs, and trend that has taken place over the last 50 years but could accelerate with new technology.

The other is the winner-take-all economy, that is dividing individual companies and cities into winners and losers. Under this trend, some center cities will do well or even thrive, while others will fall even more steeply into disrepair and poverty.

The command cities in a world economy-like New York, London or Tokyo-may survive or even thrive in the new world. This matches analysis by other analysts who have noted that many of these world cities have actually halted or reversed their population losses, with similar trends in crime and per capita income. That’s because the elite bankers, stock brokers, and lawyers will probably still cluster in these big cities. And a city like New York can still be a very desirable and fashionable place to live if you have a lot of money.

According to the report, smaller, mid-sized cities must find “niches” in the global economy. Atkinson notes that Gary, Indiana, a declining core city, used low-interest development loans from HUD to win a postal service remote encoding facility similar to the one in Greensboro.

As technology leans against some inner cities, governments need to adjust rules that presently favor development in the suburbs, the report recommends. Environmental rules now often make it prohibitively expensive to develop old industrial sites in cities, while the mortgage interest deduction rules and standard development policies actually subsidize the construction of new subdivisions on raw land that lead to greater air and water pollution.

In addition, the report recommends that cities, with help from the federal government, initiate job-skill training programs for their residents.

“It’s not just that cities are going to lose jobs, Atkinson says, it’s that the economies of cities are restructuring to have more highly skilled functions that still require face to face contact. But inner cities don’t have a skilled worked force.”

Thats not quite true. Some cities do have highly skilled workers. Its hard to swing a stick in parts of Manhattan or Washington without hitting some overly-talented individual. But its also true that even New York, which is doing better than most cities, has huge percentages of under-skilled, under-educated residents who will have no chance at the good-paying, skilled jobs that still locate downtown.

To counter these trends, and help soften their blows, the report lists 18 policy options, ranging from increasing small business loans to businesses in urban core area, to requiring HUD to assess and quantify in what ways public policies subsidize sprawl.

No wonder the Republicans killed the agency. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do: assessing technology and offering solutions, including ones that relied on government.

Though the OTA initially enjoyed bipartisan support, Atkinson says it was eliminated because of the antipathy on the part of more ideological Republicans, particularly the new freshmen. He notes that the OTA lost points with some conservatives when it was asked to examine the Star Wars technology in the mid 1980s and concluded it would not work.

“It’s unclear whether they really wanted an agency that would provide them with independent critical analysis that wasn’t ideologically based, ” Atkinson says.

The central question raised by the OTA report is whether people will still live in central cities if they don’t have to. If technology allows both people and industries more freedom to choose where they live, will many choose to live in or near downtown?

The answer is clearly yes – if cities can compete with suburbs as pleasant places to live. National Public Radio recently ran a report about how people are moving back to center cities to get away from the congestion and chaos of the suburbs. The very trends the report speaks of are causing the suburbs and the hinterlands to not be the pastoral oasis that many have in mind when they buy a house in the suburbs.

If older cities can maintain their infrastructure, their neighborhoods and keep crime down, they can compete quite successfully with the land of K-marts and freeways as a pleasant place to live. It’s quite possible that the next century will see an even greater return to the city by the middle and upper classes. New York, Paris and many other major cities have halted their population decline in the last five to 10 years, several studies show.

So maybe that graphic designer, given the choice between a mountain cabin in Idaho and a loft in Soho, might just choose Soho.


New Suffolk Courthouse: Will it Revive Downtown?

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By Alex Marshall
For The Virginian-Pilot

SUFFOLK — This handsome new courthouse of brick and stone that sits on Main Street is one answer to the question: how do we revive this city’s downtown?

Is it the right answer? This city’s center, with two-hundred years of history, was once a bustling place. Now, like Norfolk’s Granby Street and Portsmouth’s High Street, it has declined. All of these city’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, even though there are signs of life on all of them in the form of new businesses amid the vacant storefronts.

Built at a cost of $14 million, the new courthouse works with a new omprehensive plan meant to bring back downtown and manage growth in the suburbs. The courthouse adds 150 or so new bodies to Main Street, while a downtown plan is talking of doing things like carving in new streets, and turning an old high school into a civic center.

Will it work? To make a good prediction, we need to understand where the growth that fuels Suffolk’s booming suburbs comes from, and how it fits into the growth of the region. For it is finally only by understanding the region’s growth, and working with it, that Suffolk can hope to reshape its downtown into the vital, active community it once was.

Suffolk has lessons everyone can learn from. Its struggle to revive downtown is Norfolk’s and Portsmouth’s, while it’s struggle to manage growth is Virginia Beach’s and Chesapeake’s. In understanding how both are interrelated, the region can better understand how to shape itself.

THE CITY’S PLAN What does a courthouse have to do with downtown’s health? The idea is that the 150 to 175 workers in the courthouse will shop on Main Street, and buy lunch there, as will the defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, reporters and everyone else that makes their way to a courthouse, whether by choice or command. At the same time, new sidewalks, new street lamps and benches make Main Street a more inviting place to be.

Does this work? Sure it does, and you can already see downtown changing. Several new stores have opened on Main Street, including a bookstore, a restaurant, a newsstand and a cappuccino bar.

The city has also followed this up with changes of which the other cities might take heed. Over the initial squeamishness of VDOT, it restored parallel parking on Main Street. This converts a semi-highway back into a public street. VDOT’s only requirement was that they continue to allow southbound traffic after 4.30 p.m. during rush hour, to which the city agreed.

This is something that other cities can look at. Many have still not realized that there is a conflict between moving cars quickly and creating an environment where storefronts can prosper. In most streets downtown, the priority should be on the latter.

Norfolk in particular could do a lot more in this direction. It’s downtown is littered with unnecessary left-turn lanes and other devises that take up parking lanes. On Main, Plume and City Hall avenues, the city could substantially expand on-street parking without seriously damaging traffic flow. It should be a top priority for the widened Church Street. This would give on-street businesses more parking spaces, and would alert passerby’s that these streets really are meant for shopping and strolling.

What else would Suffolk do? The downtown plan calls for carving in some new streets so that dead-end streets will now go through, and the street grid will be more complete. Because of railroad lines and topography, Suffolk has a fractured street system. It’s to the credit of the downtown plan, developed by UDA of Pittsburgh and its leader Ray Gindroz, that it focuses on this often-overlooked aspect of a center city’s health. By cutting through some new streets, and connecting unconnected ones, the city could bring new life to otherwise becalmed areas.

In addition, the downtown plans for turning the city’s old high school into a civic center, and renovating the old train station. Both of these are good ideas, but they will not provide a foundation for a revitalized downtown. Other means are necessary for that.

Rather than convert the high school, a wonderful old building, into a civic center, why not convert it back into a school? Suffolk schools are straining to find space for their students. Norfolk has shown with both Maury High School and Granby High School, now under renovation, that old schools can be rehabilitated and fully meet city and state codes, including the Americans with Disability Acts. Other localities around the country have made great strides in this regard. Maryland in particular has led the way in this regard. It makes no sense for Suffolk to build new schools out in the country, when a fine one in the city sits vacant.

How does the new Courthouse’s design rate? It’s an imposing building, as a courthouse should be, with sharp corners and trim that echoes older, more formal civic buildings. Its most admirable feature is that its designers had the guts to build it directly on the sidewalk, in line with the other buildings on Main Street. This completes the walls that form the living room of downtown. If the building had been set back, even by a few feet, the vibrancy and intimate feel of downtown would have been diminished. With luck, it could become a building that is still cherished and loved 100 years from now. That’s the kind of buildings we need more of.

But a new courthouse, new sidewalks, lights and benches, and even new streets and a civic center can only do so much. For downtown to fully revive, the growth patterns of the entire region have to be understood, and then the city’s policies changed so that some of this growth goes into Suffolk’s downtown and center city neighborhoods.

SUFFOLK AND THE REGION Suffolk now is a satellite city of Hampton Roads. Although it has some industry, most notably Planters Peanuts, Suffolk is not self-sufficient in jobs and industry but depends on the more industrial cities of Newport News, Portsmouth and Norfolk to give its residents jobs. Or perhaps another way to say it is that job creators in these cities give Suffolk new residents.

We can see this trend in the data on employment and residential growth in Suffolk and the region. From 1980 to 1993, Suffolk actually lost jobs on a net basis, according to city planning statistics. But it’s total population actually grew steadily over this time period.

Where should the new residents go? In answering that question, Suffolk decides the fate of its downtown. If Suffolk puts all the new residents in new suburban housing miles outside downtown, then downtown will remain a tired place. If on, the otherhand, Suffolk limits development opportunities in the suburbs, forcing both residents and developers to look to the inner-city, then its downtown neighborhoods and eventually businesses should re-emerge as well. New houses would be built on vacant lots, new businesses on parking lots and old houses fixed up.

To reinvigorate downtown, Suffolk needs to start pushing some of its housing demand back to the center. It can do this not only by limiting rezonings in farm land, but by also ignoring calls for new roads or improved roads outside town. Every new road built or expanded leads to more suburban housing outside town.

All this points to the inter-connectedness of the region. If the Navy cuts personnel drastically from Norfolk, for example, you can bet that new housing starts in Suffolk will decline as well. It also points the need for regional growth planning and management. It makes no sense for new jobs in Virginia Beach or Norfolk to boost housing starts in Suffolk and Chesapeake, with no city having complete say over where the jobs go or where the houses go.

POLICY STEPS If Suffolk wants to accompany its new courthouse with more complete steps to revive downtown, it can consider some of the following steps. Some of these actions the city has already considered.

*Sharply limit suburban development on the fringes of the developed area, particularly in the high growth areas in the Northeast and Northwest. The city has taken some steps to do this in the new Comprehensive Plan, which calls for stopping development in the South, and limiting it in the North.

But it needs to do more. Taming development in the rural south is a paper lion, because there isn’t much growth pressure there anyway. Why? Because it’s too far away from the jobs in Norfolk and Portsmouth. The North is booming because that’s where the easy commutes are. That’s also where Suffolk has to act if it wants to retain some form for its city.

A consultant’s report, used to prepare the Comprehensive Plan, recognized this dynamic. The report said bluntly that new residential and commercial development, whose nature and location compete with downtown, will continue to sap its strength.

Steve Herbert, the assistant city manager for development, agreed that the city’s downtown health was dependent on curtailing development elsewhere. Herbert said ultimately the city might have to look at some form of downzoning, in order to scale back some of the 24,000 houses that have already been zoned.

These are some of the hard questions the councils has to deal with, Herbert said. Downzoning is a possibility, but it’s a very difficult issue. We’ll probably have to have other ways to deal with it.

Although Virginia courts have traditionally frowned on downzoning, they have not prohibited it entirely. Rather, they have insisted that it be applied uniformly and in accordance with broad public goals. That might fit in Suffolk.

Suffolk could also consider clustering development around existing village centers in Chuckatuck, Whaleyville and Driver. That way, these village centers could be improved, the rural areas kept rural, and the historical character of these places respected.

*Kill the Southwest bypass. This planned VDOT project, if built, will trap downtown between two major highways, and will encourage new suburban growth off its exits.

The amazing thing is that some people still see a bypass as a way to improve a downtown. It’s like cutting off an artery to improve circulation. One need only to look at downtown Emporia, dead since the route 58 bypass was completed around it, to see what happens to towns with bypasses. You can find hundreds of towns in North Carolina and Virginia that have been improved out of existence with bypasses. You will often find signs saying Business Route, which will take you to a downtown devoid of businesses.

Along with killing the Southwest bypass, Suffolk should examine trimming back some of the other road improvements planned in and around Suffolk. Building big highways is the quickest way to facilitate suburban growth. Suffolk should examine every road and ask whether it needs it, and for what purpose.

Herbert acknowledged that the city was risking its downtown’s health with the proposed bypass. Herbert said that people need to understand that traffic and congestion are part of a downtown’s health.

When people complain about a lack of parking and too much traffic, I tell them that there are people in downtown Portsmouth who would die for that kind of problem, said Herbert, who left Portsmouth City Hall last year.

*Make it easy to develop in the center city. Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods are full of vacant lots that could hold new homes and businesses. Clear away the red tape for these, and consider low-interest loans for home renovations. Make it easy to develop in town, harder to develop in the country. The century-old homes that scatter downtown, many of them quite affordable, are a precious resource that should be used more fully.

If Suffolk can manage to restrain growth its countryside, it might manage to have the best of both worlds: a stable suburban community, and a healthy downtown with businesses, residents — and a fine new courthouse.

JON: THIS IS A SIDEBAR. THE COURTHOUSE MAKES HISTORY The site of the new courthouse used to be the home of Suffolk’s City Hall and City Market. Inaa putting a new courthouse there, the city is returning to its roots.

For close to a century, the twin turreted City Hall and City Market served as the site for not only the town officials and police force, but for vendors selling live chickens and fresh produce, as well as dances, theater concerts and high school graduations, said Sue Woodward, a member of the Suffolk-Nansemond County Historical Society. (JON: THERE ARE PICTURES OF THIS IN THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SUFFOLK THAT PERHAPS WE SHOULD RUN.)

Like Norfolk’s old city market, which actually also had turrets, the Suffolk city market was the center of town in numerous ways. But in the early 1960s, the city, like Norfolk, sold its building and allowed it to be torn down. In retrospect, it was a horribly short-sighted decision. Both cities lost huge pieces of their history as well as buildings that could have been home for other uses.

At the same time Suffolk was tearing down its courthouse, it was also developing a new courthouse complex outside the center of downtown. In this it was also following Norfolk’s lead. It had moved its City Hall and Courts out of what is now the MacArthur Memorial, its old city market known as the Armory, and other buildings, and into the City Hall complex. In retrospect, these decisions were also mistakes. Moving the courts and municipal offices onto plazas outside downtown helped to isolate downtown and take away its customer base.

The magnitude of what Suffolk is doing can be seen by imagining if Norfolk decided to close its courts building on the windswept municipal plaza and move it back to City Hall avenue, where it used to be.

The decision to put the courts back in a more prominent position on Main Street fits with the role the courts have historically played — as centers of a town, both physically and symbolically. Courts can be thought of as anchors and rudders of society, and because of this, it fits that they should be placed in the center of town.

Before the car led to the fragmentation of cities, it was natural to build a courthouse at the center of town where everyone could travel easily to it. Bankruptcy laws still call for delinquent property to be auctioned off on the steps of the courthouse, probably because legislators could not imagine a more public place for a sale to occur. This accounts for the now comical sight of, in Virginia Beach, property being auctioned off on a courthouse that sits on the edge of woods and farms, miles away from the developed city’s bulk.


Seaside At Twenty

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE, May 2001

The tip of Florida’s panhandle hangs out over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico like ripe fruit on a low-hanging branch, easy pickings. This skinny, 100-mile strip sits directly below Alabama, almost walling it off from the sea. Located in a different time zone, an hour behind the rest of the state, the panhandle has long been popular with vacationers. Nestled in the bosom of the old Confederacy, families from Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have flocked to the small beach towns here, giving the coast the moniker of “The Redneck Riviera.” With its aqua-green waters and pure white sand, it probably rivals the real Riviera in natural beauty, if not in movie stars.

In 1981, a developer began a new resort community called Seaside. Located about midway between Panama City Beach and Destin, it was part of a new wave of growth that would hit these sandy shores in the next two decades, turning the coast into a long highway of resort sprawl. The Seaside developer was Robert Davis, who had inherited the 80 acres from his grandfather. Designed by Davis and architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the resort was a modified version of a small town. So startling was its image that it sparked a national movement called New Urbanism.

As Seaside prepared to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I traveled to this celebrated beach community to see what to make of it. I had written, often critically, about its progeny – the scores of “neo-traditional” subdivisions that now clustered around exit ramps on the outskirts of so many cities – but I’d never seen the mother seed. What was I to make of this very small, but very influential place?

I WAS HALFWAY through Seaside before I realized I was in it. The main state road coming from Panama City, 31A, is lined with condominium towers, resort subdivisions, roadside shops and other detritus. Seaside at first appeared to be just one more cluster of development, done in some vaguely historical style. “Damn, they really got their money out of Steven Brooke,” I thought, gazing out from my rental car. Brooke, a photographer, had taken many of the archetypal images of Seaside that had flashed all over the world, via books and magazines. Often set against a skyline at twilight, his photos had turned Seaside into a latter day Acropolis, a remote outpost of civilization on the Florida coast.

The more humdrum reality of the place was disorienting. I would see a beachfront home, and then on my brain plate would flash the archetypal photo I had seen of the same structure. In his book Seaside (Pelican Publishing 1998), Brooke said his early photographs “intentionally idealized and ennobled Seaside’s simple structures.” He succeeded: the photos were theatrical, not journalistic. Far from a major airport or interstate, located in the deep South away from press and academic centers, Seaside had benefited from its isolation. Most people saw only the photographs.

To see Seaside through a more ordinary lens, it helps to visualize 31A, the coastal highway that runs through it. It’s the spine of Seaside, the central artery, a commercial strip. But it’s clear that Seaside is an appendage to 31A, not the other way around. It’s one more resort development on a highway stuffed with them. Seaside was wealthier than I expected. Homes sell for an average of $700,000 to $800,000, I was told. The company produced newspaper, Seaside Times, recently listed a 2,420 square foot house for $2.25 million. I was also surprised by how few people lived in it. On a winter’s day, I walked the streets for hours, knocking on doors, looking for people. No luck. Management estimated that 90 percent of Seaside’s homeowners live elsewhere. And in winter, even the renters were gone.

The continual question that arises with Seaside, as with so many neo-traditional communities, is what exactly is it? It advertises itself as a small town, yet it’s legally a subdivision, with privately owned streets. Still, outsiders do attend community events and shop at its stores.

Davis, Duany and Plater-Zyberk did something different. Instead of high-rise condos on the beach, which wall off the views like oversized linebackers at buffet-table, they built homes and streets that were a short walk away. Surprisingly, rather than paying for the best view of the beach, people purchased the chance to be part of a self-constructed community. Davis and Duany commodified community. In the past, rich people bought isolation; at Seaside, they bought togetherness.

And it sold. Investing in a lot in Seaside in 1990 was the real estate equivalent of buying Yahoo stock before last year’s bust. But less mentioned by Seaside enthusiasts is that property and land values have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled all along this part of the coast, from Panama City to ritzier Destin. Bill Clinton, the Internet and Alan Greenspan had as much to do with Seaside’s financial success as its design. The wealth of the 1990s, and its lopsided distribution, has created a new class of wealthy families who suddenly could afford a second home on the beach.

Seaside and the neo-traditional movement it has spawned becomes a lot less confusing if they are understood as real-estate ventures, rather than acts of urban design. A developer and two architects created a successful product. They then went around the country, accompanied by professional marketers, selling this product to other landowners and developers.

It certainly worked in Florida. Neo-Seasides are popping up all over, including right next door to Seaside. The big development company Arvida, which owns huge swaths of land around here, is building a neo-traditional community called “Water Color” next door. To the East, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed Rosemary Beach, now under construction. These developments lack many of the attributes that make Seaside special: the narrow streets, the formal Beaux-arts street pattern, the walking paths behind the homes. They resemble more conventional subdivisions. Some, like Carillon By The Sea near Panama City Beach, have manned guardhouses at their single entrances. But all these developments have the tall homes with front porches that has become the Seaside style.

But Seaside is difficult to use as a model for conventional subdivisions, where people live year-round. While on vacation, people don’t need dry cleaners, large supermarkets, electronic stores, dentists, CompUSA’s, or any of the other 101 needs of daily life. They don’t drive as many cars. A resort community is akin to a college campus, with specialized requirements. Seaside, despite is prominence, is not really portable.

Seaside might have been something more if it had been part of a larger growth plan. If a state commissioner rather than a private developer had been in charge, you could have laid out “Seasides” every five miles or so, connected by mass transit, and built at the greater density that transit allows. Public authorities could have laid out efficient street systems. In between, a growth management plan could have prohibited development. The developer of Seaside, Robert Davis, immediately embraced this alternate history when we talked one night over dinner at a deserted Italian restaurant down the road. “I can see a point not far from now,” Davis said, “where it would seem completely natural that this entire area would be laid out by the municipal authorities, with minor adjustments as it went along.”

Seaside was clearly an exquisite place in some respects. The streets and tiny walking paths, the requirement that indigenous Florida trees and beach growth be used instead of grass, the care and variety of the wooden houses, made the place something to be admired or respected. It will age well. In addition to the homes, there are non-residential parts of Seaside: an outdoor amphitheater; the Seaside Institute, a non-profit New Urbanist think tank; and a tiny charter school. Most of these were grouped around the pretentiously named “Lyceum,” a grassy commons area. A community chapel is being built here, and Davis said some residents are raising money to build a tiny concert hall.

Still I couldn’t embrace the place emotionally. It was too cute, too controlled, too controlling. In truth, I preferred the beach communities with their simpler houses on unpaved, sandy streets that surrounded Seaside and predated it, like Grayton Beach, just a mile down the road. For all its charm, Seaside was too much about spinning illusions. The postal address was telling. The little business cards said “Seaside, Fl.” But legally Seaside is not a town at all, but part of the town of Santa Rosa Beach, which in turn is part of Walton County. When its few permanent residents participate in public life, they do so as citizens of Santa Rosa Beach.

Perhaps that’s the struggle Seaside best illuminates. Seaside celebrates both public life and a paradoxical escape from it into an exclusive, private realm. At some point, Seaside and the continued debates about its brethren may help us figure out which we value more.

–Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (University of Texas Press 2000).

Jackson Heights

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An Anachronism Finds Its Way

[Excerpt From Chapter Five]

The Star restaurant it was called. It sold “Chops, Steaks and Seafood.” It was the kind of small Greek coffee shop that used to abound in Manhattan, but has been dwindling even there. Here, it stood out as a leftover from a bygone world.

The shop sat on Thirty-seventh Avenue, the principal shopping street of Jackson Heights. The street was a swirl of color and activity. Colombians on their way to Ecuadorean restaurants to eat yucca or ropa vieja. Koreans and other Asians came out of small stores selling herbs and spices. Indian women walked by wearing scarfs and other components of traditional dress. The street was a river of life, bustling with people and commerce.

In this flowing river, the Star restaurant sat like an island or an alley, part of this world but not of it. It somehow signaled that it was of another era, and might not be long for the present one.

The restaurant was filled, appropriately enough, with elderly Jewish women. They seemed like refugees from a storm, huddled in this sheltered place while the passions of color, language, and dress swirled and stormed outside on the street. They sat in black-vinyl booths and at square-topped tables, drinking coffee and discussing events. They eagerly surrounded me when I asked them about the neighborhood, eager to have a visitor, and a relatively young man at that. Most had lived in this neighborhood for their entire adult life, some fifty years. The stores they walked to, the candy shops, the movie theaters, the five-and-dimes, were largely gone now. They were widows, their husbands passing before them. They did not like being minorities now in ethnicity, custom, and style in a neighborhood they helped build.

“These people are so dirty, they are filthy,” said a woman with big glasses who had just finished showing photos of her trip to Italy. “They throw their trash in the street. There is crime.”

“They change the child’s diapers in the car, and throw it out on the street, just like they do in India,” said another woman.

“And let the child diddle in the curb,” said still another.

“I even saw a man stand up against a wall and do it,” said the first woman.

This account of the immigrants’ bathroom habits seemed unfair, but probably true. Having lived in Spain for two years, I’m aware that Americans’ bathroom habits are unusually fastidious compared to most. It was common in Spain for a mother to help a child urinate into the street. Men would routinely pee against a wall on a downtown street. I became accustomed to doing so myself.

One woman, less angry than the others, said she still liked it here, but that things had changed.

“There used to be so much to do here. There were the movie theaters. There was a candy store.”

“There was the bingo hall down the street,” said another woman.

“Even the Woolworth’s is closing,” said one woman. The national chain had just closed all Woolworth’s in the country, but to these women it was just one more familiar friend departing.

The women’s complaints were ironic, because while they noticed how much things had changed, I noticed how much things had stayed the same in Jackson Heights. Even if the color, religions, and languages of the people on the street changed, Jackson Heights was still a neighborhood that took working-class immigrants not long off the boat and lifted them into the middle class by providing them the opportunity for hard work. What makes Jackson Heights a rarity is that it is an urban neighborhood, based around the subway and elevated train line. Unlike most urban neighborhoods, Jackson Heights had not become either a slum or a giant fern bar.

Working in the City

As the suburbs have become ubiquitous, the urban neighborhood like Jackson Heights has become a specialized place, for the artist, the junkie, the rich, the homeless, the gay, the intellectually curious. What it isn’t, generally speaking, is home to the police officer with two kids, the assistant hotel manager, the school teacher, and, of course, the factory worker. In other words, the working and middle classes. The classic working-class urban neighborhood, where a guy with a lunch pail walked to work or to a streetcar, subway, or bus, has become a rarity as the systems that produced it become a rarity.

The same goes for the classic ethnic, immigrant neighborhood. For many immigrants today, the town-house complex near the freeway ramp–in other words, the suburbs–has become the destination after getting off the boat. Only in a few cities, or parts of cities, are the walkable street, the walk-up apartment, still the first stop. The inner-city areas are either too expensive or too much of a slum.

But one urban area that is still home to the emerging middle class and the immigrant is New York City. In most cities, urban neighborhoods have become vestigial organs, either kept alive as luxury items for the well off, or abandoned to decay. In New York, urban neighborhoods still create the middle class, taking poor or less well-off people and providing them the environment by which they can make their way to a more established position economically.

One of those neighborhoods in the city is Jackson Heights in Queens. It’s been a ladder for an emerging middle class for most of its existence, and it still is. Latin Americans, Koreans, and Indians have replaced or merged with Italians, Jews, Germans, and Greeks. These changes have often been wrenching sociologically. But the bottom line is that Jackson Heights is still where new immigrants come, get their first jobs, and move up.

Why does it still exist? Why has it become neither a slum nor a gentrified boutique neighborhood? What keeps its inhabitants living, with jobs, in a neighborhood where the car is still an uncommon element? In answering these questions, we see several things:

One, is the uniqueness of New York City, which, after a destructive flirtation with the highway midcentury, has in the last generation become more and more dependent on mass transit. This makes it unique among America’s cities. It has not been easy. It has managed to revive and enhance and build on a seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century street pattern. Grids of streets where factory workers walked to jobs are now inhabited by stockbrokers or fashion executives who use limousine service. Neighborhoods like Jackson Heights still revolve around the central star of Manhattan, whose economy warms all the outer boroughs and gives life to their streets. Two, we see how transportation determines form and thus lifestyle. People live differently in Jackson Heights, and most of New York, because they get around differently. Three, we see the uniqueness of the street-based life that non-car-centered transportation produces. There is a closeness, an intimacy to life, in Jackson Heights that must at times be suffocating but which I often yearn for. We gave up something when most of our cities opted to build highways and Interstates, rather than train lines or subways.

The Deconstructed City – The Silicon Valley

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[Excerpt From Chapter Three ]

Urbanism and Underwear

Anne (not her real name) had worked at the small used bookstore in Menlo Park since 1967. During this time, she watched the downtown change around her. It used to be a place where the city’s politicians came to meet, a place where the average person came to buy a television, some furniture, or some shampoo. Downtown was the area’s commercial, political, and economic center. Then, hard times hit. The furniture and appliance stores closed or moved out to the malls. McDonald’s out on the highway replaced the everyday restaurants on Main Street.

Then, about a decade ago, things picked up again. New restaurants began to move in. Lots of them. The local supermarket, Draeger’s, opened an enormous upscale supermarket. Fancy boutiques blossomed. Menlo Park had come back. Only, things were different. Downtown had once been a place where you went to have your daily needs met. It was as comfortable as an old shoe. Now, it was fancy. Although she liked the downtown’s success, she wished-.-.-. that there was a place to buy something more ordinary. A smattering of older stores remained–a hardware store, a pet store, a dry cleaner–but their days seemed numbered. And all these restaurants! You could have too much of a good thing. So one day, Anne went and counted all the restaurants in this roughly two-block-long downtown.

There were thirty-seven.

“I just wish there was someplace to buy a bra or some underwear,” she said. “I’d trade a half-dozen of these coffee shops for one place to buy something practical.”

The trajectory of Menlo Park, from up to down to up again, is similar to that of the other downtowns of the Silicon Valley. They include Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and small shopping streets like California Avenue in Palo Alto. They have gone from ordinary building blocks of an economy, to outmoded appendages, to luxury ornaments. These old-fashioned downtown streets, many of them once centers of farming communities, are very alive now. They are also unnecessary. Their luck is that they exist in a suburban territory that can afford to keep them alive. They play a role for their areas, similar to what San Francisco does for the region, as beautiful antiques.

What role do these old downtowns play in this new city? They are the depository of place in the region. They are where you go to experience it. It is their franchise. As such, they punctuate the suburban monotony of the region. Every few miles, you come across another old downtown where you know you can get out, walk around–and of course find something to eat.

Eating out seems to be the main function of these new centers. They are one long dining table. In Palo Alto, the downtown is lacquered over with high-priced Italian restaurants, and more open all the time. On a Thursday night, lines stretch out of every other restaurant. In a world where people are young and work long hours, eating out is one of the main forms of recreation. For some reason, Italian restaurants threaten to suffocate you. Every other doorway offers aruguled this and balsamiced that. San Francisco is known for its French restaurants. In Silicon Valley, they love Italian.

What has happened is not simply the upscaling of an area. Something more structural has happened. The downtown of Menlo Park is now an appendage. Its businesses are able to survive precisely because they are unnecessary. You don’t go to Menlo Park to buy a pack of Fruit of the Loom, a computer, a television, or some shoelaces. You go to the mall down the road, or the warehouse-style power centers. Nor do you go to Menlo Park to see your attorney or take out a loan; those functions have moved to corporate office parks behind well-bermed lawns. The older downtowns instead have become like an art museum, a luxury that gives you a taste of a different time, and a welcome respite from your usual hectic surroundings. And as with an art museum, only the wealthiest and most upscale areas can afford one. They are luxury items, dispensable but nice to have around. They give young people a place to court with more atmosphere than the mall. But they carry no significant economic freight. If they were blown off the map, people’s palates would suffer but not much else. These old downtowns no longer function as cities, under my definition, because they no longer create wealth. Sure, their restaurants and pricey supermarkets have value, but they exist by taking the dollars that have been created elsewhere, and cycling them through. They are a secondary tier of an economy, not the primary one. If the chip plants and computer labs closed tomorrow, the pricey boutiques would go dark in a week.

It is true that some people can meet their daily needs in Menlo Park, but this is an example of the bifurcation of our society. The wealthy can afford to shop at Draeger’s. They can pay for the privilege of a supermarket within walking distance, and for an older, more personalized form of service. They can order steak for $30 a portion at Dal Boffo instead of a hamburger at a mom-and-pop cafe. It’s urbanism for the rich. The masses are left to the car and the Wal-Mart and the Food Lion. Anne may eventually get a place to buy underwear. But it would likely be a boutique lingerie store, with Aubade bras for $100 a pop. Not Hanes.

It’s significant that one place that does not have a downtown is East Palo Alto, home to the poor, who are the people most in need of an environment that functions without cars.

The End of Place

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[Excerpt From Chapter Two]

The Nature of Place

Before the car, or more particularly before the highway, the essential challenge of cities was to keep everything from being in the same place. The city was centripetal. Like a black hole, the nature of a city or town was to suck everything to one point. People needed to be near the railroad, the port, the factory to get to their jobs, and factories needed to be near the people and transportation links. This was why reformers championed public parks. Called the lungs of the cities, they were spots of greenery in the tightly packed clumps of buildings and streets. And it took real community effort to put them there. Valuable and scarce land, which could have been converted into homes and businesses, had to be set aside by the public. The tendency of the pre-automobile city to suck people to specific points only intensified with the transportation advances of the nineteenth century, which drew people, machinery, businesses, and money toward the subway stop, the streetcar stop, the railroad terminal.

Just the opposite conditions prevail today. The city is centrifugal. The city is more akin to a giant salad spinner, spraying growth out over the countryside indiscriminately. Growth still clusters around transportation sources, except that it is now the freeway off-ramp rather than the subway stop or train station. But the growth circle of a streetcar is measured in blocks because people have to walk there. The growth circle of a freeway off-ramp in measured in miles, because people drive there, and need places to put their cars at each end.

Consequently, there is no particular advantage to being right near one’s workplace. In fact, there is considerable advantage to being as far away from work or other necessities as possible. The person who locates himself on the fringes gets the advantage of bigger lots and more peace and quiet, while still being able to “raid” the jobs and commerce of the metropolis as a whole. Thus the city expands ever outward, with each person and developer reaching the short-term gain of being the farthest out.

The drive to establish parks is anachronistic now, because we no longer live packed in a block with no green space nearby. Now, most of us live surrounded by green space, from our backyards to the berms and shrubbery that surround the shopping mall and local gas station. We are enveloped in greenery, because the low-density environment has plenty of spaces for trees, shrubs, and spare land that is left as forest or fields. Now, a park is just about providing recreation, not relief from crowding and congestion.

The essential dynamic of cities and places has changed. The fundamental challenge of cities today is to keep everything from being everywhere at once. The modern push to establish growth boundaries can be compared to the drive in the past to establish parks. Each movement is attempting to check a fundamental tendency of the form in favor of the public good. The public good now concerns containment, whereas before it was the reverse. Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, said, “The effect of the auto on the city is analogous to what astronomers call the big bang theory of the universe.”2 In the past, cities sucked inward. With the car, they exploded outward.

This big bang has increased exponentially the rate cities consume land. Urban historian Robert Fishman noted, “The basic unit of the new city is not the street measured in blocks but the ‘growth corridor’ stretching 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading metropolis of the early 20th century–New York, London, or Berlin–covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city routinely encompasses two to three thousand [square] miles.”3

A news article about contemporary Atlanta, a particularly acute case, gives a glimpse of the dynamic. “Over the past six years, Atlanta has gobbled up more land than any metro area, anywhere. Each year, the region’s suburban boundaries grow by 38 square miles.-.-.-. As a result, commuters-.-.-. pile up more car miles each day, per capita, than residents of any U.S. metropolis, including Los Angeles. They also breathe the worst air of any city in the Southeast.” The fastest-growing county, Gwinnett, has tripled in population in sixteen years to 460,000. “Seen from the air, Gwinnett looks like a vast sea of cul-de-sacs–an estimated 9,000 of which are spread across the county.” The growth of Atlanta, the writer correctly observes, was fueled by three Interstates built in the postwar era that converge on the region.4

Victor Gruen, father of the first enclosed shopping mall, in Minneapolis, precisely describes the centrifugal nature of suburban development in a long piece, which he apparently writes with some regret, about the children he has sired. In a chart entitled “The Vicious Circle,” he shows an arrow from “Sprawl” leading to “Increased Use of Automobiles” leading to “Decreased Use of Public Transportation” leading to “Separation of Urban Functions” leading to “Increased Road Surfaces” leading back to “Sprawl.”5

The End of Place saddens us, I believe. We have had thousands of years living with “walls” around us in the form of streets and buildings. It’s only in the last fifty that most of us have been able to leave them. Now, like a prisoner yearning for his old jail cell, we miss the places that once involuntarily confined us. Although we chafed at our old constraints, we find now that we might need them. The car and the highway have allowed us to leave our old confines, but they also have meant we could not go back.

Is the End of Place an unavoidable consequence of the car? To answer this, we need to understand why one method of transportation is chosen or can be chosen.