Portland and Oregon

Posted on July 31, 2006 by admin

Taming the Forces That Create the Modern Metropolitan Area

[Excerpt From Chapter Seven ]

Let’s take a drive out of Portland, past the suburbs and the highways and the new homes, out past the growth boundary. You’ll find your journey a pleasant one. You’ll drive over rolling hills of farms and forests, until you come to small towns, sitting compactly in the countryside. These small towns, like Yamhill, Dundee, or Forest Grove, will be surrounded by new development that hugs the existing town. You will not be greeted by the usual display of scattered subdivisions, Pizza Huts, and strip centers that now rings most smaller towns in the country. Because of this, the downtowns of these smaller towns are more viable and alive than most.

This landscape is as much a part of Portland, and its success, as its bustling downtown. Because these small towns are limited in their outward growth, there is no way they can pluck the growth off the metro Portland area, by standing just outside of it and feeding off of it, like parasites. A newcomer to Portland cannot buy a house outside a small town in a new development within easy driving distance of Portland, a development that would doubtless be followed by other developments until a sea of sprawl was built up.

This landscape shows that growth can no longer be controlled by a city itself, or even a metropolitan area. It must be done by an entity larger than the city or metro area itself, likely the state. A metropolitan area cannot effectively limit its own growth, because there is no way to get outside of itself. It’s a Zen thing. A tongue cannot taste itself; a metro area cannot limit itself. Wherever it draws a growth boundary, a developer can always go just on the other side and build houses that siphon off the growth pressure. Only a state can limit this kind of parasitic development.

Legally, it makes growth control both more difficult and more simple. If effective growth control must usually come from a state level, then activists have the sometimes more difficult, but conceptually easier, task of persuading the state to manage growth. It’s ironic that states have generally shown little interest in urban management. It’s ironic because legally, states have the rights and powers to do so, if they choose. Legally, towns and cities are creatures of our states. They have their existence only by authority of the state constitution, which usually grants the legislators the right to pass charters which delegate some of the powers of the state to a municipality. Theoretically, the state could revoke these charters and control the actions of cities directly, from school boards to cops.

In Europe, the more controlled nature of growth is due in part to the more clearly subordinate status of cities. Their growth is controlled and ordered by a larger entity, usually the nation-state itself. It seems odd that the states in the United States do not exercise powers that are available to them.

It’s important to realize that the forces that shaped Portland and Oregon were both progressive and reactionary in nature. That is, policy makers did not set out to create great urban places, although some were interested in that. They set out to stop certain things. Mostly, they set out to stop the hills, farms, and forests they love from being turned into shopping malls and freeways.

That, to me, is the ultimate irony of Portland and Oregon. We urbanists from all over the country turn to the area to see how we, too, can fashion great urban places. But those places are largely an afterthought, almost an unintended byproduct. The leaders and people of Oregon set out to protect the streams, rivers, farms, and mountains that they loved.

“They [growth boundaries] were means to an end,” said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, who often explains the area to visiting journalists. “The point was to call an end to farmland development. The kind of press we’re getting is mostly about what we’re doing, not why. The why is the incredible landscape of the Willamette Valley.

“This is not a city that stands back and looks at its skyline and says, ‘What a great city!’ It’s a city that stands back and says, ‘Look at those mountains!'”

As Seltzer and others explained to me, it was a coalition of farmers and tree huggers that got the state growth control laws passed and have kept them in place. Governor Tom McCall, the progressive Republican governor who led the fight for the statewide planning law in the early 1970s, was a nature lover first and a city lover a distant second. The group that has been so influential, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, is bound together by its members’ deep love of nature. The Friends have become true lovers of urbanism as they have seen how that is a means to their end. They have come to love urbanism, I believe, but it was a discovery, not a goal.

Robert Caldwell, editor of the editorial page for the Portland Oregonian and a native, talks of often seeing “a cowboy” or a blue-collar worker stooping to pick up a piece of litter, or sharply telling someone else to do the same.

To me, this trait is cheering, but it is also saddening, for it suggests Americans are unlikely to unite around an urban vision. Cities are still too misunderstood, still too prone to inspire suspicion, for people to unite around a goal of streetcars, walking streets, and the diverse milieu of urbanism. They may like it once they get there, and even come to love it, but it is unlikely to be a strong enough goal to inspire the necessary work.

It also suggests that place, in the urbanistic sense, cannot be built from scratch, but only preserved, enhanced, or rebuilt. A Greenwich Village or an East Side or even a midtown can evolve, change, building on its essential form of streets and buildings. A Portland can come back, resprouting and reinvigorating its old homes, and building new ones again. But I’m not sure such a place can be built again. Cities may be a dead art form, or a limited one. It may be possible, but I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen any collection of streets and buildings built after World War II that has a coherent sense of place.

Jackson Heights

Posted on July 31, 2006 by admin

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.

Trading Places

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

The City and the Suburb

[Excerpt From Chapter Four]

“The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment.”
— Marshall McLuhan in a conversation with William Irwin Thompson; quoted in Thompson, Coming into Being

“The bloodthirsty national merchants and the Chamber of Commerce have pretty well gutted the place I remember and taken and hucked the town’s original character into the overall commercial park. The center of town, which when I was a kid hadn’t changed much in the century, and was pleasingly timeworn and functional, has now either been torn down or renovated for artificial preservation as an example of itself.”
— description of Lexington, Kentucky, from Richard Hell’s autobiographical novel, Go Now2

The King William neighborhood in San Antonio is an elegant place of huge turreted Victorians sitting on expansive lots. German immigrants built the homes in the mid–and late nineteenth century, after they had grown rich industrializing the city. In San Antonio then, you were as likely to hear German on the streets as English or Spanish. An old photograph from the 1880s shows a sign on a bridge warning people to walk their horses. The notice is given in three languages–English, German, and Spanish.

Like many beautiful old neighborhoods, King William now mixes entrenched urban homesteaders with tourism. In one count there were more than seventy bed and breakfasts in the neighborhood, and tour buses cruising the streets have been regulated. It’s ironic, because in the 1960s, the neighborhood was nearing abandonment, with the huge old homes falling into disrepair. But a wealthy believer bought and renovated a handful of homes, and suddenly a reverse exodus was on.

The tourism load is heavy in part because the neighborhood sits just a stone’s throw from downtown and the city’s famous River Walk, the winding subterranean path along water’s edge now lined with restaurants, stores, and souvenir stands. Aboveground are the city’s largely turn-of-the-century streets and buildings, which also include the ancient Alamo Mission and the modern shopping mall built a few years back. The mall gives armies of conventioneers another place to spend money.

I stayed in King William in 1997, in one of the ubiquitous bed and breakfasts. I was there on a magazine assignment, and I began my morning around the dining table with two couples who were there on vacation. They were from New Orleans, but the husbands knew San Antonio well because they traveled there frequently on business.

Knew the suburbs, that is. Like most businesspeople in the area, they conducted the bulk of their business out in the peripheries of the metropolitan area, in an environment of sprawling highways, office parks, and shopping centers that was casually called, no kidding, “Loopland.” The name came from the beltway that encircled the metropolitan area and spawned the subsequent sprawl. It was a maddening, unholy place. Glass buildings were shoved right up to the high-speed freeway, and the system of exit ramps seemed like something out of a Mad Max movie. But this was now the true Main Street of San Antonio, the place where the wealth of the metropolitan area was produced, and where the bulk of new businesses and industries were formed.

In fact, so strong was Loopland’s pull that the two businessmen, despite having traveled to the city for years, had never been downtown before or to any of the adjacent picturesque neighborhoods. The entire downtown, which includes the Alamo, the River Walk, and the business district, was a mystery to them. It was only now, on vacation, accompanied by their wives and children, that they were taking the chance to see “the city.”

The couples’ relationship with downtown is a good example of how contemporary center cities and suburbs have traded places. Older center cities–when successful–tend to be small, precious places with a limited function and market. The downtown of San Antonio was a make-believe world suitable for wives and children, who could pretend or believe they were seeing the real San Antonio.

The real San Antonio, of course, was out in Loopland. That’s where the wealth of the region was being produced, that is where new businesses were being formed.

The parts of San Antonio’s downtown that had been unable to convert themselves into tourist centers were dying. That included lovely but abandoned nineteenth-century office buildings and grand old theaters. Why? Because the business and essential living of the city were no longer being conducted in the center, and so the streets and buildings were no longer able to make a go at it by being utilitarian tools. They could only make it, to paraphrase Richard Hell, as artificially preserved examples of themselves.

The suburbs and city have reversed historic roles. The city now represents order, stability, community, and the human scale. The suburbs have become the example of constant change, gigantism, uncontrolled technological forces, and the rule of the marketplace. Whereas once the city symbolized a merciless, soulless world, and the suburbs calmness, family, and nature, the two worlds have almost completely traded places in what they represent.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment” is an accurate description of why this has occurred. The urban grid of streets grouped around a port or a train station or a streetcar line has ceased to be the central marketplace of society. It has been replaced by a tangle of streets built around freeway exits. And so the older form has gone from something utilitarian, a tool, to something whose aesthetics and value can be seen more clearly and admired because we are now outside it. The urban street is, to quote Joel Garreau, author of Edge City, an antique. And like an antique, it is seen as valuable merely for being, not for what it does. In San Antonio, the downtown plays an important role in the economy by nurturing tourism and the convention trade. But this is a passive, more gentle function than serving as the central arena of industry or the marketplace.

An antique, whether it’s an object or a process, can be studied, perfected, and honed, similar to blues music, basket weaving, or the construction of handmade paper. But the form is not alive in the same way as suburbia. We can love cities because we are no longer in them. From society’s collective new home in the suburbs, we look back on them in wonder. I wonder when this will happen to the suburbs? When will we admire a cloverleaf, an off-ramp, and a gas station with an attached convenience store simply for their form and style?

I am not scoffing at the task of reviving the city. Ultimately it is not just the urban city but the metropolitan area that is, or can be, “a work of art,” perhaps because we are now mentally outside of it in our global marketplace and Internet-enveloped world. If we are to grapple effectively with the artistic challenge before us, then we must understand city and suburb together and how they interact as a whole.

What I seek to do in this chapter is to understand the dynamic between our more traditional urban forms and the newer suburbs, and how this in turn relates to the dynamic of the metropolitan area as a whole. To understand city and suburb–and I use these words more in an iconic sense than a literal one, for I believe the true cities today in a practical sense are entire metropolitan areas–we need to understand how city and suburb have been viewed in history and what goals they have represented. When twelfth-century Italian princes built great urban piazzas, and when nineteenth-century park designers built great suburban subdivisions, what were they striving for? What heaven were they reaching for, and how far did it exceed their grasp?

The Deconstructed City – The Silicon Valley

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[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

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[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.

A Tale of Two Towns

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.

The Sex of Cities

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[Excerpt From The Introduction]

Children are supposed to turn to their parents at some point and ask innocently, “Daddy [or Mommy], where do babies come from?” Faced with such a basic question, parents then decide how directly to answer it.

I doubt any child has turned to anyone and asked plaintively, “Daddy, where do places come from?” Or, “Daddy, where do cities come from?” But it is these questions that I hope people are asking, even if not consciously, and which I seek to answer in this book.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last half-century about our cities, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Through most of it has run a thick current of dissatisfaction with the galloping forces of suburbanization that have characterized the postwar era. People may love their three-bedroom home on the cul-de-sac, but they hate traffic jams, destroyed countryside, pollution, and automobile dependence. But before we start labeling places as good or bad, or attempting to design new ones, we should understand them better. This means asking basic questions. Which are: What forces produce our streets, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions, and the shape they take? And can we control them? To proceed without understanding is to almost guarantee ill-conceived and unwanted results.

Babies come from sex. Where do places come from? What is the sex of place? What union of people and nature produces our cities, our suburbs, and the environment out of which we make our homes? If some concede the need for more widespread sex education, might I raise the call for more universal place education?

I believe we are mixed up about our cities, our neighborhoods, and the places where we live. We don’t understand how they work. We don’t understand what produces them. We don’t understand what starts them or stops them. We don’t know how to change them, even if we wanted to. That is what I hope to do in this book. To explain to myself and to the reader why human settlement occurs, what shapes it, and how it can be shaped. In this book, I discuss the nature of place and how the nature of places has changed. And how we can shape the nature of our places. I do not argue to redesign our cities in a specific way. I have preferences and make them known. But my purpose is to make clear the choices available and the price tag of each. How do we change our world? What levers do we grasp if we want to change how it is constructed?

Much of the book explicitly or implicitly addresses the dualism that has developed between the so-called urban and suburban environments, between the land of the parking lot and the land of the street. These two types of places are seen as representing different ideals, and being governed by different systems. I attempt to find the Rosetta stone that will make understandable the workings of both city and suburb. Although they indeed have stark differences in their everyday life, I contend if we widen the lens, we find both urban and suburban places are governed and created by the same laws of place. If we understand those laws, we come a long way in understanding how places and cities are created and how they function.

The Master Hand

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

The Role of Government in Building Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Six]

In 1817, the governor of New York convinced the state legislature to spend $7 million to finance a canal from Albany to Buffalo. Eight years later, after thousands of workers had carved a channel through rock and earth, the Erie Canal was complete. The 350-mile canal opened the entire upper Midwest to shipping, and cemented New York City’s role as transportation hub for the nation, and as the country’s greatest city.

In 1919, the U.S. Navy, concerned that the country was losing the race in radio technology to Europe, created the Radio Corporation of America–or RCA. It was funded as a joint project between government and private business, and the Secretary of the Navy sat on its board. Later spun off as a completely private enterprise, it grew into one of the largest and most important companies in home and commercial electronics and communications.

In 1995, Denver opened its enormous new international airport, its cream-colored canvas peaks glinting in the sun. It was a big risk by taxpayers. But like New York state’s gamble with the Erie Canal two centuries previously, it was meant to move the Rocky Mountain metropolis into the position of a central transportation hub for the nation.

What all these actions or events have in common is government, government, government. In this chapter, I seek to make clear the role of government in creating both the architecture of place, and the related architecture of economics or wealth. In this antigovernment country, virtually founded on hostility to the enterprise, we tend to obscure government’s central role in creating the places where we live, the jobs we perform, and the money we spend. Government, whether it be a republic, monarchy, theocracy, or dictatorship, is more central to our lives than many of us acknowledge or understand.

From an urban planning perspective, it’s important to understand the role of government so we can more easily grasp the levers of power when we desire to make real changes.

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We would understand government’s role in both places and economies if we understood better what government is.

Government, to put it unsentimentally, is “a system of authority,” from which all other forms of authority, including ownership of property, derive.12 In a democracy, that authority derives from the consent and will of the people. Managing this authority for the highest and best use is the central task of the people.

In this country, this understanding of political community has been replaced by rigid beliefs in the free market, without an understanding that the “free” market itself only exists through its creation and maintenance by a political state. The “free market” is a political act first. Politics comes before economics. By this, I mean the economic system we live under, in both the nation and the globe, rests on a foundation of political decisions that establish said system’s existence and form. Politics determines economics.

The capitalist system is a political act that creates a publicly defined set of rules enforced by the “system of authority” of government. Markets can be said to exist without governments only if we define markets as blind desire. “Free” markets exist only as created and underpinned by government. The polity creates the system of laws and courts and police that lets the “free” enterprise system operate.

The equations of economists, even at their most convoluted, seldom have a line saying something like “Right here there is a 10 percent chance that forces from a rival company will break through the factory’s defenses and shoot the CEO in the head.” That would be an actual free market, which we can see in operation in the drug markets nationally and globally. The illegal-drug cartels act little differently than France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they warred to control markets, robbed each other’s ships, and fought to control supply lines.

The current global economy, so often held up as an example of the benefits of the free market, was not only created by technological advances like the computer or the telephone, but from the political arrangements that allowed their introduction and peaceful operation. It was politics that allowed for the laying of a transatlantic cable, and for the creation of a system of laws and courts that governs trade. Even mailing a letter to Europe relies on a slew of postal treaties worked out in the nineteenth century.

People may forget that we had a fully functioning global economy in the sixteenth century. England no longer seizes ships from France laden with goods from India because it and most countries have a series of political agreements that allow for “free” trade. These agreements not only prohibit the use of force, but they also provide a mechanism for adjudicating disagreements and for setting standards. The peaceful creation of wealth through a market economy is always based on the establishment of a prior political system. Peaceful global trade has emerged over the last two centuries because a system of political authority has emerged that creates the structure within which a global economy has to operate.

In effect, we have a world government. We can see it in action when the World Court at The Hague in Holland orders the United States to accept tuna caught in nets that harm porpoises, even though America’s own laws prohibit its sale. Sorry, says the World Court, but the system of global trade you agreed to prohibits your discriminating against other countries’ products on this basis. Pull at this thread and you find a vast structure, including things like the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter supervised by the World Court, which in turn reports to the United Nations. These institutions, though, should serve the interests of their polity and not just the short-term interests of individual businesses or even countries.

The gradual ability for governments to replace the rule of force with the rule of law changed the form of cities, as well as the form of trade. Historian Eric H. Monkkonen says that the emergence of the nation-state allowed new forms of cities and towns to develop. Before the viable nation-state, only settlements that could defend themselves were possible. This took the classic form of the city-state. When “the state and the city separated,” it allowed more specialized forms of cities and towns to emerge, which in turn allowed a greater percentage of the population to urbanize.13

The classic model of a free market, where businesses operate unhindered by government interference, is comparable to a perfect vacuum created in the laboratory. I use this analogy, though, in a way contrary to the usage of many economists. With markets, it is government that restrains the “natural” forces of power and violence from rushing in and contaminating the perfect vacuum of the free market. Another analogy is that of a soccer game. Government not only referees the game, judging when players are offside and so forth, but also creates the field, its parameters, and how you play.

Government is often thought of as a parasite on free enterprise, or at least as dependent on it. But the reverse is more true. To paraphrase architect and organizational theorist Ted Goranson, behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand is an invisible arm–government.14 Again, this should be obvious, but I suspect it isn’t. The standard mental model of capitalism is that this magic system of supply and demand operates by itself, without human aid or deliberate organization of any kind. These are basic tenets of Economics 101, handed down by the priests of the system, the economics professors.

If you want to look at how markets operate without government, just look at the buying and selling of crack cocaine, or of bootleg whiskey during Prohibition in the 1920s. Without government, the act of exchanging value becomes quickly mixed with the use of force to control a market or command a sale. Indeed, since government itself is a system of authority, a system of regulated force, it can be said that in its absence, another “government” quickly emerges that establishes through force a system of rules and regulations by which trade can occur. The Mafia can be compared to a private government that is competing with the established government’s authorized monopoly on the use of force and subsequent ability to establish rules and structures.

Russia and some of the newly emerging capitalist countries are having problems establishing a functioning capitalist system because they don’t have enough government, not the converse. Capitalism only operates where there is the rule of law, including a court system to keep a record of contracts and enforce them. It operates even better if government creates a transportation system, a clean water supply, and other basic public goods. The limited liability corporation is a foundation of modern capitalism that is completely a political creation.

“All liberal rights presuppose or imply the dependency of the individual on the collectivity and on the principal instrument of the collectivity, that is, on the coercive-extractive state. This is a truism and a banality,” but one that has been forgotten in the modern era, says Stephen Holmes, writing in The American Prospect in an article titled “What Russia Teaches Us: How Weak States Threaten Freedom.”15

As Holmes writes, it is ironic that in this era of calls for lower taxes what Russia suffers from is the absence of sufficient taxation. Total tax revenues in Russia are at about 10 percent of the economy, which is insufficient to create a public sector to establish the rule of law and a healthy infrastructure.16

Part of our misconception of government is due to our emphasis on the Bill of Rights, which, as Holmes writes, is really a spelling out of a set of “negative liberties.”17 They focus on being free from government. But essential liberties also come from government’s presence. What makes democracy so revolutionary is that it established the concept of being free to participate in government, that this system of authority, which is what government is, could be controlled by the people, the polity, the public.

The failure to recognize that a market economy is a political choice and creation first and foremost leads to a belief that an economy operates by itself. The “laws” of supply and demand magically lift all boats to their highest and best use, without the aid of human intervention, goes the standard fairy tale. Part of this confused belief system comes from economics being classified as a science, and the conviction that, because equations and numbers are used, it can be compared to physics or chemistry. But humans are different than falling apples or sodium combining with chloride. They are their own actors, and can combine and perform in a variety of ways, many of which no one can guess.

Lewis Mumford posits that with the industrial revolution, nations adopted a new religious belief in classical economics to replace the belief that an all-seeing, all-knowing father God had laid out an orderly and just path for the world.

“The most fundamental of these postulates was a notion that the utilitarians had taken over, in apparent innocence, from the theologians: the belief that a divine providence ruled over economic activity and ensured, so long as man did not presumptuously interfere, the maximum public good through the dispersed and unregulated efforts of every private, self-seeking individual. The non-theological name for this pre-ordained harmony was laissez-faire.”

The idea of Adam Smith’s invisible hand shaping prices and production for the common good is a marvelous model that is true in some situations. The problem is, most students of economics accept it as being solid as an axe. They then proceed to pick it up and wield it indiscriminately. But the market only operates efficiently and for the benefit of everyone when the products of a market can be converted into something that can be bought and sold for money. Saving a historic building, for example, might greatly enhance the wealth and overall appeal of a town, not to mention the daily lives of its citizens. But it is very difficult to “marketize” the view of a church by charging people for the privilege of walking by it.

Not only do markets not always maximize public or individual good, they actually often degrade it through the same mechanisms meant to produce value.

There are many, many situations where people, all pursuing their maximum self-interest, make things worse for everyone, themselves included. Our treatment of the environment is the most obvious example, and the one most likely to topple the laissez-faire theology. It is simply too apparent that, left to themselves, people and companies will pollute the air, water, and land to the detriment of all without some larger system of legal control. Traffic is another. Everyone trying to get to work quickly and easily by car creates a traffic jam where no one gets to work quickly. Yet another example is the widespread distribution of guns. Individual actors, trying to maximize their personal safety, increase their physical danger, because a more dangerous world is created by the sum total of the actions of everyone arming themselves.

What’s troubling is how a proper understanding of the role of government in our lives is being undermined by a steady barrage of libertarian and antigovernment rhetoric. This language obscures the real relationship people have with government. It’s like criticizing the boat that keeps you afloat.

The version of the Republican Party dominant at the end of the twentieth century has been tremendously destructive in this, and should be rightly held responsible for the misconceptions many Americans hold. Republican leaders like Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi frequently wield the motto that “You know how to spend your money better than the government.” According to this analysis, government is akin to a thief, robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned pay. If government should exist at all, then, goes this line of thought, it is at best a necessary evil, best kept small and minimal.

This theory obscures the fact that government creates the wealth the people hold in their hands and are now reluctant to give up. A dollar bill is signed by the Secretary of the Treasury for a reason. Money is a communication device produced by a political agreement, both literally and in a wider sense. Not only does government print the money, but it also creates the conditions under which money can be “made.” It also creates the infrastructure of wealth creation, like public education and transportation systems.

America’s tortured, confused relationship to government can be seen in our tortured, chaotic, and confused transportation systems. Whether it’s trains, planes, or automobiles, the confusion between public and private has produced the worst of both worlds. Government puts too much money into highways and then prices the use of them too low, and so they are massively congested. Government shortchanges passenger train travel, leaving citizens with a skeletal, impoverished system. Government has ceded control of the skies to commercial airline companies, even though these for-profit companies depend on a public system of airports and air traffic controllers. This has left air passengers often running a gauntlet of high ticket prices and lousy, take-it-or-leave-it service. In general, we are a rich country with a surprisingly impoverished and incoherent transportation system.

Much of this would change if we recognized government’s central role in the architecture of our lives. Once this is accepted, arguments about the size of government become less ideological ones and more practical ones. Whether government or private enterprise performs a task becomes a question of efficiency. It is often beneficial to limit the scope and role of government, but this does not change government’s essential relationship to our lives.

The Stock Transfer Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back?

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall

May 2003

It sounds too good to be true. At a time when New York City and state are billions of dollars in the red, they could raise that and possibly more by reinstating a tax that is mostly paid by people living outside the state and country.

It’s called the Stock Transfer Tax. Until 1981, the state had one, and the city got the revenue.

Until it was phased out, it was raising $300 million a year for the city. Technically, it is still in place, only the proceeds are instantly rebated to the buyer of a stock. Now some people, including an Albany legislator, are considering bringing it back in a new form.

A lot has happened since 1981. The number of purchases on the stock market has grown exponentially. If the same tax were in place now, it would raise an amazing $11 billion in 2004, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office, which recently studied the issue.

Just how does this lucrative tax work? It’s a bit hard to understand, in this age of supposedly landless and nationless capital. But, even though shares of IBM or Apple may be bought by someone in Peru or Peoria, transactions still go through the New York or American stock exchanges, which are located in New York City, if the stock is listed through those houses. The buyer pays the relatively tiny tax, not the brokerage house. The old tax was set on a sliding scale, rising up to 5 cents per share, to a maximum of $350 per transaction. No one has suggested re-instating it at the old level, in part because the various fees that are associated with stock trading have all declined.

New York State Assemblyman Ronald Tocci of Westchester County has suggested reinstating it on a sliding scale, up to a penny per share. The Fiscal Policy Institute ran a scenario study of a half penny per share, with a $35 cap. The IBO, in its studies, put it at half the old rate, or approximately 2.5 cents per share on a sliding scale.

“I see it as a possible, viable alternative to a lot of other unpopular taxes,” Tocci said in an interview from Albany.

New York State first implemented the tax in 1907. In 1965, according to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, which has studied the issue, the State agreed to give all the revenues to the City in exchange for the City giving up the revenue from a penny of its sales tax. In 1975, during the City’s budget crisis, the securities industry agreed to a 25 percent surcharge. And in 1979, in part because of lobbying by the industry, Gov. Carey agreed to phase it out.

“A good tax is one where the base is very broad, and the rates are very low,” Mauro said.

“Economists agree that all taxes have economic consequences. So to have the least interference, you should have the base very broad and the rates very low.” “It’s intriguing,” said Ed Cupoli, chief economist of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee in Albany. “But the legislature would be reluctant to do anything negative to the securities industry.” In theory, the tax raises enormous sums of money at a miniscule rate of taxation, which, not incidentally, is paid by people mostly living elsewhere.

For example, if a trader in South Dakota bought 100 shares of IBM for $80 a share, the current cost would be $8,000. A penny per share stock transfer tax, depending on the sliding scale, would add at most $1 to this transaction, or 1/8000 of the total cost. For a lower-priced stock, the fee would be lower because the tax would be lower. If someone bought 1000 shares, or $80,000 worth, the fee would be capped, perhaps at $35.

Such a tax would not be burdensome on any one individual. But because millions of shares of stocks are sold daily, it would generate enormous sums of money very quickly.

If this tax can generate so much money so easily, why aren’t our competitors doing it?

They are. In fact, most other stock exchanges have a transfer tax in place, and often at considerably higher rates. Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and others have such a tax, all at higher rates than what is being proposed here, according to J.W. Mason, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an article in City Limits Magazine in October 2002 (“Big Idea: Tax the Street”, www.citylimits.org.).

London, often said to be one of New York’s principal competitors, taxes stock sales at 0.5 percent of the price of a stock. This rate is many times higher than the New York tax. In the case of the 100 shares of IBM above, this would be $40, instead of $1.

If Tocci’s plan of a penny per share were put in place, it would probably raise more than $2 billion a year. If split between the city and state, this would be a significant source of new revenue for both.

There is a downside though. The worry is that if such a tax were reinstated, then the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange, the principal entities affected, would leave town to avoid it. If the traders traded in New Jersey, their customers would pay no tax.

Tocci and others argue that the stock exchanges would be unlikely to leave town to avoid a tiny tax that they themselves don’t even pay. Some of the other remedies being considered, such as a surcharge on the income tax of wealthy taxpayers, would hit their personal pocketbooks much more directly, Tocci said.

But others in the banking and budgeting business have been more critical.

“I think it’s dead on arrival in Albany,” said Rae Rosen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank. “An industry-specific tax might on balance do more harm than good, particularly for an industry that has the ability to move operations out of the city.” The tone of the limited IBO analysis is pessimistic. The IBO examined the issue as part of a larger report, “Budget Options for New York City,” (www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/). The section on the Stock Transfer Tax says: “The proposed STT half-restoration could reduce overall private sector employment in the city by as much as 80,000 and lower receipts from other city taxes by close to $650 million.” David Belkin, Senior Economist at IBO, says that there has been a general trend against such taxes.

“The industry people say the exchange will collapse,” Belkin said. “But even just assuming some decline, that in and of itself has an impact.

London and Hong Kong have one. But there is more competitive pressure. There is a big fight going on in London over their tax. The tax is worth considering. For one thing, other more onerous taxes raise relatively small amounts of money. In the IBO’s study, “Budget Options for New York City,” (http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/), controversial measures, such as a Luxury Apartment Rental Tax, would raise only an estimated $27 million a year. Other taxes, such as restoring the commuter tax, would raise only about $500 million, or far less than most versions of the stock transfer tax.

One indication that the tax could work is that there already is one in place. It’s what funds the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Congress recently scheduled the tax to decrease in rate over the next few years, it now raises more than $2 billion a year. About $350 million of that goes to fund the SEC. The rest goes into the US Treasury.

Tocci and Mauro suggest one way to make the tax palatable to The Street is to give them some direct benefit. Some of the money could pay for a new stock exchange building, or for industry promotion. It should be remembered that in the 1970s, the industry agreed to a surcharge to help solve the city’s budget problems.

“It has to be part of a community effort, it has to be part of saving New York,” Mauro said.

“Doing this at a very low rate and raising money from all over the world would be better than raising taxes that would come directly from the New York economy.”

–First published in Spotlight on the Region, the bi-weekly newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

Whether you walk, drive or bicycle on your daily rounds, are you more in danger of getting killed from a bumper of a car or a bullet from a gun? It depends on where you live, although the stats suggest that overall, the mean metal of a car is more dangerous than that from a gun, simply because speeding cars are so much more prevalent than speeding bullets.

The New York Daily News started out this somewhat morbid train of thought of mine with its news series this month examining pedestrians killed by vehicles. The series noted that from 2000 to 2002, 580 pedestrians were killed. The news campaign, entitled Save a Life, Change the Law, is an excellent example of advocacy journalism. It informs the reader of a fact — a lot of people on foot are killed by cars — and then forcefully presents a possible remedy, in this case, making it easier to charge drivers with criminal penalties if they kill a pedestrian. If more drivers were charged with criminal penalties for reckless behavior, drivers might think twice before speeding through an intersection.

The good news is that both the murder rate and the killing of pedestrians by vehicles have been steadily dropping over the last decade. In 1990, 365 pedestrians were killed and an amazing 2,606 people were murdered. In 2002, only 195 pedestrians were killed and only 575 people were murdered. If the murder rate keeps up its swift descent, walking across a dangerous intersection will be riskier than walking through a bad neighborhood.

Eric Monkkonen, an urban historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies both crime and urban planning. He is the author of Murder in New York City (UCLA press 2001), and America Becomes Urban, (UCLA 1988). Both are excellent. He said New York City’s murder rate has always gone up and down over the centuries, but was unusually high in the last generation.

“New York has always been safer than other American cities, so the crime rate could go even lower.” Monkkonen said from his office in California. “The question is how to get it there. I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a simple answer.” Moving back to pedestrian deaths, Transportation Alternatives, in several excellent recent reports available at its web site www.transalt.org, reported that the number of pedestrians has continued to drop in 2003, with only 102 pedestrians killed in the first nine months of the year. It appears we are heading for a record breaking year in safety. T.A. credits the transportation department with a series of traffic calming measures that have significantly made things safer for pedestrians.

But only if you are satisfied with not dying.

Transportation Alternatives also reports that in 2002, 15,000 pedestrians and 4000 cyclists were injured, about the same as in past years. Also in 2002, 16 cyclists were killed, a rate that has been pretty consistent for the past decade.

How do we fare if we move from the urban streets of New York City to the more suburban ones of New Jersey? Not so well, at least if we are walking or driving.

Drivers in the Garden State killed 184 pedestrians last year, an alarming 37 percent increase, it was reported recently. Pedestrian deaths in New Jersey had been dropping, and the increase is so large that it begs some specific explanation. New York has 8 million people; New Jersey has about 8.4 million.

Given the similar populations and the similar pedestrian death rates — 184 in New Jersey versus 198 in New York City — seems evidence that it’s more dangerous to walk in New Jersey, simply because so many more people walk regularly in New York City.

It’s not only more dangerous to walk, it’s more dangerous to drive. In 2001, New Jersey had 747 traffic fatalities, at least double the number of those in New York City.

This statistic matches with the work of William Lucy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia, who made headlines consistently in the 1990s with his studies showing one was more at risk living in a traffic ridden suburb than a crime ridden inner city. Several of his studies showed that a prosperous Northern Virginian or Richmond suburb was less safe to live in than Washington DC or Richmond, which then vied for the highest murder rates in the land. The reason was surprising but obvious from the data.

Speeding cars killed a lot more people in the suburbs than they did in the inner city, where the cars tended to travel more slowly and accidents tended not to be fatal.

Here in the Tri State Region, it would be nice to have the best of all worlds. If we make it safe and most of all pleasant to walk and bicycle in the city or suburb, we will have safer and more pleasant communities all around.

–Alex Marshall, an Independent Journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

I'm an independent journalist in New York City. My articles, books and talks are on this site.

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The Master Hand

The Stock Transfer Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back?

By Alex Marshall

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat