Notes from CNU XVI
April 18, 2008It had been a while since I last attended a national conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Two changes struck me during CNU XVI in Austin.
First, the attendees seemed younger, on average, than those I recall from CNU VIII (2000) in Portland or CNU VII (1999) in Milwaukee. There were a lot of city staffers, architects, planners and urban advocates in their 20s and 30s -- much like the young knowledge workers in all fields that cities are increasingly trying to woo as residents and workers.
Second, I was struck by the frequency with which participants spoke of themselves and their fellows simply as "urbanists," dropping the "new."
Both of these shifts are positive. The youth wave verifies that the New Urbanism does not represent nostalgia for the horse-and-buggy days (a common accusation) but rather a fully contemporary yearning for the community, diversity, environmental responsibility and economic vitality that urban form at its best can deliver. The abbreviation of "New Urbanist" to just plain "urbanist" might reflect two concurrent trends of the past decade -- a broadening of the New Urbanist toolkit and range of applicability, and the rapidly spreading disillusionment with post-World War II drive-or-die sprawl and Edge City development patterns, even in their native habitat, leaving the New Urbanism as the only urbanism that matters in the United States.
In that connection, one of the most astonishing and gratifying occurrences in recent years is the proposed retrofit of Tyson's Corner, the Edge City mother ship, on New Urbanist lines to take advantage of a planned extension of the Washington D.C. Metro's Silver Line. (That proposed extension appears to be stalled at the moment, however.) The redesign was briefly outlined during a CNU XVI session on transit-oriented development (TOD), not a term that I had ever expected to hear uttered in the same sentence with "Tyson's Corner." But it was, illustrated with a master plan showing a grid of pedestrian-friendly streets and six TODs to be inserted into the existing formless mess.
During that same session, Austin City Council member Brewster McCrakcen outlined some of the challenges to the development of TODs -- among them, multiple property owners, neighborhood opposition to density, the differing (sometimes conflicting) interests of municipal governments and transit agencies, high construction costs, the difficulty of creating affordable housing .
McCracken offered Eight Commandments for TOD planners: 1. The public sector should create a catalyst project, such as Austin's 2nd Street mixed-use corridor, to demonstrate that TODs can be profitable. 2. Require an implementation plan, setting forth how parking and affordable housing will be financed, for example, at the same time as the TOD master plan. 3. Put a land-use authority in charge, not the transit authority. 4. Create a form-based code. 5. Put the pedestrian first. 6. Public dollars must pay for the infrastructure to support dense infill development. 7. The public sector should pay to build parking facilities, and profit from their revenues. 8. "Lead with your values."
A session on gentrification drew a standing-room-only crowd, albeit in a fairly small room. The moderator, the distinguished Austin photographer John Langmore, opened the session by showing a superb series of his images of people and their settings in East Austin, a neighborhood that originated from the forced displacement of Black and Latino residents from an area in what is now downtown. Long neglected by the city, but with the planned commuter line and a TOD in its future, East Austin now is attracting investment from developers and well-off house buyers. The poor and the neighborhood's sense of community, beautifully captured in Langmore's photographs, are in danger of displacement again.
Community organizer Juan Valadez acknowledged that some change has been positive. The area has gained new buildings and residents, better streetscapes, new restaurants. But, Valadez said, "In the last five years we have lost a lot of elderly, a lot of lower-income folks, because they can't afford to live there." Too much of the change has been driven by the pursuit of individual profit, not by a desire to improve the neighborhood for the benefit of its existing residents. "Change happens to us, it doesn't happen with us," Valadez said.
John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee and now the president of CNU, sought to downplay the importance of gentrification as an issue in at last some instances. It is a legitimate issue, he said, in cities such as San Francisco where property commands top dollar, but not in places like Detroit, where development proposals have been accused of gentrification even in areas that have long been cleared of buildings and depopulated. Where gentrification is a real concern, Norquist said, the solution is to provide ample affordable housing within the affected neighborhood.
Emily Taten, an Arizona State University professor who has studied the causes and effects of gentrification, challenged New Urbanists to look beyond design as an instrument to achieve economic diversity. "We've become very good at design of places. We need to embrace more the policy side, the less sexy side." She offered a long list of policy ideas -- among them, the creation of affordable housing land trusts, programs to help existing businesses take advantage of new markets, deferring tax increases for long-time homeowners, and eliminating policies that spur an influx of high-income residents.
Mike
Greenberg
