When gasoline is $10 a gallon, you'll love this idea
June 9, 2008Here's an idea to give the local Sultans of Sprawl a well-deserved case of indigestion, to say nothing of acne, athlete's foot and gout: Maybe San Antonio should require all new subdivisions (above some small minimum size) to meet the standards of the LEED-ND (neighborhood developments) rating system.
LEED refers to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a U.S. Green Building Council rating system for energy efficiency, use of recycled materials, etc., in new buildings. LEED-ND, hatched jointly with the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council, extends green thinking beyond individual buildings and lots to the design of whole new neighborhoods. For good reason: No matter how green a house might be, it's still degrading the environment, wasting natural resources and contributing to global warming if the only way to go from there to work, school, shopping or recreation is to drive, or if substantial new public infrastructure has to be built to service it, or if the development it's a part of threatens water resources or agricultural land. In general, LEED-ND encourages compact, walkable, transit-friendly, mixed-use, mixed-income development.
In the recently concluded pilot program, LEED-ND prerequisites relating to location included a range of options, but sprawl as we know it was not one of them. Gated subivisions were verboten. (Hallelujah!) The post-pilot standards are expected to be released next year.
You can learn all about LEED-ND on the U.S. Green Building Council's web site.
Would a LEED-ND requirement be possible in San Antonio? A year ago, no way. Today, with gasoline closing in on $4 a gallon, the idea could start to gain significant support. And a year from now, when gasoline is $6 a gallon? Or $10 a gallon? Those who like the culture of sprawl -- a lot of folks do -- might realize they can't afford it. And even the Sultans of Sprawl might realize that they'll go broke if they keep regurgitating their development plans from 1970.
Before long -- probably within five years -- something like LEED-ND standards are going to be mandated by the federal government in order to address critical energy shortages and climate change. It'll be a matter of national survival. The cities that will be in the best position to cope with -- maybe even profit from -- that seismic shift are the one that adapt early. Shouldn't San Antonio be in that group?
In a rut in Main Plaza
May 1, 2008This being San Antonio, city officials staged the dedication and ain't-it-grand opening for the renovated Main Plaza back on April 13, even though the project was then -- and is still -- several weeks from completion. Thus a full and fair evaluation of the design and its execution isn't possible yet.
One thing is clear, however: The new Main Plaza is not friendly to people in wheelchairs. The space has been equipped with lots of movable chairs and tables, but they've all been placed on areas of crushed stone. Yesterday afternoon I observed an elderly gentleman trying to drive his motorized wheelchair on the soft surface so he and two friends could sit and chat in the shade. His wheels just made a deeper and deeper rut, and he finally gave up. His companions had to stand.
Unlike the $5 million worth of "interactive" fountains that turned out to be inactive, this problem is easily solved. Someone with the city just needs to have enough sense to move some of the chairs and tables to the edge of the crushed-stone area, where it meets solid stone paving. That way, a wheelchair could pull up to a table on one side. (Probably five or six tables would have to be moved, to make sure that at least two of them are in shade at any time of day.)
I pointed that out to one of three Centro San Antonio "Amigos" who were languidly picking up litter around the plaza. He told me the men were welcome to move chairs themselves. That was awfully kind of him. The tables, he noted, take two people to move. They're very heavy, to prevent theft. It did not occur to him to grab one of his colleagues and offer to arrange appropriate seating for the three men, despite my strong hint and even though none of the "Amigos" appeared to be overworked. Maybe our "Amigos" need to learn something about hospitalidad.
Oh, by the way, the man in charge of the "Amigos" for the Downtown Alliance is Bernie Cantu. If you spend much time downtown, you're likely to see him. In his wheelchair.
Tempest over River North
April 18, 2008
To give credit where due, the leaders of the newly organized San Antonio River North Improvement Assn. have not claimed that the River North Master Plan will cause cancer or poison the milk of little children. But one can't predict what might be said at the next meeting.
A sizable gathering of property owners stood among the Cadillacs in the Cavender showroom on Broadway on April 17 and heard a litany of complaints against the plan and the process that produced it. A few points were well taken, but much of what was said by the organizers was disinformation, sometimes slopping over into egregious fear-mongering. One fellow, a full-of-himself attorney who ought to have known better, asserted that if the owner of an existing business, of a kind not allowed by the plan, so much as "puts up a new ceiling panel," he will be "deemed non-compliant." What rubbish. (An exasperated Beth Bender Wells, president of a design firm in River North and one of several people at the meeting who demanded some honesty from the organizers, corrected him on the facts of non-conforming rights.)
Several organizers lodged the bizarre complaint that the master plan's proposed form-based code and regulating plan would reduce the development potential, and thus the financial value, of River North property. The opposite is the case. Most River North property now is zoned industrial, with much tighter restrictions than those contemplated by the River North Master Plan. It turned out what the organizers meant was that the master plan wouldn't raise the value of their property as much as the nearly-anything-goes Downtown zoning designation would, if City Council would be stupid enough to grant it. In other words, if you give me $10 out of the blue, you're harming me because you didn't give me $20.
To judge from comments made by attendees, the most common concern of property owners has to do with the plan's height limits. I'll give partial support to their position. As I wrote in response to a question from one River North property owner -- not associated with the River North Improvement Assn. -- I believe that the most important urban design consideration is what happens at street level and one or two stories above. If the sidewalks on all four sides of a block are animated with visible retail, restaurants, offices, galleries, light industry and other productive human activity, and if there's a good rhythm of facade articulation, preferably including balconies, then I don't much care about vertical scale, except in certain specific contexts. One such context is the area that includes a number of 19th-century Irish Flats buildings, some restored, some not. Tall buildings should not be allowed to crowd those historic resources. But I don't think Broadway would be harmed by a few tall towers, if their street frontages are properly designed -- that's part of what a form-based code is meant to guarantee -- and if transportation needs can be met without overloading the area with urbanistically inert parking garages. (That second "if" is a big one.)
One of the stranger complaints by the new group's organizers is that the planning process should have been initiated and managed by the city, and thus fully open to public participation, rather than by the private non-profit Downtown Community Development Corp., a creature of the Downtown Alliance. The group is right to want greater access to the process, but it has taken aim at the wrong target.
As managed by the CDC, the design charrette that produced the initial draft of the plan was entirely open to public view and participation. The consultant team, led by Moule & Polyzoides of Pasadena, Calif., was highly responsive to ideas and criticism from all comers, though not all were satisfied with the results. In contrast, the subsequent process of city staff review and redrafting has been mostly opaque -- as is nearly always the case with the city's internal reviews of planning documents. A few changes from the January draft have been posted on the city's Web site, but without explanation of how and why those changes came to be. One such change is highly troubling: The section setting forth objectives for affordable housing and policies to achieve it has been eliminated. That's a very bad sign.
The city needs to find a way to let the public watch as the sausage is made, and no part of the plan should be adopted without a round of serious public hearings, with real opportunities to effect further change.
Feast from the Food Bank
March 30, 2008
I mean no disrespect to the expert speakers at the Transportation Choices Forum on March 28, but the best part of the event was lunch -- catered by the Culinary Arts Program of the San Antonio Food Bank. The barbecued brisket was outstanding, but even more impressive were the intelligently seasoned potato salad and beans, both of which rose far above the generic norm. Great work!
Paris and Vienna?
March 20, 2008
An Austin American-Statesman reader, Ricardo Acevedo, posted the following comment on statesman.com, March 19:
On Friday evening, the 21st at The Vicotry Grill and Sunday afternoon, the 23rd at the Hyde Park Theatre, Spike Galespie and a troupe of mostly women will perform “THE DICK MONOLOUGES”
Why “Dick” and not “P***s” as like “V****a Monologues”
I see this as retro-feminist sexism… I thought we’d moved past this crap people… I find this simular to subtle racism. A rising tide should raise all ships. Progressive modern people should be past oppressing someone else for their own empowerment.
I mean hell, there weren’t any guys doing the “V****a Monologues” I mean what do guys really know about “Vaginas”…? They don’t have one!
And pardon my assumption, this being 2008 and all, but I’m guessing none of these women have a “P***s”….
But Ric, we'll always have P***s ....
World-class groaner
March 6, 2008
I'll suspend judgment of "Luminaria," Mayor Phil Hardberger's March 15 showcase of local visual and performing arts, until it happens.
I can't, however, suspend judgment on the botched syntax, barbaric style and hick-town grandiloquence of the language its organizers use to promote it. From the Luminaria Web site:
"Luminaria is the first annual
all day and evening celebration of San
Antonio premiere artists and art organizations giving citizens of the
community a chance to experience the city’s diverse cultures through
observing and participating in our world-class artistic heritage.
Through visual, performing, multi-media, theatre, dance, music and
other artistic forms, audiences will be engaged throughout San Antonio
in a free, world-class celebration of the arts."
Apart from the gangly clunkiness of the writing, you will note that
"world-class" makes two appearances in this introductory paragraph. I
will concede the likelihood that some small fraction of the talent to
be exhibited during "Luminaria" has earned favorable notice far beyond
the borders of Bexar County, or is worthy of being so noticed. But to
describe our whole "artistic heritage" as "world-class" is patent
nonsense, and whether the celebration will be "world-class" is yet to
be determined. Anyway, only podunk cities call themselves
"world-class." I have a hypothesis about the use of "world-class" by city officials. If we're already "world-class," we don't need to invest the time, effort, thought and money it takes to get that way.
Then again, maybe "world-class" is sort of like "large olives." By that reasoning, if San Antonio is world-class, then Austin must be supernova-class. Houston is galaxy-class. And New York is billions-and-billions-of-galaxies-class. The Luminaria self-promotion continues:
"Luminaria is intended to be a cohesive celebration of the arts through a creative atmosphere showcasing San Antonio’s diverse artistic community.
"An artist-driven celebration of the arts, Luminaria is an unprecedented collaboration of over 40 non-profit organizations that will come together for 1 day to celebrate the dynamic vitality of San Antonio’s creative spirit."
The "world-class" quota having been met in the first paragraph, the writer dives into the "creative" quota. Never mind that "creative atmosphere showcasing" is gibberish, and "dynamic vitality of etc." is fatuous, and "artist-driven" is arguably contrary to fact. But wait! There's more!
"Based on the success of other international celebrations such as Nuit Blanche in Paris and Noche Blanca in Madrid, no other city in Texas has attempted to coordinate continuous artistic, educational and innovative programming for a city-wide arts celebration. To further highlight the name of this event, the traditional role of the luminaria is a clever small light that conjures up creative ideas which inspires waves of innovation."
Aha! The third "creative" shoe drops. The first sentence is syntactically challenged, and the second a complete mess. Was it translated by Google from the Latvian? But why just garden-variety "waves of innovation"? Shouldn't they be "waves of world-class innovation"?
The language we use to describe things is a map of the way we think about those things. A random grunting of gee-whiz adjectives does not indicate thought. Even if San Antonio's arts product is not altogether "world-class," it deserves better than this.
Prescient
January 22, 2008
Remember that big New York bank's "Live richly" ad campaign from a few years ago? The ad agency Fallon Worldwide launched the campaign for Citigroup's Global Consumer Group in January 2001. The simple all-text messages, ubiquitous for several years on the streets of New York and other major Citi markets, elaborated on the unbankerly theme that money isn't everything.
Cynics may have suspected that, at the same time, Citi execs overlooking Park Avenue were singing "The Best Things in Life Are Fees," but the messages on the ground did seem to contribute to the general wave of caring and friendliness that swept New York for a year or two after Sept. 11, 2001.
Last May, Citi changed course with a new theme, "Let's get it done." As in "You can stick a fork in it," apparently. Last week Citi reported it had taken an $18.1 billion write-down in the fourth quarter of 2007, thanks mostly to sub-prime mortgage exposure. And the stock market's plunge suggests that investors would have been wise to interpret some of the old "Live richly" sentiments literally. Like, "The best blue chips to buy are the ones you dip in salsa."
Big thud
January 13, 2008
Americans who think have been wringing their hands of late over the extinction of public intellectuals, the shallowness of public discourse and assorted other signs of a culture that is increasingly inhospitable to reason, inquiry and cogency. Now comes bigthink.com claiming to remedy the situation, but falling flat on its face.
At the core of the site is a library of talking-head video interviews with "experts," who supposedly say thoughtful things about important subjects, semi-organized by "meta" and "physical" categories. (Get it?) The site's users are invited to respond, or to submit their own ideas and questions for discussion. Users also are invited to "rate" ideas, so that the most popular ones rise to the top. Just like on "American Idol."
The whole thing is a disaster. The "experts" -- a potentially promising roster that includes the likes of Anna Deavere Smith, Calvin Trillin and Stephen Breyer -- might have something interesting to say. Alas, they don't say it on bigthink.com, probably because the interviewers haven't asked interesting questions. (The questions are generally excised from the videos.)
The site is poorly designed, ill-focused both graphically and conceptually. To judge from the paucity of responses, users are few.
The site's creators, Victoria R.M. Brown and Peter Hopkin, have evidently put a great deal of passion, time and effort into bigthink.com, and probably a lot of money. A little thought would have been nice.
Urban parks: A lot, or not?
January 9, 2008
During a Jan. 8 public presentation of the latest version of the River North master plan, chief planner Stefanos Polyzoides said that San Antonio has "more urban parks in your downtown than any other city I can think of." The comment drew a murmur -- perhaps a groan -- of protest from the locals filling the Providence High School cafeteria.
Polyzoides might have overstated the case, but the fact remains that River North and its environs are exceptionally well equipped with urban park space. Much of it is the legacy of a spate of park acquisitions and donations between 1870 (the block-square Travis Park) and 1881 (the block-square Maverick Park). In between came the twin-block greens of Crockett Park (a few blocks north of River North) and Madison Square. At downtown's western edge, a former Catholic cemetery was designated Milam Park in 1883. Add the plazas from the Spanish Colonial period, modern additions such as HemisFair Park and Columbus Park, the River Walk and river improvements now under construction to the north and south, and almost any location in the downtown core and River North is within an easy stroll of a public urban oasis.
Why, then, the perception of inadequacy? I can think of three reasons:
• Urban parks gain their
sense of purpose from surrounding urban development. But the blocks
surrounding most of the 19th-century parks are not sufficiently
occupied, and they're especially lacking in high-density housing.
The
blocks around Maverick Park (shown at left), Madison Square and
Crockett Park are particularly gap-toothed, providing too few users for
these parks and an inadequate sense of place. Even Travis Park, at the
very center of downtown, has a parking lot filling most of the
block-front to its east. The Vistana apartments, a high-rise
block-front now under construction immediately east of Milam Park,
serves as a model for what ought to be happening around the other
downtown parks. • Some of the parks are not well designed or cared for. Maverick Park is depressing despite its rather nice rustic pavilion. Milam Park has too much furniture. Crockett Park and Madison Square have seen improvement in recent years, but both still function more as places to pass through than as places that welcome an extended visit.
• The low scale and the outright gaps in the urban fabric between the parks on the north end (Crockett, Maverick and Madison) make them seem farther apart than they really are. I haven't seen research to support this claim, but my personal experience suggests that perceptual walking distance is reduced by a continuous building line with active uses and substantial vertical scale (more than two stories) along the sidewalk. In San Antonio's hot climate, street trees help, too. A shady quarter-mile walk past storefronts and apartment buildings is a stroll; a quarter-mile walk in the blazing sun past parking lots and loading docks is a schlep.
If the River North master plan works as intended, the gaps will eventually fill in, the scale will rise, and activity will increase on the sidewalks -- and the richness of downtown's 19th-century parks legacy should become more apparent.
Mike
Greenberg
