Civilis Consultants — Michele Reeves – Rethinking Urban Places

Traffic Engineering Writ Sexy

by Michele Reeves on November 7, 2010

Broach the subject of transportation planning and traffic engineering with nearly anyone and they, anticipating a barrage of boring facts and geeky analysis, will hastily prepare for a deep mental hibernation.

Well, I’m here to tell you that discussions about traffic can be quite engaging! See for yourself in this wonderful video of a presentation given by Ian Lockwood recently in Portland, posted by Metro.

One of the points Ian makes in his talk is illustrated by this drawing of Wall Street circa 1867: streets were not always places that we evaluated solely based on throughput of vehicles!!

The grid was a place of infinite exchanges, sights, smells, and sounds — business was conducted, kids played, you met your neighbor, you grabbed a coffee, food was cooked… . In modern times, many cities have ceded control of their streets, some of their most valuable real estate when it comes to making places compelling and interesting, and turned them over to traffic engineers. Complex computer modeling tools are then used to figure out how to move cars efficiently through town. These models tell us nothing about livability, or foot traffic, or retail viability, or downtown decay…

A good example of the impact that streets can have on a downtown is pictured below. Eugene, during the “urban renewal” heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, ripped out many of their older buildings and then installed wide one-way streets, creating a ring of pavement encircling their downtown, effectively routing people around the gem of a core that still exists near the intersection of their historic main streets.

Most small- to mid-size cities have no idea the impact that uni-directional traffic can have on their downtown cores. These streets are not designed to take you “to” a place, they are designed to route you “through” a place. For the 10% to 20% gain in throughput, a city gets a confusing downtown grid that is difficult to navigate for anyone who is not on an established route. Drivers are not encouraged to stop, experience, and look around, causing retail decline. Cars travel faster, creating an environment that doesn’t encourage pedestrianism, which causes retail decline. And, these one-way roads foster architectural form that does not contribute to effective placemaking, causing retail decline.

It is no surprise then, that the vast majority of Portland’s successful commercial corridors are on two-way streets in neighborhoods with architectural form and density that was constructed in the streetcar era.

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The Retail Genius of Trader Joe’s

by Michele Reeves on November 2, 2010

During my brokerage days, most of the neighborhoods in which I worked gave me this very clear message (with wide stakeholder agreement):

“WE DON’T WANT ANY NATIONAL CHAINS.”

Okay, check. Then, I would ask them what they did want, and with a completely straight face, they would vehemently answer:

“TRADER JOE’S.”

That wasn’t confusing! But, Trader Joe’s is a great example of a retailer with incredible caché, even amongst chain-haters.

These savvy retailers keep operating costs low by moving into existing buildings, when possible. They don’t spend a fortune on fancy buildouts and expensive merchandising. They hew to their brand relentlessly. They don’t expand willy nilly. I have always marveled at their ability to turn what is essentially a high-end convenience store into something palatable to educated foodies!

Given that, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the founder of Trader Joe’s came from a convenience store background, which I discovered in this engaging article about the grocer in Fortune magazine.

There are many interesting tidbits in this must-read about the privately held German company, like the fact that it is a privately held German company! I was particularly impressed with examples of how Trader Joe’s focuses on the customer:

A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don’t have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren’t told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what’s best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he’ll walk you over instead of just saying “aisle five.” Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try.

Fortune also dishes some dirt on who Trader Joe’s suppliers are, including busting the myth that products are all sourced from small, local, organic enterprises.

Some of that may be because Trader Joe’s business tactics are often very much at odds with its image as the funky shop around the corner that sources its wares from local farms and food artisans. Sometimes it does, but big, well-known companies also make many of Trader Joe’s products. Those Trader Joe’s pita chips? Made by Stacy’s, a division of PepsiCo’s (PEP, Fortune 500) Frito-Lay. On the East Coast much of its yogurt is supplied by Danone’s Stonyfield Farm. And finicky foodies probably don’t like to think about how Trader Joe’s scale enables the chain to sell a pound of organic lemons for $2.

In the vein of exploring supply chains, I would have liked to know more about their sourcing procedures, and the subsequent impact of those procedures on smaller vendors, because the store’s image is strongly tied to products that are purported to be artisanal. Do they sign contracts with firm commitments to orders, or do they ask small businesses to expand with only “intents to purchase?” Grocers such as Trader Joe’s carry a big stick, and I am curious to know if they wield that stick with local businesses, and if so, how often?

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Easy to Build, Hard to Reuse

by Michele Reeves on October 28, 2010

This faux downtown lifestyle center in Tigard, Oregon, called Bridgeport Village, has created a riotous cacophony of demand from various suburban communities throughout the Portland Metro region: “Hey, we want one of those malls in our town!!”

Aside from the fact that we are not going to see US consumer buying power expand any time soon, and aside from the fact that many of these places have real historic downtowns that are languishing and could use some love, the reality is that the proliferation of structures that cannot be adaptively reused easily is creating future headaches for property owners, city government, and the neighborhoods that surround them.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine why, in this economic climate, a city would pursue the construction of a large lifestyle center, since it would merely shift existing retailers from older malls or big box locations into these sexy new buildings, leaving difficult-to fill space behind. So, what do you do with dying malls and empty big box locations?

Below, Ellen Dunham-Jones shares a host of interesting suburban adaptive reuse projects based on her book: Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. She has uncovered some very innovate approaches throughout the country, but I fear our supply of dying malls is going to far outstrip our ability to fill them.

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Tacoma, I Hardly Knew Ya

by Michele Reeves on October 13, 2010

“Yowza, at some point in the past, this city was giving Seattle a run for its money,” I thought to myself on a recent visit to Tacoma, a city I’ve been to, or through, a zillion times, but have never experienced as a tourist.

This impression arose after perusing the historic industrial district that has been renovated into the University of Washington, Tacoma. All you have to do is look at the 90 foot rotunda (pictured to the left) of the historic Union Station (originally a railroad station, now a Federal courthouse) to realize that this was a very important city on the West coast at the end of the 19th century.

After wandering around the city, I felt the need to do some historical digging when I returned to my hotel room. During said perusal, I learned that Tacoma was the envy of Seattle and Portland in 1873, when it won the race to become the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad (NP), which was chartered by Congress in 1864, and broke ground in Minnesota in 1870.

It wouldn’t be until the summer of 1888 though, before the NP’s lines were uninterrupted from the shores of Lake Superior to the Puget Sound, all thanks to the completion of the Stampede Tunnel through the Cascades.

The latter half of the 19th and early 20th century were times of intense political jockeying in Portland and Seattle, with both cities laboring to ensure that they were not left out in the race to be connected to the railroad. For Portland, this was especially problematic due to the plethora of nearby rivers. In 1883, a gigantic rail ferry was put into service, over 300 feet long and 42 feet wide, that could carry the trains across the Columbia River and connect the rail lines here with the service to the north. The ferry was the second largest in the world and had three parallel tracks that could carry all types of train cars, including engines. Rail service between Oregon and the Puget Sound continued in this manner until a permanent bridge was erected across the wild Columbia. The NP Columbia River Bridge, like the Stampede Tunnel, was finished in the summer of 1888.

The gorgeous train depot in Tacoma, Union Station, opened its doors in 1911 and was designed by Reed and Stem, the architects of Grand Central Station. In my opinion, it is far grander than either Portland’s or Seattle’s train stations.

More happy discoveries about Tacoma:

There is some real drama borne from the mix of older and newer architectural form.
They have a 1.6 mile streetcar/light rail system that is free and runs commuters from transportation hubs and parking to downtown.
Their historic buildings throughout the central core are being upgraded and renovated, making for some pretty compelling places.

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Urbanism, Kids, and the American Dream

by Michele Reeves on October 3, 2010

The American middle class paradigm is this: once you have children, you move to the suburbs and obtain a three bedroom house, a yard, the dog, two kids, and a commute.

I am very curious to see what happens to the younger dual-income-no-kids set that has flocked to our urban cores when … well, when they have some tykes of their own.

Will these middle class urbanites remain in high-rise/mid-rise living units? Will smaller spaces encourage fewer children per household? Will American middle class children return to sharing rooms with their siblings.

What I see now in Portland’s urban core is a few more families than I did before the recession. In my anecdotal observations, I have noted two trends: 1) apartments with younger partners and a single baby; and, 2) slightly older, divorced single-parent households with multiple children that have a wider age range.

I notice these things now because my family of four has gone from living in a residential neighborhood to an urban center, and it has been an interesting journey.

Beginning in 2007, we spent a year divesting ourselves of our yard maintenance implements, cars, a business, a house, and an embarrassingly big garage sale full of prized personal possessions.

Then we moved to Buenos Aires for 14 months, during which time we lived in four high-rise apartments. In an attempt to get closer to our daughters’ school, we stepped down from living quarters with about 1,600 square feet, to an apartment of roughly 950 square feet. I have to say, before we left on this trip, if you had told me that my little family of four could live, happily and relatively easily, in 950 SF without us killing each other — well, I would have been skeptical.

It turned out that my husband and I adored not owning a car and we enjoyed dense urban living with our kids. And, as our return to the US approached, the thought of living in a 3 bedroom house and filling it with stuff once again was very unappealing. Not to mention our distaste for living somewhere that required we have a vehicle.

So, we returned to Portland and started a grand experiment. We chose to rent a unit in a high-rise building with two bedrooms, so yes, my daughters are sharing a room. We chose our location so they could attend neighborhood schools on public transportation and/or the school bus. And, we use the plentiful selection of nearby Zipcars as our ancillary vehicle when public transportation, or our feet, don’t get us where we need to go.

Now, I can tell you that living without a car and not owning a house earn us a lot of strange looks on the soccer parent circuit. But, we don’t have to fix a dang thing when something in the apartment breaks, we don’t have to change the oil in our car, and it takes no time to straighten the place.

So far, so good.

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The Intangible Allure of the Streetcar

by Michele Reeves on October 1, 2010

The closest mode of public transportation to my place of residence is the Portland Streetcar.

The city, happily, is expanding the streetcar line across the Willamette River to the east side of the city, and due to this expansion, the existing line was shut down for a few weeks as they laid new track.

In lieu of my beloved streetcar, they pressed a city bus into service that followed almost the same route. I ride the bus frequently, and thought nothing of it…musing, “Bus, streetcar, what’s the difference?”

Boy, was I wrong!

The same people. The same stops. Nearly the same route. But, on a bus, it was a completely different experience. And, in an informal survey of the three other members of my family, they all felt the same way. The question was, “Why?” Was it the smoother ride of the streetcar? Was it the romance of riding the rails? None of us could really put our finger on it, but the question remained in the back of my mind.

When the the electric trolley resumed its laps around the west side of our fair city, I was still asking myself, why is this more special? More enjoyable? Just more!!

As an answer, I began circling around the concept of street activation and the dialog that exists in functioning places between the denizens of the streets, the sidewalks, and the surrounding buildings. The exchanges that make a place sing. And, I realized, that the streetcar travels slowly and has large windows, and somehow is able to become a part of that dialog, a piece of the conversation. While riding, you feel that you are IN the city, participating in that exchange.

In contrast, a bus really puts you ABOVE the city. It is a paradigm of the automobile culture. You are traveling more quickly. There is no interaction. You are not a part of a dialog. You are traveling through, or moving toward somewhere else…you are not, in the moment, a member of the community through which you are progressing.

(For an interesting read on streetcars and their history, check out this excerpt from Patrick Condon’s new book “Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World.”)

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Book Review: A Field Guide to Sprawl

by Michele Reeves on September 27, 2010

I picked up this book recently from the library to thumb through. It is a coffee table lark on sprawl, told primarily through the use of very effective aerial photos.

I had two major takeaways:

The first is how much things have changed in terms of the perception of the suburbs, and sprawl in general, since it was published just a few years ago in 2004. The advent of the economic crisis and the subsequent housing slump, which has been felt most heavily in the suburbs, has been a game changer. Add to that the shifting demographics of age and race and the tottering state of many retail strip centers and malls in our outlying metro areas, and you have a mix of conditions that makes it difficult to predict the future of many of these communities.

The second takeaway is to marvel at how very creative we are, as a people. I mean, it requires a tremendous capacity for imagination (and a complete lack of sense) to dream up this many ways to screw up land use so spectacularly!

Recently, Big Picture featured a great aerial photo essay on sprawl development in SW Florida that is similar to the photos found in this book. In this case though, it looks like Google Earth was employed to capture the images, instead of a photographer in an airplane!

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Expensive Eds

by Michele Reeves on September 24, 2010

A few months ago, I wrote this paragraph as a part of a report:

When considering the future of [a college], it is important to remember that just as cities have ebbed and flowed around institutions over the years, so too will the nature and idea of campus, learning, and classrooms ebb and flow. We have experienced a dramatic expansion of our institutes of higher learning in this country for the last 50 years, or longer. The question is, how sustainable is that growth? Weaving campus into the fabric of what surrounds it will not only allow [a college] to gracefully expand, but it will allow it to gracefully contract with maximum flexibility and minimum impact on the neighborhood, should that be needed.

I was shocked to learn during research for that paper that the largest employers in many American cities are universities and hospitals, or “eds and meds,” for short.

I am concerned that we have cities banking on the continued growth of the university industrial complex, just when there seems to be mounting evidence that the cost-to-benefit ratio of many degree programs does not making much sense these days. In other words, salary inflation has not kept pace with tuition inflation. On top of that, there is the Internet, a disruptive technology when it comes to information dissemination and learning. For instance, my kids take their Chinese lessons with a tutor…in Beijing, via Skype. It’s pretty hard not to believe that the times are going to be a’changing for degree programs soon.

Given my lack of faith in the continued rocket-like growth of American universities, I was interested to read this article from the Economist, which drew on the example of Detroit in its heyday to sound a cautionary note for our institutions of higher learning: Declining by degree.

One of the more interesting tidbits from the article were these numbers:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

(The photo above is Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1869)

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