This is a fascinating, and controversy-laden topic. When I volunteered with a group of New Urbanists in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we discussed the idea at length. A cornerstone of the planning efforts was to essentially “regroup” into more defensible neighborhoods. It’s a nearly impossible task to pull off logistically, but makes eminent sense from a planning standpoint – build some successes, best utilize limited dollars and infrastructure, and create safe areas.

Gratz makes some interesting arguments in her piece, though I’m not sure they’re mutually exclusive from the efforts planned in other places. And, it’s always debatable how far you can get using New York City as an example to other parts of the country – it’s place in America is unique, and indeed the world. New Orleans, Detroit, Flint, Cleveland – these cities do not have the dynamic economy that New York has, nor the infrastructure (especially of transit). And yet, there’s no reason these places can’t regroup at a smaller scale, and in many ways look back to their origins as the article suggests. Of course, when the lower 9th and other older neighborhoods were established to begin with, they often weren’t competing with suburbia – a whole different animal…

The debate rages on . Your thoughts?

This week, my good friend John Anderson (as we like to call him – John the Bad) of Anderson Kim in Chico, CA pointed me to a new report from Arthur Nelson and ULI that puts some numbers to this phenomenon. There’s a lot to digest in this, but even just a read through the executive summary is astonishing. The report, titled “The New California Dream – How Demographic and Economic Trends may shape the Housing Market” focuses just on California but has lessons for the rest of the country. California by all accounts leads what happens in much of the rest of the country, so it’s incumbent on us to pay close attention.

One aspect that really jumped out at me is the study of supply/demand for single family “conventional” housing. The report asserts that by a careful study of existing and projected trends, California has excess supply of such houses IN 2035! Nearly 25 years from now, if no new single-family detached houses on medium/large lots are built, supply will STILL exceed demand. And, this is in one of the country’s faster-growing states.

Can you even imagine such a number in any other facet of consumer culture? What if we had more demand than supply of iPads 20 years from today?! Or 20+ years supply of french fries? Would we make any more of them, or seek to find other niches that need to be filled? The answer is obvious.

The report is interesting – here’s a link to it if you want to see for yourself. The short answer: more multifamily housing, more housing near transit, more housing in walkable neighborhoods. That’s not only what we’ve not been building enough of, but it’s what the future is demanding.

The flip side is that rules can also keep us unnecessarily bound to something artificial and without relevance. We establish rules for ourselves in one context, and then universally apply it to all areas of our life, keeping us locked into a very limited view of the world.

I’m continually confounded by how many rules are imposed on the worlds of urban planning and real estate. Even more interesting is just how sure of those rules some seem to be. Whether it comes from designers, lenders, engineers, appraisers etc. etc., we are confronted with a mind-boggling array of rules to try and make sense of our practice.

The discussion of some of these rules led to a blog-off about retailing and New Urbanism. I’m new to the world of blog-offs, so am jumping into this particular fray about retailing a bit belatedly. But, it’s an important topic, and like all bloggers, I like to throw in my two cents. For links to the other pieces in order, see the list at the end of this piece.

So many rules in the built environment have two fallacies – they are based on sprawl, which is the idea that everything will always be separate from everything else and linked by cars, AND they have a foundation in bad science to boot. The numbers we rely on are based on weak or (in some cases) non-existent research.

Donald Shoup pointed this out brilliantly a few years back with a short pamphlet titled “Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong,” which took to task the so-called science behind many assumptions of traffic engineering. In 6 pages, he directed a devastating attack at some of our cherished rules related to transportation. He’s followed this up of course with many other writings, helping us redefine how we look at transportation planning.

I mention this, because the retail blog-off discussion makes me think of the fallacies of traffic models, trip generation and everything related to traffic engineering. The discussion has resolved largely around the “rule” that 1,000 households are needed to support a corner store. It’s unfair to pick on this particular rule alone – there are dozens that are similar. And, I’m not disparaging all of the rules that Bob Gibbs writes and speaks about – many of these are very useful and indicative of a great deal of study of human nature.

But when it comes to picking numbers and using them for urban planning, I always get more than a little nervous. I know the numbers are averages, but seriously – consider the factors that influence the provision of retail:

• What’s the income of the people?
• What are their buying patterns?
• Where are they coming from?
• Are they generally sociable?
• Do they shop much on the Internet?
• What is the transportation infrastructure?
• Is the business a chain or family-owned? How is it financed?
• Are there other draws to the area, civic or commercial?
• How expensive are the buildings?
• Are they new or old buildings?

Whenever I get lost in a mental quandary like this, it helps me to try and look at real-world examples. Call me crazy, I like to look at precedent.

In this case, I thought I’d look at Slater, Missouri. I’m sure you’ve never heard of Slater. It’s a small town just to the east of where I went to high school in Marshall, Missouri. Slater is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. In 2000 numbers, it’s a town of 2,083 people nestled along state highway 240. That’s state highway, not US highway. For those of you travelling, that’s the road connecting Marshall and Moberly. Slater’s claim to fame is that for a brief time Steve McQueen lived there as a youth.

To get just a bit more familiar: Slater’s simple grid of streets is about ¾ mile by 1 ¼ mile effectively. The density is less than 1,500 people per square mile, the median age is 40, and the median household income is around $26,000. By comparison, the County median income is north of $38,000 and the state is just over $46,000. The county seat of Marshall is 13 miles away, with a population of 13,000. The entire county population is 23,756. Slater’s household size is 2.26, with just under 900 households in the city.

Aerial photo of Slater, MO

As you can see, there’s nothing terribly remarkable about Slater, which is exactly why I pick it to make my case. In the town itself, you’ll find a 3 block long main street that ends at the railroad, and blocks that are roughly 450 feet square. Some of the businesses in Slater include:

• Grocery store
• General store – mostly hardware
• Pizzeria
• Pharmacy
• Chiropractor
• Motel
• 2 Insurance agents
• Vet
• Bank
• Video store

Main Street in Slater, MO

Now, according to the rules of retail, this town of less than 1,000 households, of below-average income cannot even support a corner store.  And yet, while this is certainly not a thriving, picturesque example of Nolen-inspired urbanism, it still supports multiple businesses within a reasonable walking distance. Certainly a few customers come from the surrounding rural areas (although the vast majority gravitate toward the county seat of Marshall), and a few more come from the state highway passing by. But let’s be honest, those numbers are tiny.

At what point do we, as New Urbanists, toss out these rules that constrain us, much like we’ve done with conventional traffic engineering and conventional zoning? I would suggest that this desperate attempt at quantifying urbanism is a fallacy at its core – what we do is much more social science than applied science. Numbers are helpful at times, but they are all-too-often a straightjacket that provides little of real utility, and sometimes are downright misleading. Observing the world and human behavior, though – now that is something much more worthy of our time and study.

This is but one example – we have so much more to learn from. Whether it’s the countless towns across America like Slater, both thriving and not, or the older, historic neighborhoods of our larger cities, we have a bevy of walkable commerce we could be studying.

Instead, we spend our time finessing rules that are not urbanist in nature – they tell us virtually nothing about how people live in truly diverse, walkable neighborhoods. They tell us A LOT about how people live in suburbia, where everything is easily counted like so many beans.

We need a new practice for looking at urbnaism and retail, and it should start by looking at precedent. Let’s go back to the beginning. Remember the early days where we patterned our developments off of actual places? We can learn far more about retail by studying the good, the bad and the ugly of our precedents rather than by reading more literature from ULI.

Blog-Off Participants and Articles:

1. The Original Green, “The Necessity of Hope”

2. Placeshakers, “Retail: When it Bends the Rules and Breaks the Law”

3.  Street Trip, “BlogOff: Neighborhood Retail”

4.  Walkable DFW, “Retail BlogOff”

5. Kaid Benfield, “When shops and services are within walking distance, we walk more and drive less”

6.  Olson Planning, “Neighborhood Retail Dynamics”

7.  Chip Kaufman, “Neighborhood Retail”

8.  Steve Mouzon, “New Urbanism For All?”

I’ve no doubt that food quality plays a small role in this, as some of the piece argues. But the real truth is quite simple – we spend  far more time sitting on our butts, whether in our homes or in cars. While people in other countries walk regularly as a part of their daily routine, we routinely use a machine to get us from place to place. And why do we do this? Are we really any lazier than others? Of course not. We do so because our communities have been consciously designed for automobile travel, instead of true freedom of personal mobility. In most places, if you want to walk to the store, the park, the school or more, it is either impossible, inconvenient or uninteresting to do so. And so, we drive. This blog focuses on how we can change this facet of American life.

Link to the article and cool graphics below:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665769/infographic-of-the-day-americas-strange-attitude-towards-food

When we make such resolutions, we do so out of a desire to improve ourselves, not out of some sort of self-hatred. We do this by acknowledging our shortcomings, our failings, and looking for ways to improve.  Many times we fall short, but it’s an important effort in making sure we’re the best people we can be.

I believe the same should be true of cities, towns and even nations. By making a list of resolutions for the USA, it’s an acknowledgment that we have room to improve in many areas. In fact, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we would note that the US has room to improve in virtually all areas of life.

I think of America as similar to the 3^rd generation of a wealthy family. The first generation that makes the wealth generally is frugal, hard-working and smart. They then tend to spoil their kids with their new-found wealth, giving them what they didn’t have growing up. Sadly, in most cases what happens is that 2^nd generation spends the 1^st generation’s wealth, and tends to lack the work ethic or drive of their parents. Their kids, the 3^rd generation, proceeds to live off the fumes of the 1^st two generations, essentially living off the credit of the grandparents’ names.  At some point, the cycle ends, or starts over.

I see America through this lens. We spent a few decades building wealth and winning wars, earning a spot as top dog in the world economy and in prestige. Following that, we went on a gluttonous spending spree, building a sprawling infrastructure, an enormous military apparatus, and a social safety net. Unfortunately, we spent that wealth, and we are now in that 3^rd generation that is living off of the credit of the previous eras. No longer do we maintain the qualities that took us to the top.

We still have the biggest, baddest military in the world by far, but in most every other category we rank well below other modern, industrialized nations.  Whatever your measure – health, education, crime, infrastructure – we are consistently in the bottom tier of all modern countries.  The evidence is stark for anyone who is willing to see it.

Again, I’m not being negative for the sake of being negative. I like it here – I’m very happy to live in the US, even though it’s obvious through this blog that there are many ways in which I’d like us to collectively change. But, we do need a reality check.  An intervention. We simply are not “the greatest country in the world” in many important measures. We CAN be, but it’s time to knuckle down and get to work.

So, here’s some resolutions that I’m suggesting for us for 2012. I won’t try and solve the health care or education problems (at least today), but I can focus on our infrastructure, budget and quality of life issues. With each goal, I’ve suggested something that each of us can individually do.

Resolution: Own up to our addiction to oil, and get over it.

• For individuals: Start walking or biking to something you do every week, with the stretch goal of making that a daily trip
• For Presidential candidates: Let’s have one Presidential debate solely devoted to energy issues, with a real discussion of how we plan to get out of current mess, and the various trade-offs. Stop the pandering, and talk with us as if we were grown-ups.

Resolution: Start building real freedom of choice in our transportation infrastructure

• For individuals: Start experimenting in your travel patterns. Take a bus, a train, ride a bike, etc when you would otherwise drive. Do it once a month, or once a weekend. Demand drives change.
• For cities/towns/states:  Stop building new or expanding existing roads, anywhere. We can’t afford what we have, and need more other options regardless.
• For cities and towns: Do some real experimenting with public transit – try risky service and fare initiatives. Take a chance!
• For our federal government: The time for talk is over. Let’s get on with building a real network of trains around the US. There are many models to do this – let’s pick one and do it.

Resolution: Be more whimsical

• For individuals: Take small steps, do little things that add joy to your immediate living environment. Do something that will make people stop and smile.
• For cities/towns/states: Insist on designs that touch our human nature, not abstract creations that often repel. Public spaces and streets are supposed to be enjoyable, not off-putting
• For states/cities: Encourage more places to have liberal open-container laws, much like my new residence of Savannah, GA.

Resolution: Brainstorm some 21^stcentury solutions to renting. Those ownership models are so 5 years ago.

• For individuals: Treat your rental like a home – break down those myths that renters don’t care about their property
• For owners: Devise new models that give renters some kind of vested stake in their property.
• For financiers and federal regulators: Ditch the old financing models that make it difficult to finance and build multi-family housing or housing mixed with commercial uses.

Resolution: Focus on the simple and timeless

• For individuals: Insist on windows that open, shade in sunny areas, vegetables grown nearby and streets that you can walk along.
• For cities and towns: Reform your zoning and building codes so that simple, timeless solutions are easy.
• For neighborhoods/cities/towns: get together with people and plant some street trees

Resolution: Place simultaneous priorities on knowledge and fun

• For all of us: yes, I know this is a bit out of context, but is there anything more important than continuing to expand our minds? My hope is we all start to care more about the world around us, how we interact with it, and at the same time, how we can enjoy it and each other more.

Those are my suggestions for 2012. What are yours?