Inverted World

Pat calls it hanging like a bat.  He’d call me bat-girl, but he knows I’d probably kick his ass if he did.  Not that he’d be against that.  He’s been wanting me to kick his ass for the last four years.  But he also respects me, and he knows that the inversion table is not an exercise in frivolity.  I hurt.

I hurt all the time now.  It’s a culmination really, years of abuse combined with extreme trauma and a decade of general neglect.  Car accidents?  Check.  Motorcycle accident?  Check.  Competition kickboxing?  Check.  A decade of training horses?  Check.  Two decades of construction?  Check.  Assorted accidents in between?  Check, check. and check.  I have a running tally of the number of times I’ve lost consciousness.  It’s over 10.

I’m 38 and I should be in my prime.  This is when most women peak.  And I’m on the decline.  Hard.  It’s been practically free fall for the last year and while I know why, I don’t know how to stop the plunge.  What I do know is that everything hurts.  Physically sure, but also psychically and emotionally and spiritually.  I’m not sure how I got here.  I mean, I know what happened, but still, here?  This?  How did I come to this?  Eight years ago I was a bonna-fide badass.  And now?  It takes me 6 or 7 seconds to just stand up.  Think about that.  That is a long time.  A very long time.

I don’t even know where to start.  So I’ll start with now.  I have osteo-arthritis.  Severe osteo-arthritis.  It lives in my right hip and my lower back mostly.  But sometimes, when I push it, I realize it exists elsewhere – my left knee, my right shoulder, my right wrist.  That doesn’t stop me from pushing it.  I feel the pain, and I incorporate it.  It becomes part of who I am.   I am a being made of pain and tenacity and fierceness and determination and pure hell.  I am your worst nightmare and your best dream at the same time.  Which is to say that I am my worst nightmare and my best dream, at the same time.

You don’t hurt this much without honestly earning it.  I have earned it.  Four notable car accidents.  A very notable motorcycle accident.  At least a dozen hard falls from various horses.  And the kick-boxing… I was good at the kick-boxing.  I was angry.  I was determined.  I was terrified.  It made for an amazing primordial soup of emotion and motivation.  Never downplay the motivation.  Even now, when I know that it would hurt like hell to throw a serious round-house or a solid side-kick, I would not hesitate.  You physically threaten me?  I physically respond.  It took nearly 6 years of training to get rid of the passive door mat.  She got beat to oblivion.  And it hurt.  Not like this hurts now, it hurt less – it hurt temporarily.  But it prepared me.  This hurt now?  This constant burning in my joints?  This feeling like my bone will set the ligaments and tendons and muscles on fire and burn then until all I am is a silly holloween figure – a distorted skeleton taped to the front door, this feeling that makes every initial movement questionable?  This is a feeling I can endure.  Because I’ve endured worse.  Much much worse.

The anger, I thought for a long time that it was gone.  I couldn’t feel it anymore – it didn’t wake me up, it stopped motivating me to do what I was supposed to do… I couldn’t find it when I needed it.  I thought I had burned it all up.

I hadn’t.  There is still anger left.

It is more sophisticated anger.  It resides in places of my psyche that I was sure were traumatized beyond use.  Love?  I was sure it was gone – that it was something I was no longer capable of.  Yet here I am, ready to forgive someone who betrayed me to the very core in the name of love.  And I don’t know if real love can survive that kind of betrayal.  Does it just assimilate all the hurt and despair and sadness and turn it into some sort of latent positivity?  Or is love really the positive reaction to a continuation of negative circumstances?

Maybe that sounds like a strange question, but then I bet you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.  This is not ego talking, it is true despair.  I’ve watched people choose to be homeless over giving up their pets, and I’ve despaired that they’ve been put in that situation.  I’ve been forced to watch as people fall out of the social safety net $35 and $50 at a time, as though that amount is the difference between being able to afford safe and healthy shelter or being homeless.  Have you ever counseled anyone in the nuance of couch surfing?  Because I have.  And I can because I know.

So I’m hanging like bat on my inversion table, my ankles throbbing dully in the distance, and all up-side-down in my line of sight is my senior high school yearbook.  I’m swinging upside down to pull it from the shelf, and suddenly it is in my hands.  I open to the first page, and it comes back to me, I did not pay for this yearbook.  This is not a memory I curated for myself.  This is a memory that someone curated for me.

My brother bought this book for me.  It is difficult to think of now.  I haven’t had a real discussion with either of my brothers in at least a decade.  Neither of them approve of my current lifestyle – not that I care.  I cannot afford to care.  But still, I remember a childhood and an adolescence with people who have no idea who I am now.  And it makes me sad.  But the yearbook, the yearbook was a gift.  One of a very few, but incredibly valuable.  I worked on the year book all three years of high school.  Yet I could never afford to buy one.  My parents did not view a yearbook as a valid educational expense, and I never even thought to ask if this was something they would sponsor.  In my sophomore and junior years I stole a book from the surplus pile.  The advantage of being an integral part of the staff is that you got to know where they stashed the surplus.  But my senior year… the timing didn’t work.  By the time a book hit the surplus pile, graduation would have been over and nobody would be around to sign my book.

I didn’t know that my brother had bought a book for me until he presented it to me, complete with a dozen signatures.  At the time I did not recognize the difficulty and the effort he made in getting this book and having it signed for me.  Now I see something that has ghosted me all my life.  A pattern of comments about my character and observations about my personality that, while youthful and a bit naive, are still chillingly accurate.  I am who I was then, only with more self-confidence and more self-esteem, and more self-worth.  I am who I wished I was then.

It is an amazing feeling to realize that you’ve become the person you fantasized about.  It is a disturbing feeling to realize that you were that person two years ago and now you are an aging ghost of yourself.

I may be a ghost, but I am the stubbornest, most determined, most tenacious ghost you’ve ever seen.

The person that received that senior yearbook from her brother – signed by a combination of her and his friends, some of whom never met his sister in person, but who knew her from reputation well enough to sign her high-school yearbook – that person never even dreamed that she would be who she is.

I fear little.  Chickens, and other barnyard fowl – for good reason – and emotional intimacy.  I don’t trust easily.  I fall in love rarely – only a couple of times in my 38 years.  I used to be loose.  Now it is too much effort.  Nearly everything is too much effort.  But this book…

I read it now and I realize what and asshole I was.  I see what people actually thought of me – not just what I thought of myself.  I see that I was desired, by more than one person, though I never knew it at the time.  I see that I changed people’s lives for the better, though I probably did it for a selfish reason at the time.  I see that I was the foundation of the person I would become.

Who am I?  I am a person who can command the respect of executives and presidents and politicians and experts, and at the same time make these executives and presidents and politicians and experts feel so comfortable, so valued in my presence that they trust me.  They trust me with more than I deserve.

I am someone who can tell an amazing story.  I can make your heart ache.  And I can do it while mine turns to stone.  I can feel everything and nothing at exactly the same time.  I am your worst enemy and your best friend.  I’m an enigma that is splayed open like a dissected rodent – all my tendons and ligaments exposed, yet still shrouded in mystery.  And if you think I’m being a little too generous with myself, ask those around me.  Because generosity is not one of my faults, it is on of my strengths.  And my description of myself is lacking… sorely lacking.

My hips are burning.  My right more than my left, though I can feel both of them.  I firmly believe no-one should ever feel their skeleton.  It means something is truly wrong.  But if you ask me now, I can tell you every detail of every pain, with a precision that would make a physician swoon.  That doesn’t mean it will ever be right.

There are a hundred or more mistakes that I need to apologize for.  A hundred more that require my thanks, or my  forgiveness.   I will not be that person that gauges the present by  the past… except that I am, and I don’t yet know how to change.  Change is not what frightens me now.  Not much frightens me now.  Except a petition for emotional valuation.  Can I still feel?   I ask myself every day.

Ryan, thank you.  I never said it when it mattered.  But I realize what you did.  And I appreciate it.  You are my brother, blood to blood.  And despite everything and anything that comes between, I thank you.  And I love you.  As a brother.  Because you are.

It is the first step of a long line of gratitude.  We are naught but the culmination of those that have helped us.  Who do you need to thank?

The New Reality of Redevelopment

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to post here, a lot has changed since last August.  Especially my perspective.

My attitude towards the legislation that killed redevelopment in California has changed significantly.  I still think it was poorly written and full of editorial fails.  However, I also feel that, in many ways, the legislation could be the best thing that could have happened to redevelopment efforts.  Now that admission is akin to heresy in the world of traditional California style Tax-Increment Funded Redevelopment.  But like many heresies, that just means there is some nugget of secular truth to be wrested from the dogma of status quo. 

It’s the ultimate do-over.  And maybe, just maybe, it is the wedge that local governments and supporters of rational tax reform need to break the shackles of Prop 13.  …Yeah, it’s a big maybe. 

Today I attended a presentation by the Urban Land Institute on the future of Redevelopment in California.  I’m not sure that all of the speakers got that topic in advance of their presentation though, because there was a lot of talk about what redevelopment has done, what it could have done if it hadn’t been ended, and what we wish ABx1 26 really looked like.  And, I might be out of line here, but I don’t think that any of that really has anything to do with the future of redevelopment. 

There were some general ideas thrown out there – things that local governments might have some ability to influence; such as expedited development entitlements.  But most of what conversation there was about the actual future of redevelopment revolved around the need to find a funding stream to replace tax increment.  A funding stream would be grand indeed.  Yet, I’m inclined to think realistically, and realistically, I think that California’s cities and counties need to learn how to do redevelopment without subsidies.

Why?  Because subsidies are not long-term sustainable.  Because they are unreliable.  Because I don’t think that redevelopment has to be so fiscally onerous that it needs a subsidy to be competitive with greenfield development. 

The City Manager here said in a conversation a few weeks ago that the role of the City, in regards to redevelopment, is to be the facilitator, not the producer.  Until now, redevelopment agencies have facilitated by throwing money and assets into projects until they penciled for private developers.  That is no longer an option.  But that doesn’t mean that the role of facilitator is as defunct as the old redevelopment agencies.  What it does mean is that Cities and Counties are going to have to get nuanced about how they approach the role of facilitator. 

There are two parts to this nuance, as I see it.  The first part involves the powers of the local jurisdictions themselves.  What can Cities and Counties do to help facilitate redevelopment?  More than they think.  They can:

• Create flexible zoning for projects that qualify as redevelopment to allow for more mixed-use multi-functional development projects.
• Institute sky’s-the-limit density bonuses for redevelopment projects, especially in TODs.
• Reduce development fees (or eliminate certain impact fees) for redevelopment projects.
• Create infrastructure match funds (funded by normal tax revenue or by infrastructure financing districts, or even by municipal bonds – or if we want to get really crazy, funded by additional fees on greenfield development) that can be used to help augment the cost of upgrading infill infrastructure.
• Provide comprehensive specific plans for “redevelopment areas” with comprehensive environmental reviews in place and up-to-date so that infill developers can tier off of existing documents instead of paying full price for new environmental assessments.
• Eliminate the regulations that put the most fiscal stress on infill projects – such as parking minimums that require large amounts of land or costly parking structures.
• Partner with other governmental or semi-governmental agencies like Fire Districts and Regional Transit and other public service providers to provide infill incentives, such as increased public transportation coverage, reduced fees, and improved services.
• Develop incentives for redevelopment that incorporates housing – real incentives, such as reduced fees, expedited processing, increased zoning flexibility, additional infrastructure support. 

But before any of these ideas has even the slightest chance of working, jurisdictions will need to recognize two things.  First, redevelopment is not economic development.  Redevelopment is the re-use of under-utilized urban resources.  Legally it involved providing and protecting affordable housing and eliminating blight.  Redevelopment was never legislatively intended to be a tool for economic development.  The ideas above are not intended to facilitate economic development. They are intended to help encourage the redevelopment of under-utilized, neglected, and deficient urban resources.

Second, it is long past time to realize that the reality isn’t that infill development is more expensive than greenfield development, but that greenfield development is more heavily subsidized than infill development.  The best incentive to push developers into infill development is to eliminate the greenfield subsidies – make developers who want to develop in the greenfield pay the full cost of that development.  And not just the immediate cost, but the life-cycle cost – the cost that will otherwise get dumped on the parent jurisdiction.  For decades the urban areas have helped subsidize development in the green fields.  I think it is time to reverse that trend. 

There is another component to the nuance of facilitating development, and that is beyond the control of local jurisdictions.  I’m talking about new legislation at the State level to help encourage redevelopment without requiring a dedicated funding source.  SB 226, which streamlines CEQA review is a good start.  However there is more that the state could do to encourage redevelopment without paying for it. 

• For example, the state could declare the first $1.5 million (or more) spent on environmental remediation for contaminated infill sites to be tax exempt.  
• For infill redevelopment projects that are funded by grants, the State could greatly reduce the reporting burden. 
• It could also eliminate some of the labor standards compliance requirements and allow grant funded projects to use market wage rates, instead of prevailing wages. 
• It could give Cities and Counties the ability to create redevelopment districts with the power to levy taxes (that are apart and in addition to any taxes already collected). 
• And it could allow jurisdictions to have more autonomy, both in terms of regulations and finances. 

I was hoping to hear stuff like this at this morning’s meeting, and while there were hints, they were only hints.  The old paradigm has been discarded.  The cities and counties that are able to effect redevelopment without a dedicated funding stream and without the option of offering subsidies are going to be the jurisdictions that thrive.  Redevelopment is dead, and the period for reaction is nearly closed, as I see it.  It’s time to get proactive.  It’s time to innovate.  It’s time for the kind of redevelopment that doesn’t need subsidies.

Will Somebody Actually Read This Legislation Please?

Yesterday afternoon the California Supreme Court issued a partial stay as requested by the lawsuit brought against the State by the California Redevelopment Association and the California League of Cities.  And, just like the governor, legal analysts, and legislators before them, the court also failed to actually read the legislation before choosing what bits to stay and what bits to allow to remain active. 

In a nutshell, AB 26 is the legislation that went into effect on June 30, 2011 that suspended all rights of Redevelopment Agencies and provided the framework for the dissolution of those agencies and the wind-down of all redevelopment activities.  AB 27 is the legislation that provides the formula and the legal mechanism by which Redevelopment Agencies could pay a ransom to reactivate and then would make yearly ransom payments to continue to function.  Most agencies in the state had selected to pay the ransom.  A few were still deciding. 

About this legislation – first, I’m no lawyer, but I’ve been immersed in this legislation for the last three weeks or so – to the point that I have a working list of serious problems.  It is two pages long.  Single spaced.  And I didn’t even attempt to work out the problems in the formula – though the accountants I’ve been working with tell me that the formula has two gaping holes – one of which results in a circular calculation that breaks Excel and the other of which results in the Agency, after making the first payment, never having to make another payment to the state again. 

Dear legislature – nice job.  You broke Excel.

My list has things like blatant contradictions and spots where the same money is supposed to go to three different places at the same time and things like mandates without processes.  The legislation tells agencies what they are supposed to do, but not how they are supposed to do it, and just to make things as interesting as possible, it eliminates the most straightforward means of complying with its own rules. 

The stay, though, takes that whole convoluted mess to a new level.  It maintains the limbo that strips redevelopment agencies of their operating rights, and it maintains the financial obligations that redevelopment agencies have in bonds and existing debt and contracts.  BUT then it stays the part of the legislation that gives redevelopment agencies the ability to actually pay on those obligations.  So after August 28 every redevelopment agency in California will either be in violation of the stay or in violation of the still active section of AB 26. 

Yossarian?  Are you listening?

Each agency will need to decide what law to break.  Do they violate the stay and adopt the payment schedule required by the active section of the legislation to pay on their contracts?  Or do the break the still active law and default on their legal obligations so that they don’t violate the stay?

Hmm.  What to do…

Here’s the kicker.  I’m an intern.  Just an intern.  And I’ve picked up on this.  Over there at the Capitol building and over in the courthouse there are supposed to be some seriously smart people doing some seriously smart stuff.  And then they hand out product like this.  Stuff like this sure adds validity to all those complaints about the efficiency and effectiveness of government – even as I sit and work in the offices of a local government that has created new standards of efficiency – standards that rival private industry. 

One bad apple…

Oh, and that affordable senior housing project that I’ve been working on?  The one that was on this infill site situated between two light rail stops?  The one that was so green that it was going to be a net-zero energy consumption project?  That one?  It’s dead.  As of yesterday afternoon.  And the hundreds of hours spent on it gone to waste.  I’d almost call it ironic that the actual victim of both the legislation and the court ordered partial stay is affordable housing, but then that’s no fly in my chardonnay.

Walking the Suburban Streetscape – AKA Playing Frogger

I remember playing Frogger in the arcade next door to the laundromat when I was a kid.  I was never really any good at it – I don’t remember ever making it past the third level, but I do remember one of the underlying themes of the game – crossing the road was no joke. 

There has been quite a bit of news, both online and in more traditional media about Raquel Nelson the Georgia mother who was arrested and put on trial for the death of her son in a hit and run accident where she and her children were trying to cross the street from the bus stop and her 4-year-old son was hit and killed by a driver.  There is a lot of discussion about the lack of a cross walk, and more about the location of the bus stop – why put a stop where there is no nearby safe way to cross the street?  It is a design failure of tragic proportions.  And our streets are littered with them.

Today, thanks to a moment of bone-headedness on my part, I had an opportunity to walk the streets of the City where I work.  I don’t know about other suburban city employees, but I almost never actually walk in the City where I work.  My office is in an office park that has been expressly designed not just to the scale of the automobile, but to the scale of lots of automobiles.  I get to work from the freeway in the morning – unless it is one of those days where I actually get my act together early enough to ride my bike in – in which case I avoid the City component all together and stick to the periphery trails.  When I run errands in the City, I do it from my car.  I’ve thought about walking to the post office or the bank, but, even though they are less than 1/2 mile away as the crow flies, I end up in my car.  That is because I cannot get there as the crow flies.  I can’t even get there as the crow meanders. 

And because I have to cross the freeway. 

There is an overpass with sidewalks which makes crossing the freeway possible.  Yet it is still a harrowing experience.  The on ramps are particularly alarming.  There is nothing that checks the motorists getting onto the freeway from the street – no light, no stop sign, nothing – and many of those motorists are anticipating the freeway experience – which is to say that they are speeding.  Crossing those on ramps is just like playing Frogger.  Only there are no extra lives. 

I’ve crossed freeways on dedicated pedestrian bridges and on bridges that have lights that regulate the access to the on ramp before and while the roar of the traffic below can be a little intense, there is no immediate feeling of death looming up on you in the shape of a minivan piloted by a harried soccer mom or an ancient Buick helmed by a little old blue-haired lady – or a vehicle being driven by someone who’d had a beer with his breakfast. 

That would make that aspect of road safety an accessibility issue.  If pedestrians are going to have access to a road, then the road needs to be designed at the safety level of the pedestrian.  That safety level is based on critters that move slower, are a whole lot smaller, and have way less body armor than your usual Ford or Honda.  One of the ironies I noticed in crossing the freeway today was that there were curb cuts with wheelchair accessible ramps.  Yet anyone in a wheelchair would be at an even greater disadvantage in crossing the on ramps because they overpass design would render them out of sight until the vehicles were right on top of them – which is much too late to effectively stop.  All of this might actually be an issue – if there was any sort of pedestrian usage.  There isn’t.  Maybe a couple dozen people cross the freeway at that overpass every day.  Maybe. 

Why?  Scale.  Not only does the area feel exposed and unsafe, but even though it is only about 1/2 mile from the light rail stop it feels like it might as well be 15 miles away as everything is paved and huge and far too open.  And depending on where you are trying to go, you might end up in a similar situation as Ms. Nelson – where your destination is right across the street, but the cross walk to get there is at the absolute far end of a very long block.  The temptation to jaywalk is strong – so strong that today I gave in and sprinted across four lanes during a lull in the traffic instead of taking another 10 minutes to walk down to the cross walk, cross the street, and then walk back up the block to my office. 

There is an increasing amount of emphasis being put on creating places that are “walkable” and “accessible”.  But a lot of those efforts end up as tokens of walkability (sidewalks that do not provide access to anything but the street face) and accessibility (curb-cuts that spill wheelchairs and strollers into unregulated traffic).  They sound good in the planning meeting and at the city council session and in the CDBG reports and General Plans for the community, but in reality they fall seriously short of the goals they are intended to meet.

The question is, how do we fix it?  I’m not sure about the exact method, but I think a great place to start would be for more city planners and public works engineers and city council members and developers and others who are responsible for the design of our urban spaces to go and walk those spaces – to see what it feels like to be on the street – and not just on a Saturday or Sunday morning – but at peak traffic, at midday, and at night.  That experience could do a lot in transforming the definition of the problem from the abstract maps and plans to the reality of our built environment. 

Because Frogger is only fun when it’s on the screen.

The Real-Estate Reality

I read this article yesterday on the Wall Street Journal Opinion page and it stuck with me – the kind of sticking where you find yourself thinking about it while washing the dishes and walking the dog and all those other mundane life chores.  It isn’t that the article itself is factually wrong.  Bridges has the facts right – houses are a shoddy long-term investment opportunity for home-buyers compared to stocks.  Equity is locked in the home until sale, equity loans are expensive, and betting on equity is, as thousands of home-owners have learned, far riskier than anyone imagined.  I was trying to figure out what it was about the article that I couldn’t let go, and then it hit me – the problem isn’t the article, it is the underlying premise from which it was written.  Namely, that someone somewhere got it into their heads that homeownership was actually about investment, that it was a way for the little guy to grab ahold of his share of the wealth, that it was intended to be some great equalizing force – a bulwark protecting middle-class values, ideals, and most of all, wealth.

We’ve seen how that has gone down. 

This is not to say that the dream of home-ownership was not about figuring out a way to create wealth out of the need for housing.  It was.  It still is.  It just wasn’t ever about creating wealth for the middle-class homebuyers that bought into the suburban lifestyle.  A quick overview of the history of suburban development makes this very clear.

The first “suburbs” were actually wealthy enclaves built by people who could afford to take advantage of improvements in transportation to have the classic “country house”.  This was a reflection of the opinion of the city – an opinion based as much on prejudice as reality – that cities were disease ridden, crowded, stinky, loud, and unsafe.  This was, to a degree true – modern sanitation was still in development and immigration booms contributed to swelling populations of culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse groups – who were often poor and uneducated.  Yet as cities modernized, these opinions became more and more prominent despite the actual facts – corresponding more with the rise of racial and ethnic integration into the modern city than the social and structural failings of the city itself.  Hence the early stirrings of “white flight”.

Fast forward to the post-WWII baby boom and the housing shortage that followed.  The auto was quickly becoming a fundamental component of every household – complete with huge transportation infrastructure subsidies.  Consumerism was running full throttle as a real middle-class began to emerge and as manufacturing and commercial enterprises prospered.  Really it was a perfect storm for the birth of suburbia – for people to get away from those filthy cities and take advantage of cheap transportation to have the “country manor” and the urban employment at the same time.  Large land-owners made a killing as their parcels were subdivided and sold off.  Developers made a killing on cheaply built subdivisions – that often sported all sorts of subsidized infrastructure.  And Banks… well the banks suddenly had a whole new kind of market to play in and create wealth with.  Financial institutions might have been a little slow initially to see the advantages of the mortgage market, but once they figured it out, they ran with it. 

That was where the wealth from housing went – and where it was always intended to go.  The part where it was supposed to continue to trickle down to the actual homeowner is ancillary – or even accidental.  Of course as long as the demand for housing exceeded the supply then home prices would rise and “equity” would accrue – assuming that demand would always exceed supply.  And it did.  For a long time even – so long that the equity principle became part of the sales pitch – own your own home, away from the dirty multi-racial city, easily accessible by heavily subsidized private transportation infrastructure, and sure to gain in value like a real investment. 

Except that is all it ever was – a sales pitch.  Marketing kool-aid.  Those dirty multi-racial cities are actually the creative and innovative centers of our economy.  That heavily subsidized private auto transportation infrastructure is ridiculously expensive to maintain, quickly becomes obsolete or too congested to be effective, and has contributed to both sprawl and environmental degradation.  And that equity?  That big home-as-investment payoff?  Yeah, that went to the banks and developers and big land-owners – as intended. 

Which takes me back to the original WSJ article.  Single family homes were never a particularly good investment?  The suburban model home was not designed to be a particularly good investment – at least not at the final point of consumption, not for the home buyer, not for the middle-class, not for the average Joe.  It was designed to take advantage of cultural ideals, technological changes, federal support, and prejudice to create wealth for the wealthy. 

I’m not against homeownership.  For many people owning their home gives them a sense of control and stability – they do not feel like they are at the mercy of a landlord (though they probably have more legal protections against arbitrary actions by a landlord than they do by their bank or mortgage company), they can do what they like with the property (within code and zoning limitations), and they can rest assured that they have a long-term committment to place (30 years is a significant part of the adult lifespan).  In other words, they can paint the walls and update the fixtures as they like, add on a tool shed or a patio, and create a sense of familiarity and stable community all for the cost of a monthly interest payment.  If someone is interested in creating an actual “home” in the sociological/anthropological sense of the term, then that isn’t really a bad deal.  It works.   

But it is a marginal investment – at best.  Just ask the Wall Street Journal.

Deciphering the Bike Battle

It one of those traits unique to humanity to be both for something and against it at the same time.  The battle over bicycle transportation is a prime example.  So much attention is given to reducing greenhouse gasses and to improving traffic congestion and to improving the urban economy.  And somewhere in that attention is the understanding that one of the best and easiest tools to address these concerns comes on two-wheels.  Yet, as even the DOT has admitted, there is something missing between the idea and the application.  We know what we should do, we just don’t choose to do it.  That goes for both the people who could use the bicycle for more of their transportation needs, and the people who are in charge of designing and maintaining our urban landscape to be accessible for all users.  It sounds simple.  That means it isn’t.

One of the dominant points of contention – and a point that has real consequences for the pro-bike community – is that there is a general disregard of road laws by bicyclists.  I’ve done a bit of urban riding and a lot of urban walking and I can’t say that this point is invalid.  Friday night I was enjoying an after-dinner stroll around midtown and within a matter of two blocks I encountered two separate bicyclists riding on the sidewalk in such a manner that I had to scramble out of the way – despite the fact that there were bike lanes on both sides of the street.  This is not uncommon – especially in midtown and downtown where the sidewalks are often wide and the streets are often one-way.  While a motorist will play ring-around-the-rosie, driving around blocks to access shops, restaurants, and parking on one way streets, it is both frustrating and wasteful for bicyclists.  At the same time, riding in the bike lane against traffic on one-way streets – especially streets where the average speed is 10mph above the posted speed and where the bike lane is wedged between heavy traffic and an unending line of parked cars – takes a kind of guts that could be mistaken for attempted suicide. 

So I understand the sidewalk riding.  I’ve even been forced to use it myself – there is one underpass on the way to my gym where there are four lanes of one-way medium-speed traffic with no shoulder and a hill that makes it difficult to see what is immediately ahead – driving it makes me cautious, riding it straight-up gives me the willies and if there aren’t a lot of pedestrians out, I’ll take the sidewalk tunnel instead.  But that doesn’t mean that I think it is right.  Nor can I help but worry about the damage it does to the cause of urban bicyclists and bike enthusiasts who are constantly struggling against other critical needs for those few remaining infrastructure dollars. 

Of course the real problem isn’t the bicycles on the sidewalk or the lack of enforcement of road rules on bike riders (the kind of behavior common in the U.S. would get instant and expensive tickets and reprimands in most European cities).  The problem is that we have reconfigured our cities to optimize existing infrastructure for the movement of cars – to the exclusion of all other means of transportation.  One-way streets are great for moving lots of cars at the same time.  But they are huge obstacles for bicyclists.  They also encourage speeding, are confusing and difficult for tourists and out-of-towners to navigate, and pose traffic hazards that are not addressed by the current traffic management systems.  My worst car accident was on a one way street when someone ran a red light and hit me before I could see them – something that wouldn’t have happened if that particular street had been two-way.

There is a lot of obfuscation about the urban and commuting bicycle issue.  A lot of drivers take bicyclists to task for not obeying the laws – and they should obey the laws.  And bicyclists complain that there are insufficient bike-lanes and infrastructure support to make bicycling a safe and accessible mode of transportation for more people – justly so.  But both are symptoms of a much larger problem – the misshapen retro-fits we’ve imposed on our urban fabric to facilitate what really is a ridiculous number of personal autos.  In giving the car the prime position we’ve sacrificed our urban scale, our pedestrian accessibility, and our transportation choice.  Seems like maybe the real challenge shouldn’t be to change opinions or laws or anything else so reactionary, but instead to change the default attitude about transportation and just how our cities should circulate people and goods. 

If anything else, it would make our sidewalks safer.

Too Many Disconnections

Yesterday in the break room I was reading a newspaper article about the ATF Gunwalker Scandal where the ATF, the FBI, and the DEA had failed to communicate about their separate operations among the drug cartels in Mexico.  The result was that the Mexican drug cartels had been provided access to weapons that they were able to move across the border and then were paid as informants.  Talk about win win.  For the drug cartels, I mean.  The ATF looks pretty sad right about now.

Today I was reading the latest Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and I had a similar gut feeling – not that I think the BLS is running guns or anything.  But that there is a giant disconnect between what is actually happening in each separate segment of our economy – hell, our existence – and our understanding.  We like to partition things into understandable chunks.  Jobs are stagnant.  Residential rents are up and vacancies are down.  Educational attainment is dismal.  Commercial vacancies are increasing.  Crime rates are dropping.  But prisons are still bursting.

To make matters more interesting, there is a dramatic need for more affordable housing – especially if rents are going to continue rising as vacancies drop.  The State of California, though it requires local governments to address affordable housing needs, has eliminated the only viable affordable housing tool for most local governments by eliminating redevelopment.  But the requirements to provide affordable housing remain.  Now here is where things get really complicated. 

Affordable housing doesn’t pencil as far as most for-profit developers go.  It needs to be subsidized in order to be financially feasible – or as feasible as anything that inherently requires a subsidy to be built can be.  Yet there is an incredible demand for affordable housing.  There are also thousands and thousands of construction workers out of work.  The construction sector has borne the brunt of the employment downturn in California.  The state is also plagued by aged and failing infrastructure.  That isn’t even taking into consideration the potential for infrastructure upgrades that could dramatically improve efficiency and accessibility for the state.  There are thousands of vacant buildings and lots scattered throughout California cities that could be re-used or demolished and built-anew. 

It is like looking at a bunch of puzzle pieces on a table without any picture on the cover of the box for reference.  Why can’t we put the unemployed construction workers to work building needed affordable housing and upgrading infrastructure?  Because it needs subsidies.  But putting people back to work filling actual community needs would bring in new revenue and reduce unemployment.  Yet there is no money for those sorts of improvements.  It’s like a snake swallowing its own tail.

This conversation has one other elephant in the room.  Any project associated with state or federal money has to pay “prevailing wage”.  If anyone wanted to take a beneficial community project and kill it dead, all they’d have to do is require that the builders pay prevailing wage.  The cost of prevailing wage is almost three times what the market rate for the same skill set currently supports – which is funny, because that means that the prevailing wage really isn’t all that prevailing.  For the cost of one affordable housing project at prevailing wage, a community could build two at market wage.  For the cost of employing one worker at prevailing wage, a company could employ two or more at market wage.  That is one more person off the unemployment rolls – who, while they many not be making prevailing wage, are very likely to be making more than they get in unemployment – if their benefits haven’t already run out.  But that isn’t how it works.   

So even if there was some money to start those projects that meet community needs, there isn’t enough money to meet the standards we have set for ourselves in our own regulations.  Which means no project.  Which means no new employment. 

This is not to say that prevailing wage is the only bug in the works.  It is one of many.  There are a lot of reasons that public infrastructure and construction costs have skyrocketed over the last several decades – why it is now so very expensive to build new railroads or to repair sewers or to fix roads and bridges.  Finding those bugs and figuring out how to eliminate them would be the first step at making infrastructure improvement and affordable housing production truly fiscally viable.  

It’s just another piece of the fix-it puzzle.

The Redevelopment Ransom

California has, for the first time in a long time, passed a state budget ahead of the deadline.  The governor also signed into effect two bills aimed at redevelopment.  The first abolishes redevelopment agencies.  The second allows them to resurrect themselves – provided they pay a significant payment to the state and agree to funnel more of their collected tax increment to schools and other districts. 

The academic in me thinks that, with the exception of the part where these bills are poorly thought through, that the idea of ransoming off redevelopment activities is fairly interesting.  The whole process sounds like the results of a brainstorming session wherein nobody had the authority or the gumption to say, wait wait wait, is this really what we want to do?  What will be the long-term impacts?

Because that second question is the one that never seems to get asked in government decisions.  Maybe it is a result of the political life-span which, while it may last for decades, is only assured until the next election (provided you don’t post any incriminating photos on twitter – which will probably end it even sooner).  Yet any institution that makes policy without considering the long-term – and long-term in land use is decades – is essentially playing Russian Roulette with each new policy.  Who knows which proposition, assembly, or senate bill will precipitate the collapse of local government or drive the state so far into debt that it has to declare bankruptcy.  Because that is the game that we’ve been playing for a long time now.  Proposition 13 anyone?

That is the academic in me.  The public employee in me – the one who actually cares about providing housing opportunities for the people who need it in the places where it can do the most good, the one who got started in this career because she wanted to help fix cities, the one who sees potential in every vacant lot and building – that person is frustrated. 

Lets just take one aspect of this ransom situation – the part where the ransom amount has been set according to tax increment numbers from the beginning of the recession – before record unemployment, foreclosure numbers soared, and prolonged property value decline undercut the property tax base.  The price tag being asked of some communities – especially fast growth communities who did not have a chance to access their full tax increment potential before the great real-estate collapse – is akin asking a $5 million ransom for the return of the family pet.  We love Fido and all, but seriously? 

For other communities, though, the ransom is far more complicated.  For cities that had projects in the works – projects that had been run through the Community Redevelopment Agency, because that is what the redevelopment agency was created to do, to run projects – the ransom includes both the cash payment, and the ability to continue with those projects.  Redevelopment critics shrug and say “so they don’t get to build any more mermaid bars – big deal.”  But not all redevelopment projects are economically motivated.  At least they are not that kind of economically motivated. 

Affordable housing projects in California (as well as most of the rest of the nation) are almost inherently linked to redevelopment.  That is because the production of affordable housing does not pencil with enough profit to be attractive to regular developers.  Subsidies are necessary to make affordable housing projects go, and redevelopment agencies have been the gatekeepers of those subsidies for decades.  That is also what they were designed to do.  That is why California Redevelopment Law has such as prominent affordable housing component written into the code. 

The net effect is that the new laws passed June 29th don’t just hold redevelopment agencies ransom.  They aren’t just stopping those economic development projects that have drawn so much public criticism.  They have put affordable housing up for ransom as well.  So for some cities, the thing being ransomed isn’t just the activities of the redevelopment agency, but the senior housing project that was about to sign a development agreement, or the large family project that was being planned to give low income kids access to better schools, or the transitional living facility for homeless veterans that was to be built on RDA owned property.  All of those projects are up for ransom as well.  Which means that the people that the new redevelopment laws end up directly impacting are the same people who can least afford the impact.  I’m not talking about the deep-pocket developers who have been relying on redevelopment subsidies to make projects go, but the little old lady living on a fixed income who is no longer able to take care of her house, or who lost her house in a shady mortgage deal.  The single-parent family struggling on a part-time income.  The disabled veteran who just needs a chance to get back on his feet.  Sound melodramatic?  It is.  But then it is also the reality of housing in America – housing that has spent far too many decades building inaccessable suburbs for a middle class that is on the threatened species list. 

Eliminating redevelopment will help California’s budget woes in the short-term.  But as the boomers age, the vets start coming home, and more families struggle with un- and under-employment, affordable housing demand is only going to go up.  And cities have just lost their best tool for addressing that demand.

I wonder if anyone thought about that during their brainstorming session.

The Innovation Dilemma

In both the city where I work and the neighborhood where I live there are a large number of dilapidated commercial buildings with what should be considered ideal locations sitting empty and slowly rotting away.  In my ‘hood many of these buildings have been slated for redevelopment at some time or another – something that may not happen anytime soon (or ever) if redevelopment in California is really and truly removed as a source of land-use police power and construction financing.  In the city where I work, these buildings are recognized as proverbial millstones that hinder any forward momentum in revitalization efforts, yet the list of options for how to address the problems they pose is short – too short to be useful most of the time. 

What do you do with a burned out shell of a hotel that constantly attracts squatters and vandals and drug-users when the land-owner still thinks it is 2006 – and that his property is still worth something?

Or how about a strip of turn of the century brick buildings with beautiful street-front access whose facades are literally falling off?

In the past you waited for some big developer with a little foresight, a willingness to take risks, and a nice fat pocketbook (or access to lots of credit) to come in and make something of the latent potential of the area.  Seems though in the last few years that latent potential has become more and more difficult to recognize.  At the same time those deep-pocket developers have been much more reluctant to start projects that deviate from the “proven” model (which is scary because that “proven” model is on its way to being “proven” wrong).  Which just leaves the buildings – blighted and abandoned.

In the past and in other urban districts, buildings like this (ok maybe not the burned out hotel, but definitely the brick commercial structures) would attract the bohemian set – artists and crafts-people willing to rough it a bit to have a space that fit their wants and needs.  Both Manhattan and San Francisco are full of stories of neighborhoods that were resurrected from death-by-blight by artists and the art galleries and restaurants and bars and clubs and residents that followed them.  It is what I consider “Guerilla Redevelopment” – without the subsidies or the grants or the eminent domain or the use of laws or regulations or even zoning to control and limit and direct neighborhood changes. 

Yet as beneficial as guerilla redevelopment has been for some places, many cities work hard at limiting and restricting and even eliminating the guerilla redevelopment ethos.  Instead of allowing people with little access to immediate capital but with lots of access to sweat equity to go in and innovate, these properties are commercially advertised, commercially managed, and commercially restricted.  Which means they are commercially empty, because there just isn’t a lot of commercial demand right now. 

Cities and local governments, who could provide incentives and encouragement and an innovation friendly environment (with the recognition that the creative class (thank you Richard Florida) and the economy that they bring thrives in innovation friendly environments) instead hide behind zoning and use restrictions designed to promote homogenous development.  Even the ubiquitously praised “mixed-use” development is seldom as mixed as it could be – or even as it would need to be to be truly successful and self-sufficient in the long-term. 

Zoning and use restrictions were created to protect cities from incompatible uses – to save the residential neighborhoods from the rendering plants and the garbage dumps.  Yet they’ve become tools of exclusion that have been used to prevent everything from racial integration to socio-economic equalization to, you got it, local innovation.  Who is going to invest time and effort into a building that is going to be red-tagged for stop-work because the owner/renovator doesn’t have the funds and access to politicos that cities have come to expect from big-time large-scale developers? 

Lots of cities would agree that fostering innovation is quickly becoming a key to economic survival.  The problem is the failure to recognize that innovation isn’t necessarily going to come from the places we’ve been accustomed to – from the big corps and the big developers and the big money.  Technology has allowed innovation to scale – so now it is available to all of us.  Cities and neighborhoods would be well-off to recognized the new scale of innovation, and embrace it. 

Because a barebones but workable building occupied by artists and designers and emerging entrepreneurs is a whole lot better than a decaying empty building with its facade falling into the street.

The Public Transportation Learning Curve…

Or why even people who theoretically support public transit often don’t use it.

I spent three weeks in Southern Europe last month backpacking from city to city checking out the architecture and the city design and the different ways that different places interact with their surroundings.  I call this a vacation.

Several things about my trip really helped clarify for me the hurdles facing public transportation in America.  I was able to go pretty much everywhere I wanted to go by train, subway, or bus – and I did it without speaking the language or getting lost.  In fact, it was the opposite.  When I got lost on the surface streets, I would use the subway, and in some cases, the bus routes to find my way back to where I was supposed to be.  Using public transportation – all modes of public transportation in a wide variety of cities with a variety of methods of displaying information – gave me a lot of insight about just what it is that might be keeping Americans off of busses and light rail lines at home. 

1. Tickets.  Europeans take their tickets seriously.  Subways have gates that require ticket or paid badge swipes to open.  I’m sure there are some freeloaders who work the system, but for the most part, if you want to ride the subway or the metro or whatever that particular city calls it, you buy a ticket.  Busses are papered with signs warning, in a variety of languages, riders of what will happen if they don’t have a valid time-stamped ticket.  While I did see more people riding the bus without stamping during the rush hour – I also saw them passing tickets around the crowded bus to make sure that everyone got stamped even when they couldn’t get to the stamp machine themselves.

The last time I rode light rail in my city I shared a car with a homeless woman who had been riding the train all day as a way to stay out of the heat.  Nobody checked her ticket – she didn’t have one.  She had been hopping from one train to the other at each end of the line.  While I understand the desire to get out of Sacramento’s summer heat, setting up camp on a light rail car is not the most effective use of the public transit.  More recently I sat in on a meeting with the local police department who was discussing ways to address the inter-jurisdictional drug trade that was happening on the light rail.  Dealers were hopping on and off of the train at different stations to create a sort of “mobile retail” where buyers could use the train schedule to meet up for a purchase.  

Restricted access to ticket-holders and enforced ticket purchases would go a long way to eliminating the freeloader and criminal activity problems.

2. Accessibility.  I have long found it fascinating that the light rail in Sacramento does not directly link up to the train station.  Even though the train station is fairly well located in an area immediately adjacent to the downtown, the neighborhood feels less than inviting at night – with big empty corporate buildings on the one side and the freeway and industrial rail yards on the other.  To get to the train station from the nearest light rail stop is 8 blocks.  There are busses, but I’ll get to the issue with busses in a moment.  European cities, for the most part, use their train stations as a transportation hub.  Not only are they usually located close enough to the central city to be pedestrian friendly, but the busses, the subways, and the taxis all operate in conjunction with the train station.  It is a great way to leverage the facility.  Stations in the larger cities have extensive shopping and dining options too – with far fewer empty storefronts than most American malls I’ve been to lately. 

3. Choice.  The difference is between the hub system, where a main location offers a variety of transportation options to get you to where you need to go, and the daisy-chain system, where there is one choice – one path of travel that may or may not get you to where you want to be – and where a weak link – say, a delay – doesn’t just impact that one mode or that one line, but has a ripple effect along the whole route.

While in Florence I witnessed a car accident between a compact sedan and a scooter.  The rider on the scooter was stunned, but he wasn’t badly hurt.  Traffic, however, snarled up quickly, and the bus I had planned to take to the train station was caught in it.  I followed the other people waiting at that bus stop to a trolley stop three blocks away, caught the trolley to the station and made my train with time to spare. 

4.  Usability.  You know your transportation system is usable if people who do not speak the language and who do not know their way around the city are able to effectively get to where they want to go without a lot of backtracking. 

Trains are incredibly user-friendly.  Though the initial encounter with the bustling station and the different platforms and numbers and time-tables can be daunting, the whole system is actually pretty straightforward and standardized, and the learning curve is quick.  The biggest challenge is ensuring that you get on the correct train – and if the seats are assigned, figuring out which one is yours.   

The metros and subways are a little more complicated, but it seldom took me more than a couple of minutes with a map to figure out what line went where and which platform was the right one for that particular line.  The biggest struggle with subways, for me, is figuring out which exit back onto the street to take and then reorienting myself to the street layout.  And that happens in every country – my north-south detector is defective.  The best thing about the subway – if you go the wrong way, you get out at the next stop, walk over to the other platform, and get on the next train.  When trains run every 3 to 7 minutes, it isn’t that big of a deal.  Again the learning curve is quick and relatively painless.

Then there are the busses.  I do not know if it is some unspoken rule or some sacred cow of standard operating procedure, but bus systems are inherently more complicated to understand.  A huge part of the problem is the actual bus stop layout.  The stops will often provide a wealth of information about time tables.  What they frequently don’t share is which busses stop there, and which direction they are going.  Sure, there is a line map, but until you ride that line, it is often impossible to know which way it goes.  And if you actually want the bus in the opposite direction, the stop is not across the street.  Sometimes it is not even on the same block.  Which means that riders have to remember twice as many pick-up and delivery points. 

This is where the value of the hub system becomes readily apparent.  If the train station is your hub (or some other central transportation feature) then it greatly increases your chances of figuring out a bus route that will work – even if it isn’t the most direct.  But when the buses are daisy-chained the trip means figuring out which stops connect where and which busses to take at which stops – all of which must be done twice – once coming and once going.  I could learn the subway for a new city in two rides.  In some cities I stayed for three or four days and never quite got the bus system figured out enough that I was confident that I was going where I wanted to go.  The learning curve is steep and slow going.

This isn’t a language barrier thing.  I’ve had the same problem with busses in the U.S. – which is why I try to omit them from my public transportation trips.  If something is going to throw off my schedule, it is going to be the bus – not necessarily because it was late, but because it was so darn hard to figure out. 

Busses are the most efficient and flexible means of public transportation available, and in reality, a comprehensive bus system could be a major asset to any city.  But even the best laid-out bus system is going to have poor ridership support if the initial learning curve feels more like a wall than a slope.  What can be done to improve bus usability?  Improving the amount and presentation of route information is a great place to start.  Make it clear where the stops are and which direction and which routes are supported at each stop.  Correlate each stop with the corresponding stop going to opposite direction.  Time tables are nice, but an electronic sign that says which bus is arriving next and how long it will take before it gets there is even better.  Present the route for each bus in a way that clearly shows which direction that bus goes and which stops are supported.  This isn’t info that can be squeezed onto a bus-post sign.  This requires a well-organized information board. 

The advantage is that if a system is convenient, easy to understand, and easy to use, then it will attract riders.  If a system is well supported with a variety of options – routes and means of transportation – then people will be more likely to trust the system and will feel more comfortable using it.  And if a system is safe and freeloading is not tolerated, then people will feel like their public transportation system has value. 

Of course, we’d have to stop cutting public transportation budgets and eliminating routes and increasing wait times before any of this other stuff will do any good.  I don’t care how usable or safe a bus or train is – if I regularly have to wait half an hour for the next train because my bus got caught in a little traffic or was some other delay, I’m going to skip the system and stick to my car. 

Even though I’m a big proponent of public transportation.