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This morning on KFAQ, Gwen Freeman and Chris Medlock interviewed real estate expert and urban critic Joel Kotkin. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Kotkin wrote a pointed takedown of cities that chase the "Creative Class" with civic improvement schemes -- arenas, convention centers, government-planned entertainment districts, light rail, etc. -- while neglecting basic infrastructure and overlooking the concerns of middle-class families. Here are a few key paragraphs:

Governments prefer subsidizing high-profile but marginally effective boondoggles -- light-rail lines, sports stadia, arts or entertainment facilities, luxury hotels and convention centers.

Over the past decade, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, public capital spending on convention centers has doubled to $2.4 billion annually; nationwide, 44 new or expanded centers are in planning or under construction. But the evidence is that few such centers make money, and many more lose considerable funds. The big convention business is not growing while the surplus space is increasing. New sports centers add little to the overall economy.

Critically, misguided investments shift funds that could finance essential basic infrastructure. Pittsburgh has spent over $1 billion this decade on sports stadia, a new convention center and other dubious structures. Heralded as major job creators and sources of downtown revitalization, they have done little to prevent the region's long-term population loss and continued economic stagnation. Much the same can be said of Milwaukee's new Santiago Calatrava-designed Art Museum, or Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Transportation priorities are also skewed. Government officials in Minnesota spent mightily on a light-rail system that last year averaged barely 30,000 boardings daily. It did not focus nearly as much on overstressed highway bridges, or the bus systems serving the bulk of its mostly poor and minority transit riders. Most other light-rail systems, built in cities with highly dispersed employment, also have minuscule ridership, but consume a disproportionate share of transit funds that might go to more cost-efficient systems, including bus-based rapid transit.

In this morning's interview on KFAQ, Kotkin expanded on this theme. Here's a link to the MP3 file for the hour containing the Joel Kotkin interview. He packed a lot of important ideas about cities into a very short segment. I'll try to unpack some of them before too long, but two that come to mind:

• The fact that downtowns were designed for commerce, not for residential living, but close-in neighborhoods were designed well for housing, while providing a customer base for downtown businesses. My response: Tulsa tried to save its downtown by destroying or amputating major sections of its close-in neighborhoods to make way for parking and freeways and to eliminate "blight". (Of course, the blighted homes and apartment buildings were not much different from those in now-valued neighborhoods like Brookside and Swan Lake.) Now we're trying to undo the damage by converting commercial buildings with residential space, something I've supported, although Chris Medlock pointed out that we've spent a lot of public money per person added to the downtown population.
• The importance of parks in every neighborhood, not just a handful of centrally-located showplace parks. I need to transcribe exactly what he said, because it was spot on -- something about having to "make a day of it" to visit one of these showplaces, rather than being able to integrate a neighborhood park into your everyday life. Every neighborhood needs its gathering places, whether that's a park or a playground or a coffee house.

There's also an interview with Kotkin on townhall.com, conducted by Bill Steigerwald, about the continued importance of manufacturing to the economies of American cities. Steigerwald is a Pittsburgh native, so it's natural that the conversation would focus on the departure of heavy industry and billions spent on stadiums, light rail, and other pretty things at the expense of basic government services.

Increasingly it's the Sunbelt where manufacturing is sought and celebrated, not the old Rust Belt, which views its history with the same kind of "cultural cringe" that fashionable Tulsans feel about cowboys, Indians, and oil:

I have to tell you, almost every place I go in this country, particularly where the economy is growing, if you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say "skills." Machinists. Welders. It's not like there's a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there's a plumber shortage, there's a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this. Cities that have lost their industrial base don't want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it's almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

Kotkin makes some great points about how manufacturing brings outside money into a city (our Chamber of Commerce seems to believe that only conventions and tourism are capable of doing that), and how people forget about skilled labor jobs:

Everyone talks about how we're becoming a society of low-end service workers and high-end information workers. But here's something in between -- basically the logistics and manufacturing industry -- and nobody seems to be focused on it.

What can governments do to attract this sort of business? The basics:

I would say infrastructure and training are the two big things -- and if you think of the training as part of the infrastructure, it's really one thing. You need roads that go in and out. You need modern industrial space. You need reliable electricity. You need shipping facilities. You need workers who are relatively skilled, trainable and reliable. It's really not rocket science that you can do that and that would promote the manufacturing sector of the economy.

And to retain and rebuild a city's manufacturing base?

Are there companies that would like to expand? Are there companies that want to stay? Ask them what they want.

But that isn't what cities are doing:

We live in this dream world where we say, "Well, if we have a fancy stadium with sky boxes, that will keep businesses here." Well, what do you mean by businesses? Do you mean the gauleiters who represent multinational corporations, so they can hang out at a fancy football game? Or are we talking about somebody who's got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You've got to go ask! I don't see anyone interested in that anymore. It's all "What does some 23-year-old, footloose student want? Does he have enough jazz clubs to go to?" Or some footloose 50-year-old corporate henchman. "Does he have enough arts facilities?"

As a country, we're kind of delusional about our economies. I've found a few places in the country where they focus on this stuff, but I'm kind of becoming a persona non grata for raising these issues. I'm not raising them as a conservative, saying we shouldn't have taxes or shouldn't have regulations. I'm just saying, "How do you provide for a broad-based economic opportunity for your people? Isn't that what's it about?" Unfortunately, for most mayors in America, that's not what's it's about. What it's about is, "How do I keep the public employees happy? How do I keep the people at the very top of society happy? And how do I put on a good enough show so that everybody thinks I have a hip, cool city."

The conversation between Kotkin and Steigerwald ends with the role of local papers in pushing these projects of questionable value:

[Kotkin:] I'll tell you the truth, a lot of the blame comes to the journalists. The journalists never ask the tough questions. They basically follow the scripts that they are given. And also part of the problem, and we've talked about this in general about journalism these days, you have got a bunch of young kids who are there for two or three years. They don't understand what crap this is. To them it's all, "Well, there's an art museum downtown. That'll be good for me." If there is some "starkitect" -designed building, they say, "Wow, that's sort of fun for me." They don't care.

[Steigerwald:] I've always said the newspapers of America should be indicted en masse for having countenanced 50 or 60 years of the destruction of cities. I bet 95 percent of newspapers have applauded and cheered every boondoggle, every urban-renewal project back in the 1950s, every new light-rail project -- no matter what it was, newspapers cheered them on.

[Kotkin:] And what happens if you have the temerity to suggest that this may not be the way to go? You're "anti-city," you're "pro-suburbs," you're a "neoconservative" -- like I'm Dick Cheney or something. You get name-called. And all you're saying is, "Look, are we sure that what we are putting our money into is really what matters, given the tremendous pressing needs that every city has?"

This comment on an earlier entry by S. Lee was so well-made that I thought it deserved spotlighting here:

Rather than be accused of a being a "nay sayer" (which, as we all know, is almost as bad as being a fan of Ann Coulter), I would suggest using Cleveland, OH as an example of how buying stuff does not constitute economic development. Cleveland is a great example of a city population that was sucked into to voting for tax increase after tax increase to pay for stuff that would magically transform the city into greatness. Instead, all they got was rapid population loss, high taxes, and a crime rate even higher than Tulsa's.

Much of what is being hustled to Tulsa voters and the method of hustling looks like Cleveland deja vu all over again. Take a look at Cleveland's web site. If stuff was what made a city, then Cleveland ought to be solid gold. But it ain't. People are moving out of Cuyahoga county over to Lorain county ... where the taxes are lower (probably crime too). Brothers and sisters, can I have a Homer Simpson "Doh!"

Note a web page about living downtown; and (egad!) a waterfront project.

I've read comments about how full the Arkansas river has been lately, and wouldn't it be nice if it were always like that. I wouldn't know since you can only see the river from a very, very small part of Tulsa where I've not taken the time to go so I can see a river. Wow! A river! I'm sure I missed out on the thrill of my life -- but I sure have seen a lot of bad roads. I'll trade some better roads and lower crime for a sandy river (that I don't often see) any day, any time.

It might be interesting, at one of the county meetings, to get a show of hands of how many people know what kind of convention center and city offices Charlotte, NC has. How many people at the meeting care about what other stuff Charlotte has bought lately? If they got a job offer in Charlotte, would they be asking what kind of stuff has Charlotte bought lately; or would they be more interested in mundane things such as transportation, crime rate, and schools?

Some folks are just so stinkin' boring.

It's been a while since I've been to Cleveland, but I attended two weddings in Cleveland and a third in Canton back in the early '90s. I remember going with some friends down to the Flats and eating at (ho hum) TGI Fridays on a Friday night. (It was May 1992 and the night of Johnny Carson's last tonight show.) The Flats is a former industrial / warehousing area on the banks of the Cuyahoga River which was converted into an entertainment district, much like Bricktown in Oklahoma City or Laclede's Landing in St. Louis. I was surprised to read not long ago that the Flats are now under re-re-development.

Ron of Route 66 News evaluates one of Lady Bird Johnson's legacies:

But the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which restricted billboards along our nation’s highways, proved to be damaging to Route 66 businesses when they were struggling to survive amid the continuing rise of the interstates.

These Mother Road businesses were struggling enough against the chains. Restricting the use of billboards — a crucial advertising tool — made it harder....

[R]ich and powerful companies managed to skirt the law, while many mom-and-pop businesses didn’t have the influence to so.

From family trips back in the early '70s, I remember the stark difference between driving the Turner and Will Rogers Turnpikes and the Indian Nations Turnpike. The Turner and Will Rogers were built in the '50s and had many signs (evidently grandfathered) pointing to nearby Route 66 businesses like the Thurman Motel, Buffalo Ranch, and the Lincoln Motel, along with the requisite notice to save your appetite for a free 72 oz. steak dinner in Amarillo.

The Indian Nations Turnpike, built after Ladybird's Law, had no signs. This meant there was nothing to entice a passing traveler to venture off the highway, no indication that, for example, the McAlester exit could lead him to a land of hearty Okie-style Italian food. A traveler wouldn't know anything about available service stations or accommodations that might be just a few hundred yards away from the turnpike.

For kids, the Highway Beautification Act meant no practical way to play the Alphabet Game.

At some point, states began posting official exit services signs, with little logos to notify the traveler of available restaurants, gas stations, and motels. Of course, this favored the chains as well: An out-of-state motorist would know exactly what to expect from seeing a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel logo, but a logo isn't enough for a local cafe to tell you about its chicken fried steaks and pies.

(Then there was the case of the Okie Gal Restaurant in California, which wasn't even allowed space on the exit services sign because the highway department deemed "Okie" a derogatory term.)

Ron praises Lady Bird's work on behalf of wildflowers, as does Joshua Trevino, writing at National Review Online. You could see the wildflower and anti-sign initiatives as consistent, both favoring the natural over the man-made, but there is also something contradictory about them: Wildflowers are a kind of rebellion of local color against the monotony and standardization of a perfectly green, perfectly manicured right-of-way. But ads along the highway are also a splash of local color, a hint about the distinctive qualities of the next town and the people who live there.

Marvin Olasky mentions in passing another example of the damage caused by "beautifiers":

Coney Island, part of New York City, is famous in American literature and film. In "The Great Gatsby," Gatsby invites Nick to go to Coney Island, and in Clara Bow's 1927 silent film "It," the neighborhood's amusement park is practically a co-star. After 1950, though, waves of officials such as New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses looked down on the "tawdry" amusements that characterized the boardwalk area. They pulled strings to substitute tawdry housing projects that became gang havens.

Coney Island went through bad decades, but even bureaucrats can't take away the ocean, and the beachfront location has inspired some entrepreneurs to ignore planners' sandcastles and attempt to develop new small businesses and privately owned housing.

Tulsa has had its share of destructive "beautifiers": The barrenness of the Civic Center, the Williams Center, and the OSU-Tulsa campus parking lots are their legacies.

To go back to an entry from last Tuesday, if Tulsa's Civic Center Plaza is a bad example of a public space -- in fact is one of many examples of failed plazas that can be found across the country, even in major pedestrian-friendly cities like Boston -- what makes for a good public space?

Back in the 1970s, architect Christopher Alexander and his team set out to identify successful design patterns in the construction of homes, neighborhoods, and cities. One of the patterns was called "Small Public Squares":

A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public rooms, that a town has. but when they are too large, they look and feel deserted.

The solution was to keep the square to a maximum width of 70 feet. A square could be any length, but the width should be "smaller than you would first imagine." I've seen wider public squares that are successful -- for example, most of Savannah's squares are about 180 feet across on the narrow side, but the space is shaded by tall live oaks, broken up with grass, paths, fountains, and statuary, and every point in the square is with in eyeshot and earshot of the nearest street.

During our trip to Britain, we came across one very lively public square in the City of Durham. On Saturday afternoon, it was packed with people visiting market booths in the square and visiting the shops along the square and in neighboring streets. There was a small teacup ride for children. You could buy candy floss and other treats. The square, about 90 feet wide and 150 feet long, was defined on two sides by buildings with storefronts and the other two sides by narrow streets (at most 15 feet across), with buildings and storefronts on the other side.

Sorry for the recent silence. The 24-hour bug that has been going around town hit our family, too. The toddler had it on Tuesday night, his big brother and sister and mom got it Thursday night, and I had it Friday night. Saturday was a day of quiet recuperation -- everyone was past the worst, and we all lazed around, read, and watched TV.

On YouTube, I just came across a 1960 documentary about Greenwich Village, narrated by author and raconteur Jean Shepherd (the writer and narrator of the classic movie "A Christmas Story"). "Village Sunday" follows a white-gloved young matron from uptown as she explores the Village on a sunny September Sunday afternoon. She stops by a folk music jam session at the Circle in Washington Square, sits for a portrait at a sidewalk art show, negotiates a cobblestone street in heels, tries an Italian sausage at the Feast of San Gennaro, and has listens to a beat poet in a coffee house.

(Mild content warning -- there is some Picasso-type nudity painted on the walls of the coffee house toward the end of the film.)

As I watched the film, it occurred to me that this was the Greenwich Village that Jane Jacobs and others were working so hard to save. Jacobs began work on The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1958, and it was published in 1961. (Over the same period, a strongly anti-urban comprehensive plan for Tulsa was under development.)

Here's one more YouTube video for your enjoyment. Earworms are nothing new. The Hut-Sut Song was a hit in 1941 (you can hear an instrumental version in one of the kitchen scenes of "A Christmas Story"), with its peppy melody and mangled Swedish lyrics. This soundie spoofs the song's infectious quality and features the King's Men, a quartet who performed regularly on the popular "Fibber McGee and Molly" radio show.

St. Louis urban observer Steve Patterson has been traveling through Kansas and Missouri, visiting Garden City, Kansas, Hutchinson, Kansas, Wichita, Kansas, St. Joseph, Missouri, Shenandoah, Iowa, Salina, Kansas, and Lee's Summit, Grandview, and Blue Springs, Missouri.

Every entry has lots of photos (with links to more in his Flickr account) illustrating architecture, streetscaping, and urban planning, and each photo is accompanied with an observation about whether the subject of the photo is good or bad urban design and why. It's like a miniature course in city design.

There's a certain amount of sarcasm and cynicism, but Steve keeps it clean (unlike James Kunstler, whose sharp observations are seasoned heavily with four-letter words). There's a lot here in these entries about the latest city revitalization fad: streetscaping.

Many thanks to Steve for putting together such an informative series of entries.

One of the four NCAA men's regionals was held last weekend at the Meadowlands (aka the Hackensack Swamp) in the midst of the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey. (I spent the worst year of my life there one week.) The University of North Carolina team was put up for the weekend at the Hilton in Fort Lee, N. J. The hotel is on the eastbound lanes of State Highway 4, just before it joins with I-95 as the approach road to the George Washington Bridge, which connects Fort Lee to Manhattan. A few days ago, the highway was the scene of a tragic fatal accident involving a college senior.

As best as I can gather from various news reports, this is what took place: Friday afternoon at about 3:45 pm, Jason Ray, who wore the mascot costume ("Rameses") for the Tar Heels, was walking back from a nearby convenience store, where he'd gone to buy a Coke and a burrito. There is no sidewalk, so he was walking along the shoulder, with his back to the traffic. Crossing over to walk against traffic was not an option for Jason -- the shoulder of the westbound lanes of Highway 4 are separated from the shoulder of eastbound lanes by more than 20 lanes of traffic.

(My observations of the area are based on this Google satellite image, which has the Hilton at the center. If anyone who has first hand knowledge of that area can correct or enhance my understanding of it, please leave a comment.)

Even though a narrow strip of trees separates the hotel parking lot from a two lane city street (Jones Road), there is no access between that street and the hotel. The only pedestrian or vehicular access to the hotel property is via the westbound lanes of Highway 4. Even If he had made it to Jones Road, he'd have had to walk at least half a mile to find a place for a Coke and something cheap to eat. The area immediately west of the hotel is occupied by a single-use suburban residential development and a cemetery. (If the gas station on the highway had also had access to Jones Road, he wouldn't have had to walk as far.)

I would bet that the lack of vehicular access to the hotel from Jones Road was dictated by the town's zoning code or subdivision regulations, perhaps to allay residents' concerns about cut-through traffic.

An SUV hit and fatally injured Ray. The driver stopped and rendered aid, and no charges have been filed against him. The driver was not intoxicated or impaired. The weather was cloudy, but there had been some light rain earlier in the afternoon.

Why was Jason Ray walking along a busy highway? This is speculation, but I think it's reasonable: Here's a college student on a budget, and he's hungry. He came with the team on the plane, and he's stuck, without a car, at a "full service hotel" -- the kind of place you pay two bucks for a Coke or candy bar from the vending machine. He's not going to order room service or get something at the hotel's restaurant -- too pricey and probably not what he's hungry for. So he walks a couple of hundred yards along the highway to a gas station with a convenience store, the nearest place to buy something cheap and filling.

So what killed Jason Ray? No sidewalk along, but set back from, a busy highway, plus no alternate road or path for local traffic (access to the hotel and the gas station only from the highway), plus the confiscatory food and drink prices typical of a full service hotel which likely drove him to look for a convenience store in the first place.

Louisville, Kentucky, recently adopted a "complete streets" policy that requires accommodation for pedestrians, bicycles, wheelchairs, and strollers when a street is built or rebuilt.

When an area is designed with only car travel in mind, it puts the pedestrian at a severe disadvantage. Sometimes that disadvantage is fatal.

UPDATE: The Independent Weekly, serving the UNC area, notes that what happened to Jason Ray has happened closer to home:

The tragic death of Jason Ray, the UNC-Chapel Hill senior who played Tar Heel team mascot Rameses, is the latest reminder of the senseless danger of pedestrian-unfriendly roadways. Reports say that Ray was walking along New Jersey's Route 4, returning to his hotel room from a convenience store at about 4 p.m., when he was hit by an SUV. The driver wasn't drunk, according to police. It was just an accident on a road designed for cars, not for people. Sad to say, such an accident might have happened on Raleigh's Capital Boulevard, where eight people have been killed along a 10-mile stretch since 2002. Or it might have happened on U.S. 15-501 between Durham and Chapel Hill—in fact, a similar incident did happen there in 1999, when two lacrosse players from George Mason University, in town for a match with UNC-Chapel Hill, were struck by a car while trying to get from a shopping center to their hotel room. And last year, UNC Emeritus Psychology Professor David Galinsky was killed trying to cross Fordham Boulevard on his way to a Tar Heels game and Arthur McClean was killed the same day, trying to cross U.S. 15-501 near Southern Village.

Makeshift memorials are scattered across the Triangle's dangerous intersections, even as more hotels, restaurants and shopping centers are built there. Many of those intersections are under the purview of the state Department of Transportation, for which pedestrian safety continues to be among the lowest priorities. How long will traffic engineers continue to ignore these deaths?

Jon Cook has more to say about Jason Ray:

Ray was due to graduate in May with a major in business administration and a minor in religion. He already had a job waiting for him as a sales and marketing rep for a company in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The former Eagle Scout had a long history of social activism, including a church-sponsored mission trip to Honduras.

Ray's job as the Tar Heels' mascot, Ramses the ram, fused his passions for UNC basketball and making people smile and laugh. Jodi Stewart, a neighbor of the Ray family who attends the same church in Concord, N.C. described Jason as "an awesome kid" to the Raleigh News & Observer.

"I never knew a kid who was more full of life," said Stewart. "He was excited every day. He loved what he was doing, he loved God, his family, and being the school's mascot."

Stewart also noted that Jason was a bit of a "miracle" baby, being born when his parents were both in their 40s.

"They cherish this boy. You cannot put into words what this child means to them," she said. "Jason is their life. They live their life for him."

Some time ago, David Sucher, author of the great urban design book City Comforts, rechristened his blog as "City Comforts, temporarily known as Viaduct, The Blog." His focus has narrowed from a wide variety of urban design issues to (mainly) a single crucial issue affecting his hometown of Seattle: Whether to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an earthquake-damaged double-decker freeway between downtown and Puget Sound, with a stronger viaduct, a tunnel, or something else. Sucher's blog has been so focused on the details of the issue, it's been hard to get the big picture, but USA Today provides a summary in today's edition.

Sucher's solution is "repair and prepare": "Repair the Alaskan Way Viaduct so that we can prepare to tear it down in an orderly fashion." Don't build a new viaduct, don't build a tunnel, but strengthen the current structure. Meanwhile begin to create the transit infrastructure that can replace the people-moving capacity that will be lost when the viaduct is eventually removed.

Seattle certainly doesn't need to endure what Boston suffered with the Big Dig, the 15-year, $15 billion project to convert a similar elevated expressway, separating downtown from the waterfront, to a tunnel. But many cities have simply removed waterfront freeways. Portland removed Harbor Drive in 1974. When the 1989 earthquake weakened the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, it was closed and remained closed until it was demolished, turning real estate in the shadows of an elevated expressway into sunny waterfront property. (Casper Weinberger, later U. S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and Secretary of Defense, opposed the building of the Embarcadero Freeway as a member of the California Assembly and was gratified to see it torn down at long last.)

In the '70s, Milwaukee stopped the construction of a lakefront expressway, and just a few years ago the city demolished an expressway spur that cut off downtown from the Milwaukee River and the north side.

And other cities are reconsidering waterfront highways. A citizens' group in Louisville is arguing against the widening of "Spaghetti Junction" -- where three interstate highways come together between downtown Louisville and the Ohio River -- and instead calling for the removal of a segment of I-64 between downtown and the river, realigning the route along an existing loop road.

Thanks to the work of citizen activists in the '70s and in the '90s, Tulsa has avoided having either a limited-access freeway or a high-speed six-lane parkway cutting off access between the river and the rest of the city. We don't have to remove what we never built.

We made our own mistakes, however, in the construction of the Inner Dispersal Loop, which cut downtown off from its surrounding neighborhoods, blighting land on both sides of each leg of the road. The construction of I-244 and the last section of the Broken Arrow Expressway from 15th Street into downtown also split and damaged neighborhoods.

An element of Nashville's 50 year vision is to eliminate its own inner expressway loop, making hundreds of acres of land available for new development. Perhaps Tulsa should envision a similar long-range plan to reconnect neighborhoods, downtown, and the river.

Don't know which of her books or articles they came from, but I like these:

A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

No one had left the house since I got home from work Friday afternoon, and the plan was that no one would leave the house at all today, until my daughter woke up complaining of a very sore throat. So I made a trip to the drugstore late this morning, hoping to get there and back before the freezing rain began.

Our driveway has a bit of a slope, and I had my doubts as to whether I could get back up the hill on the Zamboni-quality sheet of ice that had been laid down on Friday. To avoid that problem, I even considered walking to the drugstore, only about 3/4 mile away, but I didn't like the idea of walking back through an Icee downpour.

While it's certainly possible to get hurt walking on ice and snow, you can't do as much damage as you can with a car, and you have more possible paths to follow. On foot, you're not as likely to get stuck behind someone trying unsuccessfully to get up a hill.

The new supermarket in our neighborhood is scheduled to open on Wednesday. It will be wonderful to be able walk a couple of blocks, without going onto a major street, to pick up necessities.

In the winter of 2004, I spent several weeks in East Aurora, New York, about 20 miles southeast of Buffalo and just as susceptible to heavy lake-effect snows. A heavy snow was already falling as I flew in for my first trip, right after New Year's. I took it slowly and made it to the hotel all right. But now there was at least a foot of snow on the ground, the plows had yet to catch up, I had yet to get anything for dinner, and the hotel didn't have a restaurant.

If I'd been in a typical suburban hotel, surrounded by parking lots and office buildings, I'd have been stuck with eating from the vending machine. In East Aurora, there was no problem. I put on my snow boots, walked one block up to Main Street, and stepped into a cozy tavern, where I read the newspaper over a slice of prime rib and a Guinness. I had three or four other good choices within a couple of blocks. It didn't hurt that, with the snow falling, East Aurora's Main Street is like a scene out of It's a Wonderful Life.

EAST AURORA EXTRA: Photo sets of the whimsically painted fire hydrants of East Aurora, Arts-and-Crafts movement inspired trash cans on the town's Main Street, and the town's classic five-and-dime, Vidler's. And, finally, here are my photos of East Aurora from January and May 2004.

Steve Patterson of Urban Review STL has an analysis of a plan for redoing three blocks of Euclid Avenue in St. Louis -- paving, lighting, streetscaping -- the same sort of treatment we've seen here in Tulsa along Brookside, Main Street, and in the Blue Dome District. Steve's article is full of brilliant insights about the gap between what actually makes a street lively and what cities tend to spend a lot of money on.

(UPDATE: Here's a link to a Google map of the target area. It extends one block north and two blocks south of the green arrow, from Lindell on the north to Forest Park Blvd. on the south.)

Steve attended a public meeting about the plan, and he heard one commenter suggest eliminating on-street parking altogether. Steve says that would kill the street:

“But how would eliminating parking kill the street,” you ask? Simple, we do not have the density required to keep the sidewalks busy at all times. Sure, we have a number of pedestrians now that make the street look lively but take away the cars and those same number of pedestrians now looks pathetic. We’d need considerably more pedestrians on the sidewalks to make up for the loss of perceived activity contributed by the parked cars. You might argue that removing parked cars from the street would increase pedestrian traffic but such a cause-effect is only wishful thinking. Density is what increases pedestrian traffic, not the absense of parked cars. Without parked cars the street would look vacant and as it looked vacant you’d have less and less pedestrians because they would not feel as safe on the street. Eventually we’d see less stores as a result. The street would die a slow death. On-street parking can only be eliminated in very special circumstances and none of those exist, or are likely to ever exist, in the St. Louis region. We all need to accept on-street parking as part of the activity of the street.

He also mentions that a row of parked cars provides a buffer between pedestrians and traffic, and it has a traffic-calming effect.

The proposed re-do of these three blocks is expected to cost $600,000 to $1,000,000 per block. That doesn't include $400,000 in design fees! Steve writes:

City streetscapes do not need to be fancy. They need good paving, concrete is a perfectly fine material. They need to be lined with good-sized street trees (spend a bit more on bigger trees). Streets need attractive and quality lighting, nothing too fancy or garish. In short, streets need to just be streets. Zoning, signing and things like opening windows to restaurants are the factors that make for an exciting street.

So why do designers focus on the fancy?

You see the design community has the nagging problem, the portfolio. The portfolio or gallery is where they show off their projects to their peers and prospective clients. It takes the really flashy stuff to show up well in photographs. A well-designed streetscape (or building) that is reasonable conventional but part of a dynamic urban context will look far too boring in a designer’s portfolio. Often they want projects that look exciting when empty, hard to accomplish unless you go all out.

I've heard complaints that the same sort of thing is happening in Tulsa. The reopening of Main Street left far too few on street parking spaces. The lighting in front of Cain's Ballroom is too bright (those horrid "acorn" fixtures) and at a height that blocks the facades of Cain's, Bob's and the Sound Pony from the view of passing cars. Worse still, the light fixtures actually obscure part of the Cain's neon sign.

In Brookside, the curb bumpouts eliminated some valuable street parking spaces for businesses like Shades of Brown and Brookside Lao-Thai. Overly-fancy streetscaping means that we don't have the funding to revert downtown streets to two-way as quickly as if we used basic but good street treatments.

I hope every Tulsa planner and the laypeople who sit on design task forces will read all that Steve Patterson has to say.

MORE: Steve has also posted a critique of new suburban sidewalks. Very pretty, but do they actually make the street walkable? Would you feel safe walking on them?

The following comment, by Tom Gulihur of CalCoast Realty, was posted on a much earlier entry, Will the Real New Urbanism Please Stand Up? Gulihur is a California-based real estate broker and financier with a fascinating resumé and deep Oklahoma roots.

This essay wasn't likely to get much readership in the comments of an old entry, so I'm posting it here. I think you'll find it as thought-provoking and well-written as I did.

I come from land rush era Oklahoman stock on both sides of the family and I lived in Oklahoma until I was ten years old, when my family moved to LA, like true Okies. Parents and grandparents are OU alums and paternal grandparents are OSU alums. I love Oklahoma in a nostalgic way, but I understand why many people outside of Oklahoma blanche at the corny Wal-Mart mentality there (and the rest of the South and Midwest).

But some real estate development business is bringing me back to OK. There's a downtown revitalization occurring in Tulsa and I'm involved in a project there. I've been reading gobs of information on Tulsa and urban renewal there and want to explain a fundamental challenge that Tulsans need to overcome. I've seen San Diego's urban renewal and have studied New Urbanism enough to understand how this has to work. First, the public has to buy-in to most of the concepts of New Urbanism or the whole thing will flop. Here is a quick version of what it requires:

• Create dense and intense development at the urban core using form based zoning code. That means don't classify building by use, but rather by their shape. Encourage mixed-use buildings but not only retail-office-residential; enable all mixed uses similar to the early 1920’s in America (it should basically look like Disney’s Main Street USA).
• Create a pedestrian-friendly environment. Expand public transit to de-emphasize the use of the car. Of course this is difficult in an economy that is based on big oil and Detroit steel (now Japanese and German steel too).
• Design an attractive public realm. Plant corridors of street trees, install traffic-calming devices, open corridors of greenbelts with paths and walkways to enable pedestrian and bicyclist activity, build 'vest-pocket parks'. Honor public institutions through architecture and placement. A well designed public realm, whether it’s a residential neighborhood (think of Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.), a public square, a village green, a park or a retail shopping street, they should all encourage people to want to ‘hang out’, ‘hang around’ or walk through it and walk to it. All this hanging out and walking around has a second major benefit to society besides the individual’s personal enjoyment of the experience, is that CRIME IS REDUCED where there are a lot of citizens with their eyes open. Democratic values are also strengthened when the public realm is strong.
• Build using environmentally sustainable techniques. Use all active and passive solar technologies available and use recycled or recyclable building materials.
• Mix housing types in random and close proximity. Don't just build high-rise condos that all cost from $300k to $500k because that fosters elitist classicism. This is the biggest challenge facing New Urbanists everywhere because of the conventional way residential projects are financed according to target market segments that naturally form socio-economic groups that lead to isolation of other groups. A truly democratic and vibrant culture occurs when a CEO and a janitor can live as compatible neighbors, although that's an extreme example.

It's important for the public to learn more about New Urbanism, which is also called Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), Transit Oriented Development (TOD), Smart Growth, or other similar concepts. The American leader in this concept is Andres Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Their architecture and urban planning firm is at DPZ.com and at CNU.org (The Congress for the New Urbanism). Better yet, read Duany's entertaining book, SUBURBAN NATION, THE RISE OF SPRAWL AND THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. Then you will ‘get’ New Urbanism.

Some conservatives see a political subcurrent to it and there really is an environmental concern and inclusionary aspect to it. But hey, the icecaps seem to be melting from global warming aren't they? Ten years ago you could argue against that assertion but it's different now. The inclusionary aspect of democratic society is an important part of New Urbanism that doesn't necessarily disagree with a conservative agenda, unless it includes environmental abuse.

In my experience, residential development always leads retail development because retail business owners cannot follow the ludicrous mantra of 'build it and they will come'. Retail will die on the vine if there it is not surrounded by a sea of 'rooftops', meaning the rooftops of consumers. So there's always a lag of retail development behind residential development. And the biggest complaint of the first wave of downtown dwellers when a city starts a downtown renaissance is that there is no convenient or good grocery store downtown. And there are the homeless, who often represent a security problem for wealthy urbanites.

But if Tulsa wants to be the next SOHO or downtown Vancouver, or Portland, or San Diego then it needs to loosen up the archaic liquor laws, IMHO. You need to get a Trader Joe's in downtown for sure, and TJ's needs to be able to sell its selection of wines and beers, which is probably only about 10% of their business, but a crucial 10%. So you guys need to dump the blue laws and welcome to the 21st century. Get out of the Wal-Mart fundamentalist attitude, open your minds and live and let live.

Tulsa has always enjoyed a more cosmopolitan flair than larger Oklahoma City (from where my family hails), although some people on the left and right coasts would snort at the words 'cosmopolitan' and 'Oklahoma' in the same sentence. What Oklahoma has all over the snobbier coastal societies is a warm friendliness that says 'you're OK!', to borrow a partial phrase from Transactional Analysis and Rogers and Hammerstein.

Good luck Okies! I'm rooting for you. But you'll need to loosen your liquor laws and learn about New Urbanism before real progress can move forward.

A couple of comments: (1) Of course I'm curious to know which downtown Tulsa project Gulihur is involved with, and pleased to know someone familiar with these concepts is involved in a downtown project. (2) There's a reference in his comment to financing, and Gulihur is involved in the financial end of real estate. One of the obstacles to building mixed-use or traditional neighborhood developments is that the money people don't understand it and don't have comparables to guide their lending decisions. (The Next American City had an in-depth article on the topic, "Why Building Smart Is So Hard," in the inaugural issue.) I'd be interested in Mr. Gulihur expanding on that issue from his experience.

Once upon a time, there was a famous architect of Asian descent who produced a plan that radically altered the center of a major Oklahoma city.

No, not Bing Thom and Tulsa, but I. M. Pei, whose plan to redevelop Oklahoma City resulted in the demolition of most of its original commercial district and the creation of the Myriad Gardens, the Myriad Convention Center, and that Habitrail-like thing just west of Myriad Gardens.

Via Doug Loudenback, we learn of a new book that puts Pei's plan in the context of fifty years of history of downtown Oklahoma City's decline and renaissance.

According to the book's blog, OKC, Second Time Around: A Renaissance Story, by Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money, "chronicles a 50-year period in which hundreds of buildings were demolished in downtown OKC, the demise of Urban Renewal, early development of Bricktown, and downtown's recent resurgence."

Loudenback, an online chronicler of Oklahoma City history, gives the book five stars plus an infinite number of plusses, for providing both beautiful pictures and informative text covering the history of downtown OKC in detail, both positive and negative. I was especially interested in Loudenback's description of the chapter on Neal Horton, an early advocate for Bricktown, whose pleas for city investment in basic infrastructure fell on deaf ears, and who didn't live to see his visions come to pass.

I plan to pick up a copy of this book when I'm next in Oklahoma City. The same kind of book needs to be written about Tulsa.

I found this item on the Fort Worth Architecture forum, on a topic about the Trinity River Vision, a project that involves Bing Thom of The Channels fame. This item has nothing to do with the project specifically, but it says so many things so well that I'm going to quote it in full. It's by Kip Wright, and it's in response to someone who wants Fort Worth to be a city of towers, just like Dallas. If this applies to Fort Worth, it applies even more so to Tulsa. (I've added emphasis in a few places.)

O.K., Jonny, at the risk of sounding anti-progress or, at worst, a sentimental old geezer, I'm gonna tell you a story about a little boy. (This is also for some others of you out there who yearn for the tall, glass towers of Dallas.)

This little boy grew up in Atlanta, Ga., and he was VERY proud of his town: The Big Peach, Capital of the Empire State of the South, Hotlanta, site of one of the most decisive battles of the War Between the States, home to "Gone with the Wind." And home to the 2nd Six Flags! The sports teams sucked, but he is, to this day a big Falcon-Braves fan. He loved Atlanta for what it was, but he wanted MORE!

When National Geographic did a cover story about his town, ca. 1976, he was very excited. He dreamed of his city getting REALLY BIG with tall glass towers -- a mecca to which many would come, from far and near.

In 1978 he watched the historic old Henry Grady Hotel on Peachtree Street emploded. Not only was it cool to watch, it was to replaced by the 79-story Westin Peachtree Center Hotel! WOW! But his grandmother had quite another take. As her eyes filled up with tears, she said "I can't believe they've demolished the Henry Grady!" (And there was nothing wrong with it either!) It had been the site of many important Atlanta events, not to mention the site of proms, when Atlanta had only three or four high schools. She had been upset, too, when, a few years earlier, Atlanta's landmark Terminal Station (with Morrocan influence) had been demolished for a pitifully unremarkable 30-story federal building.

Shortly thereafter, the Loew's Grand, site of the world premiere of "Gone with the Wind" was slightly damaged by arson. It was soon "decided" that it was not salvagable and would have to be replaced by the 53-story world headquarters for Georgia Pacific. Then, like a falling domino, came the demand by Georgia Pacific that the landmark Coca-Cola sign, gigantic and resplendent with red and white neon lights that swirled at varying speeds, would have to go, too. They could not have this "eyesore" across the street from THEIR building! An icon of over 50 years was removed.

The little boy went away to college in the 1980s. It seemed like every time he went home, another old landmark had been eradicated for "progress." The 1890s dairy farm with dwellings and outbuildings, at the intersection of Briarcliff and LaVista, was removed, with over 100 gigantic oaks, for a strip shopping center, as Atlanta sprawled, far and wide. A ca. 1920 brick gas station, with porte cochere, was removed for a parking deck next to Emory University. The list went on and on . . .

In the early 1990s, just before his grandmother passed away, the little boy took his grandmother downtown to see the changes. She mostly just said, "Ooooooh, would you look at that." Her city was almost unrecognizable. And saddest of all, to them, was the replacement of the old S&W Cafeteria and the old Woolworth's (site of many of their lunchtimes) by (guess what?) a 60-story office tower.

The little boy moved away from his beloved home town because he got his wish. Atlanta is now a super big city with lots of gleaming glass towers, 16-lane interstate highways, and umpteen gazillion corporate headquarters. Everyone is now going to Atlanta -- but him. The city is TOO BIG, there are TOO MANY glass towered office complexes, there are TOO MANY Damn Yankees who have moved to that mecca. Development, cars, and pollution now dominate his town.

Now, I suppose I'd live there again . . . if a really good reason to do so appeared. I still have a lot of friends there. I love the big trees and green everywhere.

But there is a disconnect -- many, many of the landmarks that made Atlanta what it was to me are there no longer. It is now something else to me, in many ways. (Not to mention all the Damn Yankees who live there!) It's not Atlanta to me any more.

Old buildings create a continuity between generations, they give a city an identity and a soul.

Atlanta had a hell of a time during the Olympics in deciding on an identity. Its mascot was the blue thing, "Whatizit." How can one have an identity when one scorns the past and tradition? Everything about Atlanta was "looking to the future." But everything we are today is a result of what's happened in the past. This is what makes different parts of America unique, even as we speed on towards a goal of homogeneity.

It is a given that cities are going to change, but how will they do it? Growing with a seriously-planned eye to the past, improving upon what exists? Or wipe-the-slate-clean with cost-effectiveness, highest-and-best-use, biggest-bidder-take-all, and the-bottom-line? Flirt like a whore for the developer's dollar? Sit-up and roll-over like a dog, begging for a bone?

Some of you will smirk at me as a sentimental fool, but it is you whom I pity. With your eyes only on the bank ledger you will miss texture, lines, the patina of age, the walls that can't talk, the structures that connect us with our past.

As I live here in Fort Worth, I connect to it through people and places. People die, but it gives me hope that some of the buildings will live. I hope Fort Worth wakes up before it does more to destroy its legacy. Very few landmarks have even nominal protection in this town.

So, my good Jonny, you want your city to be like Dallas? This little boy says don't wish that on Cowtown (Dallas only WISHES it were "Cowtown," so its football team mascot would make sense!) I think "Cowtown" is good like it is. Sure, progress is good, but at what cost? If you want Dallas or Atlanta, then go there -- I think you'll eventually come home.

Hearty congratulations to Kevin Walsh, webmaster of Forgotten NY, a site devoted to the physical remnants of decades and centuries past in the five boroughs and environs -- old neon, abandoned subway stations, abandoned diners, humpback street signs (think Sesame Street), vanished streets, ghost ads -- and that's just scratching the surface. It's a site you can explore for hours.

Kevin's years of diligent research have spawned a book of the same title. Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis, published by Collins, made its debut last month in hardcover and paperback. Kevin has a page devoted to the book's release party, held at a Greenwich Village pub that was once a speakeasy. Naturally, Kevin provides a short history of the bar, its famous customers, and explains how the term "86" is connected to the place.

Time Out New York put the book on its cover, with a feature story and several sidebars. And Kevin's cousin, Tom Paul, posted a web scavenger hunt as a contest. While the contest is long over, the five questions he asks will send you searching through forgotten-ny.com looking for the answers, giving you an overview of the hidden treasures you'll find there.

Urban Tulsa Weekly has a bright and shiny new website!

All the links in my archive category are now broken! But it's worth it! (And they'll be easy enough to fix -- it will just take time.)

(There's a really simple forwarding trick they could do to fix all the broken links on the server side.)

Here's this week's column, part 6 in the series dealing with The Channels proposal, this week asking about the best way to create a more pedestrian-friendly city, learning a lesson from the success of a waterfront development in Florida.

When I posted my entry, Will the real New Urbanism please stand up?, I also e-mailed the Congress for the New Urbanism to ask them what they knew about this website called newurbanism.org. That's the site that comes up as the first result on a Google search of the term "New Urbanism," but which contains a lot of radical rhetoric that goes well beyond anything I've heard advocated by a new urbanist planner or architect.

In response to my e-mail, I received a reply from Steve Filmanowicz, Communications Director for the Congress for the New Urbanism (emphasis added by me):

Thanks for contacting us and alerting us to the new content at the site, newurbanism.org. Newurbanism.org is an independent, one-person operation with no ties to the Congress for the New Urbanism and little to no apparent following among New Urbanists. The site is run by a person named Andy Kunz who registered the domain name years ago. Because of the confusion the site creates, and the misimpression it leaves with some visitors that it is a source of authoritative information about New Urbanism, CNU has asked him to surrender the domain name. Since CNU refused Kunz' demand of $30,000 in exchange for the rights to the domain, the site remains in his control, unfortunately.

Your blog entry featured an accurate and insightful description of New Urbanism, whereas NewUrbanism.org offers a distorted portrayal. While there are many environmental benefits associated with the compact, walkable neighborhood-based development promoted by New Urbanists (see information on the LEED-ND project at cnu.org), the calls for things such as bans on airport expansions and road extensions and mandates for widespread installations of solar roof panels are independent positions of Mr. Kunz that further reveal that his site is a highly unreliable source of information about its namesake.

As I mentioned previously, the authoritative source of information about the New Urbanist approach to architecture and urban planning is the Congress for the New Urbanism, and that organization's website is www.cnu.org. Mr. Filmanowicz said in his e-mail that a new and improved CNU website is to be released by November.

It appears to me that Andy Kunz is a cybersquatter, holding the domain name hostage. In fact, I wonder if he really is an overzealous environmentalist, or if he is deliberately posting these draconian ideas as a way to embarass CNU into paying him for the domain name.

Given the likelihood of confusion -- indeed, actual confusion, as Kunz's views have been attributed to the New Urbanist movement as a whole -- I wonder if there is a basis for the CNU to take legal action against Kunz, at the very least to require him to post a disclaimer on every page.

If not, Mr. Kunz has discovered an ingenious way to make an organization's life miserable: Grab a domain name that would logically belong to that organization, make it look professional and add enough detail to make it appear to the casual websurfer that this is an authoritative site about said group. (But carefully avoid stating that you are speaking on behalf of the group.) Then notify the group of your ransom demand. If they refuse to pay, add some off-the-wall content that would harm their reputation (but plausible enough so that the site still seems authoritative) and raise the price. Continue to raise the stakes until the victim pays up. The same strategy could be used against a public figure, such as a candidate for office.

I've got to hope that there are legal remedies to protect groups against that kind of attack.

This morning I heard some talk on the radio about "New Urbanism." The backers of The Channels -- the $788 million plan to build islands in the middle of the Arkansas River -- have made reference to the New Urbanist movement.

The discussion I heard this morning linked New Urbanism with radical environmentalism -- specifically, support for Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, calls for moratoria on road and airport construction and expansion, putting solar panels on every building in America, and calls to divert the U. S. defense budget for the complete remaking of the American landscape.

I've been hearing about and reading about New Urbanism for the last 10 years or so, and that's not the movement I'm familiar with. The New Urbanism I know is about relearning lessons from our past about how to build neighborhoods, towns, and cities that are pleasant and safe places to live.

The traditional approach to urban development got lost around the end of World War II, when the theoreticians took over and began to use the power of government to make city development fit their theories. The theoreticians were more interested in putting things in neat categories, rather than understanding and appreciating the complexity present in a healthy city. Government engaged in market-distorting activities that subsidized the construction of new suburbs and the building of infrastructure to serve those new suburbs over the restoration of existing neighborhoods and existing infrastructure. Zoning codes required the strict separation of homes from shops from workplaces, on the grounds that there was something inherently unsanitary about living within walking distance of a grocery store. New neighborhoods were built without basic civic infrastructure like small parks and sidewalks. When older, traditional neighborhoods were devalued by the government-subsidized construction of new neighborhoods, or split in two by Federally-funded freeways, the Federal government then provided funds to bulldoze those traditional neighborhoods, often to remake them after the suburban model. And Federal and local government policies have in turn molded private lending and development practices to encourage more of the same.

The post-WWII approach to development, which has dominated local and Federal government policies for over 50 years, has more in common with Communist centralized planning than the free market and traditional American values.

New Urbanism is an attempt to relearn the traditional way of building cities and adapt it to modern circumstances. New Urbanists are involved in preserving traditional, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where they exist and in creating new developments in the traditional style, while incorporating the kind of modern amenities that we expect in our homes and workplaces. Sometimes these new developments are infill, replacing obsolete industrial or commercial sites ("brownfields", dead malls, rundown strip shopping centers) or vacant land in the midst of a city.

Some examples of New Urbanist projects:

• Seaside, Florida, a newly built beach town
• Stapleton, the redevelopment of Denver's decommissioned airport as a walkable community of 30,000 people, with schools, offices, parks, and shops
• Legacy Town Center, creating a focal point for a Dallas suburb that lacked one.
• Southlake Town Square, another effort to create a center for a sprawling Metroplex suburb, bringing together the town hall, county offices, a library, national chain stores and restaurants, medical and professional offices, and brownstone residences
• Celebration, Florida, a small town created by Disney
• Har-Ber Meadows, a newly-built "traditional" neighborhood on the west side of Springdale, Arkansas
• The Crossings, Mountain View, California -- the dead Old Mill Mall was converted into an 18-acre mixed use neighborhood

Here in the Tulsa area, New Urbanism's influence can be seen in the proposed East End development and the Village at Central Park, and in the neighborhood plans for Brookside, 6th Street (the Pearl District), Brady Village, and east Tulsa's 21st Street corridor.

When I think of New Urbanism, the names of three urban planners immediately come to mind: Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Peter Calthorpe. These planners have been involved in countless innovative new developments and redevelopments around the world.

While I've heard New Urbanists tout the environmental benefits of more compact traditional neighborhoods, I haven't heard them advocating any radical anti-human environmental policies. So I was surprised at what I heard on the radio this morning, and I did a Google search on the phrase "New Urbanism."

The first hit was a site called newurbanism.org. Sure enough, here were all the radical proposals that were being mentioned on the air this morning.

I did some digging through the site, but I never could find out the name of the individual or organization who had set up the site. I went to completewhois.com to find out who owned it, and this was the result (the same info was provided for admin and tech contacts):

Registrant ID: 39693217-NSI
Registrant Name: New Urbanism.org LLC
Registrant Organization: NewUrbanism.Org, LLC
Registrant Street1: 824 King St, Suite 103
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City: Alexandria
Registrant State/Province: VA
Registrant Postal Code: 22314
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.1231231234
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email: email@newurbanism.org

Note that the phone number is fake, and you can't find a phone number or a name anywhere on the website.

The real, credible website for the New Urbanist movement is www.cnu.org, the Congress for the New Urbanism. You can read a history of the organization, founded in 1993, here. You will not find a radical Earth First manifesto here. In fact, here is a Flash-animated tour explaining what New Urbanism is all about.

The backers of The Channels plan have referred to a 2004 study done by the firm Booz Allen Hamilton called Dallas at the Tipping Point: A Road Map for Renewal (800 KB PDF file). The study was commissioned by the Dallas Morning News to answer the questions:

1. What are the key challenges facing the City of Dallas?
2. How well is City Hall positioned to cope with these challenges?
3. What does the City of Dallas need to do to position itself for long-term success?

I've had a copy for some time, but finally had the chance to start reading it today.

The Channels backers point to the report's discussion of the cycle of decline which leads to a hollow urban core: Quality of life declines, businesses and individuals migrate to surrounding areas, the tax base declines, infrastructure requirements are underfunded, resources for city services decline, and the tax burden increases, leading to a decline in the quality of life, which feeds another round of the cycle. The Channels backers call this the Death Spiral and they say that Tulsa, like Dallas, is in this vicious cycle. They believe we need their project -- spending $600 million in public funds to build islands in the Arkansas River -- to break us out of that cycle.

In light of that, it was interesting to read what Booz Allen recommended to Dallas. There were no mentions of islands, arenas, or other big-ticket amenities. In fact, they called on Dallas officials to focus on delivering basic government services efficiently. They called for adjustments to the city's governmental structure so that authority, responsibility, and accountability align and the buck actually stops somewhere.

Like Tulsa, Dallas has a high violent crime rate, even with more than 2 police officers per thousand population. Fixing the problem isn't rocket science:

A programmatic approach is needed to reduce crime, improve education, and encourage economic growth.... Successful approaches to each of these are already well understood. From New York's crime reduction success to Cleveland's success in economic development, there is little mystery as to basic building blocks for improving quality of life. What is missing in Dallas is a comprehensive focus and a cross-department program for delivering the change.

Improving the quality of life index was the first of three strategic imperatives. The other two: Attract middle-class families to the city and address the city's under-funded liabilities (e.g. deferred infrastructure maintenance and city employee pensions).

Note: They don't say to attract more of the Creative Class types, as much as they can add to a city, but to be effective at competing with the suburbs for middle-class families, who provide a stable base for retaining employers and retailers in the city, with their accompanying tax base. (Joel Kotkin is one urban analyst who has bucked the Creative Class tide and insisted on the importance of middle-class families to a city's well-being.)

(Related thought: By going to Tulsa County to seek public funding for their project, The Channels backers have guaranteed that the funding package will include proportionate amenities for the county's other municipalities, neutralizing any competitive advantage the core of the City of Tulsa would have gained by implementing their plan.)

The Dallas Morning News has a special online section devoted to their report on Dallas, including a 2005 update on the situation, also prepared by Booz Allen Hamilton.

End of an era: Today was the final minor league ballgame at Ray Winder Field in Little Rock. The Arkansas Travelers beat the Springfield Cardinals 7-3. Next year the Arkansas Travelers will play at a new ballpark in North Little Rock. The Democrat-Gazette had two front-page stories (online, but subscriber-only) -- an interview with a fan who had been at the park's opening day in 1932, and a story about possible futures for the stadium. Options include leaving the playing field, but converting part of the stands to office space, and demolishing the whole thing to make way for expansion of the neighboring zoo.

Here are links to memories of the park and reports on the final game:

Harry King of the Morning News remembers the Travelers of the '50s and '60s.

KATV talks to some of the 8,000 fans at the final game.

Video of fans at the final game, and a chat with the organist (a real organist sitting at a real organ -- a rarity these days).

I only attended one game there, back in 1991. I drove down from Tulsa and met my friend Rick Koontz, who flew American Airlines non-rev from DFW. In '88 Rick and I had done a "rust belt tour" of five midwestern major league parks -- Wrigley, Comiskey, Tiger Stadium, Cleveland Municipal, and Riverfront.

Before the game we visited the State Capitol. There he was across the room, big as life, chatting up and getting photographed with a female tourist -- potential presidential candidate Gov. Slick Willie his own self. To this day, I regret not having gone over to ask, "Confidentially, Governor, where can a fella go for a good time in this town?" I feel sure he would have been a fount of useful information in that regard.

Details are fuzzy after 15 years, but I am pretty sure that what we saw was a legendary Saturday night double-header against the Shreveport Captains. For years, the Travs never played at home on Sunday, but would always play two the night before instead. I seem to recall that this had to do with the financial implications of not being allowed to sell beer on a hot summer Sunday afternoon.

As we arrived, we noticed "shaggers" waiting in the parking lot for foul balls during batting practice, just like at Driller Stadium in Tulsa. (Note to British readers: Retrieving a ball that has gone astray is a possible meaning of the verb "shag" in the USA.)

At the time, Shreveport was a Giants affiliate and the Travs were a Cardinals team, and in the minors when two National League affiliates played each other, they did so without a designated hitter.

The seats were very close to the field. I remember that the diamond was a couple of inches higher than foul territory, which must have been tricky to handle.

I would rank the experience at Ray Winder Field up there with an evening at Durham Athletic Park, the old home of the Bulls. Nothing fancy about it -- just baseball, an evening breeze, the sound of the organ, a Coke, a pretzel, and a scorecard.

MORE: A couple of columns about Ray Winder Field from Paul Greenberg (another one of my favorite things about Little Rock) -- Opening Day 2005 and Opening Day 2002.

Andy Donovan-Shead sends along a couple of interesting solutions for keeping cities green while accommodating the built environment:

Rubber sidewalks made from recycled tires (Chips, naturally) are better able to accommodate growing trees without the usual heaving and cracking of concrete walks. The downside: Higher initial cost, but with the benefit of saving valuable shade trees, and the material handles temperature extremes.

Green roofs are sprouting all over Chicago, starting with City Hall. Grass and trees on rooftops help reduce stormwater runoff and clean and cool the air.

I'm reminded of the concept of permeable driveways -- using a minimal amount of solid material to make for a stable surface for cars to drive and park on, but allowing as much grass as possible, which again reduces stormwater runoff and reduces heat. If you have a driveway long enough, it's going to crack and grass will start growing through it anyway. Anyone know if this sort of thing would meet the Tulsa zoning code's requirement for parking on an "all-weather" surface?

A week from Tuesday, Springdale, Arkansas, citizens will vote on a tax package to build a $46 million AA-quality minor league baseball stadium in the southwestern part of the city. According to the Grand Slam for Springdale website, a AA team would relocate to Springdale if a new park is built. (I'm guessing Texas League, as there are three TL teams nearby -- Tulsa, Springfield, Mo., and Little Rock.)

Northwest Arkansas is a booming area and could support a minor league baseball team. The region's prosperity has three pillars: Wal-Mart, poultry, and trucking. Wal-Mart's world HQ has attracted sales reps for hundreds of manufacturers to the northern part of the metro area, in Bentonville and Rogers, where whole neighborhoods of McMansions are springing up in what used to be hog pastures and chicken farms.

Hilly, green Fayetteville, anchoring the southern end of the region, is the cultural center, home to the University of Arkansas. The city has grown, but in a less dramatic fashion, and with more of an eye to preserving its historic neighborhoods and college-town walkability.

Springdale, in between, has always been a homely place. Food processing and trucking are the main industries. A tiny remnant of a downtown is surrounded by ugly '70s strip development. At the crossroads of US 412 and US 62, it's on the way to lots of places, but not much of a destination.

So a ballpark could be a good thing for Springdale and the region, but it's interesting to see the proponents of the stadium trot out the same old tactics. The website tells voters to say yes to three propositions, but doesn't explain what those propositions will accomplish. (It appears to be a refinancing of revenue bonds for an existing sales tax for roads, and the sales tax would be extended to generate enough to build a stadium.)

There was a feasibility study done by Conventions, Sports, and Leisure, International -- the same bunch that did the feasibility study for Tulsa's arena -- which claims that the stadium will result in 300 new jobs and $600,000 in new "revenues" to the city, in the form of increased sales taxes and stadium lease payments. The website doesn't bother to say how much the city's net income will increase if at all -- no word about the expense side of the ledger.

The targeted team is reported to be the Wichita Wranglers, which plays in Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, just across the Arkansas River from downtown Wichita. Wichita has the right to buy the team if the Wranglers break their stadium lease before its 2009 expiration.

The latest big development appears to be the defection of Rev. Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church, Springdale, who no longer supports the stadium because beer will be sold there. Perhaps he really fears the baseball team will be entertainment competition for his kids' church with its fire engine baptistery. (Here is a rather lengthy comment thread on the propriety of Floyd's endorsement in the first place and the sincerity of his reversal.)

I don't in the least begrudge Springdale a minor league team, but we are talking about an entertainment venue that will be competing against restaurants, theatres, concerts, and nightclubs for regional entertainment dollars. It seems like the private sector ought to be jumping at the chance to build such a facility if it really were economically feasible.

MORE: Meanwhile, there are plans for a privately-funded 9,000 seat arena in Bentonville. Global Spectrum (bypassed for Tulsa's BOk center) would manage the facility, and the arena owners would own the minor-league sports teams that would play there.)

Found on a MySpace blog during a Technorati search for "Tulsa", this is from Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck:

Another word for dependent is burden, and that term better describes these parents' perception of the children who rely upon them for mobility. Mothers often derail their careers so that their children can experience a life beyond the backyard. The role of journalist, banker, or marketing director is exchanged for that of chauffeur, with the vague hope that their career will resume when the last child turns sixteen; thus the term soccer mom -- a distinctly suburban euphemism. The plight of the suburban housewife was powerfully conveyed in a letter we received in 1990 from a woman living outside of Tulsa:

"Dear Architects:

"I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city's design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only let out for a ride in the car. It is impossible to walk even to the grocery store two blocks away. If our family wants to go for a ride we need to load two cars with four bikes and a baby cart and drive four miles to the only bike path in this city of over a quarter million people. I cannot exercise unless I drive to a health club that I had to pay $300 to, and that is four and a half miles away. There is no sense of community here on my street either, because we all have to drive around in our own little worlds that take us fifty miles a day to every corner of the surrounding five miles.

"I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible. . . And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream."

TRACKBACKS:

See-Dubya, out on the Left Coast, says we should count our blessings:

You live in one of the greatest little cities in America, lady. I�d love to have your problems. I�d be up at Grand Lake this weekend, buzzing around in my bass boat with the rich people. I�d go all Lileks on one of the most beautiful Art-Deco downtowns in the country. I�d take my kid to the JM Davis gun museum or Woolaroc or Gilcrease or Philbrook or out to wander around in some little brick downtown with an Indian name like Warneka or Beufala that still has its feed stores right there on Main Street....

I can walk three blocks to a grocery store here, too, and it�s a fancy-pants rinky-dink Whole Foods knockoff that�s never open when I need it. Safeway is two miles up a commuter-jammed highway. I could walk to church, but to find one that actually believes in the Trinity requires a five-mile trip in the family truckster.

Charles G. Hill, down at the other end of the turnpike, sees a lot of walkers in his neighborhood, but not a lot of kids:

And I don't expect this to change any time soon: if you're buying a house in town and you've got school-age kids, your friendly agent will steer you away from my neighborhood, despite its manifest advantages, because it's in an urban school district and you can't possibly want that.

(My apologies for not having trackbacks turned on, but I got tired of deleting 40-60 spam trackbacks a day, and my old spam-deterrent techniques were no longer working. As soon as I get MT 3.2 installed, I'll turn them back on. In the meantime, I'll manually add trackback links as I find them or if they're e-mailed to me at blog at batesline dot com.

Jane Jacobs, the urban observer who helped blow away the cobwebs of urban planning dogma so that we could see what really makes a city work, passed away in April. My Urban Tulsa Weekly column last week was a salute to Jane Jacobs, highlighting three lessons from her landmark 1960 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of my favorite books.

Also of note last week: Jamie Pierson's first column for UTW, in which she recalls a suburban Tulsa upbringing, gives thanks for her midtown-based young adulthood, and gives a tongue-in-cheek call for deannexing everything south of I-44.

If you have trouble finding your way around the tidy Cartesian grid that defines Tulsa's street network, imagine learning your way around an ancient, complex, and chaotic street network, and keeping that map entirely in your head.

From the Transport for London website:

All licensed taxi drivers in the Capital must have an in depth knowledge of the road network and places of interest in London - the 'Knowledge'. For would be All London drivers, this means that they need to have a detailed knowledge of London within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. Suburban drivers need to have a similarly detailed knowledge of their chosen sector.

From a PDF document about the Knowledge of London examination system:

In order to complete the Knowledge you will need to know any place where a taxi passenger might ask to be taken and how to get there. To do this you will need to know all the streets, roads, squares etc. as well as specific places, such as parks and open spaces, housing estates, government offices and departments, financial and commercial centres, diplomatic premises, town halls, registry offices, hospitals, places of worship, sports stadiums and leisure centres, stations, hotels, clubs, theatres, cinemas, museums, art galleries, schools, colleges and universities, societies, associations and institutions, police stations, civil, criminal and coroner�s courts, prisons, and places of interest to tourists. Such places are known as �points�.

How do you organize all this information in your brain? You learn 320 "runs", divided into 20 lists of 16 runs. A run connects two major points, and you learn the route from one end to the other, the reverse route (which may differ because of one-way streets and turn restrictions), all points of interest along the way, and all points of interest with a quarter-mile of each end point.

After an introductory talk, you have six months to learn the first 80 runs, then you go through a self-assessment, just to see if you've got the hang of it. You have another 18 months to learn the remaining 240 runs. Then there are four stages of oral examinations, each of which may involve multiple exams before advancing to the next stage. According to Transport for London:

On average it takes an All London applicant 34 months to learn the Knowledge and pass through the examination process, 26 months for a suburban applicant.

Small wonder that that London cabbie was able to keep his composure when he unexpectedly found himself being interviewed on TV about an Internet intellectual property case. (Hat tip on the cabbie story to The Dawn Patrol.)

Mysterious California investors are buying historic office buildings... in downtown Oklahoma City:

California investors bought First National Center on Friday in a fast deal that could turn what many see as an albatross around downtown�s revival into a �crown jewel� in time for the state�s centennial.

It was a $21 million cash transaction, said Tim Strange of Sperry Van Ness, which handled the sale of the largest office complex downtown.

The buyers, who were not revealed, have no connection to Oklahoma, he said. Nonetheless, the deal could hit Oklahomans in the heart if the Californians are successful in resurrecting the capital city�s downtown landmark.

�Plans are to bring it back to its former glory as the crown jewel of downtown Oklahoma City. To fill it up - and dress her up and take her to the ball. Have a centennial ball in the Great Banking Hall,� Strange said.

Here's a photo of the Great Banking Hall

My first thought when I read about this at Dustbury was, "Hey, these had better not be our Californians!"

But our guys -- Maurice Kanbar and Henry Kaufman, who have purchased over 25% of downtown Tulsa's office space, with plans to create housing, retail, and art galleries -- don't fit the description in the Oklahoman story, as they have ties to the state, through their Tulsa buying spree. Kanbar's ties go back at least as far as his purchase of Tulsa's Council Oak Books.

So maybe this is the new California trend. Somewhere in Malibu, at a cocktail party, someone is going on about the office building he bought that cost less than his beach house, and someone else tops that with the tale of the gem he bought for less than his Lamborghini. As California trends go, at least it's constructive.

I originally posted part of this as a comment on Catholic Ragemonkey in response to Fr. Shane Tharp's mentioning that he's in Wichita:

Wichita is a nice place to visit. I took several business trips there in the not-too-distant past, and I always found time to get out and explore a bit.

If you're much of a meat-eater, Wichita has a great barbecue buffet in the most unlikely place. It's called B&C Creations. The front part sells antiques, gift, and art; the buffet (lunch only) is in the back. You pay a laughably low price and get all you can eat of the some of the best smoked ribs and pulled pork you'll ever have. They have garlic coleslaw, too, which is amazingly good. It's on the eastern edge of Old Town, 355 N. Washington.

Watermark Books on East Douglas is an independent bookseller with a cafe and free WiFi. Exploration Place, the science museum across the river from downtown, is a lot of fun, and you're just an hour away from the second-biggest collection of spacecraft in the world -- the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson.

I neglected to mention the Orpheum Theatre, a classic downtown movie palace which is under restoration. I went there to see Reefer Madness, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and The Terror of Tiny Town during one of my trips. I even got a tour of the projection booth.

Wichita is a nicer place to visit than you might think. The key is to get away from the main highways. Driving the length of Douglas east to west is a good way to see the most interesting parts of town, including downtown, which hasn't been as devastated by parking lots and urban renewal as Tulsa's downtown has, and the old village of Delano, just west of the river.

To city officials who say that eminent domain is the only way to revitalize cities, look at Anaheim, California:

Anaheim's old downtown was obliterated in the 1970s through past uses of eminent domain and urban renewal. Now, the city (population: 328,000) wants to build a new downtown, and the target location is called the Platinum Triangle, an area of one-story warehouses near Angel Stadium.

Sounds a lot like Tulsa. Our Main Street is all but gone, as is the old Black Wall Street, thanks to urban renewal, so we're looking for substitutes, areas that were left unscathed by urban renewal. Because we destroyed most of our downtown commercial and residential buildings, we're looking to repurpose office and warehouse buildings to create a downtown commercial/residential core where it had never existed before.

In the typical world of redevelopment, officials would choose a plan and a developer, offer subsidies and exclusive development rights, and exert pressure on existing property owners to leave the area.

That is a pretty good description of the approach Tulsa tried to take with the "East Village," the 115 acres bounded by Elgin, the Frisco tracks, the east leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop, and 7th St. Proposals were solicited, and a St. Louis big-box shopping center developer called Desco was given exclusive rights to develop the area, with the city's power of eminent domain as a resource available for assembling property for the private developer. Desco wasn't able to get anything going and their rights lapsed. In the meantime, small property owners had lived in fear of losing their property and weren't inclined to invest in improvements.

Instead, Anaheim created a land-value premium by creating an overlay zone that allowed almost any imaginable use of property. Because current owners could now sell to a wider range of buyers, the Platinum Triangle is booming, with billions in private investment, millions of square feet of office, restaurant and retail space, and more than a dozen new high-rises in the works.

Tulsa's CBD zoning district offers that kind of freedom, and it applies to most land within the Inner Dispersal Loop, although some of that land is in one of the industrial districts (IL, IM, or IH), which restricts less intensive uses. I think this might be the case in party of the East Village and Brady Village. In practical terms, industrial zoning puts hurdles in the way of retail or residential uses.

Anaheim's example deserves closer examination.

(Hat tip to U. S. Rep. John Doolittle's Morning Murmur.)

Steve Patterson of Urban Review - St. Louis posted an entry recently about that city's '70s plan to "deplete" much of the older sections of northern St. Louis. The idea was to write off parts of the city for lost, discourage new investment in those areas, and provide a minimum amount of services for those remaining, until they all die off or move away. A quote from the plan:

Efforts must be made to adjust services and public investments so as to provide for those who are remaining in these areas. Yet these efforts should be pursued without encouraging new investment until the City determined that Redevelopment can and should begin.

Steve links to this item on PubDef.net, which in turn links to this 2002 article: "Quiet Conspiracy: The Team Four Plan and the Plot to Kill North St. Louis". The Team Four Plan was an update to the City of St. Louis' comprehensive plan, and it recommended the demolition of 70,000 homes in the predominantly African-American part of the city.

The plan was drafted in response to a 1973 RAND Corporation study that predicting that the City of St. Louis would no longer be the commercial hub of the metro area and the city should accept its fate as just another municipality among many. The cause for this decline?

The report largely blamed federal government policies for the City�s fate. Very similar to what was happening at the same time in New York City, the report said that highway construction, federal home mortgage programs, and property tax incentives all encouraged the exodus of people and commerce from the City into suburban areas.

Any of this sound familiar yet, Tulsans? (A related side note: I was at a political event a few weeks ago and met Tom Kimball, the head of economic development for Owasso. He told me that right now, about half the population of the metro area lives within the City of Tulsa, and half without. He said that it's natural for the center city to become an even smaller proportion of the metro area, and pointed to St. Louis as an example. I thought, but didn't say, that Tulsa tripled its land area in 1966 precisely to avoid getting hemmed in by its suburbs. I forget the exact number he quoted me, but I believe he suggested that Tulsa shouldn't complain about ending up at around a quarter to a third of the metro area population.)

In an update, PubDef.net links to this 2004 story about city planner Rollin Stanley. A couple of points caught my eye. St. Louis' 1947 comprehensive plan called for demolishing "a large swath" of the most urban part of the city and rebuilding it with suburban-style homes. The other is the amount of distrust between the African-American community and City Hall because of plans that called for the neglect and demolition of their neighborhoods.

The idea of depleting parts of St. Louis was a popular urban "revitalization" strategy, even though it sounds more like death by exposure than healing and restoration. Another term for the idea is "planned shrinkage," described in this article by Gregory Heller, as applied to a neighborhood in New York City:

Like others in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn, this district [Manhattan's Lower East Side] was generating very little tax revenue while costing the city great expenses for social services. These neighborhoods were an economic drain on the financially troubled city. Planned shrinkage, a policy conceived by Roger Starr in 1966 and officially implemented during his tenure as Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development under Mayor Abe Beame in 1976, was a way to expedite the "death" of these troubled neighborhoods to make way for their eventual redevelopment (Wallace and Wallace, 1998, p. 18-19, 24-25).

Insurance and mortgage company redlining, withdrawal of city services, cutting back on code enforcement and police patrols, no new investment in streets and public amenities -- all resulted in vacant buildings, followed by urban renewal condemnation and demolition of blight, followed by site assembly for new private developers. Heller says that Mayor Rudy Giuliani halted the city's collection of land for redevelopment and began to get the property back into the hands of the private sector.

(Again, I'm reminded of complaints by northside Tulsa leaders about the amount of land the city has accumulated and seems to be just sitting on.)

I don't have the time or energy right now to connect all the dots. The articles I've linked will give you a sense of some of the currents of thought in urban policy since World War II, currents that affected every major American city, and not in a good way. They'll also give you an understanding of the roots of the suspicion that many north Tulsa residents have about the substandard housing initiative and other revitalization plans. Food for thought.

A vision is a "compelling description of your preferred future," not a collection of public construction projects. This week's column is about comprehensive planning and developing a real vision for Tulsa's future. Tulsa's comprehensive plan is about 30 years old, but the process to get a new one is underway. Kansas City redid theirs in the '90s, and they have an ongoing effort to implement it. Dallas has unveiled a draft comprehensive plan with a strong theme of making more of Dallas pedestrian-friendly. Tulsa could learn a lot from these cities, but the scorched-earth approach of the development lobby may stop Tulsa from having the kind of visionary leadership we need.

I first learned about the Dallas plan thanks to this topic on the TulsaNow forum.

Some supplemental links:

The report of Comprehensive Plan Process Task Force: transmittal letter, draft report, and draft process.

Tulsa City Council's resolution adopting the recommendations of the Comprehensive Plan Process Task Force.

ForwardDallas, Dallas's comprehensive planning effort.

ForwardDallas's draft comprehensive plan documents.

The urban design element of ForwardDallas (14.5 MB PDF).

Dallas Morning News (free registration required) story on the plan: "Pedestrians, not cars, star in draft of plan, but code changes sought"

Dallas does moratoriums, too. One example: building permits and certificates of occupancy within 1000 feet of a section of Fort Worth Avenue were halted for four months, to allow time for a development study to be completed. This is much stricter, although shorter in duration, than the eminent domain moratorium being proposed for Tulsa.

The big infill development battle in Dallas has been over McMansions -- tearing down smaller homes in older neighborhoods and building houses that fill their lots and dwarf neighboring homes. Here's a blog devoted to the fight against McMansions. (In Tulsa, it's been more typical to replace a sprawling ranch home on a multiple-acre lot with several multi-story houses.)

DallasBlog.com is an interesting community blogging effort at creating an alternative news presence online. I intend to explore it further.

Here's the home page for FOCUS Kansas City.

Jane Jacobs is one of my heroes, my city planning guru. If there's one book I wish every city official would read, it's her Death and Life of Great American Cities.

There's an excellent introduction to Jane Jacobs' life and work over on 2Blowhards. It not only gives you the basic bio, but it puts her life in the context of the post-war, government-driven, in-the-name-of-progress madness that destroyed so much of our nation's urban fabric. Reading this article will help you understand why so many "revitalization" attempts not only failed but actually made things worse.

If you're a Tulsa voter, and more importantly if you're a candidate or a reporter or a leader in Step Up Tulsa! or a participant in Leadership Tulsa or on the board of the Tulsa Metro Chamber or in the leadership of the Tulsa Real Estate Coalition, if you have the notion that all urban critics are cranky naysayers, you need to read this, preferably with an open mind. Even if you can't manage an open mind, read it anyway. It still might help.

Hat tip to David Sucher's City Comforts Blog.

TRACKBACK: Forrest Christian at Requisite Reading links to a post from his archive, about the application of Jacobs' urban observations to the office environment, and the importance of relationships with "weak ties" to innovation.

This morning I met up with Steve Patterson of Urban Review - St. Louis at Shades of Brown Coffee in Brookside to talk about urban developments here and there.

Steve was heading back to St. Louis after visiting family in Oklahoma City. True city aficionado that he is, he wanted to get a sense of the urban situation here in Tulsa and set aside some time this morning on his way home to explore and take a few photos. He quizzed me about interesting urban places in Tulsa, and I look forward to reading his observations of our city.

One topic that came up in our conversation was Tulsa's "East Village", the 115 acres between 1st and 7th, Elgin and Lansing. A St. Louis developer, Desco, had won a contract to redevelop the area, but they failed to do anything, which Steve indicated was a good thing. Desco is a suburban developer, connected with the Schnucks supermarket chain. Here's an example of how Desco builds in an urban environment -- cookie-cutter suburban design with the big parking lot, no pedestrian connection to the neighborhood, no respect for the traditional street grid. Looks like we dodged a bullet.

Lately he's been writing about the fight to preserve a historic church building, St. Aloysius Gonzaga and about revitalization in Old North St. Louis. This entry about the conversion of a north St. Louis middle school into apartments not only reviews the project itself, but gives you a sense of the context -- the surrounding neighborhood.

If we're going to make headway in preserving and recreating urban places in Tulsa, we'll have to learn lessons from other cities. The number of urban design blogs is growing, and Steve's blog is a great example of the emerging genre.

Not "free" the adjective, but "free" the imperative verb. America's most public-transit-dependent city has been hit with a strike of public transit workers, and the solution is to liberate public transit from the state-owned monopoly that controls it.

Karol at Alarming News sees a silver lining in the cloud of the transit strike:

I like that people get to see what Unions really are, and what they really do. What private sector employee gets a mandatory 8% non-performance-based raise each year? What private sector employee has a standard retirement age of 55?

In the comments one of her readers defended the union's strike as an exercise of freedom of association and good ol' capitalism, using the leverage they have to get more money. Here's my reply:

If this were a situation where free markets and freedom of association were at work, the city would be able to fire every worker who didn't show up today and replace them with someone willing to work. Instead, the union can put city government over a barrel because they have a federally-enforced monopoly over the labor supply for the transit system. That, in turn, puts the citizens of New York over a barrel because of laws that keep the private sector out and give city government a monopoly over mass transit.

I linked to a background paper by the Institute for Justice, which was involved in a case in New York defending entrepreneurs who wanted to provide bus service in areas that aren't well-served by the city's system. Click through and read that paper -- these are classic examples of creative people who saw a need and a way to earn a fair wage by filling that need, but they were shut down by unnecessary regulation. Ultimately, state law in New York allows the city to keep private bus companies out, which is the case in most of the country. Laws against private bus companies don't serve the public interest -- they serve entrenched interests like the union and the city transit bureaucracy.

David Sucher at City Comforts, the blog, reminds us that there is a better alternative to eminent domain for dealing with blight -- nuisance abatement. If a property is blighted in the literal sense of the word, require the owner to clean it up, or clean it up for him and send him the bill.

We already do this to some extent -- the city will mow the grass on an untended property then bill the owner, for example. This alternative wouldn't satisfy some public officials, because the aim of some urban renewal is not to clean up blight, but to get ownership out of the hands of one group of owners into the hands of another, and "blight" is defined broadly enough to make this possible.

In the previous entry, Sucher calls attention to a new meaning for the word "persuade":

Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy has said that eminent domain is an important tool. The city used the threat of eminent domain to persuade Pittsburgh Wool Co. to make way for an expansion of H.J. Heinz Co. facilities, which were later purchased by Del Monte Food Co.

The city was persuasive in the same way that a man with a gun at your head is persuasive.

Reason knows how to throw an urban policy conference.

The Dynamic Cities Conference is November 4-6 at the Mirage in Las Vegas, and it will feature convention center expert Heywood Sanders, urban critic Joel Kotkin, Logan Darrow Clements, who's behind the plan to protest Kelo v. New London by condemning Justice Souter's home and turning it into the Lost Liberty Hotel, columnist Christopher Hitchens, X Prize winner Burt Rutan, and a dozen or so editors, writers, and scholars from the Reason Foundation and Reason, the magazine. Comedian Drew Carey will speak at the opening reception.

The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think-tank, and the conference program begins with the question, "How do policies based on freedom and choice make a city great?" Here are some of the topics on the agenda:

• Misguided Megaprojects: Drawing lessons from downtown revitalization efforts, sports stadiums, and convention centers
• Command and Control. What happens when urban planners and meddlers ignore what people want and stifle innovation?
• Trains, Buses, and Automobiles: Are governments offering transit to accommodate people�s choices or control them?
• The City: The evolution of cities and meaning of urban life
• The Evolution and Economics of Gaming in Las Vegas�and throughout America
• Kelo Backlash: Public and political reaction to a devastating Supreme Court decision on property rights
• What can Las Vegas teach liberals and conservatives who fear and loathe it?
• Prague�s Dazzling Diversity: How Europe�s urban jewel is threatened most by its �protectors.�
• Rescuing Failed Urban Schools

It looks like it will be a terrific conference, full of ideas that need to make their way back to Tulsa. But, of course, that can only happen if someone goes out there from Tulsa to cover it. Between registration, hotel, and airfare, it would cost about $1,000 to go.

On a completely unrelated note, I just realized that when I reorganized my template a couple of weeks ago, I neglected to include the PayPal donation button, which looks like this:

Mister Snitch asks, "What happens when liberalized eminent domain laws meet corrupt politicians?" And he has the answer, by way of recent example.

Doing some research and came across this article, which appeared in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, in August 1994: "Houston Says No to Zoning." It was written about a year after Houston voters had, for the third time in 50 years, defeated a zoning ordinance. The author, James D. Saltzman, makes the case that Houston is a healthier city for not having a zoning ordinance. He points out that Houston is not entirely without land-use regulation -- there are 17 separate land-use ordinances covering the city, and in many areas, private deed restrictions are in effect. He also argues that in cities with zoning, those with enough money to work the system can find ways around the regulations anyway.

The link above doesn't constitute an endorsement of the article, but it's food for thought.

I'm pleased to announce that I'm writing a weekly column for Urban Tulsa Weekly. My first column is in the current issue, and it's on urban design, walkability, and what that means for Tulsans who, by reason of disability or age, cannot drive:

For tens of thousands of our fellow Tulsans, walkability isn�t about rows of trendy cafes and quirky consignment shops, or about sidewalks to nowhere; it�s about independence. For them, driving simply isn�t an option. I�m not talking just about those who can�t afford to operate a car. There are those who are physically unable to drive.

Many senior citizens, troubled by glare at night or uncertain of their reflexes, prefer to drive only during daylight or not at all. Teenagers are old enough to get around on their own, but either can�t drive yet or shouldn�t. For those who can�t drive, urban design makes the difference between freedom and frustrating dependence.

The focus of my column will be city issues and city politics. Many thanks to UTW publisher Keith Skrzypczak for the opportunity to write a column, and to UTW reporter G.W. Schulz, whose very kind profile of me in July started the ball rolling on this.

Chris Norby, a county supervisor in Orange County, California, argues in an Orange County Register op-ed that eminent domain doesn't promote economic development, and often has the opposite effect:

Widespread use of eminent domain by cities has demolished whole neighborhoods and destroyed tight-knit communities. "Urban renewal" became a catch phrase for instant slums and urban deserts created through massive use of eminent domain.

Widespread eminent domain and billions in subsidies for commercial development have produced no net economic benefits, according to the 1998 Public Policy Institute of California study, Subsidizing Redevelopment in California.

Half-empty "ghost malls" include the Hollywood-Highland center, now worth a quarter of its original value. Costa Mesa's Triangle Square, built on land seized by eminent domain, now sits virtually empty.

Anaheim residents still mourn the complete destruction of their historic downtown during the 1970s by the redevelopment agency.

By contrast, cities like Orange, Fullerton and Santa Ana have respected the rights of small property owners and have thriving downtowns.

Having learned from its past, the Anaheim City Council has now sworn off the use of eminent domain for private development.

The new Platinum Triangle is thriving because the city is allowing greater land use freedom and flexibility - not dictating land ownership or land use decisions from above.

The role of government is to protect public safety and provide public services. It is not the role of any government to micromanage land use or dictate who can - and cannot - own property. That is the role of free enterprise, where there is a free exchange of goods and services on a voluntary basis.

Earlier in the same piece, Norby makes some points about the "compensation" paid for condemned property:

"Fair market value" must still be paid, but this is meaningless in a forced sale. People have strong sentimental attachments to their home and neighbors.

A small business owner has loyal local customers. They cannot be compensated by a theoretical "fair market value."

One of the hidden costs of urban renewal is the destruction of the social capital that develops in a neighborhood over decades. You can buy everyone in the old neighborhood an equivalent house somewhere else, but you can't rematerialize the neighborhood -- and all the ways neighbors come to take care of each other -- somewhere else.

(Via PrestoPundit, with a hat tip to reader Mel Rippy.)

Oklahoma City's Downtown Guy has fascinating information about an underground Chinatown that existed under the basements of some of downtown Oklahoma City's buildings, from the turn of the 20th century until the 1940s.

In 1921 the Oklahoma Department of Health began a campaign to improve sanitation and living conditions in the state�s boarding houses, restaurants, grocery stores and the like. So in January, state health inspectors swarmed over eighty locations in Oklahoma City - six inspectors and one sheriff went underground. The inspectors were doubly amazed when they entered the subterranean village via a blue door in the alley off Robinson between Grand (Sheridan) and California - they did not expect the underground area to be so extensive nor did they expect it to be so clean.

The inspectors found several caverns of sleeping rooms extending from a central living room and kitchen and they reported that all the passageways were expertly dug and quite securely designed. Apparently two men shared a hollowed out room with dirt walls and floor and slept on grass mats placed on the floor. There were enough of these rooms to house an estimated 200 people. One inspector reported that the area seemed well-suited for three things - sleeping, eating, and gambling. Inspectors assured the Chinese inside that they weren�t concerned with gambling, just safety, and went about their business. At first they had assumed there were only two levels, but when they were all-too-eagerly greeted by men at the far end of the system, they realized there must�ve been a third level below which allowed someone to run ahead and alert the other residents.

This is the sort of mysterious place you wanted to believe really existed.

There's a lot more information in the Downtown Guy's entry.

More encouraging news: Tulsa State Rep. Mark Liotta, a Republican, issued the following statement last Thursday in response to the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling in the eminent domain abuse case Kelo v. New London:

OKLAHOMA CITY � A U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing governments to seize private property to benefit developers sets a dangerous precedent that must be fought, a state lawmaker said Thursday.

�When I first read the story, I could not believe it could happen in this country. said Rep. Mark Liotta R-Tulsa The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that governments may seize individuals� homes and businesses to benefit private economic development if the new development will generate new tax revenue to the government.

�This ruling is outrageous and undermines the foundation of the American dream � the right to truly own your home,� said Liotta, �It�s a direct slap in the face of property owners. Eminent domain can be used for the public good, but the court has stretched that definition way beyond reason by saying �the public good� now includes the personal financial gain of private developers, if it translates to increased revenue to the local government. Every homeowner and potential homeowner should be outraged.�

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O�Connor warned in her dissent that the beneficiaries of the court ruling �are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.�

Liotta agreed, saying the decision opened the door for wealthy individuals to run roughshod over middle-class families. �This decision opens the door for massive corruption at all levels of government,� Liotta said. �Every community is now open to the possibility of hidden deals between unscrupulous developers and their cronies on city councils or state legislatures to take property for private gain.�

Liotta warned �I intend to study current state statutes to see if there is any possibility of further protecting Oklahoma property owners during the next legislative session. We simply cannot sit by and wait until it�s your home or my home they come after. This fight is not over.�

He's right -- no home, no business, no church is safe under this ruling and under Oklahoma's current laws. I'm very happy to see that the Republicans in our state legislature are taking this issue seriously and looking for ways to protect property owners.

This makes me want to stand up and cheer:

Oklahoma State Senate Communications Division State Capitol Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73105

For Immediate Release: June 27, 2005

Senator Brian Crain

Sen. Crain Says Legislation Needed to Prevent Abuse of Eminent Domain

Sen. Brian Crain is planning to introduce legislation limiting the circumstances local governments can use for taking personal property. He said last week�s Supreme Court decision was a serious blow to the rights of individual property owners.

�I support the use of eminent domain for roads, bridges and other kinds of infrastructure projects that clearly benefit the public. But I do not support selling eminent domain powers to the highest bidder. That�s what I�m afraid this Supreme Court ruling could do,� said Crain, R-Tulsa.

Crain said he was very surprised by the ruling but said it was indicative of the kind of judicial activism that has raised concerns throughout the nation by legislators and private citizens alike.

�I believe the Constitution is very clear as to what circumstances justify the use of eminent domain. I plan on introducing legislation that will preserve the power of local governments to use it for projects that truly are for the public good but I think the idea of allowing local government to seize property for the city�s financial benefit opens up the door for cronyism and corruption,� Crain said. �That should simply not be allowed to happen.�

Sen. Crain said more than just home ownership could be at risk because of the court decision.

�I fear that this decision could extend to water rights, mineral rights and any other rights involving real property. We need to protect the property rights of all Oklahomans by limiting the use of eminent domain to its traditional purposes.

For more information contact:
Senate Communications Office - (405) 521-5774

Brian Crain is a freshman Republican state senator from Tulsa, an attorney with a background in real estate law. It's encouraging to see that our new Republican legislators are focused on putting their principles into practice. That was evident in this past legislative session, with the passage of landmark pro-life legislation, a road bill that reallocated existing resources to make road rehabilitation a priority without raising taxes, and the achievement of workers compensation reform.

As I noted yesterday, some see a political opportunity for Democrats in the aftermath of Kelo v. New London, but if Republicans stick to their principles, we'll see the GOP leading the charge for limits on the use of eminent domain. There are certainly those Republicans in name only who are comfortable with abusing government power to reward their cronies, but it's my observation that Brian Crain is far more typical of the Republican caucus in the Oklahoma legislature.

David Sucher of City Comforts has posted a number of interesting thoughts about the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. New London. His initial reaction -- you don't need eminent domain to promote economic development:

The central planning notion put forward by New London, Connecticut -- that it needs to assemble large tracts to encourage development -- is simply a lie. There is no basis to demonstrate that such assemblages even work. Economic growth -- just take a look at Seattle - does not come from government intervention in the land assembly process but from the energy and enterprise of individuals trying to something crass like make a buck.

He asks a question of those who applaud the Kelo decision -- "Why do you need the ability of being able to condemn one piece of private property and sell it to another private owner?" -- and challenges them to cite a project that would not have happened without condemnation to transfer property from one owner to another.

Sucher seems to think the Kelo decision offers an opportunity for political realignment in favor of the Democrats, if they can get away from "the expected statist/big government response." I agree it's an opportunity for realignment, but more at the local level and not necessarily around national partisan labels. What may happen is what has started to happen in Tulsa, where opponents of crony capitalism on both left and right work together to oppose eminent domain abuse, injustices in land use regulation, and other situations where the wealthy and well-connected pull strings to get their way at the expense of the rest of us.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sent out the following response last Friday to the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. New London:

As you may have heard...

The United States Supreme Court issued an opinion yesterday that has raised great concern among private property owners across America.

Understandably so.

In this case, known as Kelo vs. New London, the Court held that local governments can seize private property and give it to private developers -- if it is determined that those development projects also serve a public purpose.

The concern here -- as voiced by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her dissent -- is that "under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner."

Indeed, I share that concern.

The U.S. Constitution -- as provided under the Fifth Amendment -- gives government the right to take private property for public use after paying the property owner just compensation (eminent domain).

And, make no mistake, without this power it would be very difficult to build the roads, schools, and parks we all need and use.

Yet there are many important questions that we need to consider...

How can we be sure that a public purpose is served, when government transfers property from one private owner to another?

Does this decision give governments too much power over private property owners?

What assurances do Americans have -- those who work so hard to buy their own homes -- that government will not take those homes away?

Will this decision give undue advantages to politically connected developers and wealthy individuals?

Private property has long been a cornerstone of the Constitution and our American society. Indeed, our economy is based on the principle of private ownership of property.

It was John Adams who said:

"Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty."

Any infringement on that right cannot be undertaken lightly.

We should give careful consideration to these questions and explore the practical implications of this decision.

Bill Frist

(Hat tip to David Rollo for sending that along.)

I'm pleased to see that the Senate Majority Leader is concerned, even though his conclusion is comically vague. I hope his concern means that he will see to it that the next justice appointed to the Supreme Court is a strict constructionist -- someone who understands that "public use" means just that, not "public benefit" or "public purpose." And by "see to it" I mean break through a filibuster if necessary for a strict constructionist nominee and block any nominee from the White House that has a record of not reading the Constitution as written.

Assuming that that probably won't happen, what can be done to protect private property from being seized for political reasons? Here are some steps that Congress could take:

• Eliminate the Federal tax exemption for local government bonds issued to finance condemnation except for public infrastructure.
• Ban the use of Community Development Block Grant money (or other Federal funds) for condemnation except for public infrastructure.

The Oklahoma state legislature could do even more, since Oklahoma's counties and municipalities are creatures of the state:

• Tighten the statutory definition of blight to be restricted to real dilapidation. At the moment, your property could be considered blighted if it suffers from "arrested economic development," "inadequate parcel size," "predominance of defective or inadequate street layouts," or "diversity of ownership."
• Restrict the condemnation power of cities, counties, and public trusts, with a strict standard for "public use" and some sort of automatic independent review of whether the proposed use meets that standard.

At the local level, the matter is in the hands of the voters:

• Amend the city charter to restrict the scope of condemnation.
• Elect local officials -- mayor, city councilors, county commissioners -- who reject the use of condemnation except for public infrastructure.

Excellent post by Mary Katherine Ham on Townhall.com's C-Log on the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday in Kelo v. New London:

I own a 2-bedroom, 1,500 sq-ft house.

No you don't. Because someone wants to put a 5-bedroom, 4,000 sq-ft house on your lot. It will bring in more property taxes.

I own a 5-bedroom, 4,000 sq-ft house.

No you don't. Because a local BBQ-purveyor wants to turn your lot into a restaurant, which will turn a profit and produce more taxes than your home.

And so on up the chain.

Maybe we could get a "My Home is My Castle" Amendment going? Are you allowed to amend the Constitution to say what it already said?

That's the problem. When we propose countering an overreaching judiciary by passing new laws and constitutional amendments, what's to say those judges won't just ignore the new laws or deconstruct them into oblivion? I'd say impeach justices that ignore the Constitution, but I'm not sure they wouldn't rule the impeachment unconstitutional.

The U. S. Supreme Court issued its ruling today in the case of Kelo v. New London, a test of the limits of government power to use eminent domain. The Court, by a 5-4 majority, ruled in effect that there are no limits, that government may use the threat of force to take private property for the purpose of giving it to another private party, as long as they can make some claim to public benefit, such as increased tax revenues.

If I lived in the neighborhood between I-44 and Promenade Mall, I'd be very nervous right now. That'd be a great place for new retail, what with the freeway access, and the city sure could use the increased sales tax revenues.

The coalition concerned about eminent domain abuse is a broad one, extending across the political spectrum. This outcome will disappoint conservatives who believe in limited government, strict construction of the constitution, and the sanctity of private property. This outcome will disappoint liberals who hate to see government use its power on behalf of big business to pick on the little guy.

To my liberal friends who are disappointed in this result: Please note that the Court's four strict constructionists dissented in this case. The five justices who voted to uphold a city's right to practice crony capitalism:

John Paul Stevens -- appointed by Gerald Ford, a liberal on social issues.

Stephen Breyer -- appointed by Bill Clinton, a liberal on social issues.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- appointed by Bill Clinton, a liberal on social issues.

Anthony Kennedy -- appointed by Ronald Reagan after Robert Bork was rejected by the U. S. Senate for being a strict constructionist. Reagan settled on someone with a mushy moderate reputation as the best he could do with a majority of Democrats in the Senate. (If Robert Bork were on the Court instead of Anthony Kennedy, the outcome today would have been very different.)

David Souter -- the stealth justice appointed by George H. W. Bush. Souter's views on contentious issues were unknown, and the Bush administration wanted a nominee with no "paper trail" that could be used by Senate Democrats to "bork" him. Now we know that if there had been a paper trail, Senate Democrats would have embraced Souter enthusiastically.

So we have three justices appointed by social liberals, and two justices appointed at a time when social liberals controlled the confirmation process in the U. S. Senate.

These five justices have discovered previously unknown "rights" in the Constitution, such as the right to sexual expression. Sometimes they ignore the Constitution entirely and find the material for their rulings in European law. For a group so quick to see things that aren't there in the Constitution, it's strange that they can't see a limitation on the power of government that clearly is there.

To my liberal friends: Having a Supreme Court majority willing to interpret the Constitution creatively has gotten you some changes you wanted, changes you would have waited a long time to achieve through the legislative process, but your victories have come at a price. That same Supreme Court majority is unwilling to uphold the plain meaning of the Constitution when it limits government power.

I understand why liberals dislike strict construction, because it means that the societal advances liberals seek will take an excruciatingly long time to accomplish, as they try persuade a majority of the public to support their views, but our liberties are most secure when the Constitution is honored as it was written. Using the Supreme Court to blaze a shortcut by legislating from the bench is tempting, but dangerous.

I'm reminded of something from the play "A Man for All Seasons":

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

You don't like the laws -- use the legislative process to change them. You don't like the Constitution -- there's a process to amend it. It's not easy, but it isn't supposed to be easy. Can't we all, left and right, agree that, if making change easy means putting every liberty at risk, it isn't worth it? We need judges who understand that, too.

I hope my liberal friends will keep that in mind when the next Supreme Court appointment is before the Senate.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a round-up of opinion and analysis on the decision.

Earlier this week, Michael DelGiorno interviewed urban development expert Joel Kotkin. Kotkin knows Tulsa well, having visited and written about our city during the tech boom and the tech crash.

As you might expect, the topic of the interview was Vision 2025, and whether a downtown arena and convention center is going to be the answer to our city's woes.

An MP3 of the interview is linked from the KFAQ home page. It's about 25 MB, so I downloaded it, converted it to a lower bitrate (which means lower quality, but still good enough for voice), and have it available here, weighing in at about 3 MB. (I used Total Recorder to do the conversion, which does a great job of converting between audio file types. It's also capable of capturing any audio on your computer, such as streaming audio of a radio broadcast from any source. It's well worth the price.)

Kotkin visited Tulsa in May 2002 at the invitation of Brent Johnson of SecureAgent.com, as preparations for the Mayor's vision summit were underway. About a year later, I wrote an entry about Kotkin's visit and speech, with links to the Tulsa Whirled news story and op-ed on his visit, as well as his own piece in the Wall Street Journal.

It was fun to think back to that speech and the Q&A that followed. I submitted a question about whether city leaders were right in thinking that expanding the convention center and building a new arena was the key to Tulsa's economic future. From the Whirled's news story:

Kotkin's discouragement of cities seeking to build new arenas and convention centers drew some applause from the crowd.

"I think those leaders are living in the wrong decade," Kotkin said, referring to backers of expanded convention industry facilities. ...

Kotkin contends the convention industry has "played itself out."

"I can think of better things to do with the money," Kotkin said.

Mayor LaFortune's response was funny, but not intentionally so, and looking back, it was an early sign that we weren't getting the bold reformer we had voted for. He began to try to get Kotkin to agree that in Tulsa's case it would be a good idea to invest in convention facilities. Here's what he said in a later interview:

"I was surprised to hear him say that was not necessary as we move forward," LaFortune said in a Friday interview.

"I hear very little dissension in Tulsa that our Convention Center that exists today either needs to be upgraded and modernized or a new convention center built elsewhere," LaFortune said.

"I believe the Chamber officials can point specifically to business we've lost which translates to lost sales tax revenues and impacts the quality of life in our city because we don't have the sales tax dollars that make the basic improvements to our streets and infrastructure," he said.

There was a moment there when Bill LaFortune could have moved forward as a real leader, defying the conventional wisdom and leading Tulsa in a visionary direction, but I guess he didn't have it in him.

I appreciate a couple of things about Kotkin. First, he's skeptical of urban revitalization fads and looks to see if the data are there to back up the claims made for whatever is the latest rage. Second, he understands the value that middle class families add a city, at a time when many urban analysts seem to believe that families are too boring to be important, and that the key is to cater to the tragically hip. I encourage you to browse his website, which not only features his own work, but articles of interest by other authors, like this recent op-ed by John Tierney on the "Circus Maximus Syndrome" that afflicts American mayors. Tierney has this to say about the demise of plans to build a new football stadium on the west side of Manhattan:

The proposed stadium would have been a generic hulk like most other new arenas and convention centers, sitting empty most of the time and preventing the surrounding area from becoming the kind of space that urbanites really revere: a neighborhood with homes and businesses and street life.

Those neighborhoods are hurt by grand public buildings that take up valuable real estate and must be paid for with higher taxes, which drive businesses and the middle class to the suburbs. Older cities have made comebacks the past decade by getting back to that core function of protecting people's lives, but most still haven't figured out how to restore their commercial marketplaces.

Instead, their leaders build projects whose economic benefits go to the Circus Maximus industrial complex: real estate developers, construction workers, bond traders, owners of hotels and sports teams. Aside from the thanks of these groups, politicians also get a pleasant distraction from their mundane duties.

That last paragraph is comes close to containing a concise and accurate list of who pushed Vision 2025 and who's been paid so far from Vision 2025 tax money.

Still waiting for the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. New London, expected to be a landmark case on whether governments have the power to take property by eminent domain for private use. This week's edition of Phyllis Schlafly Live, an hour-long radio show, is an interview with Steven Greenhut, author of Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain. A caller to the program talked about an attempt to add checks and balances to the eminent domain process in Missouri (House Bill 258).

You can hear the show until about midday tomorrow on www.rightalk.com, where you can also hear this week's edition of Hoist the Black Flag with Ace and Karol, featuring a chat with National Review editor and music critic Jay Nordlinger.

It surprised me the first time I noticed it, but Phyllis Schlafly and her organization Eagle Forum have been stalwarts on issues that you would normally associate with libertarianism, not social conservatism. Eminent domain abuse is one example, but the first such issue that came to my attention was freedom of encryption. Eagle Forum opposed Clinton administration efforts to require use of encryption schemes with "back doors" accessible to law enforcement. Eagle Forum also opposed the 20-year extension of copyright passed in the late '90s. (That last link has links to Schlafly's writing on the subject and to an article in The Nation. It's been my experience that social-issue "wingnuts" like Schlafly -- and me -- are more concerned about abuse of government power and corporate welfare than socially moderate and liberal Republicans.)

Here's a story about a city planner who considers the city's comprehensive plan a "mandate," and he's leading the effort to update the plan, which was last updated in ... 1998! The last update lead to the creation of the city's first historic districts.

The process of gathering public input is designed to help draw out residents' dreams for their city in twenty years' time:

Shaw hopes the session will be made more lively and interactive by the approach of asking residents in attendance a series of questions about what they would most like to see happen in [the city] and what they expect to see happen as a way to promote discussion of the future development of the community.

One query will ask residents to identify what they think [the city]'s strengths and weaknesses are. Another will tap into the creativity of meeting participants.

"We'll ask, if you were given a camera and asked to take photos of the five strongest features of [our city], what would they be?" Shaw said.

"We're also going to ask the question that a lot of us ask this time of year. If you have friends or relatives coming in from out of town, what three places do you want most to take them to, and what three places do you least want to take them to?" Shaw said.

A final question will require those attending the meeting to think like a journalist.

"The scenario that we'll present is, imagine that it's 2025, 20 years from today," Shaw said. "You're a reporter for a major magazine, and you've been assigned to do a story about [our city]. What are you writing about? What happened over the previous 20 years that led [our city] to where it is? What were the successes, and how did they get there? What challenges did they face, and how did they work to overcome them?"

It's not Tulsa, obviously -- our comprehensive plan hasn't been updated since the '70s. It's Waynesboro, Virginia.

Good news from Utah -- the governor has signed into law a bill prohibiting redevelopment authorities from the exercise of eminent domain. In the name of increasing tax revenues or economic development, redevelopment authorities seize land from one private owner to sell it to another private entity. While there is hope that the U. S. Supreme Court will declare the practice unconstitutional when it rules in Kelo v. New London, it's nice to see that elected officials recognize the abuse of eminent domain and are taking steps to stop it. The Heartland Institute, an Chicago-based free market think tank, has published an analysis of the new law.

(Hat tip to Eminent Domain Watch.)

Oklahoma City's Downtown Guy links to Doug Loudenback's web collection of photos, postcards, and maps of downtown Oklahoma City from the beginnings in 1889 up to the beginning of urban renewal in the 1970s. Much of OKC's commercial district was razed at the recommendation of architect I. M. Pei (MIT-educated, I'm ashamed to say), but you can see it in its glory days in these photos.

David Hall (a doctor and a friend from church, not the disgraced former Oklahoma governor) called my attention to an article about urban design in the latest issue of byFaith, an excellent new magazine published by the Presbyterian Church in America. One of the things I appreciate about the PCA, and the broader realm of Reformed ("Calvinist") evangelical Christianity, is the commitment to applying the Lordship of Christ to every aspect of life, not just the spiritual realm. That's how you end up with blogging PCA missionaries out on the streets of Kiev, helping the Orange Revolution get its message to the English-speaking world.

And it's how you end up with an article by an Atlanta-based architect and urban planner about how we glorify God with the places we build. Christopher Leerssen says that because God made the physical world and made us to dwell in it, the built environment matters to God. He says that how we build cities affects sustainability and our stewardship of the natural environment. Pedestrian-hostile urban design destroys the connections that make a place a community and burdens people for whom driving isn't an option -- the poor, the young, the old, the disabled. Cookie-cutter building practices obliterate the natural uniqueness of a place. Restrictive laws discourage the construction of affordable housing.

David, the friend who tipped me to the article, is part of a group working to start a new PCA congregation in south Tulsa. He observed that neighborhood and home design in that part of town makes it tougher to reach out to people. It's so easy just to zip home, pull into the garage, and isolate yourself.

Why is that? Homes are oriented away from the street. Porches, if they exist, are symbolic and non-functional. If a neighbor were to pass by on the sidewalk, you'd never see him, because you're in the living room in the back of the house. You might go for a walk, but the sidewalk doesn't lead to any place you really need or want to go.

Where are the gathering places? Where do you find people who are open to having a conversation with someone they just met? Leerssen writes:

Perhaps most importantly, modern communities lack venues for outreach and discourse. Recently our church struggled with a decision of where to have an evening outreach to neighbors in the affluent part of our city. Our aim wasn�t to go bar-to-bar or stand on the street corners screaming about Jesus, but rather to simply engage skeptics and unbelievers; to discuss everyday issues in order to bring the Gospel into focus. Where would we find them, and that atmosphere?

There aren�t many places where this naturally occurs, but a city does provide options. A coffee shop is private. The local bookstore may be the right spot. But the fact is, there are not many venues that comfortably accommodate discourse. In the end, we rented a nearby bread shop one evening a week and invited people to join us. To the Lord�s glory there was fruit born out of these efforts. The city does provide options.

Go read the whole thing. And be sure to sample some of the other articles in the current issue:

• From Science Vs. Theology to a Theology of Science
• PCA Artists: Pointing to the Creator, Shaping the Culture -- doing art for its own sake, to the glory of God
• Those with Disabilities Help to Make Us Whole -- a Biblical understanding of disability, ministering to those with disabilities, and helping them to exercise their gifts in the church

Here are a couple of interesting comments on the web regarding Miami 21, Miami Dade County's proposed replacement for its ancient and complicated zoning code. (You'll find my comments in the previous entry.)

From Out of Control, the blog of the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute -- New Urbanism can be market-oriented and freedom-friendly:

For those of us that advocate market-oriented planning approaches, it is important to make a distinction between "new urbanism" and the control-minded "smart growth" movement that it typically gets confused with. Free marketers generally have no objection to new urbanist design principles per say; the objection comes when NU design is promulgated through highly prescriptive and coercive policy mechanisms. For more on this, check out this Practice of New Urbanism listserve discussion on the relationship between Libertarian and New Urbanist ideals; participants include Reason's own Sam Staley and NU guru Andres Duany, who will be leading Miami's zoning code rewrite.

Also check out this piece by Reason's Chris Fiscelli, which lays the groundwork for a market-oriented new urbanism.

Over at Planning Livable Communities, Sharon Machlis Gartenberg says the new code won't change Miami overnight, but will have an impact over time:

Even if this goes through, it will likely take years - perhaps decades - for a new zoning code to have major impact on a city the size of Miami. But in 2020, 15 years of development will have taken place with or without the zoning change. Miami 2020 will have a seriously different look and feel depending on the outcome of this zoning plan. Big kudos to them for making the effort.

The mistake so many local officials make is to look at hideous development patterns, whether in Miami or Rte. 9 in Framingham, and throw up their hands in despair. Had our local officials done something like this 20 years ago, we�d all be enjoying a nicer quality of life now in 2005.

A reader sends along a Miami Herald article (free registration required) about Miami's plans to dump its antiquated zoning code for a form-based code. It would be the largest city to adopt this approach to land use regulation, an approach that promises to make the process work better both for developers and for property owners. (Tulsans can learn more about form-based codes this Wednesday at TulsaNow's forum on the topic: "Passing the Popsicle Test: Building a Better Tulsa by Design." It's free and open to the public; 6:30 pm at the OSU-Tulsa Auditorium.)

A new high-rise condo building is cited as an example of the problems with the current code. Edgewater, an older neighborhood of single family homes, began to decline in the '70s and was dramatically "upzoned" to allow high-rises. Now you have a street of bungalows interrupted with a nine-story building with nothing but a garage entrance facing the street. Miami is trying to find a way to accommodate redevelopment and increasing density, while respecting the integrity of existing neighborhoods and encouraging a walkable environment. (A densely developed area combined with a streetscape that discourages walking is a recipe for traffic nightmares.)

The article cites several of the problems with the existing zoning code:

The explanation begins with the fact that parts of the current code date to the early 1900s, city officials say.

Since then, new regulations have been layered atop the old, so that the code has become dauntingly complex, filling several volumes and requiring developers and homeowners to hire lawyers for any significant work. Coconut Grove, for instance, has 22 different zoning designations, according to the planning department.

Sometimes, zoning has been rewritten for individual projects. Variances introduce even more unpredictability. Canny land-use lawyers make a living exploiting loopholes, and developers' political pull has often determined the outcome. The result is inconsistent decisions that lead to urban incoherence and embittered residents.

"We have a city that's the result of people being able to build whatever they want," said Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the prominent planner and University of Miami architecture dean hired by the city to oversee Miami 21. "It was never planned, just platted and developed."

The current code regulates building uses and density, Plater-Zyberk said, but says little to nothing about urbanism -- the art of ensuring that individual buildings blend into a cohesive landscape that respects the human scale. There is nothing in it about how buildings should meet the sidewalk, where parking garages should go, where entrances should be, or requirements for streetfront shops and cafes to spur pedestrian activity.

Let me try to translate: Miami's current zoning code is concerned with controlling factors that don't really affect the city's livability, while ignoring the factors that really do make a difference. After eighty years of experimenting with zoning, it's apparent that zoning doesn't produce the kinds of neighborhoods and cities that are interesting and pleasant places to live. Decades of ham-handed regulation and government-driven redevelopment have created dead downtowns and suburbs with beautiful sidewalks that lead nowhere interesting. The traditional urban neighborhood has been outlawed. The automobile has gone from being a convenience to an absolute necessity for survival, and we've stranded the young, the old, and the handicapped.

New Urbanists, like Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who was quoted above, look back and seek to learn from the way cities were built before zoning codes were widely in use. Plater-Zyberk is one of a growing number of New Urbanist design professionals developing new approaches to land use regulation that provide more freedom for developers, provide more predictability for everyone involved in the process, and promise better results.

Miami 21, Miami's proposed new approach to land use regulation, has a home page, with links to a FAQ and a slideshow (a very large PDF file) illustrating the complexity and ineffectiveness of the current code and the promise of the proposed approach. One slide promises that the new approach will "make development decisions predictable, fair and cost effective thus thwarting speculative development and reducing fear and opposition of development." And later, "The developer and the public have a clear set of regulations to know what to expect from the very beginning, in any given area, both in the public and private realm."

A clearer, fairer, more predictable process, resulting in better communities -- that should be what we're all after. Let's watch and see if Miami 21 can deliver on its promises.

Searching for blog references to Tulsa, I came across a website called The Big Apple, the core mission (sorry) of which is to provide extensive explanation and evidence for the origins of that fruity phrase, perhaps the best-known nickname for New York City. I'll give you a clue -- it has to do with horseracing. Another clue -- it has nothing to do with "road apples."

The site also features the origins of other city and state nicknames like "the Show-Me State," "the Big Easy," and "the Garden State."

Beyond the nicknames, there's a wealth of New York trivia about buildings, businesses (and their slogans), food and drink, songs, phrases, streets, neighborhoods, and sports teams. Most of the entries feature newspaper or magazine citations, trying to track down the earliest published reference to a name or phrase.

It's a fascinating site, but not very visual. If it's New York City photographs and history you want -- and plenty of both -- you need to visit Kevin Walsh's Forgotten NY.

(Oh, the Tulsa reference? It was a letter to the editor in the March 4, 2005, Tulsa Whirled, perpetuating a myth about the name's origin. A letter correcting the myth was sent to the Whirled, but never published.)

Charles G. Hill reports that the American Podiatric Medical Association has ranked 200 American cities for walkability and issued its findings. Tulsa was ranked the 78th of America's Best Walking Cities; Oklahoma City was 123rd, both higher than the eminently walkable Savannah, Georgia (ranked 131st). Charles was surprised that Oklahoma City did as well as that, and I'm amazed at Tulsa's finish in the top half. With the exception of a few neighborhoods that were built before the Model T and have somehow avoided being urban-renewed to death, Oklahoma's two big cities are notably pedestrian-unfriendly.

The 14 factors used to rank walkability include percentage of dog owners, the percentage of athletic show buyers, the percentage who visit beaches, and something called a "Golf Index." Percentage walking to work and percentage using public transportation are factors, too, but the focus is clearly on walking for exercise or leisure, rather than walking integrated into everyday life. (Dog ownership and walking aren't going to correlate strongly in a city of big fenced yards.)

Here's another strange thing: San Antonio plummeted from 9th in 2004 to 132nd this year. And New York City slipped from 2nd last year to 7th this year. The explanation is in a change of criteria. Last year's criteria included Body Mass Index, Urban Sprawl Index, air quality, days of precipitation, and number of podiatrists. Clyde Haberman of the New York Times, in a piece about the new rankings, finds out how the changes affected New York City:

Greater emphasis, for example, is now put on how active people are. One obvious question is whether they walk to work. In New York, 12 percent do, the survey finds. And 51 percent use public transportation - a higher number, it should not shock you, than for any other city in the Top 10.

But do people also walk for exercise, buy athletic shoes, backpack, go to beaches? When those questions are also asked, New York apparently lags behind.

"This was an attempt to look at the phenomenon of walking in terms of the activity being done, rather than the attractiveness of the facilities or impediments like crime," Mr. Fisher said. And so, when all the factors were weighed and allowances made for cities' varying sizes, Arlington, not even on the list last year, found itself No. 1.

The constant shifting of APMA's criteria shows how difficult it is to quantify walkability. The best measure would reflect the degree to which you can integrate walking into everyday, necessary activities. The inverse of that measurement is whether you have to drive yourself to a special place and set aside time to go for a walk. Both measures have to do with city design, and much of Tulsa is designed so that however nice the sidewalks are in your neighborhood, they won't take you anywhere you need to go. The sidewalk may lead you to the main road, but the nearest store is half a mile away along a precarious path between the road and the bar ditch. It's no wonder that there's a link between urban sprawl and obesity.

A friend recently mentioned a simple test for the walkability of a neighborhood -- the popsicle test: Can a child safely walk from his home to the store to buy a popsicle? The absence of this kind of walkability means a loss of independence for children, the disabled, and the elderly who no longer feel confident behind the wheel of a car. It also gives us less flexibility to cope with rising fuel costs -- we can't choose to walk to the corner store rather than drive to the supermarket.

At the very least, Tulsa needs to be sure that we protect the few neighborhoods that still possess this kind of walkability and encourage new development that's made for walking.

Sorry that comments weren't open on this entry. It was inadvertent, and now it's fixed.

It's audience participation time -- I'm going to throw out a question, and I'd like to see your answers in the comments or via trackback.

There are cities like Tulsa where a car is an absolute necessity for survival. Nearly the entire city was built post-Model T, with the assumption that everyone had a car at his disposal -- very low density, no sidewalks, segregation of uses. A day's necessary travel may put 30 or 40 miles on the odometer. Even with a good public transit system, getting around would be inconvenient, and we don't have a good public transit system.

There are cities like New York where a car is an inconvenience. The city was built when most people had to get around on foot, and the public transit system is excellent (even if the natives don't believe it).

There are cities in-between -- most people get around by car, but it is possible and practical to live comfortably without one. I suspect this is true of a lot of college towns. Some parts of town would be inaccessible to you, but there is at least a densely-developed core where you can find housing, employment, shopping, and entertainment within walking distance. Savannah, Georgia, seems to fit this description.

So here's my question: In what American cities / metro areas is it possible to live comfortably, as an employed adult, without a car? I'm not looking for speculation -- I'd like to know if you've managed it yourself or know someone who has. I'd be especially interested to know of cities where people have managed to raise a family sans car. I'm excluding dorm-dwelling college students -- it's easier to get by without a car when you don't have to buy your own groceries, get to a job, or maintain your own dwelling. Also, by the phrase "live comfortably," I exclude having to walk five miles along an arterial street with no sidewalk and bad lighting to get to your job. Some folks here have to do that to survive, and I applaud their determination, but it doesn't make Tulsa a city suited for car-free living.

A couple of things prompted this. One is that I've been working on a piece about how urban design affects the independence of people with disabilities, inspired by the contrast between someone I met recently in New York and some folks I know here in Tulsa, and how easy or challenging they find it to get around on their own. I am coming to believe that every city of a certain size ought to preserve or recreate at least one area where car-free living is possible, for the sake of accommodating those who can't or shouldn't or choose not to drive.

The other thing that prompted this question is a post by Dawn Eden about her job search. She doesn't drive, so the job needs to be some place where you can survive without a car. That made me wonder if there are places besides older, bigger cities like New York where that is possible.

One more ground rule -- your anecdotal evidence should be from the last 20 years, more or less. Both my grandmothers got through most of their lives without driving, living within walking distance of the downtowns of Dewey and Nowata, Oklahoma, respectively, but in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, these towns offered all the basic necessities downtown, and many merchants would deliver. (Their husbands drove, so they weren't completely car-free, but most of the time a car was not at their disposal.) Now that everyone has a car, we'll drive several miles for better prices and better selection -- the small neighborhood store can't compete, and living car-free in a small town isn't an option any more.

I'm looking forward to your responses.

The latest issue of Forbes explains why cities keep building more convention space when the convention industry is shrinking. After one story of failure after another, we read this:

"The assumptions that go into feasibility studies are the problem," says Anne Van Praagh of Moody's. "The outside firms have no financial stake in the business."

Robert Canton, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' convention and tourism practice, offers this defense: "We don't recommend to build or not to build. We're just being asked if there is a potential demand."

The answer is almost always yes. Out of 75 potential projects reviewed by the firm that Oregon hired, only 4 were deemed completely unfit. SAG partner Jeffrey Sachs says that is evidence of his shop's "objectivity." "You lose clients if you shoot down projects. They've already made up their minds by the time they come to us," he says.

Where do the experts get their rosy predictions? "We have to make a lot of assumptions. This industry isn't tracked very well," says Sachs. The most oft-cited data come from Tradeshow Week, which is owned by Reed Elsevier, a British company that also produces 430 trade shows. Its primary measure of the industry's health is its annual list of the 200 best-attended shows, making for a convenient survivor bias, and based solely on data from show managers who have an interest in masking serious declines.

Advisers' conclusions often fly in the face of logic. Consulting firm Convention, Sports & Leisure was hired by Cincinnati in 1999 to ask meeting planners what they thought of the city as a show destination. Only 39% answered positively, trailing perceptions of Kansas City (60%), Boston (56%) and Nashville (62%). CSL subtly encouraged construction by suggesting the city could improve its image. Cincinnati is under way with a $160 million expansion. A study for Minneapolis done by Coopers & Lybrand in 1994 went so far as to suggest that obvious obstacles to success like frigid temperatures and location could be overcome by "specific marketing efforts."

Read it, and, if your city is silly enough to dump more money into this dying industry, weep.

Spent some time Tuesday and Wednesday evenings in Greenwich Village, the picturesque and historic neighborhood that was rescued from ruination in the early '60s by a band of "anti-growth, anti-progress" meddlers who stopped Robert Moses' plans to turn the area into freeways and parking lots. (Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was a leader in that fight. Here's a good interview with her that tells some of that story.)

(You Tulsa folks, read those articles and tell me if you don't think the rhetoric from the "pro-progress" bunch sounds a bit familiar.)

Tuesday evening I showed up on my own for Tuesday Night Trivia at the Baggot Inn, a pub on West 3rd Street. I was welcomed onto a team by Jill and Corey, two-year regulars at the competition, and we were joined later by Barry, Frank, and Nick.

Corey came up with our team's name, taking a shot at the prize for the funniest name: "Michael Jackson: From Kiddie Pool to Jury Pool." Eleven teams competed through five rounds of 10 points each -- general knowledge, current events, top 10, audio round, visual round. My principal contributions were recognizing a list of area codes as belonging to the state of Texas, and knowing that Sen. Jon Corzine was planning a run for governor of New Jersey. There was considerable controversy over which baseball team Tropicana Field was built for. A couple of teams pointed out that Tropicana Field (aka the Suncoast Dome) was built to lure the San Francisco Giants to Tampa Bay, but the official accepted answer was the team that plays there now -- the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

In the top 10 round, the team gets a half-point for getting one of the items anywhere in the list, and another half-point if it's in the right place. Nick drew from his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music to rattle off Madonna's first ten top-forty hits in order -- forgetting only one, and putting the team on the path to triumph.

The audio round required recognizing 10 songs based on 30 seconds of the guitar riff. Easier than I expected -- all of them had been hits. The final, visual round involved 10 photos of guys who go by Al (e.g. Gore, Capone, Roker, D'Amato, Kaline, Franken) -- a half-point for knowing the last name, a half-point for knowing the full first name.

Our team led after the first three rounds with 25.5 points and finished with 43 points, a solid victory. The prize: A $25 bar tab for the team, which left us with $12 bucks and a tip to cover between the six of us. One of my teammates said there are other trivia nights at other pubs, some for considerable cash prizes, but the competition is cutthroat and one or two teams dominate -- Tuesday Night Trivia is much friendlier and much more fun.

(This is the second team trivia triumph I've been a part of in a little over a year. Last January I was invited to join my best friend from school and some other classmates and friends of friends on an existing team at the annual Holland Hall Trivia Night. The team had run close in previous years, but last year we blew the competition away. For winning each of us won a $25 gift certificate to In the Raw Sushi and a couple of passes to Philbrook Museum. Pretty nice. The trophy, a gold-spray-painted wooden shoe atop a gold-spray-painted foam-core obelisk, was susceptible to spontaneous disassembly. It spent some time in our living room, but another team member planned to take it along for a climb up Mt. Kilamanjaro. He didn't say which of the twin peaks he planned to climb.)

Wednesday night I headed to the monthly meeting of one of New York City's two Young Republican clubs. (This was the official party-sanctioned club.) There I caught up with Scott Sala of Slant Point, and we had an interesting conversation about local Republican party politics and the inner workings of the party machinery here and back home. Scott was a credentialed Republican National Convention blogger; we first met up at a Communists for Kerry rally in Union Square the Saturday before the convention. I chatted with Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk, too -- we met at a blogger event just before the convention. I spoke to a Republican city council candidate named Bob Capano, who is running against an incumbent Democrat in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn in this year's elections. I also met a woman who said she's planning to attend the 2005 Texas Blogfest in Dallas in March.

It was a nice break to get into the city and to renew some acquaintances, meet some new folks, and walk down some pleasant city streets.

Earlier this week, the City of Newark, New Jersey, and the New Jersey Devils signed an agreement to build a new arena in downtown Newark for the hockey team. The arena will hold 18,000 fans and will cost $310 million, $210 million from the city, $100 million from the team. It's supposed to be completed in time for the 2007 NHL season, not long from when Tulsa's similarly sized arena is scheduled to be complete.

Granted that cost of land and cost of labor is higher in Newark than in Tulsa, but it still ought to concern the folks running Vision 2025, given that they have less than $200 million to spend on the same size arena, with the added burden of carrying out starchitect Cesar Pelli's grand vision.

Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist used a series of thought experiments or "tests" to help people think about whether a proposed development was really going to help the process of revitalization:

• The postcard test. Is this building something you'd see on a postcard trumpeting the unique qualities of your city? Norquist did several companion slides comparing old historic buildings in the city's center (such as the library) with their new, uninspired counterparts in the suburbs. Lacing his talk with ample humor, Norquist labeled one particularly ugly new structure 'a monument to totalitarianism.'

• The parade test. Is your street design and the buildings that frame the street a place you could imagine the public congregating for a parade or similar public festival?

• The century test. Is the building designed to last? Will it be around 100 years from now? Is it attractive enough that you'd even want it around 100 years from now?
  

Oklahoma City's Downtown Guy makes a comment that suggests an additional test of urban design goodness:

One more random thought: if there is no interest in downtowns or hip urban locales, why is it that the most popular video games don�t feature races and other adventures with backdrops of big box retail shopping centers? Think about it � the coolest video games all take place in urban areas where the architecture is anything but suburban. What�s capturing the attention of today�s youth � you got it � they want to be downtown.

Let's call it the "video game test": If the cityscape isn't cool enough for a popular video game, it isn't cool enough for our city.

Downtown Guy also discovers a map of the Great Plains and that that's where Oklahoma City is. Interesting to see the way the boundary curves around and through Tulsa. That same entry lists an MIT professor's tips regarding design review, a process used in cities that have urban conservation districts, where proposed new developments in existing neighborhoods are evaluated for compatibility with the neighborhood's character. Charles G. Hill, whose Surlywood estate is located in such a district, has some comments on the same topic here.

Tulsa doesn't have any design review districts, as such. We have historic preservation districts that are strictly residential and are concerned with maintaining the appearance of the appropriate period on a home's facade. Urban or neighborhood conservation districts focus less on the building in isolation and more on its relationship to other buildings and the street. The focus is not on preserving buildings of historical significance, but on preserving any valued characteristic of a neighborhood. It would be a great tool for preserving the small and shrinking parts of our city that are truly urban and pedestrian-friendly.

A friend forwarded this week's update from the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program, with links to lots of interesting articles about urban policy. The lead article is by Heywood Sanders, the nation's leading expert on the convention industry, and once again, Prof. Sanders has dared to compare the promises made by those promoting new and expanded publicly-owned convention centers to the actual numbers generated by these facilities. It's a declining industry, but cities persist in believing that convention centers will bring a return on investment. They don't.

Report Urges Caution on Convention Centers

In the last decade, state and local governments have made massive commitments to tourism and conventions, hoping to jumpstart local economies and boost downtowns. Unfortunately, this spending�some $2.4 billion per year nationally�may target a business in decline.

A new analysis by Heywood Sanders for the Metropolitan Policy Program shows that the convention and tradeshow business is ailing, that the decline began even prior to 9-11, and that a large number of new cities are entering the competition for these events. The upshot: As with stadiums and sports teams, state and local leaders should think carefully before making big bets on these facilities. Simultaneously, they should consider other options for scarce public funds, such as attracting and increasing residential life and 24-hour activity in business areas.

In that vein, several other recent program publications have also examined what works�and what doesn't work�in local and regional economic development. One discussion paper notes that the information technology revolution extends far beyond the technology sector to encompass not just tech companies in Sun Belt locales but all kinds of companies in "old" as well as "new" economy sectors. Similarly, another reportreviews how five smaller regions in Washington state have sought to broaden the impact of the 1990s tech boom beyond Seattle by investing in broadband infrastructure and linking local research institutions to the local economy.

By contrast, a more skeptical publication assesses the structure and nature of the biotechnology industry with an eye to local development prospects. The report concludes that the extreme concentration of the biotech industry and its high demand for capital, talent, and cutting-edge research make it a long-shot economic panacea for most regions.

As Christopher Leinberger, a key player in the resurgence of downtown Albuquerque, will show in an upcoming policy program publication: The most effective downtown and local economic revitalization strategies don't focus on a single venue, but rather on a holistic approach to development that includes arts and entertainment, housing, retail, restaurants, and a strong office economy.

Note that last item -- last night at the TulsaNow annual meeting, an urban planner commented that Tulsa's leaders seem to think that it's enough for downtown that we're building the arena, and no one is thinking about how Denver Avenue will develop, or what kind of development is needed to connect the arena to the Blue Dome district and the Brady district. TulsaNow's members are certainly thinking about the holistic approach, as are some sharp people in the city's urban development department, but it hasn't trickled up to the people who can make it happen.

The Club for Growth's blog links to an op-ed that says government economic development programs don't work, but they do encourage businesses to spend lots of time and money trying to game the system:

Yet, the sad truth is: Government economic development programs rarely have lasting benefits -- for the simple reason that they run counter to good business practices.

The most glaring flaw in these programs is the fact that they increase a behavior known to economists as "rent-seeking," a euphemism for business efforts to secure government favors. Businesses pay lobbyists, lawyers and consultants large sums of money to help them obtain economic development funds. Unfortunately, this makes less money available for higher priorities, such as capital investment.

Besides, when a business succeeds in gaining government favor -- the $40 million Texas Enterprise Fund provided Sematech for an "Advanced Materials Research Center," for example -- the recipient firm gains an unfair advantage over other businesses, both direct competitors and those competing indirectly for capital and workers. ...

The Government Accountability Office in Washington has attempted to measure the impact of economic development programs using sophisticated econometric modeling. The agency (then called the General Accounting Office) reported nearly a decade ago, in 1996, that it was "unable to find any study" by any reputable organization "that established a strong causal linkage between a positive economic effect and an agency's economic development assistance." Yet, the spending continues.

What should government do to encourage economic development?

Unsatisfying as it may be to the many proponents of economic development programs, government can best promote economic growth and prosperity by sticking to the basics: protecting private property rights, enforcing the law, providing basic services, and keeping taxes and regulations to a minimum. It should then do one final thing: Get out of the way and let the economy work.

How boring! How will the politicians take credit for creating jobs if we stick to the basics?

Meanwhile, Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune is off to Tiberias, Israel, to tell them that their 38,000 residents can be as prosperous as Tulsa if they raise local taxes and build a 20,000 seat arena downtown.

Twenty-five "friend of the court" briefs have been filed on behalf of the homeowners in Kelo v. New London, the eminent domain abuse case before the U. S. Supreme Court. You can read all the briefs here on the Institute for Justice website. Here's a press release with excerpts of several briefs. The list of amici bears out my earlier comment that eminent domain abuse makes strange bedfellows. First on the list is Jane Jacobs, author of the landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Others include the American Farm Bureau Association, AARP, NAACP, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, and a number of free-market policy thinktanks and property rights groups.

The most surprising entry is a brief jointly issued by the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors. Here's an excerpt:

While NAHB include property owners and development interests, its primary goal is to preserve opportunities for housing. Affordable housing projects have proven to be helpful to support the widely-recognized public purpose of redevelopment of a blighted area or slum. Additionally, many NAHB members participate in non-blight redevelopment projects at the local level.

However, NAHB recognizes that housing will almost never afford a community with the economic development benefits that a commercial application will. If economic development as a sole justification for public use is decided using a rational basis test with deference to local legislative bodies, then the door is left open for local governments to abuse their eminent domain powers and take developable land from NAHB members as they could from any other property owner. Therefore, NAHB must adhere in this case to its long-standing objective to protect private property rights from abuses by local government.

Translation: Sometimes we like condemnation, because it gives us a chance to build new houses where there used to be old houses. The problem is that a house will never bring in as much tax revenue as commercial property occupying the same footprint. That may tempt government to take land we want to develop for homes and develop it instead for more lucrative commercial uses.

I have only skimmed the brief, but it seems to oppose banning public condemnation for private use altogether, advocating instead for heightened review and application of a "clear and convincing" evidence standard for cases where public condemnation will put property into private hands. This brief and several others make the case that deferring to the legislature regarding the definition of public use effectively disables the protections of the public use clause of the 5th Amendment.

Hat tip to Eminent Domain Watch, which also reports that the Bush Administration is considering filling a brief in support of the City of New London.

Eminent domain abuse -- using the power of the state to take land from ordinary folks and make it available to the politically connected -- is an issue that brings together social and economic liberals and social and economic conservatives. Both ends of the economic spectrum see the injustice of it, and liberals hate to see the power of the state used for special favors for big corporations, while conservatives hate to see government wielding such raw power on anyone's behalf. It's part of a continuum of issues, involving government doing special favors for special people, rather than serving all of its citizens. These issues bring left and right together, and create the kind of bipartisan coalition that now enjoys a majority on Tulsa's City Council.

While I've blogged about condemnations of eminent domain abuse from libertarian and conservative sources, a reader sends along an article from Mother Jones, a thoroughly left-wing publication, involving an eminent domain abuse case that was new to me. The case is set in Norwood, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. The article details how easy it is to get a neighborhood -- any neighborhood, no matter how nice -- designated "blighted." In this case, the developer paid the city to conduct an urban renewal study on the area he wanted -- a preliminary step to condemnation. The developer also set up the deal to ensure maximum peer pressure on the owners who did not wish to sell: If all owners sell willingly, everyone will be paid 35% above market value. If even one owner holds out, every property will go through condemnation. The article is well done, and they've also got an interview with an Institute for Justice attorney and a story about a reunion for a New Haven, Connecticut neighborhood lost to urban renewal in the '50s. Well worth reading.

(Reminds me of something I came across while browsing through the National Lampoon Newspaper Parody at the bookstore a couple of nights ago. I'll tell you about it later.)

This is just evil:

Dino Paspalakis was sure his business was secure. For 17 years, as co-owner of Joyland Amusement Center, a popular arcade in Daytona Beach, Florida, he's been pouring his money into upgrades, drawing a consistent clientele, and carrying on the family business. His father opened the arcade in the 1960s, after working every snack bar on the Daytona Beach boardwalk to make money to buy it, Paspalakis, 40, says.

But now he faces a threat. The city of Daytona Beach, using a legal doctrine called eminent domain, is trying to take the property and give it to developers to build high-rise condos and hotels. In February [2004], they told me they'll be seizing the land. Developers are pushing out [independent] shops, he says.

That's from the January 2005 issue of Entrepreneur magazine, in an article warning small business owners that they may face the same threat. Hat tip to Eminent Domain Watch for publishing the story online.

Here's what's on the front page in Wednesday's Branson Daily News:

Aldermen want more info

By Cliff Sain
BDN Staff Writer

Branson aldermen want to be more involved with a $300 million lakefront project, now that large bills are being paid.

During an informal meeting before Monday's Branson Board of Aldermen meeting, Alderman Dave Edie said he needed more information from City Administrator Terry Dody about the Branson Landing project, a $300 million retail project along Lake Taneycomo whose cost is being shared between the city and HCW Development Company, the developer of the project.

"I feel left out of the loop," Edie said.

Branson Landing, which is expected to be completed by 2006, will have a boardwalk, a town square, a water fountain display, a hotel, a Bass Pro Shops, a Belk department store and several other shops and restaurants. Next door, along Sycamore Street, the city and HCW plan to build a convention center and hotel, to be completed in 2007.

Of concern to Edie is that the bills coming in on the project are getting much bigger, as high as $600,000.

"I keep seeing these bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars," Edie said.

Currently, aldermen are supplied with a detailed list of bills before each board meeting, but several aldermen said they'd like a chance to look through the bills earlier.

The cheek! And the shocking thing is that the Branson Daily News didn't accompany the story with unflattering photos of the aldermen or quotes from the Branson Chamber of Commerce leadership explaining how unreasonable the aldermen are being. No word yet whether a recall is planned. Clearly the Daily News needs a few lessons in how to run a city for fun and profit from their counterparts at the Tulsa Whirled.

The Hampton Roads, Virginia, area is blessed to have a newspaper that opposes the abuse of government's power to condemn property. Eminent Domain Watch reprints an editorial in the Virginian-Pilot about the pending New London, Connecticut, case before the U. S. Supreme Court:

In 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court OK�d the condemnation of a Polish neighborhood in Detroit to make way for a new Cadillac plant.

Ever since, too many municipal officials have assumed they had carte blanche to take title to one person�s land and then sell it to someone else pledging to extract more jobs and taxes from it.

That�s why it�s welcome news that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to intervene. It has taken up an outrageous case of eminent domain abuse on appeal from Connecticut. The case permits the court to curb a surge in condemnations motivated solely for economic development, not for the legitimate reasons of clearing slums and blight, or public necessities, such as roads, schools and hospitals.

And EDW reprints a Phyllis Schlafly op-ed on the same topic. Schlafly is head of the Eagle Forum, a conservative women's organization. Although best known for her advocacy for conservative positions on social issues, Schlafly has been outspoken in opposition to government violations of property rights and privacy rights. This column beautifully depicts the impact of eminent domain abuse:

The American Dream is to start a small business and develop it through years of hard work and investment. Millions of small businesses form the backbone of the United States' economy, annually creating between 60 percent and 80 percent of new jobs.

Location is the key to most businesses, and entrepreneurs typically build their reputation at a particular spot. But lately, many have been greeted by a surprise message from city hall: Their town is taking their property for the benefit of someone else.

A lifetime of effort is suddenly snuffed by the arbitrary decision of a few councilmen or unelected city planners. Business owner can claim only an appraised value for the hollow building and land that he actually owns. He receives zero compensation for the goodwill and revenue stream from customers he has nourished for years. A business leasing its property usually receives no compensation. Employees get nothing.

That's a pretty good description of what Peggy Jones of the Denver Grill faced, although in her case the property will be used for a publicly-owned facility, a use of eminent domain that is not in dispute.

There are forces in Tulsa that would love to misuse the government's power to condemn for private gain. I'm hopeful that the Supreme Court will make it clear that condemnation is only to be use for public use, not private benefit.

What makes a city a desirable place to live? Author David Sucher has written a book called City Comforts which tries to isolate the keys to answering the above question effectively. Here's the home page for the book:

Our purpose is to help make our urban civilization more...well...civilized. By and large our cities lack comfort and grace. Oh, they have their bright spots � and there is lots of good work being done � but overall it's pretty dreary.

The 'theory' of this book is that we don't pay attention to the small details of cities that really make the difference in our comfort. We spend a lot of time planning, a lot of time thinking about how wonderful it could all be. But we don't spend a whole lot of effort dealing with the thousands of small details that make up our daily experience. We are great on large-scale strategy and a bit inept at tactics.

There are many people all across the world who see both the poverty of our urban environments and see a way to evolve out of it. Speaking loosely, this approach can be called 'the new urbanism.' (I say loosely because there are many threads to this emerging urban tapestry and some pull in different directions. But they are all tied together by the desire to create cities built to human scale, where people can walk and where there is a sense of community.)

The simple patterns and simple details shown in City Comforts are not any panacea but they provide a framework for judging new construction, for separating the simple but crucial patterns from the trivial matters of style. This simple framework asks us to examine a very few elements of the urban landscape but it will go a long way to improve our cities.

He's got a blog which covers urban design issues, as well as other topics:

What is this blog about? Cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance. Our response to problems of human settlement is not "better planning" and a bigger budget for local government. But alas, conservative and libertarian (not the same, to be sure) response to shaping our cities is too often barren and in denial. Our goal is to take part in fostering a new perspective. But not too earnestly.

I'm pleased to see someone approaching urban design issues from a libertarian stance. The centralized, mandated approach to fixing bad urban design or prescribing good urban design usually doesn't work and is foreign to America's ideal of private property rights. If anything, central planning has usually led to the destruction of good urban design and the construction of dead urban areas. Let's figure out how to work with market forces to make our cities livelier.

Sucher has a helpful blogroll of other sites dealing with the built environment and a list of his favorite blog entries. Here are a couple of recent highlights.

Here is an animated GIF illustrating the contrast between urban and sub-urban design -- it all starts with where you put the parking.

He asks what could be done to improve the graphic, and I think there are a couple of things that would help communicate the visual impact of a huge suburban parking lot separating the pedestrian from where he wants to go.

(1) The cross-section view at the bottom would be clearer with some subtle elevation differences, for example, showing the sidewalk and bottom of the building at a slightly higher level than the street, alley, and parking lot. A tree between the pedestrian and the street might also help make the distinction.

(2) A view showing the front of the building as seen from the sidewalk would help -- the urban version with the front door and display windows right there, and the suburban version with the front of the building far in the background, with asphalt and a few cars in the foreground.

This entry contains a link to a PDF excerpt from City Comforts the book, which outlines three simple rules, which he calls "the 'pattern generator' for creating 'city-ness'". Here are the rules, all of which have to do with the relationship of the building to its surroundings, rather than building height and style:

1. Build to the sidewalk (i.e., property line).
2. Make the building front "permeable" (i.e., no blank walls).
3. Prohibit parking lots in front of the building.

Some day, when I have a few minutes to spare, I hope to post some photos I took along Rue Ste. Catherine in Montréal back in July, which illustrate how buildings in a variety of styles, ages, and sizes all work together to create an interesting and pleasant place to walk, as long as the buildings adhere to those rules.

In the meantime, I've bookmarked the City Comforts blog and encourage you to visit there frequently.

Kelo v. City of New London is headed to the Supreme Court. This case is about a neighborhood in New London, Connecticut, which city officials saw fit to condemn, not because the area was blighted, not because the land was needed for widening a road or constructing an important public facility, but because the city officials thought the property would generate more tax revenue if a certain private company owned it. This abuse of property rights and the power of eminent domain is becoming increasingly common, and here's hoping the Supreme Court affirms the Bill of Rights which clearly says that government can only take private property for public use, not for someone else's private use.

The Institute for Justice is defending the rights of the small businesses and homeowners who would be displaced by this scheme. You can find their press release here, which has a link to their certiorari brief asking the Supreme Court to take the case.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the brief's statement:

Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery was born in her house in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, Connecticut in 1918. She lives there now, as she has for her entire life, along with her husband of over fifty years and the rest of her family. She and her neighbors, the other Petitioners in this case, stand to lose their homes through eminent domain to make way for private business development.

Mrs. Dery�s city government and a private development corporation hope that the new development projects will create more tax revenue and jobs than the homes that currently occupy this peninsula of land along the Thames River. Petitioners have poured their labor and love into their homes. They are places where they have lived for years, have raised their families, and have grown old.
Petitioners do not want money or damages. They merely seek to stop the use of eminent domain to take away their most sacred and important of possessions: their homes.

The Fort Trumbull neighborhood originally consisted of approximately 115 land parcels with a mixture of homes and small businesses. On January 18, 2000,
respondent City of New London (�the City�) adopted the Fort Trumbull Municipal Development Plan (�development plan�) as prepared by respondent New London
Development Corporation (�NLDC�), a private, nonprofit development corporation. ...

The NLDC will own the land located in the development area but lease it to private developers. App. 6. At the time of the trial, the NLDC was negotiating with Corcoran Jennison, a private developer, to enter into a ninety-nine year lease for development projects in parcels 1, 2, and 3 of the area. Under the terms of the lease, Corcoran Jennison would pay the NLDC the rent of $1 per year. Corcoran Jennison would then develop the land and select tenants for the projects. When it adopted the development plan, the City delegated to the NLDC the power of eminent domain to acquire properties within the Fort Trumbull development area. In October 2000, the NLDC voted to use eminent domain to acquire the remaining properties in the Fort Trumbull area from owners who would not sell voluntarily, including homes owned by Petitioners. Starting in
November 2000, the NLDC began to file the condemnation actions against Petitioners that gave rise to the present case. The NLDC brought all condemnation actions in this case not under Connecticut�s urban renewal law (C.G.S. Chapter 130, �� 8-124, et seq.), which permits the use of eminent domain to clear slums or blighted areas, but rather under C.G.S. Chapter 132, �� 8-186, et seq., which governs Municipal Development Projects.

These cases are becoming more and more common, as tax-greedy governments are willing to do anything to increase the take, even if it means throwing their own citizens out of their homes. A town in upstate New York wanted to condemn a neighborhood to allow Ikea to build a new furniture store. A southern California city tried to seize part of a church's property in order to build a Costco discount warehouse store.

You can learn more about eminent domain abuse by visiting the Castle Coalition website and the Eminent Domain Watch blog.

Karol and Jessica (Halliburton's Sweetheart) flew from NYC to Dallas last weekend for a conservative film festival. Here's how they wound up their wild weekend:

Jessica and I spent our last night in Dallas at some sort of house music/sushi bar with two guys who are launching a online conservative 'tv' station this week. At 3am, the four of us ended up at Wal-mart snapping photos with a disposable camera and playing with soccer balls and talking Care Bears. Our flight was supposed to leave the next day at 5am but we called (from the Wal-mart, actually) and got it changed to a noon one.

They have discovered what we do for late-night entertainment out here. How can they be content with NYC nightlife now that they've sampled the electric atmosphere of a Supercenter at 3 am, as the aisles bustle with shelf-stockers?

Here's a contest for my readers: Rewrite lyrics for either of Petula Clark's '60s anthems about urban nightlife -- "Downtown" and "I Know a Place" -- to fit a late-night visit to a Wal-Mart Supercenter. I have no idea what the prize will be, beyond public recognition.

UPDATE: Jessica's blog is back and her account of the trip is up -- part 1 and part 2:

The boys were kind enough to provide true Texan entertainment at 3 a.m. by taking us to Wal-Mart. Highlights of our adventures in the glorious store were rapping to a toddler's speech education toy, posing for pictures with T-shirts that said 'Your future ex-girlfriend' and discussing which women's granny-like undergarments we preferred. And I couldn't think of a better way to say goodbye to Dallas.

Jessica hearts Waffle House, too. (Another of flyover country's late night hotspots!)

Lileks today has a gem of a paragraph on the different influences exerted on the development of streetcorners by the streetcar and the motorcar:

I love the small commercial nodes left behind by the vanished trolley car system � you can tell where the cars used to stop, because there�s always some old brick buidings from the 20s crowding the corners. Two stories � stores on the ground floor, apartment buildings for singles, old maids, drifters and lonely souls above. The antithesis of these corners are those strange intersections where once there stood four gas stations, erected in the bitter genocidal Gas Wars of the 60s. As much as I love gas stations, I regret those four-station corners � they demolish the peculiar humanism you get with four two-story brick buildings crowding the sidewalk. Even if the stations turn into other stores, which they often do, they have the tell-tale taint of a two-bay gas station sitting in the back of the lot like motionless lizards waiting for prey. If you want to reclaim the city, you have to knock it down and start again.

Strong language from the son of a gas station owner. But he's right. It's the streetcar stops, with the two-story brick buildings hugging the sidewalk, that have formed the basis for Tulsa's successful boutique-and-restaurant shopping districts. While jumping on the gas stations chime is fun (assuming they still have one), it's more fun to be able to look in the shop window because it's right next to the sidewalk. Also, the presence of the building right next to the sidewalk means you don't have to watch for cars suddenly crossing your path from that direction or muggers leaping out of a shadowy place. It's called a "street wall", and it's something that works at a subconscious level -- we're more comfortable walking next to a building, particularly with windows, than next to an open and undefined space.

A great quote from urban observer Jane Jacobs, who has a new book out, and whose Death and Life of Great American Cities will get a "BatesLine Bookshelf" entry one of these days:

New York still has so much pizzazz, because people make it new every day. Like all cities, it�s self-organizing. People looking for a date on Third Avenue make it into a place full of hope and expectation, and this has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy. The most perfectly designed place can�t compete. Everything is provided, which is the worst thing we can provide. There�s a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a preacher who warns children, "In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth." "What if you don�t have teeth?" one of the children asks. "Then teeth will be provided," he says sternly. That�s it�the spirit of the designed city: Teeth Will Be Provided for You.

Thanks to Marvin Olasky in World Magazine's blog who linked to an entry on Blog9 which linked to the New Yorker's Talk of the Town item on Jane Jacobs.

And here is a link to blog9's account of Jane Jacobs' recent talk promoting her new book.

A friend sends along a couple of Chicago Tribune articles (free registration required) about Paducah, a small city (27,000) on the Ohio River in western Kentucky. The city is providing incentives to encourage artists to relocate in and revitalize a struggling older neighborhood. So far they've spent $600,000 on direct incentives, are spending another $1.2 million on infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood, and they claim to have seen $7 million in private investment by the artists themselves.

(Here's a link to another article about Paducah on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's website which doesn't require registration.)

The inspiration was Paducah's Artist Relocation Program, which has exerted the same magnetic pull on others who've dreamed of living, working and, most importantly, owning in a neighborhood of like-minded residents. In 2 1/2 years, nearly 40 people have moved here to transform a beat-up area of homes known as Lower Town into a blossoming art colony.

The newcomers have come from as far away as San Francisco and Massachusetts to take advantage of incentives making it easy for them to buy old houses -- at dirt-cheap prices -- to turn into studios and galleries. Almost to a person, these painters, sculptors, muralists, printmakers and jewelers say they never, ever pictured themselves moving to Kentucky.

I had this notion that I'd have plenty of time for blogging during my recent business trip, without the responsibilities of home for a week or so. Instead, I've worked some 10- to 12-hour days, and the last thing I felt like doing once I got back to the hotel room was thinking and typing. Often, being back at the hotel room just meant a chance to use the high-speed Internet connection to get more work done. Some lengthy e-mail replies to friends were started but never finished.

So there are all these random thoughts in my head -- about baseball, nightlife, Fisher-Price, foliage -- we'll see how many I can get typed on the flight back home.

Some Buffalo-area political notes:

New York takes a different approach to local school funding. A school board approves a budget, and calculations are done to figure out the property tax adjustment needed to bring in the required amount of money. Citizens vote on the budget in mid-May. If the budget is rejected, the board can make a second proposal. If that one fails, the board "would be forced to adopt a contingency budget." Thursday's Buffalo News had a story on suburban Orchard Park, where the school board president announced he would campaign against the 9% budget increase which was adopted by a 4-3 vote, because of the impact on taxpayers with fixed incomes. The board president had proposed a 6% increase. Here's the element of this story that will be familiar to Tulsans: board members on the winning side of the vote insist that the board president should support the adopted budget:

"I'm not going to comment on other board members, but they know how they should act, " said Joseph F. Bieron.

Jacqueline J. Paone, executive director of the Erie County Association of School Boards, said the law does not prevent a board member from campaigning against a budget, though such a situation is rare.

"When a school board makes a decision, regardless of what the vote is, the intent is the entire board would then support that decision," she said. "Does that happen all the time? No. But that's the advice we always give."

If a board member thinks a budget is bad enough to vote against, it only makes sense for him to try to make the same case to the electorate. Some people want to treat a school board or a city council as if it were like a president's cabinet, where members serve largely at the president's pleasure and together represent the president to the public. You would expect a cabinet to discuss policy options behind the scenes then unite behind whatever course of action the president chooses.

But a school board or a city council is a legislative body, and its members are individually responsible to the constituents who elected them. Insisiting on institutional solidarity will usually result in the betrayal of the interests of the voters.

Indian casinos are much in the news here. The Seneca Nation, which developed a casino in the old convention center in Niagara Falls, NY, plans to build one east of the airport in Cheektowaga. (And you thought Oklahoma was the only state with interesting Indian place names. Up here, they've also got Gowanda, Tonawandas -- North and plain, Lackawanna -- maybe they can borrow one from Tonawandas.) Buffalo pols are frustrated because they thought they helped push through the state gaming compact which authorized a casino in the Buffalo area. City officials thought they had a promise that the casino would be in the city limits, preferably in downtown. The Senecas point out that the compact wasn't that specific, and that they couldn't find a place in the City of Buffalo to meet their requirements. City officials are threatening lawsuits. A better approach might be to trademark the city's name so that the Seneca Nation can't use it in the name of the casino. If they want to call it "Seneca Buffalo" casino, they'd have to put it in Buffalo. Otherwise they'll have to hope people can remember where Cheektowaga is.

Reports are that the casino has done nothing for hotel occupancies in Niagara Falls, NY. Ontario has a competing casino across the river with slightly lower minimums, along with a better view of the falls and a range of tourist attractions from natural beauty to businesses that would be equally at home on Highway 76 in Branson. The Ontario casino is sandwiched between Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not, Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood, a Hershey Store, a Coca-Cola Store, and is just a few steps away from the gorge's edge. The New York casino is in a dead part of downtown Niagara Falls, surrounded by surface parking lots, apparently the result of earlier urban renewal efforts.

The cheapest blackjack table is CAN $15 in Ontario; US $15 at the Senecas' casino. That's a lot of money to bet on the turn of a single card, and it reflects the difference between a state-enforced gambling monopoly and the free market that exists in Nevada. In Nevada, you can sit down at a $2 minimum table with a $50 bankroll -- what you might otherwise spend on an evening's entertainment -- and play for a long time. That makes it easier for people to play without going over a prudent limit. In New York, you can lose it all in four hands -- if you're going to play for an hour or so you'll need to be prepared to lose a lot more. I suspect that the high minimum casinos attract more local compulsive gamblers and not the casual players from out of state that you would find in Vegas or Mississippi -- the kind that actually bring money into the state. If Oklahoma's going to open the door to gambling, we ought to allow free competition (with appropriate regulation), not a state-sponsored monopoly.

I've spent a lot of time in Hampton Inns over the last year -- one in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia, one a block away from Main Street in East Aurora, New York, and one next to an Autoroute in the industrial and office park wasteland north of Montreal's Dorval Airport. Driving around downtown Buffalo, I noticed a new Hampton Inn at the corner of Delaware and Chippewa, in the heart of a lively entertainment district. These hotels were all built in the last few years.

What is striking about the Hampton Inns built in urban areas is how well adapted they are to their surroundings. The technical term for this is "sensitive infill". I wonder whether this is a strategic choice by the hotel owners or by the chain, and to what degree local zoning regulations mandated design choices.

I'm still up here in East Aurora, New York, east of Buffalo, where the daffodils are just starting to bloom.

I just spent a pleasant hour at Tony Rome's Globe Hotel, which is not a hotel at all, but a restaurant in what was an inn for a century or so. Over a prime rib dinner and a Guinness (which really is good for you), I perused the two weekly newspapers which compete for the patronage of the 6,000 or so residents of East Aurora, and the 30,000 more who live in the surrounding townships, a semi-rural area on the eastern edge of Erie County.

The East Aurora Advertiser is an independent broadsheet paper, in operation since 1872. Its publisher channels the ghost of Millard Fillmore at the 13th president's annual birthday bash here.

The East Aurora Bee is part of a chain of tabloid weeklies circling Buffalo.

Both papers devote a lot of space to detailed coverage of various town, village, and school board meetings in the area, along with local columnists and civic events. Can you imagine it? Two different detailed accounts of the village council meeting. You might actually gain some perspective.

Zoning and budgets seem to get a lot of attention here. East Aurora's village council passed a budget that won't require raising property taxes for the coming year. The board almost deferred the vote, because there was a question about whether the work session qualified as a public meeting under the state's Open Meetings Law. According to the story, the Advertiser's publisher has "criticized local officials for improperly condeucting business behind closed doors." (Imagine, a newspaper publisher who wants public officals to have their debates in public!)

The village board is also considering a moratorium on the development of gas stations and automotive businesses. This was prompted by a convenience store company buying a commercially-zoned house two lots behind an existing Main Street location, deeper into the neighborhood. The broader concern is about homes which are zoned commercial and could be converted to any commercial use, no matter what the context is. They may convert these homes to "residential-commercial" zoning which would allow small offices, but not gas stations. There's also talk of a moratorium on auto-related businesses and drive-throughs on Main Street. The village board's attitude is interesting, because they seem to place preserving the character of Main Street and the neighborhood above the value of new development, and they don't seem to be concerned about being sued for changing the zoning after the property has been bought by a commercial interest.

The Bee covered most of the same stories, complimenting the accounts in the Advertiser. The Bee does not have much content online, but they do have a very long page of police blotter entries, taken from all of the chain's papers, with links to the best of the blotter for each of the past eight years. The blotter page in the paper itself runs with the following disclaimer:

The Bee's police blotter is a sampling of unusual, sometimes humorous calls received by the police department. It is not intended to be a complete record of all incidents reported.

Some recent entries in the blotter:

Authorities were called to settle a dispute in which the daughter of an East Aurora woman alleged her mother read her diary.

Three pudding containers were thrown at a residence on Osgood Avenue, damaging a shutter.

Read on for more....

I noticed yesterday morning that the rental car didn't have an ice scraper and snow brush. The reason I noticed yesterday morning is because there was a half-inch of wet snow on the car.

Traveling north from Tulsa in April is like hitting rewind on the Earth's orbit and going back a month and a half. Once again today, I found myself leaving Green Country at its most glorious to experience the tentative beginnings of spring in western New York State.

When I arrived a week ago, there were still icicles dangling from north-facing eaves, patches of snow covering deep green grass, and, at the edges of parking lots, four-foot high piles of grey ice, reminders of knee-deep snow falls from two months ago. Snow had fallen Palm Sunday weekend, and we got a few flurries early Good Friday morning. But Maundy Thursday afternoon was sunny, and I enjoyed a free hour to wander the streets of East Aurora. The trees were still bare, but crocus could be seen in every lawn.

Heading from the airport to the hotel, as I turned onto Transit Road this afternoon, I could see that spring had truly arrived: Salvatore's Italian Gardens had removed the classic cars on display from their winter cocoons of plastic shrinkwrap. The cold rain over the weekend had been warm enough to dissolve the last of the slush piles. A few buds can be seen in the trees. Spring is here, again.

No Federal elections this year, and only a handful of governor's races on the ballot, but many cities around the nation hold their municipal elections in the fall of odd-numbered years. (A good time of year for elections, but it appears that a proposal to move Tulsa's elections to the fall won't be on the ballot anytime soon. Instead we may end up with an early January primary and campaigning during the Christmas season. Bleah.)

It's interesting to see how many of these local elections turned on questions of development and growth, dealing with the nitty-gritty of zoning codes and land-use plans. Here in Tulsa, such issues have not been a major factor in city elections, at least not in terms of open debate -- but development interests have funnelled huge amounts of campaign dollars to favored candidates, and the Tulsa Whirled has managed the trick of endorsing candidates based on their redevelopment philosophy without actually mentioning the issue on their editorial page or in their news coverage.

But elsewhere in the country these issues loomed large and were given significant coverage in the local press.

Iain Murray has linked to a report called "The Cost of Policing New Urbanism". The report concerns "Operation Scorpion", a British research project to determine whether a new urbanist neighborhood is more "criminogenic" than the suburban cul-de-sac form. The report claims that a New Urbanist neighborhood requires three times the police coverage as a neighborhood that is "Secured by Design".

Here is how the report describes the "Secured by Design" neighborhood:

Table 1 - Some Key Features of the "Secured By Design" Scheme * Create defensible space and territoriality. * Organise the built environment so that anti-social behaviour is less likely to be ignored. * Create space that generalises a sense of ownership (so restrict the amount of public space, and create 'buffer zones' between public and private spaces) rather than space which promotes anonymity. * Restrict the number of escape routes available to criminals (which is a large part of the explanation for why the Secured by Design scheme has come to be associated with the cul-de-sac). * Promote natural surveillance from residents' houses. * Restrict the number of crime generators such as: - footpaths which link places together; - supermarkets and other activities which are out of scale with the locality because they are intended for a wider community; - 'honeypots' (such as fast food take-aways) which encourage people to concentrate; - 'hotspots' (places which already have a record of criminal and anti-social behaviour); - 'fear generators' (places which cause perceptions of fear) * Effective site management regimes, that promote the sense of a cared-for environment.

This is the traditional suburban form as we have come to know it in America: Being able to walk from your house to a store or a restaurant is a Bad Thing, because Bad People might walk from the store to your house. A neighborhood is only for the people who live there. Public places should be segregated from neighborhoods.

New Urbanists would point out that Secured by Design neighborhoods will tend to empty out during the work day, making them prime targets for burglary. And because of the cul-de-sacs, chances are the burglars will be able to work unobserved and undisturbed by passing vehicles or pedestrians.

I think the author of the report has misunderstood New Urbanist principles, because the photos accompanying the report, described as of a high-crime, New Urbanist development in the northern Home Counties, show a development that violates many New Urbanist principles: pathways that take pedestrians out of sight of roads and houses, bollards blocking traffic, walls and underpasses that create hiding places and block passageways from public view. Jane Jacobs would not approve. Bricks, paving stones, and decorative lighting do not constitute a New Urbanist neighborhood.

A real New Urbanist neighborhood would allow for parking on the street, would keep pedestrian walkways alongside streets, and would have homes that provide "eyes on the street". This is described as a feature of "Secured by Design" -- "natural surveillance from residents' houses" -- but most homes in cul-de-sac neighborhoods are designed to minimize the view of the street from the home (and vice versa). Garages are prominent, entries are small, and the biggest windows face the fenced backyard, leaving the public space to whatever hooligans wander by.

I look forward to reading a rebuttal of this report from a prominent New Urbanist designer.

Over on National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg has caught on to eminent domain abuse and puts it all in a nutshell:

OUT-FRICK'N-RAGEOUS [Jonah Goldberg]

I blame myself for not being up-to-speed on this issue already, but man oh man, if you saw "60 Minutes" last night and aren't outraged by the use of eminent domain to kick people out of their homes, you should re-read the constitution. Cities and states across the country are simply seizing peoples homes and businesses -- with some shut-up money, to be sure -- and then handing the property to deep-pocketed developers so the government can collect higher taxes. They profiled one city in Ohio where a lovely neighborhood has been designated a "blighted area" so the government can give the land to condo-builders. In order to make that plausible, they had to redefine "blight" to include any homes without attached garages or central air conditioning. In other words a home is blight if it is inconvenient to the state. Thank goodness the Institute for Justice is on the case.

"A home is a blight if it is inconvenient to the state." That's certainly the case in Oklahoma. Here are the state's "declarations and findings" regarding blight, and the state's legal definition of "blight":

1. "Blighted conditions" means conditions which, because of the presence of a majority of the following factors, substantially impair or arrest the sound development and growth of the municipality or constitute an economic or social liability or are a menace to the public health, safety, morals or welfare in its present condition and use:

a. a substantial number of deteriorated or deteriorating structures,

b. predominance of defective or inadequate street layout,

c. unsanitary or unsafe conditions,

d. deterioration of site improvements,

e. absentee ownership,

f. tax or special assessment delinquency exceeding the fair value of the land,

g. defective or unusual conditions of title,

h. improper subdivision or obsolete platting or land uses,

i. the existence of other conditions which endanger life or property by fire and other causes, or

j. conditions which create economic obsolescence, or areas containing obsolete, nonfunctioning or inappropriately developed structures;

Definition "j" could be called the elastic clause -- blight is truly in the eye of the beholder.

The Local Development Act has an even broader definition of what can be condemned for the sake of "economic development":

"Reinvestment area" means any area located within the limits of a city, town or county requiring public improvements, including but not limited to transportation-related projects identified by any transportation authority pursuant to Section 1370.7 of Title 68 of the Oklahoma Statutes, to reverse economic stagnation or decline, to serve as a catalyst for retaining or expanding employment, to attract major investment in the area or to preserve or enhance the tax base or in which fifty percent (50%) or more of the structures in the area have an age of thirty-five (35) years or more. Such an area is detrimental to the public health, safety, morals or welfare. Such an area may become a blighted area because of any one or more of the following factors: dilapidation; obsolescence; deterioration; illegal use of individual structures; presence of structures below minimum code standards; abandonment; excessive vacancies; overcrowding of structures and community facilities; lack of ventilation, light or sanitary facilities; inadequate utilities; excessive land coverage; deleterious land use or layout; depreciation of physical maintenance; and lack of community planning. Such an area includes a blighted area as defined in Section 38-101 of Title 11 of the Oklahoma Statutes at the time of approval of the project plan;

The bottom line is, if government thinks it can get more tax dollars out of your land with you out of the way, prepare to move. More later about some egregious local abuses and attempted abuses.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, writes about the joys of wireless blogging from a downtown Knoxville pub:

I LOVE WI-FI: I'm wireless-blogging from the Downtown Grill and Brewery, which is yet another in the list of wifi equipped local businesses.

I note that Shannon Okey is playing up the idea of free wireless hotzones as tools for downtown redevelopment. I think that there's a lot of room for that sort of thing. Knoxville's Market Square, downtown, has wireless access now. I'd like to see that sort of thing spread.

Of course it may be -- as Paul Boutin suggests -- that businesses will take care of this everywhere. (That's actually how it is in Knoxville -- the City hasn't done squat). And in fact, as Boutin also points out, the biggest hassle and expense in setting up a for-pay wifi hotspot is the billing setup. I think that means that wireless internet access may really be "too cheap to meter." Though perhaps that will change as wifi becomes more popular. In the meantime, be sure the hotspots have backup power, so that people can post photos to their blogs during blackouts!

Here's a related story:

Somerville [Massachusetts] is considering setting up an urban hot zone in Davis Square to provide free wi-fi to customers of participating businesses and three parks. The cost to merchants is expected to be approximately $30 per month with no charge to the city for access in the parks.

This is a great idea conceived by Wi-Fi activist Michael Oh of Tech Superpowers (who first set up the NewburyOpen.net hot zone prototype along Newbury Street) and Patrick J. McCormick, the chief information officer for the City of Somerville.

Why not in the Blue Dome and Brady and Greenwood districts -- and why not now? This could be a cheap way to get people excited about downtown and send a message that Tulsa is a city committed to technology. And it could be done by businesses alone or in partnership with government.

Are there any wi-fi hot zones or wi-fi-equipped coffee shops, bookstores, or restaurants around town? E-mail me and I'll give said businesses a free plug.

(Wi-Fi is short for wireless fidelity, a system for wireless computer networking.)

Neal Boortz tells a horror story from Alabaster, Alabama. A mall developer wants to build next to the Interstate, but some property owners don't want to sell. As Boortz puts it,

That, my friends, should be the end of the story. If one private individual wants to own a certain piece of property, but the legal owner of that piece of property doesn�t want to sell it, the private property rights of the owner of the real estate should be recognized, and the person trying to buy the property should back off.

Next week the Alabaster city council will begin condemnation proceedings to seize the land by eminent domain. The council will then sell the seized land to the mall developer.

How can they do this? The 5th Amendment only allows government to take private property for public use. How can this town's leadership justify taking private property for the benefit of another private party?

So, Alabaster�s �public use� excuse is that the current owners of the land simply don�t pay enough taxes. The land needs to be seized and turned over to someone who will generate some more tax payments. Those additional taxes can then be spent on the public. There�s your �public use.�

You do realize, don�t you, that this very same excuse can be used by any government entity anywhere in the United States that wants to increase its tax revenues? Let�s say that you�re sitting fat and happy in a home that has been in your family for generations. You�re sitting on about five acres in a prime location near a major city. A local developer wants your property to build a subdivision of cluster-mansions. You don�t want to sell. The developer goes to the county commission and tells them that if he had that property he could build at least 15 homes there worth about $600,000 each. The developer correctly points out to the politician that the county could collect thousands of dollars in additional property taxes if he could just get his hands on that land and build those homes. A few weeks passes and one day you get a letter from the county attorney telling you that your property is going to be seized by the county. Their only excuse is that they can get more tax dollars if your five acres had 15 homes than they can with your 60 year-old farmhouse. The �public use?� More tax revenues.

If governments can abuse the concept of eminent domain in this manner then your private property rights are virtually non-existent. You own your home only so long as the local politicians tolerate that ownership. Let some developer come along with a better idea, and you can kiss your dirt goodbye.

Can't happen in Tulsa? It happens all the time. The Tulsa Development Authority used eminent domain to seize much of the land where the Reynolds Center now sits, and some of the land in the new section of University of Tulsa's campus west of Delaware Avenue. The University of Tulsa is a private, sectarian institution. TU let the city know what land it wanted, and the city took care of removing recalcitrant owners.

So far as I am aware, the City of Tulsa hasn't used condemnation powers at the direct request of a business, but some city leaders have openly discussed the possibility. Developers want to build retail in Midtown, now that Midtown is fashionable again. But most of Midtown's commercial areas are too small to accommodate suburban big box stores. The developer's preferred solution is not to redesign the store to fit the site, but to take adjacent houses and assemble enough property for a big development. If some of the owners won't sell, city officials would force them to sell.

There is an organization monitoring eminent domain abuse -- the Castle Coalition, a branch of the Institute for Justice.

Here is the Castle Coalition's list of the top 10 eminent domain abuses, summarized by Boortz:

* Removing an entire neighborhood and the condemnation of homes for a privately owned and operated office park and other, unspecified uses to complement a nearby Pfizer facility in New London, Connecticut.

* Approving the condemnation of more than 1,700 buildings and the dislocation of more than 5,000 residents for private commercial and industrial development in Riviera Beach, Florida.

* A government agency collecting a $56,500 bounty for condemning land in East St. Louis, Illinois, to give to a neighboring racetrack for parking.

* Replacing a less-expensive car dealership with a BMW dealership in Merriam, Kansas.

* Condemning a building in Boston just to help the owner break his leases so that the property could be used for a new luxury hotel.

* Seizing the homes of elderly homeowners in Mississippi and forcing them and their extended families to move in order to transfer the land to Nissan for a new, privately owned car manufacturing plant, despite the fact that the land is not even needed for the project.

* Taking the building of an elderly widow for casino parking in Las Vegas, claiming it was blighted but without ever even looking at the building .

* Improperly denying building permits to a church in New Cassel, New York, then condemning the property for private retail as soon as it looked like the church would begin construction.

* Condemning 83 homes for a new Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, that was supposed to bring jobs but ended up employing less than half the projected number because it is fully automated.

* Forcing two families (along with their neighbors) to move for a private mall expansion in Hurst, Texas, while spouses were dying of cancer.

James Lileks is one of my favorite writers and webmeisters. His beautifully designed site features his daily musings (The Bleat), the "Institute of Official Cheer", an archive of the unintentional humor of advertising, postcards of motels, diners, and restaurants, matchbook covers, and postcard-based urban studies of Minneapolis, New York, and his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota. Lileks combines laugh-out-loud humor with keen insight and some writing that can move you to tears.

Monday's and Tuesday's Bleats were even more thought-provoking than usual.

Monday's Bleat describes taking the old highway (US 10) from Minneapolis to Fargo, which leads to a meditation on small towns that vanish and those that stay.

Some of the towns are just rusty smears - a busted down garage, a grain elevator, a Cenex gas station, a tavern whose sign has the Hamm�s Beer logo from 1967. You wonder who lives here; you wonder if this is just a large disorganized nursing home, with old widows counting out the few last pennies of summer #78. In ten years the town will lose its postal designation. In twenty it�ll be gone. When people can get from A to C in 27 minutes, there�s no reason for B to exist. And so it dies.

But A and C thrive nicely, if they�re near a lake. To the modern small town in Minnesota, a lake has the value a railroad line once had. They bring the tourists, and the tourists like to golf, too. They like to eat. They like to hunt. They buy bait in the summer and bullets in the fall and Miller Beer all year round. Add the needs of the local farmers - insurance, implements, hospitals, groceries - and you have a petri dish of urban life. If the town�s big enough to have a north side and a south side, you have rivalries and reptuations. You can't imagine how much you'd learn if you stopped and spent a year.

The prosperous cities have a water tower; they have a proper traffic light at the intersection of Front and Main. They have a sign that welcomes you with a variation of the same old sentiment: Warborg: A nice place to call home! Smagsburg: You�ll feel at home here! Stupley: You�ll Get Used to the Turkey Barn Smell! The sign is spattered with the emblems of the local booster boys, the Lions, Kiwanis, Eagles, Elks, Wombats, etc. There�s a sign reminding the world that the New York Mills girls softball team have been State �A� champs three years in a row. The downtown saw better days, but it�s seen worse ones as well. The old bank on the corner: antique store. The old movie theater: antique store. (The old antique store: espresso.) Names are carved in the cornice of every brick building, the names of the men who put up these whimsies in the middle of nothing for reasons you can only guess.

Tuesday's Bleat features a meditation on malls and downtowns, inspired by a visit home for his birthday:

But they�re spiffing up downtown - the trees that smothered Broadway are gone. The �mall� has been ripped up; there�s angle parking again. It looks as if someone cares, which is more you can say for many towns with dying downtowns. Dying? No: dead. At least for retail. Picturesque and historic as it is, it�ll never come back until you block off freeway access to the burbs, and force people downtown at gunpoint. Spending a lot of time and money trying to bring it back to life is like disinterring the first mayor and putting the paddles on his brittle bones. CLEAR! Bzzzz. Crackle. Damn.

I say this with no cheer, since I love downtowns, especially this one. ...

My wife and child were at West Acres Mall, so I drove out to meet them. And here I learned where everyone was on a gloomy Saturday. The place was jammed. The Mall was finally rehabbed a few years ago, and it�s one of the more incoherent overhauls I�ve ever seen, but the place still draws the traffic. And why not? All these bright stores close together, all these commingled scents of coffee and doughnuts, of candles and perfume; all these people - packs and claques of teens, rumpled weary families with small kids, idle middle-aged men cooling their heels in Mission easy chairs, stolid moms and tarted-up daughters shopping for shoes and face-paint. There�s more life here on a Saturday than you�d ever find downtown outside of the day before Christmas. No weather; no worries.

It�s the inescapable truth: people prefer malls to downtown. Malls lack the character, the history, the charm, the serendipity. But they are intensely social in ways downtowns never are, aside from the occasional parade or summertime farmer�s market. Fargo made its choice. It�s ugly, but it works for them.

And Fargo's downtown appears to be far more intact than Tulsa's is. I think downtown's best hope for life is as a BoBo (bohemian bourgeoisie) neighborhood -- an urban alternative to the suburbs, because not everyone aspires to live on a cul-de-sac. The slow process to build that kind of neighborhood is underway, a process that will only be stunted by closing streets, demolishing old buildings (which are the least expensive and therefore best opportunities for new ventures), and plopping big faceless public buildings and big-box stores all over the landscape.

Lileks.com is a daily stop for me, and it should be for you, too.

I said earlier that Tulsa was mentioned in an essay the new issue of The Next American City. I received permission from Kevin Adams, the author of the essay, to post it here and distribute it. He also provided me with some additional material -- specific policy recommendations which flesh out his ideas. Here is his bio from the magazine:

KEVIN ADAMS works as an economic development analyst for the metropolitan planning organization of Southern New Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania. He is a native Tulsan, but aggravated with the lack of residential choice in his hometown, currently resides on a traditional American street in the heart of Center City Philadelphia.

Here are a few excerpts from the article; the full article is linked at the end of this entry.

Here's how he begins:

I recently met a woman who had given up her job as a Houston oil company executive to sing full-time in a national touring company. I asked her if she had ever performed in Tulsa, and what she thought of the city. Her response was polite and restrained. After some prodding, she admitted that it was one of the least hospitable cities she had visited. Car-less and trapped in a downtown hotel, she and her fellow performers couldn�t wait to get back on the road.

About the 1997 "Tulsa Project":

In the late 1990s, Tulsa�s city government proposed a grand building scheme known as the Tulsa Project, hoping to rescue Tulsa from its image void while revitalizing the downtown. The effort resembled countless other so-called urban revitalization schemes that larger cities had employed, with a few twists.

Tulsa�s big idea was to take a failed model and scale it down to Tulsa size. ...

About the current vision process:

While it�s exciting to see community spirit thrive in the face of so many failures, the friction from our collective wheel-spinning is becoming unbearable. I want to scream out to Tulsans to think. If these projects are getting us nowhere, what�s the point of yet another?

Tulsans understandably want an American city to be proud of, but we should slow down and think about the quality urban places we love and why we love them. Is New York just its skyscrapers? Is San Francisco only a bridge? What do these cities, big or small, have that Tulsa does not?

Is Tulsa a real, defineable, urban place? No, but it could be.

In its present form, all of Tulsa looks suburban. Even downtown is more an office park than an urban village. Cars are used for all trips. Consequently, each element of city life�housing, jobs, stores�is increasingly separated from others by miles of asphalt, creating a city of parking lots, expanding highways, and little else. How can an outmoded, suburban Tulsa compete with a shinier and even less dense suburb on our fringe? We should leave the suburban market to the suburbs and try to develop a new urban market for ourselves, incorporating the time-honored principles of Jane Jacobs� school of urbanism. We should focus on creating exciting urban streets, which will encourage personal and economic exchange qualitatively different from the social and economic interactions of the suburbs.

Richard Florida has received a lot of press recently for his new book about the "creative class" and how a city prospers when it is a place that the creative class wants to be. There was a review of his book in the first issue of The Next American City.

In the latest issue of American Enterprise, Joel Kotkin questions some of Florida's assumptions, and observes that most of the growth today is occurring in family-friendly and business-friendly regions, like southern California's Inland Empire:

Alvarez, who bought his Ford-Lincoln agency seven years ago and added a Jaguar dealership last year, has boosted his sales from ten cars per month in the mid 1990s to 114 a month now. He credits most of his success, and that of the other 15 dealers at the Riverside Auto Center, to the remarkable demographic and business growth that has made the Riverside-San Bernardino region of Southern California into arguably the strongest regional economy in the nation. Since June 2001, this highly suburban region east of Los Angeles, known locally as the Inland Empire�with a population exceeding 3 million people�has enjoyed annual job growth of over 3 percent.

No other area of the country of comparable size has experienced anything like this rate of job creation during the current soft economy. According to Economy.com, California�s overall job numbers fell by 0.2 percent during the same period (driven largely by a rapid collapse of the over-inflated, over-hyped tech sector in the San Francisco Bay area), while the national rate dropped by a full percentage point.

The striking success of the Inland Empire�and the poor performance of places like San Francisco and other glamour economies of the late �90s such as New York City, Boston, and Seattle�sharply rebuts recent conventional media wisdom on the underpinnings of economic growth. In the late 1990s, a trendy argument launched by academics and propagated by journalists held that future economic growth depended on attracting high-technology workers and affluent yuppies. It was said that this in turn would happen only in places with lots of graduate students, artists, bohemians, homosexuals, and unmarried singles packed into a vertical city with loads of nightlife. In other words, places exactly the opposite of the sprawling, highly familial, lower-bourgeois Inland Empire....

Kotkin identifies a number of growth cities that don't fit the "Creative City" mold -- not only family-friendly, but more accommodating to business, and less wedded to high-tech.

America�s new growth spots tend to be economies centered around basic industries like construction, distribution, retail, and low-tech manufacturing. This can be seen in the relative success of such diverse economies as Portland, Maine; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and McAllen, Texas. Some tech centers�like Boise, Raleigh, Austin, and Provo�also rank as family-friendly locales, with well-above-average rates of married-with-children households.

In addition to being much more family friendly places, today�s growth regions tend to differ from fashionable but economically lagging parts of the Northeast and coastal California in another way: They have different attitudes toward business and enterprising. Places like the Inland Empire are very friendly toward founders and builders of business establishments. In these places, expansion is regarded by citizens, local government, and regional media much more as a good thing than as a source of problems. That attitude is reversed in many more culturally liberal regions�and in the national media.

Tulsa seems to fit this description to a T -- so why aren't we prospering in the same way as Provo and McAllen? Kotkin doesn't say, but I'll suggest that Oklahoma is not as friendly toward capital formation and job creation as it needs to be, and that's a change that can only be made at the State Capitol, by modifying our tax and regulatory regimes.

Got word today that Tulsa Now was mentioned in the the second issue of The Next American City, which describes itself as

a new national magazine that explores the transformation of America's cities and suburbs, asking tough questions about how and why our economy, society and culture are changing. ["Our Mission"]

Unfortunately, the article that refers to Tulsa Now, entitled "Tulsa Time Blues", is not yet online; only selected articles from the current issue are available. There are plenty of interesting articles online, however:

• Why building "smart" is hard -- the article describes, among other obstacles, how the real-estate lending system breaks down when a mixed-use development is under consideration.
• The three-acre lot versus the town center -- How can smart growth accommodate market demand for rural living?
• A review of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida -- a sympathetic review, but which intelligently challenges some of Florida's conclusions using the evidence he presents.

The description of that book review is a fair characterization of the approach that The Next American City is taking: Sympathetic to "smart growth", New Urbanism, and related concepts, but willing to examine honestly their theoretical contradictions and practical problems.

One complaint: The website is not Mozilla-friendly. You can only get to the drop down menus and therefore to many pages on their site if you are using IE.

Can't wait to find out what they said about Tulsa Now, but until then, there's plenty of stimulating material to ponder.

Someone sent me this -- a Bob and Ray bit with Ray as Hubert C. Waxford, chairman of the "Far Sighted Planners for Urban Renewal":

Bob: I understand you put forth a number of new theories on urban renewal from your office in Washington.

Waxford: I did have an office in Washington, but it was torn down on the recommendation of another urban renewal planner.

Bob: Well, in any event....

Waxford: I'll get him for that, too, if it's the last thing I ever do. Yeah, he turned my office into a parking lot for his office....

Later, Waxford demonstrates more far-sighted urban renewal ideas:

Waxford: Now for instance, I recently calculated that Tucson, Arizona, could become a city of one million if it had a good harbor on the Pacific Ocean. But we'd have to tear down San Diego and replace it with Tucson to do that. However, I'm hoping that some of the people who had to move away when we tore all the buildings down may eventually come back. If they do, they'll find that it's much better planned than it used to be.

Bob: Well, I'm sure that's true, and you've given us all a better understanding of how you improve communities by destroying them, Mr. Waxford....

They really nail the urban renewal ethos. You can hear it on Bob and Ray: The Lost Episodes, Volume Three.

Sorry for the slow pace the last few days. Life has been busy.

I received a couple of interesting responses to my report on Atlanta's downtown and why nothing seems to have worked, and also to my item about the proposed downtown Tulsa sports arena, redubbed the "regional events center". The writers have consented to be quoted here. Here's one comment:

Why the Bricktowns of the world (also the Buckhead area of Atlanta and the Dallas West End) are doing so well is simply that people crave Authenticity.

Tulsa, too had a Bricktown, which was north of the Williams Center to Archer between Cheyenne and Detroit area. Unfortunately, aggressive urban renewal razed those old buildings to make mostly parking lots in the late '60's/early 70's. OKC and Dallas just were not as aggressive as Tulsa in the Demolition Derby, and managed to save a critical core of the older brick office buildings and warehouses. I remember when ALL the Dallas West End had going for it was a Spaghetti Warehouse, and an undistinguished hamburger stand, circa 1980, plus many, many old vacant cotton warehouses. It did have a slight advantage in being 4 blocks from Dealey Plaza, though.

I fully expect to see a new Tulsa Project III additional one-cent Tax Blitzkrieg to be launched on us about 60 days before a scheduled special election. The proponents will be well-organized, well-financed, and speak with a well-honed message from Turnbo and Snakey. They will blitz the airwaves with the message to just spend one more itty-bitty penny and HALLELUJAH -- Salvation will come to Tulsa. The 60-day blitzkrieg is to prevent an opposition groups from a) getting organized, and b) getting a different message to the voters.

Tulsa's core problems are lack of new high paying jobs, and holding on to the ones we've still got.

In a later comment, the same writer adds:

Finally the idea about people craving authenticity is not truly an original idea of mine. Michael Crichton introduced me to this idea in his fine book Timeline. I think this craving has something to do with the success of E-Bay, where people can buy tiny bits of Americana or memorabilia, stamps, coins, collectables, hoola-hoops, Davy Crockett Caps, etc. Or, witness the popularity of antique stores, frequently in small town America. Guthrie comes to mind. It's a living Bricktown!

Then there's this from a well-traveled young entrepreneur -- the kind of person everyone says we need to attract to Tulsa:

...when I read the draft of projects being considered the other day, my primary reaction was: "Tulsa Regional Events Center---What in the World and Why?!?" Why would something suddenly appear "out of the blue" and warrant almost 100 million dollars of tax money? What is the purpose for it? We already have an event center going up west of downtown. And where would it be?

Your comments answered my question of "What is it" (leading to a subsequent feeling of depression and nausea...and confirming my worst suspicions), but what I don't understand is why the new administration (who is supposedly more enlightened and concerned about the vitality of Tulsa) refuses to take into account proof of research and the similar mistakes of other cities? When plans were announced for the music pavillion, I thought this issue of the arena was taken care of....

I appreciate the article about Atlanta. In fact, I have visited Atlanta a number of times, and although I drove through downtown for the first couple of times looking for SOMETHING to do (unsuccessfully--I might add), I always spent my time in Buckhead--quite disappointed that a city of such size would have only a very small area of vitality and interest. So I quit visiting Atlanta. The one time I did anything in downtown Atlanta was go to a Braves game, then immediately left downtown when the game was over to drive back to Nashville where things were more interesting. And when I spent a few years in Nashville, it was prior to the building of their arena. And I can tell you...that city was ALIVE downtown...years before the building of an arena. People flocked to the restaurants, clubs, eclectic shops, and entertainment in the downtown district. (I still miss my old hangout--the jazz club.) And I had friends who lived in loft homes above the downtown retail shops.

Thus, even my own limited travel experience disproves the theory that an arena revitalizes anything! So why in the world are they ignoring research and the mistakes of other cities to still consider an arena of primary importance for tax money? I have always thought that if it's such a great idea, a savvy private investor will take advantage of the opportunity and do it him/herself. (Oops! Someone just did that...or something very like.)

That last parenthetical comment is a reference to the Oklahoma Music Pavillion, a privately funded venture for a 20,000 seat concert venue scheduled to break ground this month.

Last week ground was broken on a new downtown destination for Atlanta, the $200 million Georgia Aquarium, to be funded entirely by a donation by Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution used the occasion to take a sober look at the likely impact on downtown Atlanta's vitality:

Construction cranes will raise hopes along with girders. Finally, boosters exhort, Atlanta's urban core will have the last major draw it needs to turn back 35 years of downtown resembling a ghost town at dusk....

Gov. Sonny Perdue adds his voice to the chorus. "This area can be a dramatic destination for people to stay longer in Atlanta," he said this week.

If the hyperbole sounds familiar, it is. Downtown Atlanta's recent past is checkered with the "next big thing" that was to save it.

The renovation of Underground Atlanta was the buzz in the 1980s. The 1990s were a whirlwind with the opening of the World of Coca-Cola museum near Underground and the decision of the Atlanta Falcons football team to stay downtown rather than move to the suburbs, not to mention the 1996 Summer Olympics, which were to make everyone want to live in the city center.

Each event was a step forward. But collectively the projects have remade downtown into the home of no more than 2,500 residents. It is not a destination that keeps suburban residents returning to events such as $3 summer concerts at Centennial Olympic Park and free ones at Woodruff Park, or packing Underground's restaurants on the way to a Braves game.

This year alone, Macy's closed its historic department store and the prominent King & Spalding law firm announced it would move out to Midtown. Last year, Georgia-Pacific scrapped plans for an office building once slated to rise more than 20 stories above Peachtree Street.

Note that Atlanta's downtown population is pretty close to Tulsa's. (2,487 was the population within Tulsa's Inner Dispersal Loop in the 2000 census.) If billions of dollars of public and private investment in large edifices haven't made the difference for downtown, will one more tourist-oriented facility bring it back to life? The article goes on to give hints as to what is holding downtown Atlanta back:

This is a break from traditional planning in Atlanta, where attractions are plunked down with little effort to link them. Atlanta's hotel district is not within easy walking distance of the football and baseball stadiums, the convention center or Underground....

These days, walking the streets is not a pleasant experience, in part because sidewalks are broken and filthy and homeless loiterers use shrubs as toilets and aggressively hit up pedestrians for cash. Few of downtown's narrow streets beckon tourists to stroll along them in hopes of finding that funky gift for friends back home....

The lack of restaurants downtown could become a bigger issue once the aquarium and Coke museum open. Several fancy places already exist near the park and downtown hotels. But they are priced for diners on expense accounts, beyond the reach of families on a budget....

There's also a clue as to what might help the most:

Meanwhile, Georgia State University's downtown expansion is helping to make streets feel safer.

Thousands of students trek daily to and from the main campus, classrooms and studios in the historic Fairlie-Poplar district, which lies between Peachtree Street and Centennial Olympic Park. GSU President Carl Patton believes the students and faculty are boosting the area's vibrancy. Still, the college crowds have not prompted many new restaurants to open.

Maybe there's a clue here -- people, not big buildings, make a downtown more vibrant. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin summarized the problem, as quoted in a sidebar to the other article:

"We see a thriving Buckhead. We see a Midtown with a great plan and a revitalization under way," she said. "But in downtown -- while we have assets like the Georgia World Congress Center, the hotels, Philips Arena, the Georgia Dome, Centennial Olympic Park -- it still doesn't seem to come together. You don't have a sense of place. And you don't know you are in Atlanta."

I've not spent much time in Atlanta, but I read that Buckhead is a district of historic residential neighborhoods and walkable shopping districts, while Midtown Atlanta also offers historic neighborhoods and landmarks like the fabulous Fox Theatre. Downtown has big sports/convention facilities, but the areas that are thriving have history, local character, and, most of all, people living there.

I note that the AJC's article was picked up by the Tulsa World over the weekend. Let's hope that the members of the Dialog / Visioning leadership team read the article and take Atlanta's lessons to heart as they choose a package to put before the voters.

Yesterday I wrote about our visit to wonderful Riverside Park in beautiful Independence, Kansas. All along our route we noticed well-kept, attractive towns.

Ottawa has a picture perfect courthouse and a well preserved Main Street. (A 1999 series in the Ottawa Herald indicates concerns about their downtown, but it appears that the community has acted to save what they have.)

Garnett is another town with an intact Main Street and tree-lined residential streets.

Lawrence is set beautifully on hills overlooking the Kansas River. Massachusetts Avenue is the main drag -- a bustling Main Street serving both town and gown.

Here's an observation and a question: I am a proud Oklahoman, and yet I can't help but notice a quality and pride in these Kansas towns that I don't see in towns of similar size in Oklahoma. These Kansas towns seem to be surviving and thriving, while many similar towns in Oklahoma are on the wane, with Main Streets falling into disrepair, storefronts vacant or filled with sub-optimal uses and public spaces showing signs of neglect. The pride I've observed in Kansas I've also seen in many parts of Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Illinois. What accounts for the difference? I have some theories, but I'd love to see some of your ideas first.

A couple of interesting items yesterday regarding vagrancy (or as they call it these days, "homelessness"). John Derbyshire reports on the "battalions" of street people he encountered at City Hall Plaza in San Francisco, and reports that city leaders can't understand why the "homeless" population is increasing "despite" all the money they spend on the problem.

San Francisco is indeed generous to street people. A homeless adult on county welfare gets $395 a month, more than in any neighboring jurisdiction. There is no requirement that recipients have any roots in the county, nor is there any work requirement. I am willing to bet, though I haven't found a source, that there is not even a requirement for U.S. citizenship. So far as I have been able to discover, there are no requirements whatsoever. You just quit your job, move to a place with the most agreeable climate in the world, cease attending to matters of personal hygiene, get yourself a substance habit, and sign on for a hundred bucks a week, no questions asked. And Ms. Lelchuk wonders why the "homeless" population is growing!

Elsewhere on National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger links to a story from Oklahoma City TV station KFOR, in which Brad Edwards investigates what panhandlers do with the money people give them:

And, at another favorite panhandler intersection, I watched a crippled man flying a "need help" sign. He received four donations from drivers in only 17 minutes.

A local convenience store manager says the man doesn't limp when he's in using the donations to buy quarts of beer.

I approached him outside and the homeless man admitted to having cirosis of the liver and hepatitis, probably from alcohol abuse....

Meanwhile, back to our group of organized panhandlers who work their signs in two-hour shifts. They claimed the money wasn't for alcohol or drugs, they wanted to find a way off the streets. This, even though we found them sitting, well away from the highway, and out of sight. Drinks went behind the bench as we approached.

Tulsa has plenty of "hand-out" services for vagrants, but there is also a "hand-up" available. The best way you can help a street person who truly wants to escape self-medicated vagrancy is to get them to John 3:16 Mission, which offers a long-term rehabilitation program, as well as emergency food, shelter, and clothing.

John 3:16 Mission provides this list of eight ways to help the homeless.

Hearing news of a large tornado hitting the southern Oklahoma City metro area, nearly four years to the day after an F5 tornado cut a wide swath, like an expressway right-of-way across the southern and eastern suburbs of Oklahoma City.

Last weekend's Oklahoma Republican Convention was in Midwest City at the newly opened Reed Center, built in the midst of an area cleared by the 1999 tornado. Just a mile east on I-40 is Tinker Plaza, a now-rundown shopping center with a few tenants still in business, including Atkinson Development, the company that developed Midwest City after the opening of Tinker Air Depot. . I vaguely remembered going there once or twice as a child while visiting my cousins in town.

The center is surrounded by empty, razed blocks, another result, I assumed, of the same tornado. As I drove through I marveled that the tornado had spared the massive water tower -- tallest thing for miles -- and Tinker Plaza, but had destroyed everything in between. Turns out it wasn't the tornado's work after all, but a redevelopment project to create a "new urbanist" city center on 83 acres at the heart of the original 1940s development.

Does devoting half the area to surface parking lots disqualify the plan as new urbanist? Looks more like a slightly modified power center (like Southroads or Mingo Marketplace in Tulsa), but the architect for the project describes it as a "power hybrid", combining "big boxes" and "lifestyle" shopping. He rejects the term "power town" for this kind of development, because it lacks residential, office, and governmental uses, although by connecting to the street grid, it does provide something like a downtown.

If I read the site plan right, Tinker Plaza will vanish completely, so here's a photo with links to a couple more:

Tinker Plaza, Atkinson Properties

Movie theatre, water tower and emptiness in between

A highlight of the Republican convention was a quick visit to Oklahoma City's Bricktown. A half-dozen of the Tulsa contigent drove in from Midwest City after the banquet Friday night, paid $5 to park in the garage. Parking was not too hard to find, but there seemed to be plenty of activity on the streets. It was bustling but not claustrophobic. Several of the clubs had lines out to the sidewalk. Being that I was the baby of the group (age 39) and that none of us looked hip enough to gain admittance, we passed by the rope lines and strolled down to the Bricktown Brewery for an hour or so of specialty beers (I stuck with Dr Pepper) and half-heard conversation.

As Tulsans look longingly at Oklahoma City for how to revive our city's spirit and recreate a lively urban center, people tend to focus on the new Ford Center arena, the Canal, and the Bricktown Ballpark. But there was nothing scheduled at the Ford Center tonight, and the Redhawks were out of town. So what was bringing people in to spend money in Bricktown?

Bricktown is its own attraction. It was a success long before the Ford Center opened. The baseball stadium hosts less than 70 games a season. The big ticket, publicly-funded facilities may have called attention to the nightclubs and restaurants, but there is no question that these privately-owned businesses, and the variety of people that they draw, are the big attraction. People want to be where other people already are. Once you build a critical mass of people, more and more will come. That's why I believe targeted investments in public infrastructure (e.g. streets and sidewalks), aimed at encouraging investments like those already made by Michael Sager and other urban pioneers, will do more to make downtown vibrant again than an arena or ballpark. If we make it easier for more people to live in downtown, and if we remove anything in the public sphere that deters new investment, we'll see the kind of new life we've been hoping for.