We just don’t get it

Strong Towns would like to welcome back guest contributor Nate Hood, who authored this post. Check out his excellent work on his blog at Thoughts on the Urban Environment.

The American collective is slowly starting to figure out how to make plans that look good. City Councils and Planning Commissions across the nation have slowly started to realize the potential of a healthy downtown and/or have become enamored with New Urbanism. Whatever the reasoning, most small to mid-sized towns have, or are developing, some 21st century plans.

This is good news, but it takes more than just having a plan. You have to follow through with it, and we are clueless on implementation.

Take Oakdale, Minnesota for example. It’s a mid-century suburb with no downtown. But, what it does have is a derelict 26 year old defunct mall surrounded by a vast unkept parking lot. To help remedy this eyesore, Oakdale’s planning department took a proactive approach a few years back and created a praise-worthy comprehensive site plan. This plan will not, however, come to fruition.

The new plan is much less ambitious - instead of a reasonably dense, mixed-use community connected to adjacent land-uses, Oakdale is going to get two strip malls, with the possibility of a small, two-story building in the future, that will be, once again, surrounded by parking.

In doing such, Oakdale will get a short-term property tax revenue boost; but wait 20 years and they’ll be in the exact same situation, because it’s not the aesthetics of the unattractive mall that lead to its demise – it’s the programming. The new strip malls will be a slight visual improvement, but it will have precisely the same programming that already failed once. What makes anyone think it’ll work the second time around?

Subsidizing Competing Land-uses

The problem with revitalization plans is that cities also subsidize sprawl, and often times to a much greater degree. It is as if we desperately want downtown to thrive, but aren’t willing to give up our auto-dependent environments.

For example; Mankato, Minnesota really wants a vibrant downtown. They’ve pulled out all the usual stops: promote mixed-used development, a historic building facades grant program, improve street, pedestrian and bike connections and reacquaint the town with its riverside. The plan is good, but the City has absolutely no idea how to make it happen.

All the money and time spent towards revitalization efforts is moot if Mankato doesn’t stop subsidizing large competing suburban infrastructure projects that add no real value to the community and quickly become financial liabilities. In this case, the City has, and still plans to, build roads into cornfields to accommodate more suburban houses. These expansive road subsidies vastly outweigh any amount of money thrown into the downtown beautification.

Public officials appear to want the best of both worlds: 1) more quick tax revenue windfalls from easy-to-build suburbanism, and 2) a vibrant downtown. This point is best illustrated by Mankato’s new Holiday Inn:

This is Mankato’s new Holiday Inn. It’s five floors surrounded by soy beans.

This is the four lane road, plus center turn lane, that leads out to the Holiday Inn’s secluded location. Even at its absolute busiest, it’s doubtful the Holiday Inn (or its one neighbor) generates enough traffic to justify four lanes. Yet, while the City of Mankato tries to build up the downtown – it also builds these massive, expensive roads at the edge of town that enables businesses, like the above Holiday Inn, to leave the town center. In this case, Holiday Inn relocated 3.8 miles away and dropped its Walk Score from a solid ‘83’ down to crossing your fingers you don’t get hit by a car running across 6 lanes to get to the Applebee’s.

Even if the city wasn’t simultaneously subsidizing sprawl, Mankato’s downtown strategy would probably fall flat because it isn’t a change of programming, but an effort to pump money into things that don’t make that big of a difference; like hanging baskets, nicer looking sidewalks and more benches. The reason people aren’t going downtown isn’t because there is a lack of elevated floral arrangements. This is the reason:

This photo exemplifies Mankato’s misguided downtown revitalization. The City has added new lamp posts, wider sidewalks, floral arrangements and some benches. But, all of this competes with a large 6-lane road and an ugly building. Mankato has even tried to add public art along main corridors in downtown, but since the town has so many “missing teeth”, these statues look like nothing more than the garnish of small parking lots.

The reality is that we just don’t get it.

We can’t get serious about revitalizing our traditional downtowns unless we first stop subsidizing sprawl and secondly, stop bending over backwards to accommodate the automobile. There are new, innovative and exciting urban planning ideas are out there, but most municipalities aren’t connecting the dots and are merely continuing the status quo circa 1990.

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Friday News Digest, Catch up edition

It has been way too long. Two weeks ago I had a tremendously busy week, was a little under-the-weather and was preparing to leave on vacation, so events forced me to skip the News Digest. Then last week, I was relaxing by the pool in Texas while the wires got crossed back here in Minnesota....no News Digest. I'm so sorry, and so this week we're going to make it up to you with an extra long, super spicy, action packed and never dull News Digest. And yes, it is July and I went on vacation to Texas. Hopefully this sunburn carries over long enough to keep me warm this winter.

Enjoy this month's news.

• I admire public officials that blog, especially when they take on weighty issues in an effort to inform and inspire the residents they serve. One of my favorites is Scott Huizenga, the city administrator of East Grand Forks, MN. His recent post on Local Government Aid, the Minnesota government shutdown and the concept of the Buffalo Commons is a great example (and includes a friendly link to STB - thanks Scott).

Most frame the debate in a traditional DFL vs. Republican context.  This stands to reason given that the sitting Governor is a DFLer who favors more revenue (i.e. taxes), whereas the Legislative majority leaders are Republicans who favor budget cuts.  The divide ultimately may be more than simple ideology or party affiliation.  The more critical schism that Minnesota and several states face is urban versus rural populations.  Or, perhaps more specifically, urban versus suburban versus rural.

• Last week we ran a guest column from Nate Hood, whose work we have featured here in the past. I've asked him to post here monthly as I like his insight and his writing is getting really good, like his post this week where he threaded a narrative on Strong Towns thinking from one edition of his local paper. He's got natural talent and a good eye for this stuff, but it is especially cool for us to watch him take our work and build on it. That's what we're trying to inspire.

New developments paying for infrastructure looks appealing in the short-run. But remember: the City must maintain the infrastructure thereafter. The maintenance cost of an extra turn lane is minimal. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t one turn lane – it’s the dozens upon dozens of unnecessary turn lanes that add no economic or social benefit whatsoever to the community at large. At best, they are only a small financial burden.

• I was able to enjoy a Twins game with Riordan Frost of Minnesota 2020 this week (Wednesday - we won). Riordan is leaving us to go to grad school in DC, so it was nice to be able to chat before he heads out. In my pile of news is this post he did last month on Complete Streets where he quotes us and the posts we did on the topic. He let me know he would continue to write and seek to get published, so keep an eye out for him.

As Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns warns, however, we must be careful to not let complete streets be confused with complete roads. The difference, as Marohn defines it, is that a road is a thoroughfare existing outside of urban areas, whereas a street exists within neighborhoods and urban areas. The status quo for engineers when it comes to roads outside urban areas is, and should be, to focus on cars, car speeds, and car volume.

• The website Mez Dispenser (written by Dave Meslin) detailed a Tactical Urbanism-like project taking on the phony traffic analysis presented by their city by doing their own actual counts. A bunch of volunteers went out and physically counted pedestrians, bikers and autos and their results were so far from the "official" count that it was stunning. I'm a professional with an engineering license and a planning certification and I will attest that our cities all need much, much more of this type of intelligent challenges by layman to the standards and orthodoxy of the professionals. The narrative is an entertaining read as well.

One year ago, I wrote a blog post about the City’s “John Street Corridor Improvement Study”.  I called into question the validity of some of the measurements in the report.  Specifically, the study claimed that there was not enough road width to include bike lanes and wider sidewalks.  It was presented as a choice:  bike lanes OR a wider sidewalk.  I took advantage of a high-tech quantifying device called a “tape measure” and proved them wrong.

• Speaking of biking, congratulations for the city of Minneapolis for holding their first Ciclovia. We need to do this in every city across this state.

• At our Curbside Chat this week I was told that I made people a little "depressed" with some of the statistics and narrative. I always find that an odd critique because I feel like I am actually fairly optimistic, especially considering that I do not have the luxury of being blissfully unaware of where we are at in this country. Want to see depressing? Try this story from Market Watch detailing ten reasons we are "doomed" to repeat the financial crisis of 2008.

Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.

• And if my small observations are depressing, what should we make of the statements from our Treasury Secretary, who I hope knows a lot more than me about where we are headed.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (GYT'-nur) says many Americans will face hard times for a long time to come. He says President Barack Obama rescued the United States from a second Great Depression and will keep working to strengthen the economy. But Geithner says will be some time before many people feel like the country is recovering. Geithner tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that it's a very tough economy. He says that for a lot of people "it's going to feel very hard, harder than anything they've experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come."

• I came across a 1982 article from Time Magazine about the rapid rate of business bankruptcies at that time. It was worth reading and gave some context to where we are at today. Individual bankruptcy filings are skyrocketing, but from the data I have seen, it does not look like businesses are in the same position. This is not to say businesses are doing well -- to the contrary -- just that, like other parts of the economy, they are floating in the sea waiting for the next wave to crash into them. From my vantage point, this is especially true for small businesses, which is a major focus of the Time article. The impact of inflation and the need for a run of bankruptcies to cleanse the system described in the article may provide some preview of what is to come for us today.

Despite the anguish corporate bankruptcy causes individuals, many economists agree with Eastern's Borman that it is an inevitable, perhaps even healthy, aspect of capitalism. Like a forest fire that creates more productive land by burning off dead trees and scrub, the failure of one company often yields markets, capital and skilled labor that fuel the growth of another. Says Eugene Lerner, professor of finance at Northwestern University's J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management: "For a long time, thanks to inflation, a lot of firms found it convenient to borrow a lot more than was prudent. If inflation had continued, these same guys would have been millionaires. But someone always gets caught when the merry-go-round stops."

• One of the things that confused me 15+ years ago when I euphorically made my first investment in a rising tech-led bull market was how stock prices would drop dramatically even when there was a positive earnings surprise. I'm not going to pretend that I understand the market, but what I do know is that our securities trading system is not set up for my benefit. This article on earnings surprises explains another facet of the ridiculous nature of the game being played.

The percentage of companies that have beaten expectations often is cited as a barometer of corporate profitability, an indicator of how well the economy as a whole is doing or a predictor of where the stock market is going. What goes unsaid, however, is that these positive surprises are becoming so common they are nearly universal. They are predetermined in a cynical tango-clinch between companies and the analysts who cover them.

• We've written extensively here about the frail financial condition of America's cities largely wrought by the unproductivity of the suburban pattern of development. Earlier this year we focused in a blog and a podcast on the predictions of Meredith Whitney, a respected analyst that projects large scale municipal bankruptcy. I don't know all of the nuances surrounding Central Falls, R.I., but it looks like they are headed into bankruptcy.

As state officials try to dig Central Fall out of its financial hole, negotiations are ongoing with labor unions and retirees and cuts are being sought from every corner of the budget. Without major concessions, bankruptcy is a very real possibility. Bankruptcy can take a toll on a city’s reputation and put stress on neighboring communities, which might have to step in to provide services.

“It’s a difficult, painful, and wrenching process,’’ said Richard Levin, an attorney who has been advising the city council in Harrisburg, Pa., which has been flirting with bankruptcy because of more than $280 million in debt on its trash incinerator, several times the size of the city’s annual budget. “Some people think bankruptcy is like a bath or a free pass. That’s not it at all.’’

• We're hoping to make it over to Fergus Falls, MN, very soon for a Curbside Chat. It looks like the discussion there is evolving in the right direction thanks to some really active and informed residents.

When you look at cities of Fergus Falls’ size, particularly many suburbs of the Twin Cities, said [Community Development Director Gordon] Hydukovich, “They’re trying to get down to what we have.” What Fergus Falls has is a pedestrian-friendly, scenic neighborhood within walking distance of a downtown area. Study author Cindy Gray and the 23-person committee determined that such an area is valuable to Fergus Falls and helps set it apart from other cities, although Hydukovich added that the plan could still change before final approval.

• As I write this, I have CNBC on here in the office and they are featuring all of the politicians talking about the debt ceiling. I read the Economist and find the foreign, generally apolitical, take on our system to be more interesting that nearly anything we produce here. They have some good insights in this brief on the bargaining position of Speaker Boehner.

HOUSE Speaker John Boehner is fond of saying that a debt-ceiling deal that raises taxes cannot pass the House of Representatives. Slice the numbers a bit more carefully and you can easily conclude the opposite: a deal that doesn’t raise taxes won’t pass, either.

• The Economist also had an insightful take on the sausage being made over a transportation bill, legislation that is guaranteed to disappoint on multiple levels. We've simply built a system that is too big and too unproductive to maintain. All the tax increases and spending cuts imaginable won't change that underlying math.

And America’s roads and railways are deteriorating; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that $20 billion more is needed each year just to keep them in their present poor state. If the parties are unable to bridge their differences, the gridlock in Washington will quickly find its way to streets around the country.

• The transportation funding gap is something they discuss in depth in this piece posted on The Infrastructurist blog, although they seem to suggest that a gas tax increase can somehow prevent decline. While I won't argue that it will forestall decline in some areas, I think they are more precise in their analysis on the underlying dysfunction of the system, as stated in this quote from the piece:

We’ve all heard about the trillions of dollars America’s transportation needs. The numbers are so big they seem insurmountable. But today’s spending patterns, whether there is more money or less, exacerbate the problem because they are so dysfunctional.

• The Disney Corporation is brilliant, especially in their design of theme parks, and I've been a huge fan for a long time. I lament that the only place most Americans can catch a glimpse truly good design is at a Disney park, and I often use Main Street USA in speeches to explain some aspects of placemaking for people who have lived for decades in hostile, auto-only environments and know that as "reality" (instead of what it is: an historical anomaly). I don't want to second guess Disney, but I have to admit being baffled and confused by the "Cars Land" they are building in their California Adventure park. I realize the cartoon theme, but watch the walk through video below and decide for yourself is this is space you would enjoy inhabiting.

• I am not one to get all uptight over obesity statistics. I understand the devastation of obesity and its tremendous social and financial ramifications, but I also understand how obesity is the symptom, not the problem. We won't fix obesity in America until we are much poorer and, as a result, walk more, do more physical work, eat more local and less processed foods, etc... I grew up on a farm and we ate volumes of food I could not imagine consuming today, yet we were very fit and healthy (while today my BMI is, sadly, in the "overweight" zone). Despite my lack of passion for the topic, there are some very revealing statistics and information in this article from Huff Post.

The nation is getting bigger and bigger every year. And looking at state-by-state statistics over the last 15 years, the groups found exponential waistline growth – Colorado, with 19.8 percent of adults considered obese according to 2010 data, would have been the nation's fattest state in 1995.

"When you look at it year by year, the changes are incremental," says Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America's Health, which writes the report with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "When you look at it by a generation you see how we got into this problem."

• Earlier this year we wrote about the perverse subsidy of school busing, especially in suburban and rural areas. Now a school board in Texas is asking parents to pay directly for busing their kids.  I'm not sure this is how I would go about doing this, but I do think we are more likely to see this as schools struggle to keep money in the classroom.

Under the plan, parents or guardians will pay $185 a semester for one child to ride the bus and $135 for a second child. Students who get free and reduced lunches will have to pay $100.

“There will be buses,” superintendent James Veitenheimer told parents after initial worries that there wouldn’t be bus service during the school year. “They just won’t be free.”

• And finally, my beloved Twins are getting healthy, pulling themselves out of the cellar and becoming a much more entertaining team to watch than their brutal play in April and May. I had planned to post this video of speedster Ben Revere tumbling into a somersault on his way to legging out a triple, but this GIF file of Thome's monster home run took precedence. The great thing about this is not the home run, which you can't see, but the immediate and dramatic reaction of Delmon Young waiting in the on deck circle. You can tell from seeing his expression just how far the ball traveled.

Keep cool, be safe and enjoy your weekend.

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Minnesota’s $125 million interchange is not “Economic Development”

Strong Towns would like to welcome guest contributor, Nate Hood, who authored this post. Check out his excellent work on his blog at Thoughts on the Urban Environment.

Highway 169 and Interstate 494 can be one of the more frustrating intersections to navigate in the Twin Cities. During peak periods, it is either at a stand-still or creeping along slowly, and it goes without saying that something needs to be done. The question is, what something needs to be done?

The design currently under construction is a $125 million state-of-the-art interchange that consists of six roundabouts, ten runoff ponds, five new bridges, noise walls and the removal of stop lights. Proponents of the new intersection argue it will reduce congestion and be a beacon of much needed “economic development” while “saving lives, time and money while strengthening the economy of our state and region.”

Although well intentioned, the advocates couldn’t be more wrong as they have based their assumptions on what is essentially a set of faulty principles.

Over the past 60 years, the American road building status quo has operated under the assumption “if you build it, they will come.” And for the most part, this has happened. We built more roads and continued to see more congestion. Like a broken record, we fell victim to the fundamental law of road building that states more roads will beget more traffic. This theory has been particularly true for I-494 and H-169. At its present capacity, the interchange is overused and outdated. Yet the current interchange, which was built during the mid-1990s, is only outdated because of the development pattern we’ve chosen.

[Here is what it’ll eventually look like and here is a 3D fly-thru.]

Let’s take the two nearby suburban counties of Scott and Carver as an example. Scott County’s population boomed from nearly 58,000 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2010 and nearly all of it is car-dependent sprawl with only approximately 35% of residents working within the county. A similar story can be told with Carver County. Its total population increased from 47,000 in 1990 to around 91,000 in 2010 and, again, is primarily all car-dependent sprawl reliant on the metropolitan core for employment.

This leads me to my first point: most of the congestion on 494/169 exists for reasons other than engineering. It exists because we’ve built lots and lots of single family houses outside of the metropolitan beltway where people are reliant on driving long distances. Take a look for yourself: Scott County in 1991 versus 2009. This is precisely the type of development we’re likely to get out if we continue to subsidize massive road projects.

The structural problem in our road building system is that we’ve based these large financial decisions on faulty premises and inaccurate estimations. We’ve justified and enabled the subsidizing of less efficient forms of development through the aid of cost-benefit analysis. For example, the I-494/H-169 interchange looks great on paper at first glance. It’s going to create jobs, help the economy, save time, etc. Unfortunately, the reality is that it’s unlikely to do any of these things.

For starters, the project’s traffic projections seem to ignore the effects of higher gasoline prices and cultural shifts in driving habits. The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) estimates an increase of 124,000 vehicle trips per day by 2030. These numbers are contrary to current trends. Between 2004 and 2007, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in Minnesota have actually flat lined, and have been decreasing since 2007. VMT are likely to stay stagnant with higher fuel costs and financial constraints related to economic downturns.

Not only do policymakers need to more accurately link traffic growth estimates with current economic realities (such as the deflated housing market, depressed credit markets and stagnant suburban growth), but they also need to ask the question “Do we want to continue to subsidize more sprawl-inducing infrastructure?”

The cost-benefit analysis looks merely at numbers and makes no . In this case, the interchange project is said to have a 1.19 b/c ratio; meaning that for every dollar spent, there will be a benefit of $1.19. This savings would be remarkable if only it were true. Of the $198 million in “benefits,” $181.6 million is in the form of incremental time savings.

A previous Strong Towns post summarized the situation best:

There is no direct or indirect financial return to the government for this savings. Sure, the application argues that the “delays have a direct impact on the productivity of our local businesses and schools”, but nobody is arguing that this increased productivity will result in … million[s] in increased sales, income and property tax receipts. Or any real increase. The time savings is a purely social benefit for the people … who will now enjoy reduced travel times from the construction of the overpass.

This $181.6 million benefit is a “social benefit” – no money is actually being exchanged nor is government revenue increasing. And these small, incremental pieces of time savings do little to improve overall economic vitality. Improving an individual’s commute from, say, 1 hour to 20 minutes might spur growth, but improving the average daily commute by an estimated 5 minutes will not.

We are acting under the assumption that moving cars is of the utmost importance and that traffic must be moving at a consistently high speed at all times, no questions asked. MnDOT has identified H-169 has a “high priority interregional corridor,” meaning it must “function at a free-flow level of operation, with a minimum of 60 mph speeds and minimal conflicts and interruptions to traffic flow.” A considerable segment of Highway 169 cuts in relatively close proximity to many residential neighborhoods and commercial areas. Is it absolutely necessary for vehicles to be, at all times, traveling at 60 miles an hour minimum?

The weakest argument made is to improve “access for employees and visitors to the tribal casinos.” It’s hard to believe, and somewhat disheartening, that slightly improving a 30-plus mile round-trip car ride to a casino is now being considered a “significant long-term benefit.”

At the end of the day no matter how you break it down, the $125 million intersection is not economic development. In the short run, it will save time for those traveling during peak traffic hours; mainly those who have chosen to live far, far outside the city, in sprawling single-use, auto-oriented communities who drive heroic distances to work. Even under the best possible economic conditions, the $125 million interchange would be nothing more than another means of subsidizing suburbia.

Even if this intersection does make new suburban growth possible (which it won’t), it’ll be the type of development that is destructive to our current infrastructure and simply not needed. Minnesota doesn’t need another housing subdivision or big box store in Scott County.

Related Links:

• Further readings on this topic can be found on Nathaniel’s blog

• The Interstate 494 / Highway 169 Project Page

• Twin Cities Freight and Commuter Bottleneck Removal Project

• Strong Town’s Costs and Benefits Three Part Series (one, two and three)

• Strong Town’s Podcast, The emperor has no clothes