I spent some time talking with Aryeh Cohen-Wade at Bloggingheads TV about urban planning, the high cost of housing, NYC vs. LA, and “New York values.” We touched on a bunch of pieces I’ve written recently, and talked about what I’m learning as an urban-planning graduate student.
Link to the full conversation is here. Thanks to Aryeh and the BHTV team for having me on!
I haven’t been writing much lately but I did get the chance to present my first conference poster a couple weeks ago, at the UC-CONNECT transportation-planning conference in Riverside, CA. It was great to do some research of my own and see what other transportation students across the UC system are up to.
I’m still relatively in the dark on California transportation matters, so I stuck to what I knew best and took a look at the situation back in New York. The subway system is having all sorts of problems (capacity, equipment age, etc), and while the Governor of NY State basically controls the MTA and gets to set the state’s transit agenda, Andrew Cuomo has been very neglectful of the nuts-and-bolts improvements the system needs. He has, however, been very enthusiastic about building shiny new projects that he can put his name on.
My poster examining these two approaches to NYC transit is linked here. It’s also in the “Work” section of my website, under the Essays/Errata/Etc heading at the bottom. Perhaps as I pick up more of an academic track record over the next year and a half, I’ll break that work out into its own section, but for now…
I wrote something on Forbes‘ “Americas Coolest Cities” list, which came out last week and put Washington D.C. in the number-one spot. I think lists like it are sort of silly but also have the potential to cause a backlash and take people’s focus off of what’s really best for the whole city. Some stuff that’s happened in D.C. over the past year is an example. Sorry…it’s sort of long (1300 words, edited only by myself).
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The jokes began immediately. When Forbes released its annual list of “America’s Coolest Cities” last week, Washington, D.C. took the top spot. For D.C.’s many fans, it was yet more evidence that the city has finally arrived as a world-class metropolis. For everyone else, the decision beggared belief. One New York journalist called it “next-level trolling,” and another said, “Being rated America’s coolest city by Forbes is sort of like…” The Times’ Josh Barro quipped, “Are we all going to Le Diplomate tonight to celebrate DC being America’s coolest city? Or are we doing Lauriol Plaza?” (These are two of the city’s most popular restaurants—respectively, a good but very unoriginal French bistro, and a really mediocre, yuppified Mexican joint.)
Though it’s impossible to reach any real agreement on what “cool” is, by the basic criteria of Forbes’ methodology, D.C. seems like a worthy winner. The magazine weighed six factors for its rankings: Cultural resources per capita; recreational amenities; local “foodie” culture; a city’s so-called “diversity index” (the chance you’ll randomly meet someone of a different race or ethnicity); the percentage of population aged 20-34; and the metro area’s net migration from 2010-2013. Washington is a young, growing city with lots of museums, local sports teams, music, and so on. It’s got lots of city parkland, and is close to a national park and large bay. It’s very segregated, but in the aggregate, it’s diverse. Check, check, check.
Even so, there’s something troubling about this list. It’s not that I think Washington is the wrong choice—I like D.C., though it probably wouldn’t be my personal pick for number one (it’s cliché, but I’d probably choose Portland, Oregon). The problem with a “coolest city” ranking is the way it takes things any city ought to be proud of—diversity, urbanity, art, energy, walkability, transit accessibility—and attaches them to a polarizing sociological identity. Most Americans probably don’t have strong opinions about multimodal transit, or bicycle infrastructure. But they do have strong feelings about snobbish urban hipsters.
In fact, as D.C. shines in Forbes’ eyes, the magazine seems to have missed the fact that a local backlash to the city’s “cool kids” is underway. Last summer, the city floated a plan to eliminate mandatory parking minimums from its zoning code (the Office of Planning is still in the process of rewriting the code, which dates to 1958). Parking minimums, which require builders to include a certain number of parking spaces in any new development, exist in most American cities. While the specific requirements vary by city and land-use function, what unites parking regimes across the country is their focus on the convenience of suburban commuters over the wellbeing of city residents. Minimums drive up the cost of development, incentivize private auto traffic over transit and walking, and require a one-size-fits-all approach to development that’s anathema to maintaining a healthy, livable city.
Washington, where an estimated 38 percent of households are car-free, was on the verge of ending parking minimums downtown and in the vicinity of subway, streetcar, and high-frequency bus lines. At the last minute, it backed down. It would be easy to caricature the victors of this battle as entitled, wealthy drivers. The loudest voices in favor of keeping the minimums, after all, tended to come from the city’s affluent, car-centric Upper Northwest. But their advocacy often came with a healthy serving of disdain for the “young people” behind the proposed changes. A local AAA flack, defending parking minimums, said that the move toward transit-friendly development just reflected the arrogance of youth.
The urge to associate young people with dense cities and a car-free lifestyle is reasonable. In the last decade, the most marked decline in vehicle-miles traveled has been among young people. It’s too early to tell whether this is more due to active choices or economic hardship, but it’s likely a combination of both. As Ben Adler has noted, the choice to travel by auto or transit is influenced by a web of incentive structures. If current trends continue, the incentives to go car-free will increase. For anyone who’s uncomfortable with this reality—either because they see driving as an American birthright, they’re resistant to change, or something else—the easiest thing to do is to link unwelcome changes in transit policy to a wave of young migrants who just don’t get how we’ve always done things here.
Of course, when it comes to hating millennials in D.C., no one can hold a candle to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy. Milloy’s anti-bike screed from this July, which stops just short of endorsing vehicular homicide, is a prime example of anti-cool-kids backlash. Milloy, who casts himself as the voice of the city’s forgotten black middle class (despite living in suburban Maryland), hates entitled bicyclists who believe they have just as much of a right to the street as drivers. They slow down motorists and keep the elderly from exercising their most important right of all: free parking in front of church. And demographically, they are “newly arrived, mostly white millennials.”
Almost all of Milloy’s writing about new arrivals in D.C. relies on cultural code words that play to common stereotypes about young people. He dismisses the city’s young transplants as people who are “too busy tweeting flash-mob snowball fights and guzzling imported beers at urban sandy beach bars” to really care for their new home. He once tweeted, “The main reason I’m on twitter is to track millennials & find out if they do anything in dc other than party and gentrify.” This ability to rely on his audience’s dislike of those kind of obnoxious people, is what saves him the trouble of actually having to explain why bike lanes, dog parks, and fusion restaurants are bad things.
As Milloy likely knows himself, these are not bad things at all. (In fact, he gives away the game late in his piece on bikes, when he justifiably complains that bike lanes haven’t been built in the poorest parts of town.) Almost all the available evidence on bike lanes suggests that they are very beneficial for cities in terms of safety, quality of life, affordability, and sustainability. Making bike lanes part of a broader, multimodal approach to transportation is even better. But the wealthy residents of Upper Northwest and Courtland Milloy, even as they come from radically different backgrounds, have arrived at the same conclusion: You don’t need to argue the merits of urban policy when you can rail against the kind of widely disliked people who you assume will benefit from said policy.
When city officials capitulate to arguments like this, they engage in the same sort of policymaking-by-tribalism that has been so destructive on a national level. (Issues ranging from capital-gains taxes to teachers unions to the mortgage-interest deduction are now proxies for debates over what kind of people deserve to be the beneficiaries of government policy). And while the last year in D.C. has been marked by aggressive moves from those looking to make their city less “cool,” that’s just one town’s experience. A couple hundred miles north, Bill de Blasio’s pitch to bring the 2016 Democratic Convention to Brooklyn has a lot to do with playing up the borough’s youthful, “cool” image, and very little to do with providing tangible benefits to people who actually live here.
Those “tangible benefits” are the heart of the matter, though. And questions about those benefits are what people who study cities should be asking themselves. Not “Will bike lanes, farmers markets, and art galleries appeal to young, well-educated people?” but “Will these things, on balance, make our city a more affordable and diversified place than it was before?” When the focus of city governance shifts away from hunting for compliments from Forbes and toward providing useful services for as many constituents as possible—cool people, uncool people, and the vast, middlingly cool majority of us—the U.S. will have finally have the urban renaissance we’ve been promised.
Had a handful of articles published over the last few weeks, which I’m happy to share (and link) here.
1. “On ‘Density,’ the Most Slippery Word in Urban Planning.” I published this in The Baffler as a reaction to Bill de Blasio’s housing plan for NYC, and more broadly, as a look at the way that urban planners mobilize the idea of “city density” to achieve their goals. I am broadly in favor of laws that allow for greater density, but only if affordability is built into these plans.
2. “Ten Things That Are Just Like ‘Game of Thrones.'” Wrote this for the Washington Post’s new PostEverything vertical. A list of just how many journalists are using the HBO show as their metaphor du jour.
3. “Upworthy’s Unworthy Politics.” I’ve been thinking about Upworthy and its various partners in the viral mediasphere for awhile, and have always been interested in trying to figure out what ideology, if any, Upworthy represents. This, in Al-Jazeera America, is my attempt to describe what I see as the belief system underlying Upworthy, and explain why I think this soft, feel-good form of liberalism is unlikely to solve really intractable problems.
Good news and bad news…
Bad news first: I haven’t been updating the blog with my own writing too much.
Good news: I’ve had a handful of pieces published over the last month or so, so writing that would normally go here is instead being made more widely available on teh interwebs.
Stuff from the last month:
1. “In Defense of ‘Millennial'” for Al Jazeera America. People hate the word “millennial.” They REALLY hate it. So I tried to explain why I think it’s a useful word, and in particular how millennials can reclaim the word as a tool for generational organizing.
2. “On D.C. Nerds and Outsider Wannabes” for The Baffler. My reaction to the White House Correspondents Dinner, and in particular the “Nerd Prom” label that follows it every year. I came to realize when I lived in D.C. that conceiving of yourself as a “nerd” is a big part of the local culture for many people, even when you’re sitting near the most powerful man in the world. So I try to unpack that a bit.
3. “Jane’s Walk: How City Waterways Can Become Public Spaces” for UBM Future Cities. Last weekend I participated in Jane’s Walk, a festival in which volunteers lead over 100 free NYC tours about urbanism and architecture. I took one that looked the history of the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and wrote up some thoughts about how to best develop the space.
I’ve got a new article up at The Baffler, my first for that magazine/website. I wrote about the financial problems Citi Bike, NYC’s bikeshare program, is having. It’s losing money rapidly, despite its popularity with NYC residents, so I tried to look at why there’s no money and what could be done to improve it.
The Baffler is known for having a lot of pretty polemical lefty content, so in the spirit of the magazine, I place a lot of the blame on Bloomberg.
Link is here: http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/04/how_to_make_a_bikeshare_fair
One reason for my long-ish sabbatical from the blog was that I went on vacation in February. I spent eight days in Mexico—mostly in Mexico City, but also a few days in Puebla and Xico, a small town in Veracruz. The whole trip was great, and from a city-planning perspective, I was particularly impressed by Mexico City’s public transit network, especially its new Bus Rapid Transit system. I wrote a profile on it for UBM’s Future Cities, on why it works well and what U.S. cities can learn from it.
Link is here: http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/author.asp?section_id=454&doc_id=526661
I just returned from a trip to Miami, where I was visiting my father (who was down in the city for the holidays). It was my first time there and I thought it would be useful to think about the city from an urban planning perspective—something I’ve tried to do more in the past year and that I’ve found helpful in understanding how cities work and what they’re like from day to day. This will (I hope) be the first of many entries on cities and urban planning, but for the record I should note that I have no formal background in the area and would definitely value suggestions/thoughts from those who do.
So with all that in mind, my basic impressions:
1. The city feels extremely new. Part of it, I think, is the fact that almost all the buildings downtown are white. This gives the skyline a really striking look when seen from afar, and the effect is really beautiful—gleaming white skyscrapers up against a very blue body of water. But the clean look of the skyscrapers means the downtown area doesn’t feel worn in.
I realize that downtown might not be the best neighborhood to judge a city by, so let’s take Little Havana, which is probably the city’s most famous area along with South Beach—certainly, from an outsider’s perspective, the one that has the most historical cachet. The city’s Cuban community largely dates to the Cuban Revolution in 1959; the first wave of Cuban exiles came soon after Castro took power. When you’re used to older Northeastern cities, this seems like almost no time at all.
2. Everyone speaks Spanish. I don’t really have a problem with that since I do too, but in most shops or restaurants I walked into, staff immediately said “Hola, qué tal?” and went from there. I generally think gringo paranoia about “Press 1 for English, para español marque 2” is very overblown—see this Junot Diaz quote for a funnier version of how I feel—but whereas in other cities Spanish might be the working-class lingua franca, in Miami it seems to be the default for almost everyone.
3. Transit and density: There’s no way around it. Miami is a car city. In this sense it’s very similar to the rest of Florida, which has massive amounts of open space and no transit infrastructure. But Miami’s urban core has a NYC-style level of density, with huge skyscrapers and lots of people packed into a fairly small space. If you travel three miles outside downtown in most directions, the zoning turns suburban (detached houses, separated residential and commercial uses, etc), so this combination of suburban sprawl and a very dense downtown leads to traffic and excruciatingly high parking costs because there’s no space for surface lots. The city has one above-ground subway line that links the suburbs, airport, and downtown, and a free monorail system that loops around the downtown area. But some sort of train between downtown and the Miami Beach area seems like a no-brainer, and there is none—you either cab it, or take a slooow bus. Check out this chart, which shows that Miami’s combined housing and transit costs are the highest in the US.
4. Exclusivity. There’s no denying that the city’s main attraction is its gorgeous beaches, but prompted by this post-Sandy op-ed, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of beaches in or near cities. I think there’s a compelling case to be made for treating beaches as a public good, but while a park down towards the southern tip of the island provides public access to that part of the beach, Miami Beach is a long island and most oceanfront property is owned by swanky hotels along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue. You have to walk through the hotels in order to access the beach.
Other cities have things to mitigate this sort of exclusivity: New York has solid public transit to its beaches, for example, and San Francisco and San Diego have much of the best beachfront land set aside for state parks. Miami Beach is an expensive area with high parking costs, exclusive hotels, and very little public transit to its most valuable resource. The whole thing is really a shame.
I should clarify that that the city has a lot going for it—great food and weather, wonderful Cafe Cubano, and a world-famous clubbing culture (if you’re into that sort of thing—I’m not). And I really did enjoy my visit, since I almost always have fun getting to know new cities and spending time with the fam. But I don’t write this just to kvetch—I really do hope it can be the jumping-off point for a broader conversation on this blog about what makes for dynamic, interesting cities.
jordan fraade 
