The Mountaindale General Store

Mountaindale isn't really a place. At least, it's not anymore, and it hasn't been for a long time.



When I was a child, there was a little store with a gas pump at the intersection of a couple quiet country roads. For me, it was a sort of landmark; we turned at the store, went past the old, red, one-room schoolhouse, and then we were at Grandma's house. A few times my grandmother took me on a quick errand to get milk or butter at the Mountaindale General Store, although we usually went into the small nearby town of North Plains or further to Cornelius or Hillsboro for any more significant shopping. My memory of the Mountaindale General Store is not very clear, but in my imagination it was a creaky old wooden affair with a few creaky old locals hanging out inside.

Appropriately, during the store's waning years, it served as a shooting location for an episode of some forgotten TV show titled Nowhere Man. I never watched it, but the reviews on IMDb are quite positive. Mountaindale played the role of a Southern town with a population of 37.  "Is this the whole town?" the protagonist asks after getting off the bus. The store was the last remnant of Mountaindale to close.

Planning in Your Frontyard

Yards (like this one in Yonkers), as well as stoops and
parks, are places where neighbors come together

Last week, The New York Times ran an engaging article by Emily Badger about community opposition to new projects titled, "How 'Not in My Backyard' Became 'Not in My Neighborhood." It is subtitled, "The expectation that homeowners should be able to reach beyond their property lines has become deeply embedded."

It is a timely article and a discussion that planners need to continue. As many dense urban areas continue to see sustained growth, community resistance to development has become a significant problem. I am not sure Badger's explanation of the problem is entirely correct, though, and it may lead to the wrong conclusions. Wrapping up the article, she says:

We want people to be invested in their neighborhoods, but not to the exclusion of anyone else who might live there, too. We want to empower neighbors to fight a trash dump, but not to halt every housing project the region needs.

Ultimately, we need to find a home for trash dumps, too. I would argue what we need is to empower people to work together to develop plans that are fair and provide improvements for everyone. We want to channel their loud voices into a chorus of optimism rather than shouts of fear.

Badger clearly makes an appeal to balance, but I think the fixation on homeownership may carry her off course. Homeowners have become too focused on their own interests, she seems to argue, to the detriment of others who have not yet found a home. The natural conclusion seems to be reducing the power of self-interested homeowners to better provide for the common good. While I do not doubt there are plenty of examples of selfish constituencies, I am inclined to think what we really have is a process problem.

The article itself shows a touch of ambiguity about the role of homeownership. While most of the text ascribes motives to the financial interests in homes, there is some contradiction:

...as residential mobility rates have declined, [Vicki Been] suggests, Americans are staking even stronger claims to their neighborhoods, with renters now behaving in ways we once associated more with homeowners.

It may seem I am being picky with the difference, since it was the financial investment in a home that kept homeowners rooted to a community while renters could simply move away from problems. Nonetheless, there is a more significant underlying point: what drives opposition is a concern about neighborhood quality of life. Homeowners may in fact feel sensitive to the worsened conditions as a financial impact, but I expect they are generally more upset about how it will affect their daily lives while they are still in their homes. At any rate, any effect on the value of their home is a function of quality of life in the neighborhood as seen by the next set of homeowners, which brings us back around to the same place.

So if the question is really neighborhood quality of life, why are we having problems with such a backlash? Do all these proposed projects really deteriorate neighborhoods so much? There is clearly a sense that projects that serve a public good are being fought bitterly - is urban growth really just a zero sum game? Can we not accommodate new residents without making current residents worse off?

I think the problem is a lack of real planning.

We have a lot of process. There is a lot of public participation, but it repeats over and over without actually forming plans. While indispensable for planning, extensive public participation is disruptive for projects, and unfortunately that is often precisely what we do.

While developing a plan, it is important to engage the community. This exposes differences in what people want in their communities and informs prioritization. In the best cases, a consensus vision can coalesce; otherwise, the deliberations that set strategic direction are at least transparent and lay out shared expectations, even when disagreement remains.

Adopting a plan insulates the individual projects from prolonged process during implementation. With the decisions settled about the key features, developers and other project sponsors can move forward with greater certainty. This reduces a range of costs including design revisions and financial expenses incurred from delays. Given the overarching concern about housing affordability, reducing these costs is important.

A plan can also improve balance and equity in ways that fighting over projects cannot. By subjecting an area to an overarching framework, there is less room for power and influence to manipulate decisions for specific projects. It can also better address negative features (a waste transfer station, for example) by demonstrating how social burdens are shared and mitigating impacts with other positive features more comprehensively than project-level "mitigation" measures.

Finally, progress can be tracked with a plan. People can see if things are improving, and they know what benefits to expect as work continues. In the absence of a plan, each project can seem like a new fight to make small gains or hold onto whatever you have. It can seem never-ending with no sense of collective achievement.

Very often, what we practice as "city planning" is not really planning. Many jurisdictions have instead adopted public process without drafting plans. This is an approach that fosters NIMBYism. Without the overarching framework to ensure fair treatment in spreading impacts and benefits, residents are compelled to face off on every project to fight for their interests. Even those who embrace social equity and are prepared to accept a fair share of impacts must eventually take a stand too, if they are to avoid being exploited by other less progressive (and often more powerful) communities.

In my view, it is not really a matter of reigning in homeowners who are not willing to share with the next generation of neighbors who isn't there yet. We have communities full of people who have friendly discussions in their front yards, on their stoops, and in neighborhood parks. It is an issue of engaging them in developing an actual plan that provides them confidence about how their neighborhood will grow and thrive in a changing city. Perhaps it is because I am a planner, but I see better planning as the solution to our NIMBY backlash.

Work in Progress

Sometimes it is difficult to understand why renderings for new buildings create concerns that could be easily avoided. Sometimes it's hard not to jump to conclusions, but those often don't stand up under scrutiny. The use of these images is relatively new, so hopefully they are a work in progress.

Take this example for a new building in The Bronx:

This rendering may actually be more accurate than most. The weedy overgrowth in the tree pits and below the retaining wall, as well as some tagging on the wall have all been retained.  But there are a number of inaccuracies. 

The Dystopia of Parking Automated Cars

The future of parking is very much an open question, given the uncertain, diverging possibilities of automated vehicles. Ultimately, the future will be whichever dystopia we create through our collective decisions. Last night, I had a glimpse into one of the cities we may create.

There were neighborhoods with beautiful streets. The sidewalks were wide, well landscaped with rain gardens, and uninterrupted by driveways. The houses and apartment buildings were free of blank garage doors and the local retail had outdoor seating areas instead of parking lots. Occasionally, people walked out to cars that quickly and quietly whisked them away, or they were dropped off near their houses before the cars pulled away and disappeared.

But out of sight were the poor neighborhoods, places where the affluent and middle-class residents rarely had reason to venture. As always, the houses were not as well maintained. The streetscapes were nothing like the more affluent areas. Less City funding had been invested in either paving materials or landscaping when widening the sidewalks, and they did not enjoy the additional street furniture and maintenance available with the resources of private associations. But what really stood out were the driveways up and down the streets. They interrupted the street trees and the scrubby landscaping, and especially in the early morning and later evening, a steady stream of empty vehicles cut across the sidewalks and filled the streets. Needless to say, there were few retail areas with people enjoying themselves outside. The parking facilities for automated vehicles dominated the streets.

This dreadful image followed yesterday's discussion about automated vehicles in the Transportation Committee of the New York City Council. As part of the discussion, the New York City Department of Transportation suggested automated vehicles could reduce demand for parking and open opportunities to convert space to other uses. An optimistic takeaway was picked up in a tweet by the committee chair:

.@NYC_DOT says autonomous vehicles could lead to less car ownership, leading to less need for parking, more open public space & more

— Ydanis Rodriguez (@ydanis) October 28, 2016

Little Houses on Charlotte Street

Charlotte Street in The Bronx has a mythic place in the history of The Bronx, and it continues to grow as the borough recovers from its period of neglect and abandonment. As the mythology grows, Charlotte Street becomes increasingly symbolic. Yet it remains a place where real families live and build dreams for their future.

As with any other symbolic place, people impose their own agendas onto its history and argue about its meaning. Its history becomes contested through competing efforts to use its lessons to shape the future. Attention to Charlotte Street will only mount going into next year, the 40th Anniversary of the Blackout and The Bronx Is Burning. Quality discussions that hear and consider different perspectives will be invaluable.

Interest in Charlotte Street has already percolated for much of this year. It bubbled up when Bernie Sanders held his massive rally at St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx in April, and it has boiled over since Netflix released its new series The Get Down. As we approach the 40th anniversary of "The Bronx is Burning," attention is likely to grow.

The Sanders rally naturally led to a round of discussions about historic presidential visits to The Bronx. None are more mythologized than the pair of stops at Charlotte Street by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

President Carter visited the area in 1977. His suggestion was to "See which areas can still be salvaged." Mere weeks later, televisions viewers watching a Yankees game were told a massive fire was in the same area (it was actually a mile and a half away in Melrose). That moment, paraphrased as "The Bronx is burning," became permanently branded on the borough's image. While the specific fire seen on television that night was not actually on Charlotte Street, it was an apt enough depiction of the arson that left nothing but debris of former homes in its wake. In 1980, local activists staged a People's Convention on the site of Carter's visit during the Democratic Convention to draw attention to broken promises. Later that year, Reagan stole their idea and visited the site to try emphasizing his opponent's failures.

Ultimately, planners and developers led by Ed Logue finally rebuilt Charlotte Street and the surrounding blocks. What they created looked like the image of the prototypical American suburb had literally been xeroxed right into the middle of the least likely inner city neighborhood. A small handful of streets were lined with cheerful little ranch houses. They have hardly changed today. Each has its own little fenced yard. You can hear the birds singing when you stroll down the sidewalk.

"The Great Garage Rescue"

The other morning, I was watching an episode of Handy Manny with my favorite three-year-old. It occurred to me that maybe planners should watch more kids' cartoons.

Handy Manny is a Disney Junior show about a handyman and his talking tools, who always help the residents in their diverse urban neighborhood. The episode that caught my attention was a special titled "The Great Garage Rescue." In it, Manny's older brother has an auto repair garage, which is being threatened with an urban renewal scheme. The City is going to build a "mini-mall" in the name of progress, destroying a family business that is part of the local community in the process. Community members rally around the garage and save it in the end.

The storyline about local businesses standing in the way of urban renewal bulldozers has been well worn for decades. It is easy to use the notion of a modern "mini-mall" as a convenient foil, too. What is interesting, though, is the idea that an auto repair garage would be a valued part of a community worth saving. It's an idea that does not occur to urban planners often enough.

Far too often, these types of businesses are labeled as "nuisances," and targeted in rezoning efforts. Affordable housing or mixed-use development is a more likely candidate to displace the repair shop in current schemes by planners and public officials, but the lack of understanding and sensitivity to the needs of the workers and patrons of these businesses is the same. It takes a change in perspective; instead of seeing places with auto repair shops as leftover areas passed over by development, planners need to learn to recognize the valuable community assets that are there and create solutions that embrace them.

Shows like Handy Manny that recognize and celebrate the value of these places of work can help. And hopefully more planners will catch the message when they're home watching cartoons with the family on their day off.

Where Do Nuisances Go?

This weekend, I walked by a home in a residential district that has been illegally converted into a security system business. The side yard is now a poorly designed parking lot for commercial vehicles. As far as non-conforming uses go, it is relatively benign. It's visually obtrusive, and contributes a little extra noise, but otherwise has little tangible impact. Its illegal status contributes to a sense of disorder, though, and this would never be allowed in "better" neighborhoods.


Although this particular business has relatively little impact, many other uses encroaching on residential neighborhoods are greater nuisances. A couple weeks ago, I passed a vacant lot that has been used as a junk yard for an auto shop for decades.
 

When repair businesses are forced out of manufacturing areas that are rezoned to open them up for residential development, the activity often finds new illicit locations in disadvantaged communities. There is a certain irony in efforts to provide more affordable housing as part of a progressive agenda focused on social equity resulting in environmental impacts in disadvantaged communities.

With the longtime trend of declining urban manufacturing, areas zoned for industrial uses have been coming under pressure for conversion for residential development as city populations have started increasing again. As light-industrial businesses are cleared out, there are ever fewer places for them to relocate. Pressure mounts for the support services that underpin the city's economy to crowd into working-class and low-income neighborhoods. Illegal commercial uses gain a foothold for two reasons: they have less influence and they're somewhat sympathetic toward the workers. These are communities that do not have the influence and power to ensure a Department of Buildings that is not fully competent (and questionably honest) actually address problems in their neighborhoods. And the residents aren't always so sure they want the codes enforced. Their friends or neighbors may depend on the jobs, or they may simply feel that the interest of the workers to earn a living is more important than the problems the businesses bring with them.

These outcomes are not inevitable. Increasing the supply of housing is critical, but it is also important to accommodate the support functions that keep the city running in a manner that is efficient, sustainable, and equitable. As we continue to ignore these marginalized jobs and fail to provide for them intelligently and with dignity, they are forced into marginalized communities, along with their impacts.

What we have now is the gentrification of blue collar job sites and passive environmental injustice by turning a blind eye toward the displacement of nuisances into less affluent neighborhoods. What we need is progressive, comprehensive planning that looks at more than numerical housing targets.

Dirty Heat and Ugly Streetscapes

In a city with transportation as efficient as New York City, much of the energy use and air pollution comes from building systems. The old, decrepit heating systems in many of the city's aging apartment buildings is a particular problem.

Many community activists focus their energy on trucks. The impacts of heavy vehicles traveling on streets with children is undeniable, and smart campaigns to improve the routing and safety of large vehicles need all the support they can get. The fixation on trucks to address asthma problems, on the other hand, seems largely misplaced. Refocusing some of that energy and attention on heating systems would do more to combat asthma, improve quality of life for lower-income residents, and reduce energy consumption.

Combating truck use is largely a futile effort, since many of these trips are necessary and relatively efficient. Companies have already done a great deal to optimize routing in the interest of cutting costs to improve their own profits. Federal regulations have already vastly improved emissions in recent years. There are certain investments that could make rail alternatives more competitive, and I do not mean to discount them. Yet these are mostly changes on the margin and require major investment. The benefits that would ultimately reach disadvantaged communities would be small and diffuse.

Rather than pouring all the energy into the invisible remaining emissions from the tailpipes of trucks supporting working-class jobs, it's time to focus on the buildings belching big black clouds of smoke over low-income and working-class neighborhoods. Targeted support to improve heating systems in old apartment buildings could be implemented more quickly and continued on an ongoing basis, with much better results. Every time one of these buildings is improved, the quality of life would directly benefit the residents, mostly lower-income, who have had to suffer from poor heating for countless winters.

As it stands now, many heating units actually fail in these buildings. Then an emergency mobile boiler is brought in, parked on the street, and connected into the building. The residents who suffer from the lack of heat are far more impacted than anybody else, not only by suffering through the cold by also by the way they are marked with a sign of poverty. You truly have a "poor door" when there's an emergency boiler sitting outside the entrance to your apartment building.

The emergency boilers have negative effects for others in the neighborhood, too. When an emergency boiler gets plopped down, the deterioration of the building starts to erode the public space in the neighborhood. These boilers contribute to poor air quality, remove parking spaces from use, disrupt street cleaning during alternate side parking, and create an unattractive space that may even feel unsafe for pedestrians walking down the sidewalk between the building and the boiler.

Addressing these building systems really should be priority repairs. Although far too slowly, there has been some progress, primarily by converting the buildings to natural gas. Not only are the new systems cleaner and more efficient, supplying them with fuel is less disruptive.

Looking at Landscapes of Work

Twenty years ago, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time by J. B. Jackson was published. I didn't read the book for the first time until a few years later, but it has become a text that I always enjoy returning to reread. It still feels relevant in a way few books do after a couple decades have passed.

The year Jackson's book came out, I was living in France. I was raised as the son of a Steelworker in a small, industrial city in Oregon; spending a year of high school as a foreign exchange student was a rare opportunity for exposure to European culture and urban life. Like so many other Americans who have stayed in Europe, I felt the allure of dense urban neighborhoods. Like many others, most of my experience was also focused on historic city cores, middle-class neighborhoods, and scenic countrysides. I had such down-to-earth experiences as shopping at Carrefour, and I had some working-class friends at the school I attended. But I was not living in an HLM and I saw relatively little of the cités industrielles. Certainly what impressed itself most heavily on me was the contrast between the walkable, transit-rich, middle-class places I encountered and the sprawling, largely industrial, working-class landscape where I had grown up.

The idea of emulating European urban neighborhoods certainly merged with the American ideal of social mobility. My parents worked hard to provide me with opportunities; I was supposed to work hard to achieve a higher standard of living than they had. So as a planner, that naturally seemed to translate into improving neighborhoods along the lines of the desirable European middle-class models I had seen. Of course, aspiring to remake American cities more like European precedents has been a prevalent trend in urban planning since long before I was inspired to become a planner. It remains a strong strain to this day, particularly when it comes to the growing push for better streets, with Copenhagen serving as such a strong model for bicycle infrastructure that "Copenhagenize" has become a term. 

Jackson provides a different perspective. Rather than looking to Europe for a model of what American cities could become, he looks at our domestic landscape to understand how it actually works. He concerns himself with the places where workers earn their livings. It is a poignant reminder of the diverse needs of complex economies and the inherent dignity of work.

For most planners, myself included, Jackson can be a challenging read when he begins an essay by saying:

I am very pro-automobile, pro-car and pro-truck, and I can't imagine what existence would be without them. But I have learned to be discreet in my enthusiasm: disapproval from environmentalists and other right-thinking elements in the population is something I could not possibly survive. (p. 167, "Looking into Automobiles") 

Real Poor Doors

There has been a lot of discussion about the "poor door" scandal in New York City. The New York Times covered it in depth yesterday. Some developers taking advantage of affordable housing incentives have been segregating their below-market units from the more affluent residents with separate entrances.

As insulting and socially destructive as that is, this whole discussion does not do justice to the housing challenges of New York City's poor. The "affordable" units in the new buildings are still positioned at incomes around the city's median household income. This is not housing that is within reach of the poor.  This fact provides some support to the push back against the critics of this practice; many people just aren't that sympathetic to the insult to residents who could afford a typical apartment but have won the opportunity to move into a much nicer unit because they happened to win a lottery.

This situation is typical of the public discourse around affordable housing in New York City. There is attention and programs for the middle-class, with public debates back and forth about how much support professional workers really need and deserve. Meanwhile, the units that are inhabited by the working poor, who spend so much of their earnings to inhabit apartments with much worse conditions than new construction with a side entrance, are places that remain invisible to public discourse.

The poor have always inhabited the residual spaces of the middle class. Sometimes these were neighborhoods of speculative middle-class housing that were left over from a glut of  housing bubble,  ultimately becoming crowded ghettos as the houses were chopped up into apartments. Other times, and increasingly in New York City today, it is extra space in one- and two-family houses in neighborhoods where the working class moved in after the original middle-class owners moved on. These less affluent owners often can no longer afford the entire space for themselves as they struggle to pay the mortgage and maintenance on the structure. Many turn to renting out rooms for supplemental income. These are the illegal apartments that fill basements and cellars, and dangerously partition floors in houses throughout the city's sprawling residential districts.