If You Don't Want People Parking in Your Driveway, Why Have a Driveway?

Seen while knocking on doors in New Bedford:

 Why would you give up a chunk of your yard and pay someone to pave it over if not to encourage your home's visitors to park there? Do people deliberately park in a stranger's driveway, then just walk off to go shopping? Considering a company mass-produces these signs, is this a widespread problem?

Makes you wonder if every house has a driveway in most communities because residents demand one, or if every house has a driveway because that's just what you're supposed to do in car-centric America.

Like Affordable Housing? Oppose Parking Minimums

Even within the city limits of Boston, one of America's great walkable cities & home to one of the country's most-used transit systems, developers are required to build a minimum of half a space for each unit of housing up to a ridiculous 1.5 parking spaces per unit of housing, whether the residents want them or not. It adds to the cost of housing and adds an incentive to drive - if you're forced to pay for a parking spot, you feel like you should keep a car there (or at least a large, rectangular box).

But some mavericky developers are boldly refusing to build things their customers don't want to pay for:

One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.

“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.

Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”

“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says. Mullens says the current market is friendlier for affordable rental apartments than for condominiums. He says the Irvington Garden filled within weeks of opening, and has remained that way. He says the majority of renters don’t have cars – though some do, and park on the street.

And when some renters DO park on the street? Duncan Black flagged the worst horror stories single-family-home-owning neighbors have had to offer:

“The personal anecdotes I’ve heard have to do with elderly relatives coming to visit, or driving into the neighborhood, and having to park a block or two away, and/or fears about that.”

Parking a block or two away??

Walkable Development Again Blocked in Chesapeake

Neighborhood opposition has killed a plan to build 260 apartments in Chesapeake and instead only 30 to 40 single-family houses will be built:

[NIMBY activist Miguel] Walker also says the quality of Hickory schools would draw families with school-age children to the Chapel Hill Apartments.

"I couldn't blame anybody who would want to," he said. "But it also comes down to renters. I don't know if this sounds terrible: Renters aren't really going to be invested in the community."

A similar saga played out last month in Western Branch, but on a larger scale, when City Council killed the massive Breckinridge development. Walker said he's expecting a call from John Arthur, who spearheaded the fight against Breckinridge, but he also has picked up pointers about the Western Branch efforts from reading newspaper accounts.

That Breckinridge development would've brought 1,500 new living spaces and millions more in economic development to an area in decline, but Chesapeake blocked it anyway, again citing concerns about new students. As Matt Yglesias points out, "'the schools here are good and people will want to send their children to them' operating as a reason to not let people move to a neighborhood has a particularly toxic impact on educational equity and effectiveness."

You often hear people say that Americans must want sprawling suburban lifestyles, because otherwise more people would live in smart growth-style dense developments and any attempt to say otherwise is a secret UN socialist plot. But here we have two very real examples of existing single-family homeowners preventing new apartments from being built, forcing hundreds of people to live further out and drive further to get where they want to go, spending more on gas and spending less time with their families in the process.

Americans Want Walkability, Not Suburbia

The new book The Conundrum claims that despite gains in energy efficiency, real energy savings will be hard to achieve because people want giant houses in the suburbs necessitating long driving commutes.

Except a new survey shows Americans strongly value having sidewalks and being able to walk places. That backs up earlier research showing both a preference for right-sized homes over McMansions and that younger Americans hate driving.

"We Have Built America in a Way That is Fundamentally Unhealthy"

Opponents of climate action pointed to estimates that it may have slowed economic growth by 1 to 3.5% by 2050 as reason to maintain our status quo on energy, transportation & community design. But as a new PBS series details, the cost of sprawling communities that are unhealthy for either people or the planet may already be at least that high:

“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Richard Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”

He adds: “Two percent of the United States’ gross domestic product goes to the treatment of diabetes. This is a crushing economic impact.”

And that's only a fraction of the cost, from higher taxes to pay for more & wider roads, billions of dollars sent overseas to buy foreign oil for gas & home heating, and countless hours wasted in traffic that could've been spent at work or with family.

Here in the DC area, WETA will air the series in its entirety on Saturday (2/4) starting at 1pm. Learn more and find listings in your community at DesigningHealthyCommunities.org:

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia (preview all episodes here) from MPC on Vimeo.

Arlington Passes Strip Mall Preservation Act

Rest easy, strip malls of Arlington. The Arlington County Board has acted to let developers know if they try to turn you into housing, they can expect ... well, probably just a sternly-worded letter, but still:

County Board members on July 9 unanimously adopted an initial “historic resources inventory list,” which ranks nearly 400 properties constructed between 1909 and 1962 based on how important staff and a consultant believe it is to shield them from demolition. It is an effort, County Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman said, to make up for lost time. 

“We didn’t have a great tradition of preservation in Arlington,” he said, particularly since the county has a limited number of properties more than a century old.

Never let a lack of actual historic properties stop you from declaring that whatever properties you have handy are historic.

The first phase of the effort focused on only a very narrow slice of property types in Arlington: garden apartments, shopping centers and commercial properties more than 50 years old. Leventhal said those types of properties are most vulnerable to redevelopment.

As the National Trust for Historic Preservation points out, in many cases the greenest building is the one that's already built. But saying properties more than 50 years old are most vulnerable to redevelopment is like saying cars more than 10 years old are most vulnerable to being traded in. Even if it's still functional, does it still meet your needs? Will it be a slight to the historic value of TheGreenMilesMobile if I need a roomier car when I have kids?

From Fort C.F. Smith to the Key Bridge, I understand the value of preserving truly historic places & sites. But in a place like Arlington that's nearly 100% built-out, historic preservation doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a choice between maintaining existing structures and the best available use of that land in redevelopment - often the choice between a short, single-purpose building that can serve a smaller number of people and a tall, multi-purpose building that can serve a much larger number of people.

This comment to my original post is the essence of why the sustainable development advocates at the Urban Land Institute thought my original post was from The Onion. The comment discusses the Colonial Village Shopping Center strip mall as if it was the Pyramide du Louvre & bashes "misguided," "pious transit-related development. It also ignores the inherent choice - that every time we give a one-story strip mall & parking lot the cover of preservation, we're choosing to block something else potentially more beneficial.

And let's face it: Arlington was a quiet bedroom community before transit-related development revitalized it. Actually, I don't even know if "revitalized" is the even right word, which implies we were this vital at some point in the past - Arlington is more lively in 2011 than it's ever been, and the graph is trending straight up.

Here's the most annoying contradiction: Does anyone fighting new multi-family housing near Metro want to give up the added value of their homes, wildly inflated by their proximity to these vibrant neighborhoods? Of course not.

So what's next?

Still down the road is a similar effort for the roughly 10,000 residential properties the county government believes have historic value.

Arlington has 207,627 residents with about 90,000 households & around 60% of residents live in multi-family units. I emailed a friend who works in local real estate, "Arlington County thinks there are '10,000 residential properties' with 'historic value'? Come on. How many houses are there in Arlington total?"

He replied simply, "10,005."

Sustainable Cities Have Slimmer Residents

Michael Humphrey writes at Salon.com about how he lost 80 pounds after moving to New York City:

Back in the Midwest, where I lived my entire adult life, the most common question was, "How did you do it?" Some people asked with a wink and nod -- you know those vain coastal people and their shortcuts. No, I didn't have surgery, didn't take supplements, didn't hire a trainer or even buy a miracle-cure book.

I walked more, and I ate less.

Part of my diet plan was simple necessity. Back home, I drove a car everywhere I went. I cherry-picked parking spots to get as close to the door as possible, shaving my walk to the minimum. But my normal daily walk in New York City was about three miles, just getting to school, walking to work either in Greenwich Village or Midtown and meeting my friends and wife for dinner.

It's not just living in the city - it's about living in a city designed to facilitate walking & biking:

Cities and states with more sidewalks and bike paths tend to have slimmer residents than locations where people must rely on non-active, car transportation, a new study finds.

Those cities with the highest levels of active commuting and lower obesity rates tended to be the older U.S. cities with well-developed public transit systems in the Northeast (Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.) and on the West Coast (Seattle and San Francisco). More than 10 percent of work trips in these cities involved walking or biking, said study researcher David Bassett, of the Obesity Research Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

What Generation Y's Preferences Mean For Arlington's Future

One more thought on the research discussed here yesterday about Generation Y's living preferences. This is what I find so weird about attempts to kill the Westover Market Beer Garden or opposition to the East Falls Church redevelopment plan.

Current neighbors view them as shattering their quiet community. But according to this research, that's the equivalent of when those same neighbors' parents told them to knock off that darn rock & roll music.

Generation Y doesn't want single-family homes and a neighborhood that (even if it's lively during the day) demands they drive elsewhere for entertainment - any more than their parents wanted to listen to Bing Crosby. They want smart density, townhouses, a pub they can walk home from, and who knows, maybe 30 years from now some sort of transit option we haven't even considered yet - a streetcar down Washington Blvd. all the way to the Pentagon?

The Westover Market Beer Garden isn't an aberration - it's Rubber Soul, an evolutionary leap that signals a generational shift. Let's say neighbors block music at the Beer Garden - won't someone just see that untapped niche for live music & act accordingly? Maybe Samuel Beckett's would look there for a 2nd location?

This isn't about whether change is coming - it's about what will change look like. Neighborhoods like East Falls Church & Westover will never be Clarendon, but they'd be wise to learn from its history. You may not be able to stop change, but you can make sure it's doesn't look like Home Depot.

Generation Y Hates Loudoun County

At last week's National Association of Home Builders conference, panelists presented research showing the Millenials despise McMansions:

A key finding: They want to walk everywhere. Surveys show that 13% carpool to work, while 7% walk, said Melina Duggal, a principal with Orlando-based real estate adviser RCLCO. A whopping 88% want to be in an urban setting, but since cities themselves can be so expensive, places with shopping, dining and transit such as Bethesda and Arlington in the Washington suburbs will do just fine.

“One-third are willing to pay for the ability to walk,” Ms. Duggal said. “They don’t want to be in a cookie-cutter type of development. …The suburbs will need to evolve to be attractive to Gen Y.”

Outdoor space is important—but please, just a place to put the grill and have some friends over. Lawn-mowing not desired.

Makes you wonder. Who's going to live in all those McMansions when the baby boomers no longer need or want them? Will those areas redevelop sustainably, or will they just slowly revert to forest, The World Without Us-style?