More Damage to Niagara Cities

Proposed Outlet Mall in NOTL.  Note the guard towers at entrances to keep out pedestrians.

On the June 8th Standard front page we saw three hospital sites are leaked and an “XL retail outlet” for NOTL proposed, all of them outside urban areas. Why are we again going to hurt ourselves?

Regional policy promotes Smart Growth which includes encouraging diverse walkable neighbourhoods with healthy and vibrant downtowns.  Yet we, through our politicians, continue to permit non-urban development that ensures further damage and sprawl.  This must stop.

Are we are really set on repeating the mistake of placing the St. Catharines Hospital outside of the urban fabric? Hospitals are a major urban asset that should be in neighbourhoods to be easily associated with residential and related commercial development.  

As for the Nike and Dockers outlet, tourists want an authentic regional destination. Locals, who will keep this QEW strip mall afloat for a while, will see it eventually die, but not before this economic leech damages the really interesting places, including our downtowns (see www.deadmalls.com).  

For years we have known we must be smarter about development to reduce our infrastructure costs, ensure a resilient sustainable environment, and make for more livable cities; and then we get this.

The Best Value is Downtown

Linked here is an interesting article by Todd Litman from Planetizen discussing smart growth and the impact on affordability. For years we have put our social housing at the edge of urban development believing that avoiding infill NIMBYism was essential to achieving the housing at all. That was possibly true, but not as true today.

Right now I’m consulting on an AHP project located at the bleeding edge of new development. I regret the decisions that were made not to further pursue a downtown site after our initial effort. Hindsight is great and in retrospect government imposed timing conditions, project size, and the path of least resistance put us on that site. But in the long run we may have not done our residents a favour, especially as transportation costs rise.
That is a rental development, but for ownership – equity building suburban developments, the negative impacts are likely worse. It seems counter intuitive but the case made in this article is persuasive. Litman summarizes saying, “a typical household is likely to be a hundred thousand dollars wealthier in a decade if they choose a smart growth location over automobile-dependent sprawl.”

If we are going through “the great reset” as Richard Florida calls it, toward a new economy and new priorities, the Niagara Growth Strategy needs to be strengthen, not diluted by the pressures of old habits, to ensure we create the right conditions for good transportation options in our urban cores, and between the municipalities. Appreciation for high density urban living, by necessity, will evolve to be the new paradigm. Affordable rental housing efforts need to be there, involving smaller developments, multiple sites, and mixed with and in ownership housing.

Mandating Zero Energy Homes

What if the Niagara Region insisted in its Official Plan that all new subdivisions were required to have zero-energy homes? Imagine the fuss, the complaining, the backlash. They would, however, be doing us all a huge favour. It can be reasonably imagined that homes that are energy inefficient will lose market value. With oil at $132/barrel, today's price and climbing, it is possible that all energy costs, including natural gas, will have a profoundly negative impact of the viability of homes that are poorly designed.

A net-zero energy home is capable of producing an annual output of renewable energy that is equal to the total amount of its annual purchased energy.
Is this far fetched? In fact no, Austin Texas is considering the idea. This from Builder Magazine:

Austin has appointed a task force to study the feasibility of a change in the building code that would require all new single-family homes in the city to be zero-energy–capable by 2015.

"The NAHB Research Center put out a report this year that stated that zero-energy homes are feasible across the U.S. by 2020," says Richard Morgan, green building manager for Austin Energy, the city-owned utility. "We figure we're a little ahead of the curve here, and 2015 should be feasible for us."

The city's goal is to make all homes built within the jurisdiction of Austin zero-energy–capable with on-site energy generation, which with today's technology means solar voltaics, Morgan says. That would make the houses about 60 percent more efficient than similar units built today.

If large numbers of homes are not viable in a high energy cost market, the whole local economy will suffer, people will double up or leave, and the tax base will diminish. Services will suffer, including mass transportation. All in all not a pretty picture and demonstrating that Smart Growth is also about ensuring the 'private' sector and well as the public infrastructure are equally important areas of concern.

Development Charges on Size

This directly relates to development charges. I find it interesting that we in Niagara continue to charge the same for monster McMansions as we do for modest homes. If we want to encourage smart growth, living space sizes need to come down to encourage better density. This from Cooltown Studios:

Imagine if half of all your employees suddenly couldn't afford to live conveniently near your workplace? Many of them would leave rather than spend two hours of their daily lives in traffic or transit. Of course you'd replace them, but you wouldn't be attracting the same level of talent, then naturally, your customers would gradually realize the same.
Thus local businesses today are advocating for more 'workforce housing' - housing that is attainable to working families earning between 60%-120% of the median income for the area, and typically unsubsidized, as defined by real estate industry representative Urban Land Institute.
The following survey results of local businesses (this one in New Orleans) reflects a growing national concern, a result of a peaking perception that more square footage is better.
- 71% said the lack of workforce housing negatively impacted their business;
- 65% considered the need serious;
-42% felt developer incentives would increase the supply;
- 33% proposed public-private partnerships as the answer.
Myriad solutions are provided for such a pervasive issue, but the most logical lies with the fact that the average area of living space per occupant in the U.S. was 290 s.f. in 1950 and is 939 s.f. today. So maybe the answer isn't how do we build affordable 1200 s.f. homes, but how do we make 'not so big' cool again

So Long Suburbia??

Author James Kunstler says the end of the Automotive Age is near, along with all the at dependent on it. From Business Week:

The suburbs were largely products of industrialism. We had a huge supply of oil and cheap undeveloped land, and we decided to become a happy, motoring utopia. It had many practical benefits. The trouble is after a while it became a cartoon
of country living. Cheap oil is what made suburbia possible. But we'll run into problems with spot shortages. As we get into trouble with these supplies, our economy will suffer. Major instabilities in the system will present themselves much sooner than we are led to believe. And by that I mean the way we
produce food, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we move around.

The rise and fall of oil production is asymmetrical. In other words, it'll be a steeper, rockier tumble down than the steady increase going up. My own sense of things is that we will be in very serious trouble inside of five years. I get people who come up to the podium after a speaking engagement to tell me they've just gotten a Prius, expecting brownie points. It's not that we're driving the wrong cars. It's that we're driving cars of any size, incessantly.

Virtually anything organized on a grand scale is liable to fall into trouble—government, finance, corporate enterprise, agribusiness, schools. Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.

This sounds ominous, but is consistent with what many have been saying for some time. Imagine a week or a month of shortages at the pump. The oil is still flowing, but not as quickly as we expect. Spot shortages in Niagara will have the same effect as everywhere else.

• People will stop buying anything but the essentials. They will stop travelling (goodbye Niagara Falls).
• They will not be eating out as much.
• Big ticket items, homes, cars, etc, will simply crawl to a halt until there is some clarity in the market.

When it become clear that the shortages are not predictable, unnecessary travel will be a thing of the past for most people. Buses, trains, (not airplanes) will be in demand. Home close to city centres will be in demand. Prices for suburban homes will be in decline.

Poverty and Smart Growth

It is not often that I hear this. A few days ago in conversation I was told that poverty is not an issue that is central to Smart Growth. I was taken by surprise by this as this person does have feelings for the poor, but somehow could not make the connection.

I am on the Smarter Niagara Steering Committee and have been for 6 years. One of the so called "10 Principles" of Smart Growth is the availability of a range of housing options. It is a weak half-hearted statement, but there it is. What burns me about Smart Growth is the emphasis on technical issues: transects, road widths, bicycle paths, walkability, density. What we often get out of this is Smart Sprawl, developments that have all of these features, but are disconnected from the rest of community life as smartly designed socially gated communities with Stepford standards and prices forcing out the untidiness of the mere ordinary.

My view is that it is not "Smart" if it does not move us socially or economically toward making room for all. The root of this evil is the inequity of income and opportunity, along with the contrasting gluttony of conspicuous and near patriotic consumption supporting the extended last gasp of oil based market economy. Smart growth that leaves out the poor, that further segregates people on the basis of financial equity, is just as cruel as 'dumb' growth'. It is just better to look at and more enjoyable for the 'creative class'.

This is from Trixie Ling at Citizens for Public Justice:

"The visible signs of housing insecurity across Canada are part of a bigger picture of the impact of poverty. The reality is that poverty creates social exclusion and inequality by denying people access to affordable and adequate housing and to full participation in the economy and society. While poverty creates barriers for people to live responsibly and build healthy communities, lack of decent housing is detrimental to the health and well-being of individuals and families. "

I would add it is detrimental to all of us. In the end, if large numbers of citizens are smartly left behind, left out of the sweetness of new traditional neighbourhoods and vibrant downtowns, then we have not accomplished very much at all. Decay, crime, and despair will have just moved down the street into the old suburbs we so love to hate. Eventually it will all come back.

The disparity of income and opportunity, - and I'm no socialist! - that is where the battle begins for a fair and just society that is capable of adapting successfully to a sustainable future.

Development Incentives

Last evening the Smarter Niagara Steering Committee was given a draft overview of policy regarding development charge discounts and exemptions. The Region of Niagara provides incentives to encourage development in accordance with Smart Growth principles.

What concerns me about the draft document is the inherent paradigm in the DC policy discussion, especially relating to cost recovery, which places incentives outside of the costs to be recovered. Incentives are not considered a service. We build roads so that our economy may do well. Street lights are installed to promote public safety. Waste treatment is built to ensure environmental quality. All of this is needed.

What is also needed are expenditures that promote smart growth to be included in the list of services covered by development charges. These costs are not for new libraries or parks - clearly not services that should be included, but to create a pattern of development that fosters a healthy living environment including walkable, safer neighbourhoods, less greenhouse emissions, and lower infrastructure requirements.

Sprawl costs, therefore sprawl should pay a premium to ensure that incentives are available to encourage smarter decisions. Last century definitions of what constitutes a service will not get us to where we need to be.

One further comment; incentives are being subjected to a cost/benefit analysis as they should. Has there been a request of the engineers to explain why there should be 12 stop light fixtures at many intersections? They seem to able to include this in the budget based on standards they have adopted and without any value analysis supplied. They may be right although that should be doubted, but when planners propose incentives as direction signals to development, the level of scrutiny is intense. I say, "no more stop signals."

It has to have beauty!

From Richard Florida's Who's Your City. What is it that makes a resident happy to live in their city? The surprising survey results, ranked in order of importance:

1. Aesthetics - Physical beauty of our communities comes first, followed by outdoor parks, playgrounds, and trails. The bottom line? The physical beauty and aesthetics of place does not only matter to the wealthy (as the myth goes), it matters to everyone.

2. Basic services - Jobs and housing are paramount, as usual, but a surprising second.

3. Openness - A close third, with the primary correlation being with innovation, human capital, income and housing value.

4. Economic and Personal Security - Money isn't everything.

5. Leadership – Last in order: I guess it is not really expected – kind of sad isn't it.

University as Developer

Wall Street Journal - "One of the most ambitious real-estate-development projects in Philadelphia involves revamping a 42-acre eyesore on the banks of the Schuylkill River into a hub featuring gleaming office towers, apartments, a hotel and restaurants. The catalyst for the $2 billion redevelopment: the University of Pennsylvania.

Universities, increasingly, are extending their reach to off-campus development in an effort to give their surrounding areas and town centers a vibrant and modern feel. In the process, they are becoming major drivers of economic development after concluding that their fortunes are directly tied to those of their cities.

University officials say the campaign could eventually bring 4,000 new jobs to the area. Another reason for the push is that institutions are recognizing that, along with lucrative financial packages and strong academic reputations, they need to have attractive and exciting college towns to lure top faculty and students."

Universities as Urban Catalysts

There is movement among colleges and universities to reconnect – or connect for the first time with the urban fabric around them. The trend is to move away from the ivory tower concept towards understanding the institution as a major economic and cultural force that can markedly improve the quality of urban development around them.

David Perry, director of the Great Cities Institute and professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago argues that universities have always had a connection, but it was more academic than economic or cultural. Recently in The Columbian, he is cited as saying, "The intellectual connection, however, eroded over time, as evidenced by the language of academia. Universities provided "outreach" and "extension services" to talk to the community and viewed cities as "laboratories" or "experiments.""

Examples a changed attitude include:

• Morehouse College in Atlanta is working with the city to help rebuild surrounding neighborhoods.
  
• Georgia Tech, which is also in Atlanta, is helping with downtown revitalization by partnering with private businesses to erect two buildings. One houses traditional university functions while the second is used for research and development conducted by private businesses matched with university researchers.


• In Chicago, DePaul University restored a former department store. The school uses the top three floors, leases the middle four floors to the city and brought retail outlets to the ground floor.
  
• Brock University, in Niagara, is also considering its relationship to St. Catharines, specifically in considering partnership in a performing arts centre. Discussion is ongoing.

TND Traditional Neighbourhood Design

The acronym TND stands for Traditional Neighbourhood Development, a comprehensive community design that includes a variety of housing types and land uses in a defined area. The variety of uses permits schools, civic buildings and retail (even light industrial) to be located within walking distance of private homes. A TND is served by walkable streets and lanes suitable for pedestrians as well as cars.

A good example in St. Catharines is "The Village on the Twelve". This development is showing award winning leadership in urban design in Niagara.

Other Canadian Examples
Bois-Franc, Saint-Laurent, Québec saintlaurent.ville.montreal.qc.ca, boisfranc.com
Clayton Village, Surrey, BC claytonvillage.ca, sustainable-communities.agsci.ubc.ca
Cornell Village, Markham, Ontario cornellvillage.ca, dpz.com
Dockside Green, Victoria, B.C. docksidegreen.com
Downtown Markham, Markham, Ontario downtownmarkham.ca, city.markham.on.ca, dpz.com
Downtown South, Vancouver, BC city.vancouver.bc.ca
East Fraserlands, Vancouver, BC parklane.com
False Creek North, Vancouver, BC city.vancouver.bc.ca
Garrison Woods, Calgary, Alberta garrisonwoods.com
Kettle Valley, Kelowna, BC kettlevalley.com, ekistics.ca
Maple Ridge Town Centre Plan, BC sgog.bc.ca
McKenzie Towne, Calgary, Alberta mckenzietowne.com
Oak Park, Oakville, Ontario metrontario.com
Terwillegar Towne, Edmonton, Alberta terwillegartowne.com, ekistics.ca
The Village, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario thevillagenotl.com, dpz.com
UniverCity, Burnaby, BC univercity.ca

Courtyard Houses

Portland is widely recognized as an urban planning and design leader. In 1974, the city council killed plans for a highway and instead used the federal funding to create the first modern day light rail system. Six years later, the city became the first in the nation to create an urban growth boundary to contain sprawl. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, Portland faces many of the crises common to the contemporary American metropolis: lack of affordable housing, declining numbers of families with children, and rapid growth at the suburban-rural fringe.

Enter the Portland Courtyard Housing Design Competition, whose winning entries were announced in late November. Sponsored by the city, the competition promotes courtyard housing as an affordable way of increasing neighborhood densities without sacrificing public space and environmental sustainability. The courtyard model also extends Portland's tradition of street oriented urbanism. "Suburban houses avoid the street," said Mark Gillem, a competition director and a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon. "The courtyard can engage it."