Mary Newsom / Jul 09 2010
For Release Sunday, July 11, 2010
Citiwire.net
As local politicians across the country get scorched by voter anger over recession-induced budget cuts — laying off teachers, closing schools and libraries and slashing services — perhaps they’ll be more receptive than usual to some powerful and surprising tax revenue numbers.
So what follows is about fiscal prudence as much as it is about smart city planning.
Conventional wisdom, of course, says that to prop up the property tax base, a high-end shopping mall is just the ticket. But when Sarasota County, Fla., looked at where the county government gets the biggest bang for its property tax buck, it found some numbers that may surprise a lot of people.
Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter Katz, speaking to a meeting of Citistates Associates in Minnesota late last month, described a recent analysis of the county’s property tax revenue per acre. He pointed first to residential areas. Not surprisingly, when you work the numbers on a per-acre basis, residential property inside the county’s municipalities offered the biggest revenue per acre — a little more than $8,200 per acre for single family houses within the city of Sarasota. This makes sense, as in-town land values tend to be higher.
Read More »
Mary Newsom / Jun 26 2010
For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
Citiwire.net
ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.
In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.
Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.
In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.
Read More »
Mary Newsom / Feb 28 2010
For Release Sunday, February 28, 2010
Citiwire.net
A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.
It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.” Read More »
Mary Newsom / Sep 24 2009
For Release Thursday, September 24, 2009
Citiwire.net
The TV bar, “Cheers,” was a perfect, though fictional, example of one. The Paris café Les Deux Magots was a real one, and it famously drew artists and intellectuals such as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. If you’re lucky, you live near one, too: a coffeehouse, pub, barber shop or general store where you can visit anytime and linger. You’ll see people you know and people you don’t, and no one makes you leave ’til you’re ready.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg dubbed them Third Places in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. He wrote that Third Places (not work, not home) are “the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy.” But in the U.S., he wrote, we’ve almost lost them, as people spend more time in cars, in shopping malls, or at home in front of a screen.
Earlier this month I spent a couple of days in Toronto at a conference for the Information Architecture Institute, which drew hundreds of bright and creative people interested in the human mind, IT and how they intersect. One social media expert spoke about Oldenburg, and proposed that online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are America’s new Third Places.
Well, no. Read More »
Mary Newsom / Jun 25 2009
For Release Thursday, June 25, 2009
Citiwire.net
Maybe somewhere in Obama-land, stimulus money is protecting public school classrooms. But here in the red clay of North Carolina, there’s a teacher layoff bloodbath going on.
A few days after I heard that the toughest and best history teacher at our daughter’s high school got the ax–one of hundreds of teacher layoffs in Charlotte’s public schools and thousands in $5 billion-in-the-red North Carolina–I listened to Charlotte’s airport manager describe a $300-million parking deck he’s planning, complete with pedestrian tunnel. It’s in a package of projects: a new international concourse, two new hourly parking decks, an expanded ticketing area, a new runway–all to be funded by bond sales, the debt paid with airport revenues. “We’re spending money like drunken sailors,” the manager recently told a Charlotte Chamber of Commerce group.
This is madness. Read More »
Mary Newsom / Feb 26 2009
For Release Sunday, March 1, 2009
Citiwire.net
Across the U.S., civil engineers are practically giddy–well, they’re as giddy as civil engineers are ever going to be.
“For the first time in my career,” says Wayne Klotz, a Texan who is president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, “infrastructure is a hot topic.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, president of the National Governors’ Association, has for a year been trying to spotlight the nation’s serious infrastructure needs–although (don’t tell Klotz) Rendell himself concedes the topic lacks a certain sexiness.
But these days, recession-pummeled Americans are following the federal stimulus package almost as avidly as, in happier times, they obsessed over Anna Nicole Smith or Laci Peterson. They’re arguing whether stimulus money should go to the arts, or to repair and expand infrastructure, such as fixing bridges, boosting transit or finishing urban loop roads.
It’s about time people noticed those public works projects. Read More »