What is the best way to experience and be a part of your surroundings? In city or countryside, this urbanist knows being on foot is tough to beat, but a recent trip to the Boundary Waters (BWCAW) caused me to reconsider. A canoe is hard to beat as the best way to experience wilderness lakes in northern Minnesota. Could a bicycle be the best way to experience the city? Perhaps the canoe and bicycle are kindred spirits.

In his 1956 collection of essays about the Boundary Waters entitled “The Singing Wilderness,” author Sigurd Olson describes “The Way of a Canoe” as an excellent means of experiencing the wilderness. The fluidity of dipping a paddle in the water and the responsiveness of the canoe allows one to truly experience the beauty and wilderness the Boundary Waters has to offer.

If the canoe is the best way to experience wilderness lakes, then perhaps the best way to experience a city is on a bicycle. Sigurd Olson describes the pace of canoe time, and slowing down to get in to the rhythms of the wilderness. Slowing down in a city is similar; you can’t race through it nor experience it properly from behind the glass of a motorized vehicle. Call this bicycle time.

Olson describes the canoe as enabling “near flight” across the water, allowing “a sense of harmony and oneness with the earth.” Just as the paddle is an “extension of your arm” in a canoe, the bicycle is an extension of your feet, enabling harmony and oneness with the street and buildings around you. As well, a canoe can cut almost silently through water, and a bicycle slices a quiet path through urbanity. Paddling gracefully across a wilderness lake allows you to see, hear, feel and smell the wilderness as you slip by. A bicycle in the city is no different. Paddling across Long Island Lake in the Boundary Waters is amazingly similar to bicycling through Haight Ashbury in San Francisco or along the canals in Amsterdam; you are at one with your surroundings. The pace feels right.

Need convincing? The pace of a canoe is slow enough so as to not miss the scenery but fast enough to get across several lakes in a day. Each stroke of the paddle brings a new vista of water, rock and tree. Likewise, you can pedal at a pace slow enough to view street life and architecture around you, yet traverse a neighborhood in no time at all. Each street and intersection is a new perspective.

The canoe is silent, allowing you to hear the breeze in the pines, the call of the loon, and the music of songbirds. On a bicycle, you can hear the boisterous laughter of sidewalk cafes, the revving and honking of traffic, air traffic overhead, and the clinking of bottles dumped in the recycling bin behind a restaurant.

From a canoe you can smell the damp, mossy woods in the morning, the mists on the water, and the warm wind drying out the pines. On a bicycle you can smell the changing seasons in a city, the tantalizing scents of different restaurants, coffee shops, or bakeries beckoning as you pass by, garbage water spilled on the pavement, and the exhaust of vehicles passing you or idling in traffic as you glide by in the bike lane.

Be it sight, sound, or smell, you are acutely aware of your surroundings. Likewise, you are exposed to the elements, at one with the weather, be it in a canoe or bicycle, for better or worse. When it is hot, you sweat. When it rains, you get wet. Just as fighting a stiff breeze builds character, pedaling or paddling downwind is like being on top of the world. On the water, the shade of morning gives way to the potent sun overhead. In a city, during a twilight ride you can pass from the heat of daytime pavement to the relief and cool of evening wafting across the road. But you are not just passing through it, you are part of it.

We must balance the wilderness and the city. As Ed Glaeser explains in Triumph of the City, we need urban places more than ever in order to interact and prosper. Perhaps as well, as another Ed (Edward Abbey) wrote in Desert Solitaire, we need wilderness more than ever. Certainly to experience it and get away from it all, but even if we never visit, just to know it is there. Regardless, wherever you are, it is important to know how to navigate it; to slow down enough to properly experience it. Pedaling and paddling are perhaps one in the same. That said, if you spend a little time in a canoe in the wilderness and on a bicycle in the city, you will come to know each in a way not possible from the confines of a motorized vehicle. At the end of the day, perhaps that is most important of all.

Sam Newberg is a Twin Cities-based writer and real estate consultant. His e-mail address is sam@joe-urban.com.

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“That site is going to sit vacant for a decade.” That was the comment made to me by a frustrated developer as we left a public hearing after the city council voted down his planned apartment project. Although this scene occurred in a suburb of the Twin Cities, it could have happened anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s replicated time and again across the country.

This begs the larger question: if city after city continues to shoot down economically viable rental housing projects, where exactly we are going to accommodate the expected growth in this country in the coming decades? Furthermore, why are cash-strapped cities passing up economic development opportunities? I’m all for local decision-making, but the result of these decisions, multiplied across our metro areas, simply pushes more growth to the urban fringe — an ecologically and economically wasteful choice.

The plan called for an attractive apartment building in a city that has seen little new rental housing in recent decades. The market study indicated that the project could “pencil out,” or be financially feasible. Furthermore, the site in question was located along a transit line and close to freeways and employment. Everything seemed to line up.

The sticking point was leadership. Like so many other inner ring suburbs, this one has a stock of rental housing that averages 40 years old. They often suffer from functional obsolescence, plus increasing crime. Result: in the eyes of the suburb’s public and elected leaders, all rental housing has a bad reputation, and any new project is unacceptable — even with a willing developer, a good design, a market study that supports the project, and the absence of any request for public subsidy.

The city council listened as the development team gave a presentation as to why it believed the project would succeed and bring a $20 million investment to the city, all at a time when revenue is badly needed.

But the reaction? A steady stream of residents who, one-by-one, got up to oppose the project. Over a three-hour period, every single resident, save one, stood up to speak against the project.

Sound familiar?

All opposed were existing homeowners in the city and all were older than 50. One gentleman even reported that he not only owned a home in the city, but also several apartments. The fact that he kept his home in better shape than his rental properties was proof, he asserted, that rental housing is bad for the city!

The lone person to spoke in favor of the project was about 30, a recent home buyer in the city. Reinvesting in this project would be good for the future finances and demographics of the city, she said. One could tell she was having second thoughts about her home purchase as she explained how she’d formerly lived in a neighborhood where renters were embraced. But here, even as a homeowner, she was unable to meet new neighbors, the area seemingly unfriendly with shades drawn and nobody about.

Something is out of balance. A recent Urban Land Institute publication, Housing in America, predicts the coming years’ demographic and economic trends will mean substantial demand for rental housing nationwide. But concurrently, millions of acres will become available for redevelopment on greyfields, often obsolete retail centers. More often than not, rental housing of some kind is an appropriate use for these sites. Developers and many city planning departments are there. But where’s the local leadership?

Michael Carliner, visiting fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, is researching issues surrounding rental housing for a report scheduled for release later this year. He agrees that my story is not uncommon in suburbs (and sometimes core cities) across the country. “It is more common for suburbs to zone it out,” he says, referring to multifamily housing in general. “They don’t make it easy to develop it. These are very local decisions.”

Local decisions, indeed, and I can sympathize with the city council’s perspective. Like those residents opposing the project, the council members were older, and remember building their home when the city was a growing suburb, everything was new and shiny, kids played in the parks, schools were full and crime was low. Now the kids have grown up and the homes need some renovations. The apartments built in the late ’60s for young baby boomers have become run down, and full of people the city founders don’t recognize. Crime festers. Even the old drive-thru on the drag is closed and falling down. (This is like a Bruce Springsteen song.)

Multiply this scenario by the hundreds of American cities and suburbs that act against the welfare of their region and their city itself. One’s led to agonize: what is the future of our metro areas?

I’m all for local decision-making and public process. But one has to fear for the future of our country when real estate development decisions are driven by an angry and vocal few. One thing is certain: if that lone 30-year-old woman in favor of the project wants to run for city council, I’ll contribute to her campaign.

Sam Newberg is a Twin Cities-based writer and real estate consultant. His e-mail address is sam@joe-urban.com.

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The slogan – “Keep Austin Weird,” launched by Austin’s Independent Business Alliance — has caught on as a way to celebrate the Texas capital’s artistic, “hip” side. Indeed, in today’s “flat” world, any appeal to the so-called “creative” classes gets lots of attention.

But are companies really attracted to such culture-public art-music-park focused cities as Portland, Boulder, Minneapolis and Austin for those qualities? Will those attributes actually attract companies?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” “There is no perfect location. There are always tradeoffs,” says John Boyd, founder of The Boyd Company, a site selection consultancy with over 30 years of experience helping firms make location decisions. Boyd explains that in addition to the bottom line considerations like cost of labor, cost of real estate, and taxes, there is also availability of qualified labor, proximity to transportation, infrastructure, proximity to suppliers – competitors with “quality of life issues.”

Plus, there are actual incentives (tax breaks and the like) cities may offer footloose firms. Although as Boyd cautions, “Incentives last five or ten years, and then you better be in the right location.”

One example from Austin provides some insight. Michael Wilford is CEO of Twisted Pixel, a company that develops games for Xbox and Nintendo. Twisted Pixel recently moved its operations from Madison, Ind., to Austin. “Ultimately we settled on Austin because it had everything: great weather, quality of life, low crime, (low) cost of living, (low) cost of doing business, talent pool, substantial digital media scene, university interest and collaboration, incentives for our industry, and industry support from the governor,” says Wilford. He notes that other places his firm considered had many of these things, and some others were sometimes better than what Austin offered. But, he says, “Austin was the only place that had a respectable score on every single one of these factors.”

So Austin, for being “weird” and having a great quality of life, indeed attracts companies. Of course, Texas is one of very few states with no income tax, which doesn’t hurt. It also explains why Austin isn’t the only Texas city doing well through the recession. Dallas or Houston may be equally attractive for someone (or some company) not endeared to Austin. “Keep in mind, qualitative factors are highly subjective,” says Boyd. “Some of our clients like vanilla, some chocolate when it comes down to lifestyle considerations. Cost structures, however, are real, unbending, and go straight to the bottom line.”

Of course, for every Twisted Pixel that chooses to move there, there are probably several that were created in Austin in the first place. Joe Cortright, president of Impresa Economics, a Portland, Ore., based consulting firm specializing in metropolitan economies and knowledge-based industries, points out that chambers of commerce and economic development agencies often look at it the wrong way. The key is to find the right entrepreneurial environment that supports new growth, not necessarily the one with the lowest taxes or best incentives – when a company chooses to move or expand it is because it has already achieved success, not the other way around.

“The trouble is, the world isn’t flat,” says Cortright. “Companies have different needs.” The private sector is proving that quality of life almost always enters the discussion at some level, but it is rarely the primary reason for a company to move or expand. Firms must carefully balance the issues of taxes, real estate, transportation/infrastructure, and quality of life, as if pieces of a pie, when choosing if or where to move.

It is true that some cities attract companies due to their low taxes, location, incentives or infrastructure. A company relying on imported goods and proximity to a strong transportation network may choose a warehouse in the Inland Empire to be near the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, while a car company may choose rural Georgia for a car plant due to the right incentive package, and yet another company with time sensitive shipping needs can choose between Louisville and Memphis because of their air cargo hubs.

But a word of caution to those who might think a silver bullet solution like low taxes is perhaps the only thing necessary for a successful city: Fred Smith, founder, chairman, president and CEO of FedEx, stated last year in the Memphis Commercial Appeal that quality of life is the biggest issue facing the future of Memphis. Mr. Smith’s comments should not be taken lightly.

So where does that leave us? Not every city can be home to a major port or air cargo facility. As well, not every city will be “weird” like Austin. Still, elected officials would be wise to learn from the example of Twisted Pixel in Austin. Low taxes matter. But so does financial support for industries, and the right partnerships between government and the private sector. A strong university that can not only educate people but effectively put research in to the marketplace is important. Also critical, of course, is overall quality of life. It is finding that right balance that is tricky, as every city has unique strengths and weaknesses. The cities that truly excel in the global economy will be those that not only create an environment where businesses can succeed, but where people experience an opportunity-rich environment.

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Halloween’s ghouls and goblins make for a spooky night in our cities and towns. But nothing fills me with more fright than missing the opportunity to build dense, attractive transit villages around our rail stations, thereby reducing sprawl and lowering our collective carbon footprint.

I’ve seen the upside opportunity in London, New York City, Chicago and elsewhere–housing, offices, shopping and leisure destinations all within a short walk of transit stations. The overriding equation is density, a notion that is frightening to many.

A number of leading urban experts, demographers and think-tanks are forecasting that more cities will develop like this in the future. The Urban Land Institute’s recent “The City in 2050″ is loaded with visions of high-tech, denser cities with improved transit systems and a reduced carbon footprint. Coupled with these visions are studies by the likes of the demographer Arthur C. Nelson, who predicts that demand for large-lot single-family housing will be negligible in the next 20 years, whereas the future of housing development lies in attached housing.

The stars seem to be aligning. Or are they? The popular strategy for accommodating the future vision of smarter, denser cities, coupled with meeting forecast housing demand, is transit villages like those found in our older and popular cities. The idea is that these transit villages will have areas next to urban rail stations that accommodate intense development, thereby reducing the population’s carbon footprint and making cities more efficient.

A number of very attractive and popular transit villages have emerged in the past decade in cities like Dallas, Denver and Portland. Well-known places like Mockingbird Station, Englewood, and Orenco Station are favorites among planners, developers and transit village advocates. I’ve seen these and other newer transit villages, and they are not ghost-towns–far from it. They are popular for good reason, as they provide very attractive, walkable places with a mix of uses and access to the regional transit system.

However, I’ve noticed in many cases that these newer transit villages lack the density achieved in older, established cities. Perhaps these newer transit villages are just testing the waters, a primer for cities and developers to ramp up density in the future. But I wonder if we are selling ourselves short.

Are we greening our cities, or are we just dressing up auto-dependent sprawl in a transit village costume? Do we really have the proper regulatory tools, and more importantly, the public and political will, to achieve the density required for truly greener, more efficient cities?

True, most new rail lines in the United States connect to major employment centers, stadiums, university campuses, airports, and other major destinations. All that boosts ridership–as it should. Too frequently, though, plans for residential development within a half-mile of rail stations call for too few housing units to make a dent in cities’ growth projections.

For example, the two new light rail lines planned in the Twin Cities will add 30 new stations to the metro area. Current station area plans call for approximately 30,000 new housing units in the next 20 years. That seems like a lot, but it is just 10 percent of the 300,000 new households forecast for the Twin Cities in that time period. We need to ask: shouldn’t these station areas handle more of the total, like one-quarter or one-third? Increased intensity around each station will accommodate more of the metro area demand for housing and increase transit usage, reducing strain on roads and lowering vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Multiply this by upping the density around new train stations around the country and you start to curb the effects of sprawl.

Furthermore, increased density and a more robust mix of uses within transit villages makes them more active and increases trips on foot, even for people not using the transit system. A common standard for the number of housing units required to support a small, full-service grocery store, for example, is 10,000. Building a small fraction of that total in a transit village won’t support a grocer.

Arlington, Virginia, is appropriately cited as a top example of recent policy to create appropriate intensity around transit stations. There, a “bulls-eye” policy–to locate an intense mix of housing and other uses close to the five train stations along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor–has resulted in the appropriate density to boost demand for retail and other services within each transit village. The corridor also boasts very high ridership and modal splits. Arlington County’s success in getting a disproportionate amount of its real estate taxes from the intense uses along the corridor is a positive outcome of good land use policy. What is so spooky about that?

The ideal vision of the city in the future is more density built around transit villages. Demographic and housing demand forecasts support this vision. One cannot wave a magic wand and reverse sprawl, however. Lurking in the shadows are the NIMBYs, who will affect the political will to intensify uses at station areas, and increase the specter of sprawl-as-usual. But let’s not run in fear from the creation of attractive dense transit villages. Why? Business-as-usual is our scariest option, indeed!

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Criticism of Atlanta’s traffic congestion and sprawling consumption of land are well-deserved. Severe air pollution has threatened to choke the city. Right now a bitter debate is raging over whether and how the state will let the city and region pay for critically needed anti-congestion, pro-transit improvements.

But there’s another Atlanta with a radically different image, as I discovered recently exploring some areas close to center city.

A top example–Atlantic Station. I’d been hearing a lot about it in the real estate development and planning world, and knew the project was heralded as a great infill project with good transit. But I was short on the details. So on a recent trip to Atlanta, I decided to visit.

On a rainy day, without prior briefing, I approached Atlantic Station with open eyes. I took MARTA to the stop nearest Atlantic Station, but I still had to walk a considerable distance, including crossing I-75/85. OK–Clearly this crossing/interchange was upgraded for Atlantic Station, and the sidewalk was wide and had a sun shade along much of its length–a thoughtful gesture to pedestrians in Georgia summers. (Only on my return to MARTA did I realize there is frequent shuttle bus service between the development and the station. Still, MARTA is an excellent, if underbuilt, transit system.)

As for Atlantic Station–well, I’ve never seen anything like it. On arrival, I found the drill was to descend from street level into one of the numerous parking access points. But I wasn’t underground–not even close. I was still three stories up, as the actual ground is three levels below the street. I could see for what seems like an eternity in every direction in a bizarre underworld of parking.

Atlantic Station is mostly built out, and the area known as “The District” is centered on a park that is flanked by pedestrian-friendly retail, with a Publix grocery store, Target, and hotel and office towers at the edge. The District, in terms of mixed uses and design, is much like other “new-old” town centers built in the last five years. The most stunning feature is that the entire complex is built over the three-story parking structure. Since the site is a former steel mill, apparently they couldn’t dig down (too dirty, too expensive, or both). So they built three stories of “underground” parking above ground, treating the fourth level as the “ground level.” It is ingenious, and I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.

To the west is “The Commons,” an area of apartments and condos centered around Commons Park. The entrance to the Commons contains a huge arch, called Millennium Gate, which is not unlike the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Overall, Atlantic Station is a big, grand, and pretty impressive infill development. It’s obviously the result of extensive collaboration between numerous public and private entities. Its design definitely encourages walking.

But the examples don’t stop there. The core of Atlanta is full of good urbanism. I next made a visit to the offices of Atlanta Beltline. In a very ambitious plan, the organization is converting a 22-mile set of old rail corridors that circle the core city. It’s converting them to greenways, trails, parks, transit and sites for housing and other infill development.

Ethan Davidson of Atlanta Beltline gave me a quick tour of the Beltline and some great infill development that has already occurred nearby, particularly east of downtown. Along the way we breezed through Inman Park Village and Glenwood Park, two large scale redevelopments in historic neighborhoods, and past Renaissance Walk, a project in the historic Sweet Auburn district of the city. We traveled through numerous neighborhoods rich in character, all giving me the urge to go back and explore on foot or by bike.

Also on my itinerary was an evening stroll through Centennial Olympic Park, built for the 1996 games. Although the rain had abated, a mist still hung in the air, and nobody was about. It was delightful. I watched the Fountain of Rings and wandered across the great lawn and up the garden walk. Every downtown deserves a nice park, but I couldn’t help but think that if not for the Olympics, I’d have been standing in a still-neglected portion of downtown.

Yes it is true, and hardly surprising, that Atlanta managed to grow in to a poster child for a half century of decidedly anti-urban policy in this country. But for a city with such a reputation for sprawl and sometimes soulless high-rises, much of today’s city core qualifies as an island of good urbanity. Notably, many of the good examples have gone up in the past decade. It’s as if the city saw the error of its ways and is making amends. It will be fascinating to see if it’s willing (and able) to continue on this path.

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