Review: Leinberger’s The Option of Urbanism

Reviewing some of the best known books about urban topics by American authors is something like walking through an intellectual house of mirrors: each author’s view is strangely distorted, making it hard to discern the objective reality discussed.

Some are critics, crafting harsh polemics against our Suburban Nation, decrying our Geography of Nowhere, or providing us a Field Guide to (our) Sprawl. Historians want to help us uncover the Origins of the Urban Crisis, but are only now beginning to write a New Suburban History. Some are one-dimensionally obsessed with one topic, describing the High Cost of Free Parking or How to Build an Urban Village. Still more are modern day utopians, sketching bold visions of the Sustainable Urbanism the future could (or should) hold.

Perhaps that’s why when a friend asked me to recommend a good book to introduce her to the field or urban development I struggled to come up with a title to suggest: It’s a rare book indeed that displays a sophisticated understanding of the forces that shape our cities in an engaging and accessible way.

This is the primary strength of Christopher B. Leinberger’s new book The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. A readable synthesis of history, planning, and real estate, the book is not yet another polemic about How We Should Live, but an informed and realistic argument about future growth and what choices we face along the way. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, Leinberger is also a developer in his own right and Director of an academic program in real estate at the University of Michigan. Recently he has stirred debate in Washington by suggesting the city should re-visit its height limits on buildings.

The past sixty years in American history, Leinberger argues, has been a break from the past 5,500 years of human city building. Equipped with a vision of a “drivable sub-urban” (as he insists on calling it) American Dream, a booming economy, and a powerful auto industry, Americans created the low-density auto-dependent city we know so well. His terse re-telling of the criticisms of this sprawling type of development (Chapter 4) could no doubt be criticized for including or excluding some reason or another, but is impressive for its clarity. This section’s description of the financial forces driving recent growth was perhaps the most unusual. He argues the real estate industry’s overheated growth of the 1980s caused the Savings and Loan crisis, arguing the crisis was “the defining moment of the past half century for the U.S. real estate industry.” He describes how Wall Street subsequently stepped in to provide loans to the industry through Real Estate Investment Trusts, and how the forces of global capital encouraged the commodification of real estate into nineteen generally single-use “product types,” categories like the “neighborhood retail center,” “urban high density apartments” or “move-up housing,” generally developed at low quality for short-term returns.

The remainder of the book contains a typology of the alternative, what he dubs “walkable urbanism” (like Ballston, Virginia, to the right), a discussion of some of its consequences (housing affordability and corporate chains are discussed), and the five steps he thinks are needed for the full emergence for this, “next American Dream.” The steps described are: new zoning, changes to real estate finance, ending subsidies favoring sprawl, investing in (mostly rail transit) infrastructure, and good management of the new urban districts.

While Leinberger’s views would fit well with advocates of both Smart Growth and New Urbanism, he skips a strong affiliation with either of these groups, opting instead for his own nomenclature. Most of all Leinberger is a realist. His blunt assessment of the income inequality of American cities remind me of Bill Rankin’s provocative 2006 City Income maps, that seem to offer a visual proof to Leinberger’s description of the “favored quarter” where investment and wealth is concentrated. He sees the coming trend of walkable urbanism independent from the inequality and segregation in our cities, and even not necessarily tied to increased use of transit (which he’d prefer). This frank grounding of his argument in actual places (Washington, D.C. is featured prominently) and first-hand knowledge of the real estate industry’s inner workings helps relate the general concepts of walkable urbanism into a concrete understanding of what’s built and why.

Leinberger’s book offers the novice a readable introduction to some of the debate surrounding the American city, and the veteran a lively respite from the house of mirrors. With well-selected references that provide a good jumping-off point for further reading, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the book to my students or friends looking for a fresh take on the form and future of our cities.

> Amazon.com: The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

Wanted: Photos of Google’s Book Digitization Project

I’ve engaged in some speculation before about the size and character of Google’s effort to digitize the nearly 5 million volumes in the University of Michigan library as part of their plan to digitize the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library. I’ve also long intended to post this request.

I’m looking for photos of the process at work at any of these libraries. I will protect the privacy of any submitted photos to the fullest extent I am able. Please email them to rob.goodspeed at gmail.com

Discuss D.C. Neighborhood ‘Turf Wars’ Thursday

This event featuring a new book about the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood caught my eye. It’s the first I’ve heard of the book which sounds quite interesting. As a note, Mt. Pleasant was also the subject of Brett Williams’ 1988 work, Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington DC, meaning it has been “gentrifying” in somebody’s mind at least as long as I have been alive.

Discussion Forum with the Author of the Book:
Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place.
Thursday, February 22nd, 6:30 to 8:00 pm
(Busboys and Poets)

Gabriella Gahlia Modan discusses and signs her new book, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place. Turf Wars is a fascinating and innovative ethnography of Mt. Pleasant, an urban neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. It is a story about how the members of a multi-ethnic, multi-class Washington, DC, community use language to project conflicting images of their neighborhood. By waging wars around such issues as public toilets and public urination, the “morality” of co-ops & condos, and characterizations of “good” girls and “bad” boys, community members create identities for themselves as legitimate community members (e.g., as tough urbanites or sophisticated historic preservationists) while creating identities to discredit others (e.g., “People who belong in the suburbs”). Turf Wars provides insight into the ways that local activity shapes larger urban social processes. Cultural anthropologist and linguist Gabriella Modan offers a detailed, rich, and highly engrossing ethnographic account of a neighborhood and the people who live and work there. She also provides readers with a little background in linguistic anthropology, cultural geography, and urban anthropology. This event is co-sponsored by Sol y Soul, Sol Y Soul promotes, nurtures, supports, and presents the work of socially-conscious established and emerging artists. This event is free and open to the public and will be held at Busboys and Poets which is located at 2021 14th St. NW. No pre-registration is necessary.

> See my Books about 20th Century Washington, D.C.

My Vacation in Links

I just returned from visiting my girlfriend Libby in Michigan and parents in Maine. In Michigan Libby and I stayed at the Inn on Ferry Street, ate a Coney dog, saw a Tigers game, browsed the shelves in John King Books North, and spent time in Ferndale and Royal Oak. I noticed construction has begun on the long vacant Book-Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit, and there seems to be a lot of other development along the Woodward Corridor. In Maine, I went to the Yarmouth Clam Festival, had a lobster roll from Bayley’s, and biked on a Maine segment of the East Coast Greenway. I also saw Tom, who’s been doing lots of work on his house lately.

On the plane to Michigan I read Justice Thomas’s extremely interesting dissent in Kelo v. New London (the 2005 Supreme Court Case where the court held economic redevelopment qualified as a public use under eminent domain law), where after arguing for an originalist interpretation of “public use” he throws in a paragraph about how eminent domain has been used to displace poor and black communities, concluding that “Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.” I first read about the dissent on this blog post on blackprof.com which contains Emma Coleman Jordan’s analysis.

I also read an article published in the Journal of Urban History in January by Blake Gumprecht examining the geography of college towns by using Ithica, New York as a case study. I found the article quite interesting and I think there are many similarities between Ithaca and Ann Arbor. Gumprecht describes the various communities of the “highly segregated” college town including the status-seeking greeks, NIMBY faculty neighborhoods (”You don’t want to live next door to an undergraduate student house. One property, one bad apple, can cause a whole flight.”), and the familiar student ghetto with both modern and dilapidated rental housing. Describing the development of Ithaca’s Collegetown, Gumprecht throws in this tidbit: “The city encouraged development by temporarily suspending building - high limits and parking requirements. Over a ten-year period, more than a dozen apartment buildings, capable of housing 1,70 people, were built.” (p. 255) How’s that for pent-up demand? The article is available online here: “Fraternity Row, the Student Ghetto, and the Faculty Enclave.” (PDF)

On the topic of reading, I also finished a borrowed copy of “The First Days of School.” Although mostly relevant to K-12 teachers, it did contain some tips I’m sure will be useful for the class of 18-year-old freshman I’ll be TAing this fall. Ironically, it was in Maine where I discovered the book “Saving the Neighborhood: You Can Fight Developers and Win!” at a church book sale. The book is a NIMBY handbook written by a DC resident and published in 1990. The examples of citizen activism include a petition to stop the construction of an office building on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest, and the entire book seems full of DC-area examples.

Just Added

A revised permanent page of books about DC. Feel free to post comments or suggestions over there in the comments. There’s a permanent link to the page on the sidebar under “Hot Topics.”

Reviewing The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington metro

Zachary M. Schrag’s recently published book The Great Society Subway has been on my “to read” list for quite some time now.

Since the first time I visited Washington, D.C. I was captivated by the city’s Metro system, which I first began to explore in earnest when I lived in the city without a car for the summer in 2001. The system was surprising to me for two reasons: it’s big and relatively new. In a country where a car is required to get around virtually every city, Washington D.C. had a massive new subway reaching far into the surrounding region. While I heard plenty of people complain it didn’t go enough places, it was clear to me the system was much better than most other American cities. In fact, it’s the second-busiest subway system in the country, behind New York.

As I began to study 20th century urban history in earnest in college, the system seemed even more the marvel. Since WWII, a combination of federal and local policies and personal choices meant America would be a country of autos, freeways, and suburban growth. When I heard about Dr. Schrag’s book I was of course interested: How had Washington’s massive rapid transit system come to be?

The answer, I discovered, is that it was created much like sausage: however functional the end result, its manufacture wasn’t pretty. In its early days subway proponents had to fight against the overwhelming support for highways, and cobble together a fragile coalition between the region’s diverse political jurisdictions. Once authorized Metro had to face down a stubborn Republican Representative hell-bent on forcing the District of Columbia to construct freeways and not rail. When construction costs and inflation spiraled out of control in the 70s the system had to win emergency financing from Congress. While reading Schrag’s story I was sometimes amazed the entire system was actually completed.

Who is responsible for Metro? Was it a small group of city fathers who began discussions about a potential transit system during friendly lunches in the 1950s? Was it citizen activists who filed lawsuits and staged protests to prevent freeways from slicing up their neighborhoods, pushing a subway as an alternative? Was it lobbying and patronage by three presidents and their pro-rail appointments to important federal posts? Was it the residents of several suburbs who voted on massive bonds to help pay for a system? Was it a D.C. Council, which in its first year of existence voted to turn over their highway funds to pay for the construction of the system in lieu of highways? Was it Jackson Graham, the retired general recruited to push through much of the system’s construction?

In Schrag’s telling, all of these people played a role and more: the disabled lobbied for elevators to every station, the influential black minister and civic leader Rev. Walter Fauntroy championed a “mid-city” line to serve African American neighborhoods, and even the now-defunct Commission on Fine Arts played a role, insisting on the dramatic, if expensive, station design.

Yet these actors aside, beyond all the system can attribute its existence to the U.S. Federal Government. First, their legions of downtown workers guaranteed ridership, and a policy of locating federal facilities near transit ensured the pattern would continue. Second, repeated and lavish political and financial patronage ensured the systems survival when it faced dire financial or political challenges. Schrag acknowledges at the start of his book the exceptional nature of Washington, and thus also its transit system. Yet I believe the system’s intertwined history with the government means it should primarily be understood as an artifact of the capital city, not an American city. This caveat aside, it’s a hell of a story and Schrag tells it well. His book contains chapters ranging from the the architecture of the system, the freeway revolt, construction, and even the system’s impact on the surrounding suburbs. While it would be all too easy to reduce the history of Metro as a bureaucratic or technological story of a machine, Schrag has resisted the temptation and instead crafted a holistic narrative about not just a system but the physical and social history of a region. This is the book I was hoping for.

Thus, until I read more about D.C. and have more time to digest what the book does and does not include, I have but a few complaints. His chapter “The Bridge,” which contains a re-telling of the dramatic struggle between proponents of freeway and rapid transit which was symbolized by the never-build three sisters bridge, the activists portrayed are one-dimensional and the focus is on elite discussions and not citizen activism. The Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, a grassroots organization bridging diverse neighborhood communities is given short shrift, and Shrag falsely, I believe, implies many of the freeway opponents also turned out to be Metro opponents. (As a whole, the bus system )which serves many more passengers, is almost wholly ignored – but this is not a book about buses, after all.) Scrag freely admits these faults in the introduction (“This book is not an encyclopedia history of Metro … it only brushes against such topics as labor relations, bus operations,a nd maintenance …”) and his book provides a thorough framework for future study.

Most persuasive and intriguing, I think, are his discussions of the impact of the system on the region. In Montgomery County he discusses planners who carefully and deliberately planned for the growth so familiar with us at Friendship Heights and Bethesda. In Fairfax, he observes county leaders unable or unwilling to match the system with the Tyson’s Corner area where most growth has occurred. And in Downtown D.C. the system has, he argues, sparked a real estate revival still playing out. Through these examples he concludes transit-oriented development is “dependence on political leadership and will,” and not a natural, organic process. The system has become a backbone, he argues, which is only now starting to be fleshed out.

This is, at its core, a book about big people making big decisions and building a big subway system. In his view, the system is itself a physical manifestation of the Great Society, which viewed public works like a transit system not simply as a means to move people but to unify and uplift the city. “Metro has been championed by people who believe that public things need not be mean, utilitarian, or even quantifiably cost-effective.” Schrag concludes, “Rather, its advocates have argued that public things should be grand, just, and enduring.” Schrag has ventured into uncharted historical territory of recent history and his book, while far from definitive, will surely prove a standard in understanding 20th century Washington.

> Amazon.com: The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape)

I Want a Library

I just uploaded a set of photos of my neighborhood branch of the D.C. Public Library. The library has been closed since 2004 and no plan exists for its re-construction. It was closed with two other neighborhood plans and slated for demolition and re-construction, but the D.C. Board of Public Library Trustees canceled the construction contract last fall, deciding the plans did not fit with the overall vision for the library system a task force had outlined. At a meeting last November officials told neighborhood residents the branch might not open until 2008. Temporary storefront locations to serve the three neighborhoods now without branches have also not opened, despite assurances in October the library was moving quickly to scout out locations.