ArborUpdate.com Shuts Down

The website ArborUpdate.com, which I helped found in Summer 2004, has decided to shut down. The last post includes a number of interesting comments discussing the website’s history. I created the website, which operated as a non-hierarchical editorial collective, to discuss news and civic issues in Ann Arbor.

Since it was founded, personal blogging has proliferated and competing websites have appeared in the city. Most notably, after 174 years the city’s daily printed newspaper the Ann Arbor News shut down in June 2009. At its close, newspaper company launched AnnArbor.com, a blog-like website with comments and a small core of full-time writers.

I think there’s a lot to learn from this case. One of the most important lessons is something Lisa Williams (of Placeblogger.com) mentioned to me during a conversation we had last fall. She said longevity alone isn’t necessarily a good measure for success of online citizen journalism projects. Given changes in the internet and broader media landscape in Ann Arbor, it seems right to shut down the site. I trust the community members will work to ensure what it achieved will continue somewhere online: a source for information about local issues and a venue for (mostly) civil discussion.

Detroit and the Limits to Urban Decline

Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent yearly fluctuations, created the current landscape of the city and shape possible responses.

The numbers quantifying the cause of urban decline in the American Rustbelt are staggering. Between 1980 and 1990 alone, the Northeast and Midwest lost 1.5 million manufacturing jobs and $40 billion (in 1998 $) in aggregate manufacturing worker earnings. During the same time period, central counties of the 28 metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast regions lost 1 million manufacturing jobs. (Kasarda, 2001) The industrial jobs, generally secure and good-paying, constituted the core of the urban economy. Their departure was magnified many times as it rippled more broadly through the economy, as the service jobs supported by the core industries disappeared. African Americans were particularly hard hit. Millions of jobs left, but new jobs were not easily accessible and often required high education levels. These so-called spatial and skill mismatches resulted in skyrocketing jobless rates among central-city blacks. One economist found that by 1990, four fifths of young inner city school dropouts were unemployed. In Detroit, by 1990 Detroit was 79% black and the surrounding suburbs 79% white. For the uninitiated, Thomas Sugrue’s excellent Origins of the Urban Crisis contains a detailed history of the origins of economic decline.

Metropolitan Context

Before I plunge into an analysis of the City of Detroit’s housing stock, it should be noted that the majority of jobs and people in the metropolitan area live outside of the city limits, and also that within the city there exists many middle class and even upper class neighborhoods. Although containing vacant land and buildings, the city presents the visitors a strange combination of energy and investment with decay and abandonment. (Captured well in this blog post) The map to the right, produced by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), shows the vast scale of the metropolis — only the green central municipality is the City of Detroit.

Housing in Economic Decline

Economists theorize that the rate of urban decline is largely determined by the durability of the housing stock. In short, even if the jobs are gone the physical persistence of homes mean people will continue to live there. In a shrinking city, first the households size decrease as the declined population is spread more thinly among the surviving buildings. After reduced household sizes, the market begins to abandon houses. Homeowners may move to the suburbs or out of state, retaining title to the property. Some default on mortgages or fail to pay taxes, resulting in thousands owned by various units of government. In Detroit, tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots are owned by the city, state, county, and other public agencies.

The vacant structures are dislike by the remaining population. They shelter criminals and drug users, packs of feral dogs, and pose a physical hazard through collapse and lead paint. A strong demolition policy has become an article of faith for city politicians. “Unbuilding has surpassed building as the city’s major architectural activity,” quipped one architect. Between 1978 and 1990, the city issued 9,000 building permits and 108,000 demolition permits. All told, between 1970 and 2000, over 161,000 houses were demolished, a figure one journalist points out constitutes more than the total number of occupied dwellings in the city of Cincinnati today. Nonetheless the city’s severe lack of funding meant demolition could never keep up with abandonment. The U.S. Census estimated in 2006 that fully 23% of the housing stock still standing, or 85,951 units, were vacant. Since 1970, the city has had a net loss of housing units every year according to SEMCOG permit data:

Economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko observed in a 2005 paper that the maximum rate of decline for housing seems to be about 1% per year. Without speculating the causes of this speed limit to housing decline, they observe that no matter how fast the jobs disappear, the housing stock rarely declines at a faster rate. I created a graph showing the number of housing units from 1970 to 2008. The U.S. Census counts show a greater decline than is reflected in the construction and demolition permits, a discrepancy caused by unpermitted activity, record-keeping error, and perhaps different definitions of housing units. However, I defer to the U.S. Census to establish starting and end points. The annual net changes from housing permits are inflated 11% so that the total matches the observed change from U.S. Census data over the same period. This method captures the variability shown above, while ensuring the starting and ending points match the Census. Superimposed on the results is a fixed 1% annual decline from the 1970 housing units.

The correlation is striking. If we extend beyond, we can see what the formula predicts. Again, this is not a projection, but simply an extrapolation of a 1% rate of decline from the 1970 Census. The true rate of decline may vary from the formula thanks to public policies, such as public demolitions, or arson. Of course, at any point if the city started growing again we would expect the actual number of units to level off or even increase.

Planning For Decline

How public authorities can plan during decline is an important and under-studied issue. The Shrinking Cities project has sparked discussions around this topic, and officials in Michigan have become leaders by virtue of their unique circumstances. The Genesee County Land Bank in the Flint area (which has experienced similar decline, albeit at a smaller scale) has become a national leader. Their approach is that a government agency should obtain full title to abandoned properties, demolish or stabilize them, clean the lots, and then sell them back to the private market in a controlled way. By limiting the supply the government can realize market, or above-market prices for vacant land and buildings. There have been discussions for creating a similar land bank for Detroit, or Wayne County, and this 2006 report by students at the University of Michigan is an excellent examination of the issue. Of course, for the land bank model to work some private-sector demand must exist for land, and revenues from property sales must cover the costs of program administration. In the absence of a demand for land for new housing in Detroit, any hypothetical land bank would have to find buyers interested in land for commercial, agricultural, or other purposes.

Another approach with a lot of energy is urban agriculture. One of the most ambitious plans for large-scale urban agriculture was developed by students at the University of Detroit-Mercy. Their Adamah plan proposed resurrecting a buried stream, and creating a dairy, tree farm, vegetable gardens, shrimp farm, and wind power. Although nobody has attempted it as the scale envisioned by the plan, today in Detroit 220 family gardens, 115 community gardens and 20 schools participate in the city’s Garden Resource Program. When BLDG Blog’s Geoff Manaugh published a conceptual proposal for converting vacant property in Philadelphia into agricultural land, it provoked this comment:

“i live in west philadelphia, where there are already dozens of ‘abandoned’ lots in my immediate neighborhood that are being used for both small and large-scale gardening. they have it going on up in northern liberties, too. these were started up without the benefit of instructions from some blogger in his ivory tower. it seems that some things just aren’t brilliant ideas until some mouse-pusher who has never stepped out from his/her fluorescent office ‘imagines’ it.”

The same is true to a lesser extent in Detroit, where even un-planted fields can begin to resemble cultivated ones:

Most troubling is the relationship between economic decline, physical abandonment, and social problems. Economists argue the low housing prices in the city will attract those with low levels of “human capital,” creating a cycle of decline. “If low levels of human capital then create negative externalities or result in lower levels of innovation, this becomes particularly troubling because a self-reinforcing process can result in which an initial decline causes concentrated poverty, which then pushes the city further downward.” The barriers to overcome this cycle of economic decline are great, and renewal in Detroit will mean not only increasing numbers of jobs and residents but a reversal of decades of compounding problems.

Resources
> LOST Magazine: Dissapeared Detroit
> Southeast Michigan Council of Governments
> Planning for Detroit’s Tax-Reverted Properties: Possibilities for the Wayne County Land Bank

(Cited: Kasarda, John D. “Industrial Restructuring and Changing Location of Jobs.” in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, Volume I: Economic Trends. R. Farley, ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). Glaeser, Edward L. and Joseph Gyourko. “Urban Decline and Durable Housing.” Journal of Political Economy 113:2 (2005).)

The Paradox of Cheap Parking, in Real Time

Last spring, I heard about an interesting dataset about Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for four years as an undergraduate student. Busy with the flurry of activity leading up to my completion of graduate school, I stored it away to look at later. After all, real-time information on cities is hard enough to come by, let alone on the simultaneously ubiquitous and fascinating topic of parking.

The Data
The parking lots and structures in downtown Ann Arbor are operated by a quasi-public organization, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Together with their parking vendor, last April they implemented a system that provides real-time information about the number of parking spaces available in several lots and garages through digital signs at each garage and through their website. An old Ann Arbor friend Brian Kerr wrote a simple script to scrape that page every 20 minutes and record the number of spaces available at each facility. After letting it run for about two weeks, he posted the data file online. Subsequently a local blogger interviewed the DDA’s IT manager about how the system was implemented, and even posted some charts encouraging visitors to match the chart with the garage. The data sparked a bit of interest on local blogs but the conversation soon died out.

At the time of the completion of a recent parking study in 2007, the DDA operated lots and structures containing 5,770 parking spaces in downtown Ann Arbor. These facilities are concentrated in a relatively small physical area, as shown in this map from the study:

For my first pass at the data I thought I’d look at just one garage, indicated by the arrow above. As is shown, the Maynard Street structure is near two movie theaters, a busy commercial district, and one block from the University of Michigan Central Campus Diag, with many classroom buildings and a large auditorium. The first chart is the number of spaces available in just one day – Monday, April 7, 2008:

The first thing to notice is that the garage is never full during any 20-minute measurement. Although the technical capacity of the garage is 797, the garage flat-lines at 618 (perhaps due to long-term permits or construction). The garage is only filled over 90% of this reduced capacity for one 40-minute period, from 1:40 p.m. to 2:20 p.m, or roughly 2.7% of the entire 24-hour period.

Expanding the time frame for the next 7 consecutive days reveals this pattern:

The spikes correspond with the midday rush, and the garage only fills once, around 1:00 p.m. on Friday, April 11th. This seemingly dry data can tell a rich sociological story; everyone rushes in just after nine, with various people lingering around into long into the evening. In a sense, the curve represents a unique DNA of the local land uses and the preferences and customs of their auto-using patrons, residents, and visitors.

Observations
Based on the data we can make a couple observations. First, the vast majority of the parking lots and structures are almost totally empty the majority of the time. This means they represent a huge amount of inactive urban space. A common rule of thumb is each structured space takes up 300 square feet of floor space for the bay and associated aisles and ramps. If we use this standard, the same floor area in this garage could be 239 apartments (assuming they average a generous 1,000 square feet). Certainly good design would demand a residential structure be taller or configured differently on the site. However, given the extremely fickle use of the garage now, a residential use would mean more people physically at the site on average than are now.

Second, from the chart above we can see that parking demand at the DDA’s prevailing price structure is very spiky, with extremely high demand only at limited times. (This garage costs $.80 an hour, or $175 for a monthly permit) It would seem logical for the DDA to use variable or tiered pricing to create a market incentive for a more efficient use of their space. For example, parking overnight could be inexpensive given the very low demand, with parking around the midday peak much more expensive. Even a modest form of performance parking may change this observed pattern.

Overparked?

Despite nearly 5,800 spaces the DDA continues to develop more parking, this October publishing on their website details about a proposed underground lot near the library boasting green design. How will the city know when they have enough parking? After all, parking policy guru Donald Shoup points out one can rarely provide enough of something that’s under priced. The proposal for the new garage advises readers to “review the findings of the 2007 Parking Study to learn why vehicle parking is needed even with extensive investment in alternative transportation.” Unfortunately the 2007 Parking Study doesn’t exactly settle the matter, including as one of its final recommendations “Maintain a formalized process for determining when new supply is needed.” The study, by the alternative transportation experts Nelson/Nygaard, is chock full of state-of-the-art policy suggestions (including variable pricing discussed above) but avoids the sticky question of determining how much is necessary. Perhaps it’s because like other seemingly scientific questions in urban planning the answer is not scientific but value-laden and political. (A similar question: How many freeways and/or lanes do we need?) And in Ann Arbor, the people want more parking.

Parking in the Real-Time City
In another vein, publishing this real-time data (especially on a still forthcoming mobile format) could itself have profound implications for the transportation system. Could real-time data allow people to avoid full structures and make use of the resource more efficient? The Washington, D.C. suburban rail station lots tend to fill up early, and I’ve heard stories of people driving downtown stopping at each station to look for a spot. What if the space was beamed to their home computer or car? (The more important question might be, “How much parking should they provide to begin with, and what should it be priced?” One suggestive study I saw of San Francisco’s BART concluded replacing parking with offices would boost the agency’s riders and revenue) If the DDA makes summary data available on the website, it would make costly data collection unnecessary for this data point. All citizens would know exactly how full or empty the garages were, and the DDA would be able to observe the impact of pricing or policy changes in real time.

> Previous parking posts: The Urbanists’ Panacea: Parking Reform, Are Expensive Parking Meters Fair?, more
> Homeless Dave’s Interview with the DDA’s Stephen Smith
> Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority

Michigan Campus Activism Guide Published

Although it has been a while since I’ve written about the University of Michigan, I thought I would note the publication of a book by my friend and U-M senior Mollie Bates. An Art and Design senior, in collaboration with the progressive paper the Michigan Independent, Mollie has designed and produced an 80-page, full color book on progressive campus activism at the university titled The Michigan Independent’s Guide to Campus Activism. The book features detailed descriptions of activism from 2003 to 2007 (Students Supporting Affirmative Action, The College Democrats, Voice Your Vote and The Coke Coalition), historical information dating back to the 1960s, and a how-to guide for future activists. I had the opportunity to peruse a copy this summer and was duly impressed. You can get a copy of the book by getting in touch with Mollie at mollie.bates at gmail.com. She informs me it will eventually be available for purchase online, and I will update this post when that happens.

> Preview the book on Mollie’s online portfolio

Almost everyone has had a printer at one time or the other. This is the age of lexmark printers. Throw away the old ones, and get new printer accessories and start printing right away.

‘It’s Fun To Be In the O-R-D-E-R’

For those accustom to my usual topics about urbanism and D.C., permit me a brief digression about a University of Michigan “leadership” society with a controversial history, that recently re-named themselves from Michigamua to The Order of Angell.

The Ann Arbor blog Left Behind in the Fishbowl has posted what appears to be a copy of lyrics of a song written to be used during initiation rituals by Michigamua/Order of the Angell, titled “YMCA (Pride 2008)”. Whether or not the document is authentic of a sophisticated parody, it makes for hilarious reading.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Michigamua/Order of the Angell because they just inducted new members. Readers of this blog will know I think the group should be abolished since it is a shameful blemish on the history of the University of Michigan, but I won’t belabor the point. I think my views are a quite reasonable conclusion based on my research. It seems some basic history is a good starting point.

1. At its founding, the group created an elaborate invented mythology using their views of Native American culture, which they proceeded to use for nearly 100 years.
2. For 90 years of their history most internal communication (including all newsletters) was in a stylized speech (see below for examples)
3. The group first admitted women in 2000
4. The organized had privileged space in the Michigan Union from the 30s until 2000, had close relationships with administrators for many years, and even at one point had a special university account for their finances. For years, they used university property outside downtown Ann Arbor for special events.
5. They agreed to abolish all references to native American culture in 1989, however the tower occupation revealed numerous objects and a wigwam retained by the organization

Whether it is even possible — or even desirable — to whitewash this history with a quick name change I think is an open question. This is not to mention the appropriateness of having such a group with such an elitist past (and present) claiming to act “for Michigan.”

Here are the new members, from the Daily:

“Pride of 2008″
-Sarah Banco – Women’s soccer
-Lindsey Cottrell – Women’s soccer
-Steve Crompton – Dance Marathon
-Lindsay Davis – Women’s golf
-Alessandra Giampaolo – Softball
-Sam Harper – College Democrats chair
-Michael Hart – Football
-Jen Hsu – Co-chair of the Michigan Student Assembly’s LGBT commission
-Nellie Kippley – Women’s gymnastics
-Matko Maravic – Men’s tennis
-Doug Pickens – Baseball
-Randal Seriguchi – VP of the National Pan-Hellenic council, MSA
-Sejal Tailor – Multicultural Greek Council president
-Alex Tisdall – ROTC
-Tyrel Todd – Men’s wrestling
-Alex Vanderkaay – Swimmer
-Zack Yost – MSA president
-Michael Cromwell – A capella
-Nicole Wojcik – Marching Band
-Anup Shah – IASA
-Rohan Patel – Dance Marathon
-Kelly Sanderson – Women Engineers
-Gervis Menzies – Residence Hall Association

Here’s some images I pulled from my collection:

Newsletters from the 1940s

Class of 1966

Induction ritual photo and account from 1960s

This letterhead was used well into the 1970s. Ironically, this copy contains notes from a meeting where negotiations with Native American students was discussed.

Note, donations from this 1980s fundraising letter are payable to a “University of Michigan — Michigamua Account”

Objects discovered in the “wigwam” during 2000 Student of Color Coalition occupation.

Recent News
> Michigan Daily: “After seven years, group recognized by ‘U’ once again”
> Michigan Daily: “The secret society that lived: New name alone can’t cover blemishes of a shady past”
> Michigan Daily: “Jim Toy Viewpoint: To build a bridge” (Community member describes why he is working with group)

Resources
> Native American Student Association — Michigamua “Guide to Understanding”
> The Order of Angell Maize pages entry
> The Order of Angell website
> Michigamua Members: 1999-2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 (For previous years just drop me a line, I have a printed directory going all the way back to 1902)

More
> Previous Michigamua Posts

Detroit Plans Airport City

But will the aerotropolis be ‘cool’?

Cities have always developed around modes of transit, whether they were key crossroads, strategic port harbors and rivers, or major railroad depots. Why not around airports? That question is being asked more often as the volume of air travel continues to increase and airports and the land around them become increasingly urbanized. John D. Kasarda, a professor at University of North Carolina’s business school who has written widely on the topic, described these emerging cities in the May 2006 edition of the magazine The Next American City. Noting that large airports now “have the density of highway and transit connections that are usually associated only with CBDs” Kasarda predicts that although these “Aerotropoli” have evolved spontaneously to date, these new cities “will require localized infrastructure planning of unprecedented scale” if they are to solve — or prevent — serious development problems.

Airports have long been recognized as engines of local economic growth. Urban Age magazine noted in 1999 that between 1960 and 1995, air transport increased at an annual rate of 11.1 percent for cargo and 8.9 percent for passengers, nearly triple the rate of overall economic growth. According to their statistics, over 1,000 jobs are created for every 1 million passengers, and the article notes the wide variety of “hotels, exhibition halls, businesses and conference centers” that choose to locate near airports.

In few places could an airport assume a larger role in economic and urban development than Detroit, Michigan. Thanks largely to a declining manufacturing sector Michigan’s unemployment rate has been higher than the national average since 2000. In August, Michigan was tied with Mississippi for the highest level of unemployment in the nation – 7.1%. Growth in the “knowledge-based” sector has lagged behind the national average. The state’s Life Sciences Corridor is a state effort to cultivate a potentially lucrative new industry. Inspired by the theories of Richard Florida that knowledge-industry workers (he calls them the “creative class“) are attracted to high quality cities, the state’s Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm launched a Cool Cities Initiative in 2004 to attract, retain, and potentially incubate the workers of the creative economy. Google’s recent decision to locate a major employment center in Ann Arbor was viewed by state leaders as a vindication of this new, urban-based approach to economic development.

Although Florida’s controversial theories can be somewhat ethereal, the economic impact of Michigan’s largest airport are refreshingly concrete. A recent study released this year by the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport and the University of Michigan – Dearborn concluded the airport’s 36 million passengers were responsible for 70,000 jobs and demand for $7.6 billion in goods and services in the state. The airport is not only a major domestic hub but also handles over 2.8 million international passengers, making it the 11th largest in North America and 20th largest in the world in 2005. The airport opened the new McNamara Terminal in 2002, which features 122 gates, a 400-room luxury hotel, and in-terminal automated tram system. Another new 26-gate terminal is expected to open in 2008.

For these reasons local government officials together with Prof. Kasarda and the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning sponsored a 3-day design charrette in January 2006 titled “Aerotropolis, A new city: YIP/DTW” to create designs for a new city near the airport. The New York Times recently described the charrette in the context of increased activity at Willow Run Airport — a small airport used for charter flights located just down the road from the much larger DTW — in the story, “Living at the Crossroads, Working There, Too” The article reports that over 160,000 passengers will use the Willow Run airport on charter and corporate shuttle flights this year. A new, airport-based city is a “logical step for Detroit,” points out the Times, noting development in the city has “followed the transportation innovations — sail, steam, rail, auto and jet — of every era stretching back to the city’s founding in 1701.”

What ideas did the students come up with? Although the posted presentations contain little explanatory text, they give some idea of each team’s general approach. The “Supersonics” team proposed a variety of development in the region including both a dense, transit oriented development and luxuriously suburban plans for use-segregated superblocks reminiscent (for me, at least) of Detroit’s land use plans from the 1940s and 50s. The “777′s” plan seems the most practical – it preserves a greenway along local waterways and identifies a corridor for development between the two airports along a proposed transit line. The “Stratocruisers” propose infill development for the small cities in the area in addition to a compact Metro City aligned carefully near both freeways and transit, just across I-94 from the airport. For reference they have slides superimposing portions of Paris and Washington, D.C. over the planned site. Their design for Metro City contains a gridiron with a radial avenue and two circles inspired by the Baroque city planning tradition that shapes Paris and Washington.

Although I think the exercise is worthwhile, the plans all seem a little to prescribed to be either economically or politically feasible. The Times points out the plans will require the municipalities adopt a “regional master land use plan, common architectural standards and zoning that mandates the look and location of buildings.” The Detroit Free Press did a good job last April of analyzing some of the obstacles to realizing such a bold, large-scale vision. My conception of planning tries to steer clear of this sort of government micromanaging in favor of providing for a more general framework for growth. Also, the student’s presentations do not mention the state’s Cool Cities program, which has the stated goals of “Building vibrant, energetic cities that attract jobs, people and opportunity to our state.” Many of the greenfield development schemes in the plans seem destined to produce sterile, “no-place places,” (to quote the phrase my girlfriend Libby used about the project) instead of authentic, dynamic cities. I don’t think the creative class is itching to move into master-planned superblocks in suburban Michigan. The dense transit-based developments might be more successful, but if built would likely replicate the much-criticized synthetic feel of other New Urbanist projects like Celebration or The Kentlands.

If local leaders are serious about cultivating an Aerotropolis, both feasibility and “Cool Cities” criteria demand design decisions should be based firmly around existing urban infrastructure and unique qualities of the region. Sinuous Belleville Lake could present some interesting development options given its proximity to both airports and the region’s two major highways – I-94 and I-275. Indeed, the 777′s plan proposes a development just across the lake from the existing city of Belleville. Unfortunately, the current proposed route for a light rail connection between Detroit and Ann Arbor runs well north of either airports, directly through the city of Wayne, where the Stratocruisers’ plan calls for 400,000 sq ft of building footprints on a wedge of land currently occupied by low-density uses.

If local leaders want to cultivate urban development around DTW, I think the best path would avoid Brasília-like suburban design, and focus on creating a framework plan that protects open space and guides growth towards transit and existing urban infrastructure.

The Historical Idlewild

While OutKast’s new movie Idlewild (IMDB, official site) may be set in a fictional Georgia town in the 1930s, it shares a name with an actual Michigan place. Idlewild, Michigan was founded in 1912 by a group of four white businessmen as an African American resort community for the growing black middle class.

The creators sold property to a number of prominent African Americans and the community grew rapidly, developing a reputation as a “Black Eden” — an intellectual and cultural mecca. Although the resort declined in popularity after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a core of year-round residents remained. The Idlewild African American Chamber of Commerce website contains a variety of historical information, and Wikipedia provides a good historical overview of the community and many links to further reading. The graphic is the cover of this book on Idlewild history.

As for the movie, Rolling Stone didn’t seem to like it, but Salon did, and it’s polling just about even on Rotten Tomatoes.