My July Planetizen Post

This month I survey the career of greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, and ask: “Where Are the Star Planners?

Rapid Bus Service Starts on Georgia Avenue

Today marks the end of the second week of service of WMATA’s new Metro Extra line on Georgia Avenue. To my knowledge the project is the second Bus Rapid Transit line developed in the region, and the first express bus to operate almost exclusively inside the District.

The service, officially Metro Extra Route 79, currently operates every ten minutes from 6-9:30 a.m. and 3-6:30 p.m. along 7th Street and Georgia Avenue, with stops at the Navy Memorial, Chinatown, Shaw, Petworth, Walter Reed, and Silver Spring, among others. When Dr. Gridlock took a ride on the bus recently he found it running smoothly, with the exception of a few confused riders. Over the next year new bus shelters, sidewalk bulb-outs, and technology to speed buses through intersections will be tested and installed. The service may also be eventually be extended to provide all-day service.

Although the branding for the route is less than ideal (extra what?), the marketing has been more creative than I’ve seen for any other WMATA bus service. I even received a pamphlet in the mail in Spanish and English clearly explaining the route, and containing coupons to use at the AFI Silver Theater and Borders Books (both located near route stops), and two coupons to ride the bus free during its first week of operation. With Arlington County, WMATA developed the successful PikeRide to provide service on Columbia Pike in Virginia. However, other suburban express routes could be improved by clearer marketing and route information.

The service, a joint project between WMATA and the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) shows that DDOT continues to be much more dedicated to enhancing transportation in the District, having also launched the successful DC Circulator service, which recently expanded to take over the Georgetown Blue Bus route on Wisconsin Avenue.

The project is a rare bright spot for WMATA’s bus system, where little major changes have been made since a 2005 evaluation in which experts reported the system was providing erratic service on aging buses along routes that have changed little since 1973. High hopes are riding on WMATA’s much-discussed new General Manager, John Catoe, Jr., who successfully led the overhaul of bus service in the sprawling Los Angeles system.

> WMATA Metro Extra Information
> Metro Extra Project Development Website
> W. Post: “Georgia Avenue to Get Express Bus Route“, Get There Blog: “New Metrobus Rolls Out”
> W. Post, 12/27/05: “Progress Has Passed Metrobus By”
> DCist, 11/17/06: “New Guy on the Bus” (Catoe profile)

Announcing Planetizen’s Interchange

All too often when I tell people I am studying urban planning, my statement is met by a blank stare. Some will mumble something about a city they’ve been to, or admit they don’t know much about it.

Urban planning’s lack of visibility extends to the web, where there is a depressing lack of good websites and blogs about the field. To a certain extent this should not be surprising, since the field is dominated by government officials generally limited to addressing local issues, and university professors who are either unable or uninterested in communicating to a wider public. However, I think the profession is more important than ever in today’s troubled and highly urbanized world, and writers like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford have shown there exists a huge audience of people interested in building better cities.

Given that context, I have long been a fan of the website Planetizen. One of the web’s best websites on urban planning and development issues, their discussion forums, job listings, news features, and other sections provide an essential resource for the profession. Today they launched their newest feature — a new blog called Interchange, whose contributors include some of the the field’s best-known thinkers and writers. The list includes University of Pennsylvania Professor Eugenie Birch, Next American City editor-in-chief Adam Gordon, innovative scholar Joel Kotkin, and many others. They hope the blog will help provide exposure to new ideas and create discussions that bridge disciplines.

I’ve also been invited to participate. My first post was on the Washington, D.C. library system: “Public Library in Limbo in Washington, D.C.”

> Check out Planetizen Interchange

Mapping Development in College Park

Today at Rethink College Park we launched an interactive Google Map of all the various development projects we have written about so far on that website. It also serves as a graphical index to the site, since each point is linked to a page containing all our posts on the project.

While it’s not as robust as some of the sophisticated GIS systems used by more forward thinking governmental agencies (see the City of Alexandria’s development viewer), since we developed it in a few days at no cost, I’m pretty happy.

> Rethink College Park Development Map

Can Wheaton Become the Next Silver Spring?

A motley collection of one and two-story strip malls in the DC suburb of Wheaton, Maryland is poised to be transformed into a high density urban downtown. Montgomery County officials have declared victory in downtown Silver Spring, where a decades-long redevelopment process injected millions of dollars of new development into what was an economically depressed district. County officials are looking to Wheaton for their next major project.

Wheaton is an important regional transit node — in addition to the Red Line Metro Station, roughly a dozen bus routes converge on the area where several busy roads converge. High density development has not happened due to zoning restrictions adopted in 1992 that were designed to limit the scale of new development and prevent Wheaton from becoming a large-scale edge city like Bethesda. However the tight restrictions on development mean there has been little new investment in the area and now community members — and Montgomery County officials — want change.

The illustrations above and below were created by architect Jim Russell for the Wheaton Redevelopment Advisory Committee. They depict the outcome of a community “visioning” process where residents and business owners proposed creating a dense development with a central park on land that today contains aging low-rise commercial buildings, a parking lot, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. While County officials are dreaming up plans, some major developers have been investing money: already two major luxury housing projects are open for business and the Bozzuto corporation plans to break ground soon on housing over the WMATA-owned bus depot. The website of the county’s Wheaton Redevelopment Program has more information on projects, and this map (PDF) dramatically illustrating how many projects are completed or proposed in the area.

The redevelopment program is moving aggressively to work with local businesses to improve their business saavy and modify zoning laws to attempt to preserve the “small business character” as much as possible. As part of that effort county officials have partnered with the DC-based Latino Economic Development Corporation to provide loans and financial advice to small Wheaton businesses.

Despite the bold goals and vigorous citizen involvement of the redevelopment project which will impact hundreds of businesses, most of the reporting has been regarding just one: Barry’s Magic Shop. I won’t go into the details here other than to say the shop is facing eviction by county officials to make room for a long-planned pedestrian walkway, just barely visible off Georgia Avenue in these renderings.

Thanks to the Wheaton Redevelopment Program for providing digital copies of Jim Russell’s drawings.

D.C. Gentrification and Section 8 Subsidized Housing

This post is second in a series on gentrification in the District of Columbia.
Part 1 - D.C. Gentrification and Section 8 Subsidized Housing
Part 2 - ‘Gentrification’: The Birth of a Word in D.C.
Part 3 - Metro Growth and ‘Gentrification’ Use
Part 4 - Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement

I dislike the term “gentrification” because it glosses over what is a complex process, placing a negative stigma on needed neighorhood economic revitalization and ignoring the forces that slow neighborhood change. While the reduction of affordible housing and number of rental units that often comes with new neighborhood investment is a problem, gentrification can be slowed or stopped by a variety of factors: freeways, large institutions, stubborn property owners, public housing projects, etc.

One of the most important brakes in cities like DC on rapid neighborhood change is the federal government’s Section 8 housing programs. Under one facet of this program, builders can receive loan to construct a building if they agree to rent it to government-approved low and moderate income families. In exchange, the government requires tenants pay 30 percent of their income as rent, and the government pays the remainder up to a fixed “fair market rent.” This way building owners — either companies or nonprofits — have an incentive to provide affordable housing. (The program contains an individual subsidy and voucher programs, but I don’t know as much about their impact in DC.) In DC these Section 8 buildings serve as an important brakes on the gentrification process, and ensure a base level of affordable housing for the city.

Therefore, I was blown away by this quote I read in the Post recently:

The [housing] study also sounded a warning about subsidized housing. Contracts for half of the District’s 10,561 apartments that participate in the federal Section 8 program, which subsidizes rents for needy tenants, are due to expire within the next year. Building owners can decide whether to renew their contracts or sell the buildings, making the apartments no longer affordable.

Greene said it is unclear how many buildings will leave the subsidy program. “If a Section 8 contract expires and you have a really hot condo market, there’s a lot of pressure on that owner to sell it at a profit,” he said.

To try to mitigate the impact of a drop in Section 8 housing, the city is beefing up its program that helps tenants buy their apartment buildings, Greene said. Under District law, tenants have the first right to purchase a building up for sale.

With so many of these subsidized buildings up for renewal and possible development, I wondered whether this would provide the impetus for aggressive speculation in revitalizing neighborhoods, potentially at the cost of affordible homes for thousands. This housing report (PDF) from the NeighborhoodInfo DC website below contains a map of the projects, color-coding them by which will expire this year. However, their map isn’t very detailed, and doesn’t include any information about the nature of the properties. To create my own I located a Department of Housing and Urban Development’s database of all Section 8 property recipients in the nation, and extracted 117 properties located in DC. Then I plotted the properties on a map of DC to produce a clickable map. Here’s a detail:

(Click here to view the full map)

What I found in these two maps confirmed my suspicions about who owned these buildings and where they were located. While the three non-Northwest quadrants have a smattering of properties, by far the largest concentration is in the Midcity area most affected by the 1968 riot and thus targeted for redevelopment in the 1970s: the 7th Street and 14th Street corridors including the neighborhoods of Shaw, U Street, and Columbia Heights.

In these communities I’ve sometimes heard people wonder why the pace of gentrification seemed so slow. Even community leaders in Shaw sometimes wonder why — or whether — revitalization has skipped over the neighborhood entirely. While reactionary churches have something to do with it, the neighborhood’s high density of Section 8 buildings are the greater cause. (For lots of reasons best left to another post.) These properties and their residents are very stable, thanks to regulated rents locked in place by multi-year contracts with the feds.

When the HUD contracts with the building owners expire, it seems clear at least some of the private owners will cash in the astronomical property values and sell the properties wholesale, causing the forced eviction of the building tenants. However, according to the HUD data many of the buildings are owned by nonprofit corporations, most of whom I assume wouldn’t sell. A small number may seize the opportunity to capitalize on the high demand for real estate and re-develop their low-rise properties to be denser, mixed use properties appropriate to the neighborhood. Ideally the new buildings would include the same number or perhaps even a greater number of subsidized units, in addition to market-rate units and retail space. Sites along 14th Street and in Shaw (one adjacent the Metro) are two that seem good choices for this option. There are many potential obstacles to be sure, as I am not sure many models exist for the unusual financial arrangements such a project would require.

This latter path could provide additional economic opportunity in the city, as well as boosting the economic diversity of the neighborhood. “Gentrification” is often a zero-sum discussion of winners and losers, but the remarkable convergence of events can allow community organizations and city leaders to build a denser, more diverse, and more dynamic city. No matter exactly how the situation plays out, the large concentration of Section 8 properties in the Midcity neighborhoods will define the path of their development for the forseeable future.

The next step for my research will be to look closer at the data from HUD to determine which expiring contracts may result in a sale or new development, and what their location might mean for revitalization trends in the city.

> Section 8 Properties in the District (See below of a key of the property details)
> WaPo: “Price Increases Migrating To Poorer Neighborhoods”
> The Urban Institute’s NeighborhoodInfo DC (The post story was about their recent housing report)

Read the rest of this entry »

Student Housing in Ann Arbor

My friend Dale has just posted a rough introduction to his urban planning thesis to his blog. He is making an ambitious argument — perhaps too ambitious — but I’m interested to see what he uncovers in the process of investigating it.

In this thesis, I argue that students individually and collectively were agents of change in this period of major alterations in the educational project of the university, in local and university housing policy, and in federal housing policy, making significant contributions to urban development even while they worked within a structural framework of national economic depression and world war, changing federal housing policy, suburbanization, the emergence of the research university, and urban crisis and revitalization. This consideration of student housing, then, is an effective means of examining the changing relationship between the city and the university in twentieth century American urban history.

I’ll also be interested to see what comparisons could be made with College Park from his finished work, and what insights he uncovers on the topic of student voting rights. A year ago I blogged about an interesting group, the Student Voting Rights Campaign, but sadly just noticed their rich trove of articles collected in 2004 was lost to a server crash. Here’s to hoping it’s backed up somewhere.

> Urban Oasis: “Allow Me to Introduce Myself“