Lassiter Interviewed

Ann Arbor blogger Homeless Dave recently posted this interview with University of Michigan professor Matt Lassiter. The interview notes he recently made tenure. Here’s a taste:

ML: Yeah. So you’re against sprawl, right? And you can think of that in terms of being a good environmentalist, and you’re against big developers coming in and messing up your neighborhood, and you’re against pollution and all that. But then you can also be against sprawl and it’s about protecting your property values and about freezing things like they are, which has an element of class exclusion. Same thing about historical districts. It’s a great idea in a lot of ways, but as a public policy it’s really very flexible. Not just in Ann Arbor but around the country, historical districts have often been used as a way to protect property values, as a way to prevent multi-family housing or more density, which is about keeping people out of your neighborhood, not just keeping it the way it is. And it’s not that either one is all bad. NIMBY-ism has become a bad word. There’s progressive and reactionary elements to what we call NIMBY-ism, I think. And probably the same thing about historical districts and zoning itself. Zoning can be a really progressive policy tool, and it often has been in this country one that has preserved racial segregation and class segregation.

> Teeter Talk: Matt Lassiter

National Building Museum

I thought this photo I took of the National Building Museum’s Great Hall came out well.

1100 New York Avenue

I’ve wondered about this building for a while now and only recently got a chance to take some photos. It was built in 1940 as a Greyhound bus station and successfully saved from destruction by the Art Deco Society of Washington, according to their website. The historic structure is now part of the modern office building behind it. DC photographer Elvert Barnes recently blogged about the building and posted some photos to Flickr.

Site Design Changes

You may have noticed some design changes to this website I made over the weekend. I widened the layout and greatly condensed the sidebar content, eliminating the blogroll and moving some of the old links to my archives page. I deleted the links partly because of what I read in this post about how they reinforce hierarchy, and partly because they were woefully outdated. I’ve chosen to expand the design to 800 pixels but not wider because about 15% of site visitors view the site at that resolution. Are there any other changes I should make?

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.

Detroit’s ‘Dream Cruise’

Last Saturday’s Woodward Dream Cruise, billed by organizers as “the world’s largest one-day celebration of car culture,” is a car show featuring over 40,000 cars cruising along a 16-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue through nine different suburban cities. (I was able to catch a bit on Friday when I was in the Detroit area visiting Libby) Organizers estimate the crowds on a rainy Saturday near 1 million, but the event can draw as much as a half a million more with good weather. Interestingly, the cruise doesn’t actually start inside the limits of the Motor City but at 8 Mile, its northern bountary. The Detroit Free Press described this year’s efforts to extend the event to the heart of the city:

If the rain diminished the action north of 8 Mile, it devastated the first attempt to bring the cruise into Detroit. A small but enthusiastic group of volunteers huddled under a tent on Pontchartrain, waiting to pass out Cruise in Detroit maps. But by noon, just two cruisers had cruised all the way to Detroit and the T-Plex Museum on Piquette and Brush. When the driving tour ended late Saturday, 46 had taken part, said Chris Kempa, a project leader with Detroit Synergy, the volunteer group that sponsored the tour.”It would have been a lot better had it not been for the rain,” he said.

While Detroit residents enjoyed the event, news from the domestic auto industry continues to be dismal. Coverage of the Dream Cruise in Saturday’s Free Press shared space with a story reporting that Ford is cutting domestic production 21% for the last three months of 2006. Michigan’s unemployment rate is currently at 7%, making it the state with the second highest unemployment level in the country. The state’s economy is the top issue in the state’s gubernatorial race where Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm is facing former Amway executive Dick DeVos.

> Free Press Dream Cruise page
> Detroit News Dream Cruise page
> Dream Cruise official website

Photos taken by Flickr user MadisonAvenue

Rethinking College Park

Click here to visit the new blog Rethink College Park.

In May I blogged about an interesting op-ed published in the University of Maryland student newspaper written by Maryland undergraduate David Daddio. Although College Park is the home of the University of Maryland’s flagship campus with almost 35,000 students and has its own Metro station on the D.C. subway, the “city” is limited to a run-down stretch of U.S. Route 1 near campus and few strip malls. In recent years a consensus has emerged among students and community leaders in College Park that the city should strive to become a better “college town.” At the end of the school year the student government even sponsored a design brainstorming session with the architecture school about how the city could grow. Despite all the interest, development has been uneven in the city: zoning decisions are controlled by county officials with other priorities, students are disconnected and ill-informed, and University administrators are often not engaged with community concerns.

David’s op-ed proposed a website that would function as “an ongoing public participation venue where students and city residents can be educated, debate the merits of projects and voice opinions.” When I got in touch with David to talk to him about my work with Arborupdate and DCist and offer to help in the effort, we decided to collaborate on a new site. Thus, today I’m happy to announce the beta launch of Rethink College Park. Our visionfor the blog is similar to what his original op-ed proposed: to connected stakeholders and encourage a “walkable, inclusive, and dynamic city.” We’re actively looking for event planners, graphic design people, writers, photographers, and just about anybody interested in helping, so please drop me a line if you want to get involved.

> Rethink College Park