Late yesterday afternoon, I learned that Darryl Beeson passed away. Darryl was involved in a car accident a few weeks ago and died from unspecified complications. Today on SideDish, his long-time friend and Savor Dallas co-founder Jim White remembers Darryl.
FrontBurner
A Daily Conversation About Dallas
When the GOP gubernatorial debate was finished last night  at Belo’s WFAA-TV in Dallas, the 40 or 50 journalists who’d been watching the show backstage from a “media viewing area” were invited to file into the Channel 8 lobby, where featured performers Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Debra Medina had been asked to attend a post-debate press conference.Â
Pretty soon, though, word filtered into the lobby  that Perry wouldn’t be showing up. Then came news that Hutchison wouldn’t, either. Only Medina (pictured) stepped to the podium, claiming a “strong” debate performance and ripping her opponents for their absence at the after-party.Â
Medina was right about performing strongly in the statewide debate–she outdid Hutchison, for sure–but I’d say the night’s real winner was Perry. In contrast to the public-TV debate held earlier this month, when he came off oily and shallow, last night’s Perry was sharp, composed and commanding, downright statesmanlike. The turnaround was enough to etch his frontrunner status in the race in stone, I’d bet, and by the time the evening was over the increasingly formidable Medina–surprisingly and against all odds– seemed a threat to overtake Kay.
Do you think you know the difference between a hand-harvested scallop and a U-10? Then you will want to enter the “I Scuba for Scallops” contest on SideDish. (Hi, Adam!)
When I spoke with him on the phone this morning, Irving Mayor Herbert Gears hadn’t heard about today’s Houston Chronicle report that Exxon Mobil is drawing up plans for a big corporate campus down near The Woodlands.
The news has led to speculation that the world’s biggest company may be looking to relocate its corporate headquarters away from Irving. Gears said he expects that if they were planning a move he would have been alerted to the possibility before it were reported in the media.
“I have not had any indications whatsoever that they’ve been thinking about moving their headquarters anywhere,” he said. “We certainly would be sad to lose them, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure we prevent that.”
“I’ll make a call as soon as I get off here. I’ll call Rex [Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil].”
A few of us have gathered at the Nasher this rainy afternoon to hear a talk given by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, whose “Genus and Species” opens January 30. The Nasher is promoting it as their first exhibition by a living artist. Funny story: a Nasher employee who shall remain unnamed was ferrying Plensa around in his/her car earlier and accidentally ran a red light. Plensa made a joke about how it was almost the Nasher’s first exhibition of an artist killed by the museum.
Update: I’m sure Peter will be along in a minute to share some details about the brief speech that Plensa gave and about his art. But here’s my favorite part: Plensa concluded by saying, “I’d love for you to touch my art.” He said the same thing to a group at the museum last night. The notion is giving the guards at the Nasher fits. Because, as you know, you ain’t supposed to touch anything else there. They are afraid that people won’t know where to draw the line. One minute you’re caressing an alabaster Plensa head (first picture); the next minute, you’re engaged in some out-of-bounds frottage with one of those people high atop Borofsky’s Walking to the Sky. So bottom line (no sexual pun intended), if you get handsy with either Twin 1 or Twin II (second picture), and if a guard tells you stop, be sure to tell em that Plensa said it was copacetic.
There’s a great local quote in this morning’s story about John Edwards’ handlers scrambling to funnel hush money to Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter. It evidently originated with Edwards’ old pal Fred Baron, the Dallas plaintiff’s lawyer and Democratic Party rainmaker who died in 2008:
Other distributions came from Edwards’ former campaign finance chairman Fred Baron, including a FedEx envelope of $1,000 and a note that read: “Old Chinese proverb: Use cash, not credit cards.”
The Dallas Theater Center opened its third production in their new home last Friday. The verdict? Give It Up is like MTV’s The Real World meets HBO’s Real Sex, only it all plays out more like a traditional musical comedy than a sex romp,” writes our theater critic David Novinski. You can expect more from David in the coming months. Now just a tease: his full review is after the jump.
1. I was going to comment on Dallas ISD’s proposed fix for four high schools that face possible closure by the state. They’ll create magnet programs at each of the campuses to attract students that could boost the test scores and graduation rates (the DISD board seems to know it’s about “the inputs.”) I was going to say that this solution sounds like a trick to beat the system. Then I read the final paragraph of the DMN piece: “In addition, state records show that all four schools would not have passed Texas’ academic standards if they did not get statistical help from the state. Various formulas allow for schools to pass the standards even if too many students flunk state tests.” So, since districts apparently have access to a magic calculator, is there really a state accountability system left to trick?
2. Would this middle school student have been arrested any place other than in the Park Cities? Without knowing exactly what the threat was, it’s hard to say. But can we all agree that Fox 4 needn’t have required poor Sophia Reza to stand in the rain last night, outside a closed school, to report on an incident that occurred last week? Let’s free TV reporters from the tyranny of the wholly unnecessary live shot.
3. I was a little amused by the billboard. I find the commercial a little icky. But it’s all pretty sophomoric.
Crime sucks. Especially when it happens to you (unless it’s funny). In the past three months, someone very close to me (literally and home proximity) has had their car broken into twice, parked in what is supposed to be a secure parking garage.
This is not solely a downtown phenomenon either, as once when I lived in uptown, I had my car broken into in my building’s parking garage (an entirely private garage) as well. Luckily, I was more accommodating and left the doors unlocked, meaning no smashed window to deal with (apparently, we didn’t share the same taste in fashion as the $200 dollar ray-bans were picked up and moved in order to take the pocket change).
In Dallas, I’m one of the few who willingly choose to live car-free. I do so now b/c I’m a lunatic. But for a variety of reasons, primarily, as a city’s transportation is its skeleton driving the overall form, the transportation network and city have evolved entirely car-centric. Jobs aren’t near housing, not enough housing is near transit, the City is still in its infant stages of adapting to DART, which can take decades or longer for the market to shake out the true value of land w/in x distance of DART and measure that factor by the quality of place and station area.
A new study at HumanTransit.org ranks American cities by CarFree household. I’ll spare the suspense. Dallas unsurprisingly misses the top 50. Hooray! Unless you find choice in the marketplace to be a good thing.
However, when narrowing the spectrum to cities above 250,000 in population we find Dallas snuggled in at #38 ahead of San Antonio, Nashville, San Diego, and Jacksonville (the nation’s largest city by land area). If I were to surmise the primary factors would be city form and poverty. And since poverty rates are generally much more standardized city to city, the single most important factor is city form. This is verified by the results. The top ten consists of Eastern cities, Chicago, and San Francisco, all well-established before the introduction of the car and with fairly extensive public transpo.
So, while one might be inclined to say, “Woohoo! We all own cars! We’re rich!” That isn’t the reason we rank so low, especially since Dallas is 16th in percent living below the poverty line.
Looking more deeply at the statistics, Dallas ranks 31st in % of public transit commuters, which is an improvement (with the assumption that commuting to work by car is a bad thing economically, as it requires excessive road construction, maintenance, inefficient land use patterns, gas/oil use, and air quality) from its overall ranking.
While it can be assumed that slowly but surely Dallas is evolving to DART which opened its first lines about 10 years ago, commuting by bike and foot are quite abysmal. What this means is that Dallas’s commuting patterns are tremendously skewed towards the more expensive means of transportation (rank them 1. car 2. bus/train 3. bike 4. foot), even without factoring in the multiplier effects of energy and land use.
Therefore, the population near or below the poverty line in Dallas are forced into car ownership to make ends meet, while transportation can account for as much as 40-45% of their income, while the well-to-do are forced to subsidize it via roads to make the whole system work. Lose-Lose.
I hate lose-loses. We’re all about win-wins at CarFreeInBigD, which is why we’re in favor of choice. Any functional marketplace must have choice, right free-marketeers? I guess mode of transportation doesn’t count. Furthermore, the majority of these costs (ownership and operation, oil/gas) leave the local economy.
I’m rare b/c I’m nuts (and I like to live out my self-righteousness). However, I’m not self-righteous enough to force this way of living onto anybody. Sane people have to have a car still in this town. In fact, they are essentially coerced into having a car to take care of daily needs like getting to work, groceries, etc. Any market economy or government founded upon free will can not function under coercion. Choice also applies to housing type. There is a tremendous pent-up demand for housing of all types near transit and in walkable communities. Meeting that demand is what will lead cities out of the recession.
As stated, poverty isn’t the driving force in car ownership or lack thereof, but it very well might induce petty theft and property damage. In fact, I might argue the causal relationship is the reverse and that poverty is driven (pun) by the necessity of car ownership.
I’m one to always want to know the underlying forces driving behavior. Seeing that we are all fundamentally people with the same genetic wiring, deciding and abiding by a similar set of criteria. Until there is a better option, I will define this criteria as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to which I’ve discussed the relationship of city building before.
I’m suggesting that forced car ownership and the cost of infrastructure to support an auto-centric economy, is driving a vicious circle where some increment of the population is barely getting by in the car-only local economy. It seems quite logical that cars would be the first place to scour for items to make ends meet, would it not?
I hate to be apologetic about crime because it is the worst feeling in the world to have your daily routine interrupted by a smashed car window and missing possessions (next to being locked out). But, this crime in particular is petty (in comparison with others) by definition and no matter the place or time, there will always be shitheads in given community.
I’ll liken it to street design where regulation and enforcement also has negligible effect. The design of the street is the problem, moreso than the people who might speed. People will drive the speed they feel comfortable. Perhaps the design of the system is the primary problem.
This system, the behavior of people within (or operating outside of) the legal economy is much more complex, however than silly bandaid measures like speed bumps, and speed limits, and pulling police away from more important tasks to sit in a car and watch for someone going 60 in a 45.
This is the economy, which is the construct of how we interact with each other, represented by the form of our city. when our city is so divergent, as to force people of all incomes to HAVE to own a car, which can be up to or greater than 40% of their netcome, just to participate in civilized society perhaps the instinct of some is to withdrawal from that particular brand of civilization.
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Physical Effects
Let’s think about this from a design perspective now, beyond a behavioral one. High car ownership, means grossly exaggerated amounts of car infrastructure beyond roads. All of those cars have to be parked somewhere. Professor Donald Shoup once calculated that there were four parking spaces provided for every car in America. That was in 1973.
Prof Shoup is the THE expert on parking and its negative effects on America. He is full of good statistics, like the one he gave recently at a presentation at Yale, “the MINIMUM requirement for parking in Los Angeles is 50x the MAXIMUM allowed parking in San Francisco.” LA has about half the car-free households that San Fran does. Shoup’s ultimate point is that while parking isn’t free to build or provide, it is often free to park (just like roads), thus further subsidizing car-culture.
While some measure of parking standards and codes are policy driven by the market, the market is steered by further policies creating that market, ie car-only transportation networks. If a market is an invisible hand, highway funding et al., is the invisible arm controlling that hand.
Whether we’re providing 4 spaces per car or 50 per, either is still too much parking, which in built form comes in the way of large surface lots and parking garages. Neither contributes much to the synergies of cities. They act more as middle men deducting city efficiency and vibrancy, hurting the local economy.
Here is a simple test: is it easy to find a parking spot? Has any place in the world that you ever really wanted to be had ample parking? No. Why? B/c space/land in places of high demand is much too valuable for such things as temporary car storage. This is why a covered parking space in NYC can cost as much as an apartment in Dallas.
The other negative effect parking places on a city is perception. Neither parking lots nor garages feel like safe places to be. No matter how much flood lighting is applied, whether they are safe or not is immaterial. They are perceived as unsafe, which means the reality becomes that they are unsafe. They create dead zones with few watchful public “eyes” protecting the public realm.
Walkable cities still have places to park, they are far less ubiquitous and less obtrusive on the physical landscape. Less parking is provided per car or capita, thus forcing more parking to be accommodated on-street. On-street parking with detached minimum requirement is a much more efficient way of handling parking load because it is floating, much like the electricity grid works as energy storage.
Rather than providing x spaces per square footage of building by use for every single block, creating a tremendous surplus of parking (so much so that it is considered cheap enough to park rather than commute by other measures). Somebody can easily park a block or two away (the choice is theirs based on how far they’re willing to walk (or pay for closer parking in a demand-based priced parking scheme). These are both district-based parking schemes (rather than use, block, or building codes) which take the burden off of private development.
Parking (particularly in dense areas) can cost as much as 20% of a development’s hard costs, which is a significant barrier to investment. However, even if there are no minimum parking requirements, like I’ve stated a private developer would typically want their own garage where they can regulate, maintain, and ensure safety. Because so few are able to live car-free, it is at this point market-driven. So where do we go from here?
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Potential Strategies
For the last segment, I’ll list several potential strategies off the top of my head that I’ve seen throughout the country to effectively deal with the parking dilemma, make the City feel (and be) safer, as well as revitalize Dallas, in particular, downtown. I’ll leave it up to you dear reader to weigh cost/benefits of each.
Early in Portland’s downtown revitalization the City began a program of building several large parking facilities which would remove the burden of parking provision from new residential development. This is one method of parking district. Each neighborhood (or downtown sub-district if you will) has its own primary garage, from which, one can walk to all nearby destinations.
Lesson: Learn to walk a few blocks. You could probably use the exercise.Drawback: We already have too much parking in Dallas, so building new garages doesn’t really alleviate that problem, unless we do so in order to consolidate surface parking.
Another option, and this one addresses on-street parking more than others (but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be applied to all public parking facilities as well), is to price meters based on demand. This means the meters would be computerized and interconnected so that they communicate to each other and set prices at a level that ensures approximately an 85% occupancy. The 85% number means there is always an availability of parking, the city gains extra revenue thru the market-based pricing, and we are not encouraging car-use as much via policy. Everywhere this has been in place, it has improved business.
Lesson: Price parking so as to discourage driving.Drawback: Business is allergic to any kind of change and this does little to leverage the surplus of surface lots. Unless of course, we think the over-supply of surface parking means low rates for on-street parking, where the City would then create more on-street spaces (to generate more revenue). All of which would then drive prices too low for the private surface lots to stay in business, which they might then sell.Drawback 2 to Drawback 1: Some wishful thinking there.
Last would be more coercive policy attempts to limit surface parking. I have seen two ways of doing this. The first, and the more politically volatile, is to ban surface parking lots in special districts. Start a clock running that the owner has to sell to a potential developer by a certain date, essentially amortizing the cost of the land. Currently, surface lots are generating enough cash flow that the owners aren’t willing to sell. The price is too high to develop.
Lesson: Surface parking lot owners don’t give a shit about the city.Drawback: Good luck fighting those political battles. Which brings me to option 3b:
Another, more centrist way of accomplishing a similar ends: establish a Land Value Tax in certain overlay districts (a variation is a Split Tax which unbundles land tax and improvements on that land (ie floor space) allowing for a high cost of land area and a low cost for built improvements which puts stress on the public’s infrastructure). This has to jive with local and state law, of course, so that is an issue. What this is, is essentially a performance bonus/punitive tax (carrot/stick) based on the performance of real estate. Taxes are reduced on performing properties and increased significantly on properties deemed underperforming, underdeveloped, or vacant. The valuation metric can be set however you want it: typically, it’s leasable, occupiable FAR over a minimum (with protections for grandfathered/historic structures).
This likewise creates an incentive for out of town owners or surface lot owners to sell to more willing partners for city development and revitalization, who typically have some skin in the game or motivation beyond $ like passion for the city and revitalizing it. This plays well with local businesses (their taxes are reduced) and those that want to help the city and who cares about those that oppose it. If the goal is to revitalize an area, set the policies that are proven to work, build consensus of support, and don’t worry about the howls from the opposition.
Anecdotally, my hometown went from 5000 vacant buildings to 400 in twenty years of operating this policy.
Lesson: Surface parking lot owners don’t give a shit about the city.Drawback: Could be some short-term budget gaps due to lowering taxes on current businesses/residents.
It may well take any combination of these efforts as well as potentially some others to steer the city slowly away from strictly a car-oriented economy, to a safer, more inclusive and robust one. I will bet a year’s salary that these would have more effect than any streetscaping measures or new parks on the revitalization of downtown from a $$ standpoint.
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In conclusion, current city form and continuing policies forcing the poor into car ownership is a humanitarian offense of accumulated actions placing emphasis on road construction; the links rather than the places. It creates a culture of unsafety and disinvestment, which is bad for the local economy and efforts at revitalization.
Fortunately, the City of Dallas is headed in the right direction, realizing that transportation and development are intertwined and forever interconnected, despite what 20th century dinosaurs might think. Compartmentalizing the two into the hands of specialists is what got American cities into the mess in the first place.
We received at the office yesterday an invitation from a Florida-based PR firm to take a press trip to Dallas to visit the recently renovated Sheraton Dallas (the largest hotel in Texas, for those keeping score at home). Besides the fact that we were invited to take a press trip to our own city, there are a number of things about this invitation that I found entertaining. Jump for the itinerary that journalists from across the country will enjoy — along with my comments.
In the category of, “uh oh, know when to run away.” A principal of a British architecture firm goes all paternalistic and suggests, “let us make all decisions.”
The problem is that the majority of contemporary architects are merely sculptors who look at post-Katrina NOLA and Port-au-Prince as good news stories and a chance to experiment on the poor with their misguided self-indulgent visions. Do you want cities like this?
This is precisely where those exact people get all huffy and drag this into a simple debate about style, exclaiming that I would attempt to limit their brilliance with silly rules based on empiricism and proven regularities of urban economies and places. Once again, I am stylistically agnostic.
In a post entitled, “Gehry the Dinosaur,” I suggest that architects should actually be limited when it comes to city building and broader issues, at least until its proven they have some understanding of complex interactions and dynamics of cities, beyond “big bridge, big building, big big big.” Oedipus-turned-Edifice complex?
Although, it might seem that I am contradicting my own post on Representative Democracy on Design, the key is public engagement and education. Increased public awareness creates for a competition with the “credentialed professionals,” which ensures the progress of a field.
Many architects don’t like that however, because they know many of their experimentations will not fly. Only through a singular well-financed and misguided entity can they do so. In that vein, they construct an entire language that means nothing, and in effect create a self-defensive, retrenched in ivory tower cult. Seriously, transcribe Eisenmann or Mayne sometime. Their words literally have no meaning.
Or, perhaps it is currently just a British problem. Because while no doubt there still exists some vestigial remnants of the highway pigs at the trough and the Senators that oblige them, in our federal government. At least, today as I write this, the US federal government, HUD, has reached out to the CNU and asked for a list of all federal barriers to Smart Growth and Livable Communities. Hooray!
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Vancouver Sun has an article on micro-condos, complete with picture of one with a Murphy Bed. Once more cities are ready for this market, these will emerge. I have written at length (here, here, here, and here)about the Millennial demand bubble emerging that will drive a trade-off between personal space forgiven for more social space, amenities, sociability, and urbanity.
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Grist shows a graph from Architecture 2030 suggesting 75% of the built environment will be replaced by 2035. However, it should be noted that the author is mistaking this for normal in his assertion that “cities get remade more often than you think.” While it is true to some extent that cities are constantly molting, this particularly accelerated building life cycle is entirely an American phenomenon, symptomatic of the same issues that brought down the banking industry. Delivering cheap crap to the American consumer, removing building restrictions and code oversight, and promising forever growth.
Personal anecdote: I served as lead urban planner and designer on a project redeveloping nearly 100-acres of low-grade garden apartments. These were built in the 1960’s and were once a happpening, swinging singles area. Before they were torn down and the tenants were given money for relocation, there were families living in buildings where the ceiling joists were literally caving into the rooms, walls had rotted, etc.
If you think building materials and construction quality have gotten better, you would be wrong. Which is why Texas homebuilders lobbied a certain former governor very persuasively and effectively for removal of all liability from the homebuilder on the date of the purchase.
The next twenty years, suburban life ought to be pretty interesting when everybody’s new home literally starts melting.
If you want to REALLY think about sustainability in a deep, meaningful, and transformative way, start asking how we can finance buildings based on life-cycle costs/performance, particularly in fields where developers typically flip their buildings immediately or shortly after construction.
FYI, the building I lived in in Rome was several hundred years old and the particular unit I was renting was on the market for $1 million. Think about the ROI on that entire building.
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Pittsburgh conducted a study regarding cost savings switching street lights to LEDs and the results are…illuminating. (sorry)
the city, which spends $4.2 million annually on electricity and streetlight maintenance, could save $1 million each year in energy costs and $700,000 in maintenance costs with LED lighting.