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STOP POSTING THERMOMETER PICS ON FACEBOOK/TWITTER/INSTAGRAM. And don’t think you can get around it by posting thermometer shots of somewhere else and saying “I wish 🙂 !!!!!!” because that is maybe even worse. I am a human with working nerves and ruined shirts so I obviously know what the temperature is, and I live in Texas, so I could probably guess even if you locked me in a sensory depravation tank, or banged me on the head so I turned into the guy from Memento/Tim. I stay up late, have a laptop, and am an extremely good guesser (the number you’re thinking of right now is 8), so please do not make me lock all of you out of your accounts, because I will do so.

Your “pal,”

Zac

Once again wanting to take a closer look at the data behind our ranking of the Best Dallas Suburbs, I decided to find out which school districts were making the most efficient use of their funds.

For each school district we came up with an overall education score (ranging from 1 to 5). Factored in were the average SAT score, the percentage of students taking college entrance exams, the TAKS passing percentage, and the total dollars spent per pupil.  The top education score went to Highland Park and University Park (both part of Highland ISD), with a 4.7. The lowest was Lancaster with a 2.0.

So I divided each district’s dollars spent per pupil by the points scored on our education rating above the minimum to determine dollars spent per pupil per point earned.  That’s my rough approximation of the districts that spend the least per student to get the most.

Jump for the top 10, with total $ spent, our education score, and the $ per education score above the minimum listed:

Or how to use a Seinfeld reference with no connection whatsoever to the actual post.  That is, beyond the name Harwood.

The latest downtown news is that a few streets are to undergo one-way to two-way conversions.  Also, the Deck Park is about to open.

It’s important to note, that as part of the Klyde Warren deck park design, Harwood was closed through the park for cars, though the connection will exist as a pedestrian promenade/plaza.  When the design was first unveiled, I fretted, rightfully, that this would kill Harwood through downtown (not that there were a lot of ground floor businesses thriving as it is on Harwood, but still).

There were already too few connections between downtown and immediate surroundings that it’s damn impossible to get anywhere.  As I’ve joked, it’s easier to get to Plano from downtown than to uptown.  I make the trip every day.  And I worried that this was a dangerous compromise.  It makes the park better, but it could hurt much of downtown.

And a compromise between the two would be a street that can close for events, but is otherwise calmed with pavers as a plaza, much as it was designed.  During events retractable bollards could rise from the ground to close it off for pedestrians.  Otherwise, downtown could use the traffic flow from uptown.  Traffic count data on Harwood is only available for 1990 and 2009, where it dropped from 5,951 per day to 1,700 after the park’s groundbreaking.


Today, you can walk down the middle of Harwood at just about any time of day without fear of coming into contact with a car.  Some traffic is better than no traffic.  As I mentioned in the piece earlier today about the deck park, a park’s design is only ever as good as its physical, outward connections. How many people can get to it, ideally without driving?


Certain types of ground floor businesses that activate the street need more traffic than others, both foot and vehicular.  Neighborhood service goods (like a 7-11) need only 5,000 vehicles per day, but also need 5,000 people living within 1/4-mile.  Most of their business comes from foot traffic.

Restaurants and bars, look for a minimum of 7,500 vehicles per day and soft goods look for 15,000, as they’re catchment area is larger, the population doesn’t have to be immediately nearby as with neighborhood service goods, but it still helps to be close.  The downtown workforce population that covers that gaps between these really only supports the restaurant and bar commercial segment.

The traffic counts on Harwood are still too low for really much of anything to work.  The workforce population is headed underground or to Main Street.  So we have to generate traffic another way.

Even though we’re well down the path of some two-way conversions, Harwood being one-way for half of its length through downtown is an obvious opportunity.  Making it two-way will increase the traffic counts while calming the traffic that a wide one-way typically is ineffective.  Calmer street, theoretically there will be more pedestrians as well.

While calming and making it go two-way might not double the vehicular traffic, but with the increased pedestrian traffic, we might double the traffic overall.  But that is still short of what we need for ground floor businesses to succeed.  How else can we increase traffic?  I know, bikes!

With the push for complete streets, bike lanes, and improved connections to the park, there is the opportunity for cycle tracks linking Old City Park, the Farmers Market, Main Street Garden, to the new deck park.  While we’ll likely never move the 36,000 bikes per day that some cycle tracks in Copenhagen move, if we can do a tenth of that, we’ll be sniffing the 5,000 trips per day we need as a baseline to revitalize the street.

Much of Harwood seems to be 44′ curb-to-curb with four 11′ lanes with some variation for pedestrian bulb-outs at DART and extra turn lanes here and there which bump it up to 54′.  If we were to convert it to two-way with bike lanes it could lay out as above within a 44′ section, with the occasional increases going to on-street parking or increased sidewalk cafe space as determined by the buildings/context/opportunity therein.

Bike lane | Buffer | South Travel | North Travel | Buffer | Bike Lane is just one possible solution.

Another would be to put the bike lanes together as a two-way cycle track on one side, a bicycle super-highway so to speak, in order to differentiate it and emphasize its role as a prominent and improved north-south link between the three parks.

In section that would look something like this:

8′ parallel parking | Travel lane | Travel lane | 2′ buffer | 12′ two-way cycle track

And if you’re confused by the ominous floating thing in the graphic, that’s just a recycled concept from a street section design for another hot sunny climate in Las Vegas, where we were really just recycling from the streets radiating out from Plaza del Sol in yet another hot, sunny climate: Madrid.

Among the opinions released by the Supreme Court of Texas today was a case out of North Richland Hills, in which the city was sued by the parents of a 12-year-old girl who died as a result of sudden cardiac arrest:

Sarah Friend collapsed on July 14, 2004 while standing in line for the “Green Extreme” water slide at NRH2O, a city-owned water park in North Richland Hills. City employees responded with oxygen masks and other airway equipment, but did not retrieve an Automatic External Defibrillator device (AED) from a storage closet elsewhere on the park grounds.  As a result, Sarah did not receive defibrillation until twenty-one minutes after her initial collapse, when the city fire department arrived. She was rushed to the hospital but could not be revived, and she died shortly after noon that day.  The Friends allege that had the city employees used the AED on Sarah immediately, prior to using the airway equipment, the device would have saved her life.

The court was considering the question of whether the Friends even had the right to sue the city. State law grants local governments wide immunity from liability suits, and North Richland Hills argued that there was no cause for an exemption to be granted.

Since the Fourth of July happens to land on a Wednesday this year, the celebrations are sort of scattered. I’ve rounded up your best bets for patriotic partying, a list you might want to peruse sooner rather than later.

Friday

Deep underground, a puppet is stirring. Several puppets, with foul mouths and a penchant for song. Leave the children at home. Theatre Three, in the Theatre Too basement space, gives Avenue Q its first professional regional production. It opens tonight, tickets are $20, and you can still purchase some online. Make Union Bear your pre-theater dinner spot and split a honey pig pizza and a frozen Moscow mule. Seriously, share the mule, or else you might have to walk to the Quadrangle instead of drive.

Speaking of driving, there’s a weird little theater in Fort Worth worth checking out. It’s called Pantagleize, and they’re putting on a version of Woyzeck, an incomplete German drama from the late 1800s that everyone from Werner Herzog to Tom Waits has taken a crack at finishing. Pantageleize’s has a circus theme, so we follow the woes of Franz Woyzeck, the low man on the sideshow totem pole. He does menial tasks to earn extra money to pass along to Marie, the mother of his illegitimate child, and he’s been eating nothing but peas in preparation for his own sideshow act. Can you really blame the guy for going insane? I reviewed the show here for FrontRow, but for mood music, listen to Waits’ “All the World is Green.”

When you write a few million words, a few of them will come back to haunt you, like a half million of them.  In this case, it was clumsy wording on my part regarding criticism of the Klyde Warren deck park, which has since been quoted (out of context), but linked to (for said context) at Pegasus News’ announcement of the opening celebration for the park.  Of course, it’s my fault for the original, hyperbolic, and lazy syntax.

The specific words in question are “great design, lousy location.”  In the rest of the piece (and an earlier one, from 2010), I discuss the nature of the park (and parks in general) as a heavy-handed form of Keynesian economic development. Build park, raise land value (as parks do up to 25% immediately adjacent, an increase that is known to taper off up to about 1/4 mile away – or close to immediate walking distance), generate investment, new tax base, etc.  It’s easy politically to build parks.  Which is why we end up with too many of them.  It’s much more difficult to alter the physical network of the city, but the returns are exponentially greater.

However, a point that I emphasized on the AIA panel last week, that there wasn’t much to leverage in terms of new investment in the area.  Sure, Museum Tower was built with the confidence of the park being in place when it was finished, but while it helped the construction and financing of the project, it hasn’t actually moved the market to buy, with only a tiny fraction of units under contract as you read and I write this.  A new office building was built on the north side, but facing McKinney.  It has four-stories of liner residential units facing the park (at the bequest of the city, IIRC, which the building owner has effectively mothballed for the last three years – presumably until the park is done).  


Other than that, there is a small bank site that could and should be redeveloped, but the majority of the sites within that 1/4 mile radius are already spoken for.  Parks are only as good and only as valuable, not for the design within them, but the connections to them from their surrounding context.  Has this been improved?  No.  At least not yet.As I wrote in the 2010 piece:

The Woodall Rogers Deck Park is a great thing for this City and its design in absence of the complete removal of the/a freeway is the best (well, 2nd best possible) solution. But Bryant Park isn’t great without Gramercy. Piazza Navona without Centro Storico. Want to be a World Class City? Yes, that is the competition.

This post isn’t intended to poo-poo the park, but remind us that the work isn’t yet finished.—LoMac has a highway, a park slapped on top, an incomprehensible and impossible to navigate set of anti-urban spaghetti of roads, and a lot of density with no urbanity.

In sum, I think the park will be great.  “Better than what it was,” of course.  Does it address deeper issues facing the city and downtown as more than an expensive band-aid?  No.  Could the $60M have been used better to leverage more investment, increased tax base, and in turn, even more amenities?  Yes.


Incidentally, $60M is almost exactly the number we figure is necessary for tearing out IH-345, which we found would add 25,000 new residents, $110 million/year in new tax revenue, new parks, and streetcars linking downtown with East Dallas, where the opportunity lies.  

The unpleasantness of the hail storm of a couple weeks ago caused major damage to the Lakewood Theater in Dallas. As you can see, the marquee was destroyed, but what’s even worse is that the tower has had to remain dark, as it’s in need of repairs.

The theater has set up a fund through Chase Bank, taking donations to aid their effort. Anyway, I’m making this plug for somewhat personal reasons.

My wedding reception was at the theater. Our names were up on that marquee on that special night, so it hurts a little to see it damaged.

Ahead of the Little People of America convention that starts this weekend at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Dallas, the Morning News profiles Jason Owens, who himself has dwarfism.  Owens makes the most of his small stature, among other things running his own ice cream truck called “Short N Sweet.”

Every year, around October, his holiday gigs start lining up: He’s done homeowners association Christmas events and sidekicked with Santa at The Shops at Legacy in Plano.

“We have people who want to hire a dwarf just to hang out at their parties,” he said. “Sometimes people want an elf or a leprechaun. We just did a 50th birthday party in ____________, with togas. I passed out hors d’oeuvres.”

The gigs pay as much as $200 an hour.

“It sounds strange, but for us, it’s good money and hard to pass up,” Owens said. “I’m happy with what I do in my life.”

I inserted a blank in that quote, in place of one of the Best Dallas Suburbs. Can you guess which?

As you may have seen, a few of us took a tour of the Woodall Rodgers deck park recently. In about four months, everyone will get to tour it. It will have progressed a bit by then. In fact, it’ll be finished. There will be grass, pavilions, a butterfly fountain, and a dog park, among other things. I’m looking forward to the opening and to enjoying the park. My husband and I disagree about how much we’ll use it. I think we’ll walk to it from our apartment multiple times during the week (it’s about .8 of a mile). He thinks it’ll be every other week. If we get a scooter with a sidecar for the dog, however, we’ll be there every night. (If you’re selling a scooter with a sidecar, let me know.)

Wholesale Electricity Prices to Increase. The Public Utilities Commission agreed increase the cap for wholesale power prices to $4,500 per megawatt hour. Does this mean your cost could go up? Yes. Probably. Even if you’re in a fixed rate contract.

Frisco Mayor Saves Family From Fiery Death. Maher Maso, Mayor of Frisco, was on his way home from a golf tournament when he saw smoke and flames coming from a home. So he stopped, knocked and called 911, probably saving Bob Pollock, his wife, and their 18-month-old granddaughter. Then he grabbed a water hose and put some fires out. Back to you, Mike Rawlings.

Flaming Lips Might Re-Do That Thing. Remember how the Flaming Lips did a video and it had Erykah Badu and her sister and the nekkidness and then nobody talked about it at all ever? Well, now they’re saying they might re-do the whole thing but with Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer instead of Badu, who is presumably unavailable or something.

Dallas NAACP Wants Texas Lottery Gone. The local chapter of the civil rights group says poor and minority Texans spend their money on the lottery instead of rent and health insurance, and not enough of the money raised goes to public education. Most curious to me, though, was branch president Juanita Wallace’s story of the man who didn’t buy health insurance but instead bought lottery tickets and then died of the lottery.

Texas GOP Takes Strong Stance in Platform. And man, are you screwed if you’re a dune sage brush lizard. I bet you thought I was gonna say, “a woman,” or “gay,” or “poor,” but no, lizards.

If you haven’t heard, Stockton, CA recently became the largest American city to declare bankruptcy putting a fire sale on virtually all city assets.  While this may belong to the state of California, I have an idea where to start:

Stockton boomed for the ten years of cocaine and steroid fueled housing euphoria, but alas it has come back to Earth, as things are wont to do when those evading the high prices (and taxes) of the bay area sought browner(?) pastures of affordability at the sprawling edge of an agricultural community well over an hour from where many worked.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their current fiscal status, the local property tax rate + county rate is pretty shockingly low.

Much of the blame has fallen upon the waterfront redevelopment scheme.  It’s an appropriate target.  Waterfronts AND the two stadiums built on it were sucker bets.  Both can serve as cherries on top, but not the foundation of economic development.  The result: broke.

The city is remarkably in tact form wise, except for the leapfrog development of the most recent housing bubble.  That, and some underdevelopment and seemingly flagging industrial along freight rail lines and the waterfront.  I’ll try to put together a map showing the new development from last ten years with underdevelopment.  Should be illuminating.

While selling off the Right-of-Way under state highway CA-4 doesn’t do much to guarantee demand for the development that could theoretically replace it, selling the land off at a quarter on the dollar ensures a level of affordability + proximity to amenity (and a train station connected to San Jose) that the sprawling edge can’t provide.  The edge has affordability (now), that is, if anybody is still living in them (or ever were).  It will make the place more livable while being affordable, which not too much of California can provide both.  It’s a start.

I have some rough financials that I’ll try to assemble tomorrow.  But after running them, I can’t see how Stockton can possibly maintain their low tax rate in combination with low density and high infrastructural burden.  In other words, sell off the burden.