A story in the Sunday Journal Gazette titled “Section 8 leaves poor unmoved: Efforts to scatter poverty meet unplanned hurdle” takes a look at where poorer people live,evenwhen given the chance to move:

If people living in the projects were bedeviled by crime, deteriorating conditions, bad schools, few resources and urban blight, a voucher that would let them escape to neighborhoods with less crime and fewer problems might also help them escape poverty altogether. Those with vouchers would pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, the government would pay the rest.

“There was a general feeling that there was a contagion effect,” said Ron Haskins, a poverty expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The idea was to disperse low-income families.”

Thirty years later – despite the chance to live anywhere in the city — a map of where Section 8 vouchers are being used in Fort Wayne shows they are largely concentrated on the southeast side.

Poverty experts aside, people for the most part still like to live in the neighborhood in which they live. Read the story here, but you’ll have to get the print edition to see the map.Similar Posts:

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You’ve heard of the woman who lived in this house, haven’t you? Here’s the lead to the story in the Seattle P-I:

Edith Macefield died at home, just the way she wanted.

The Ballard (Wash.) woman who captured hearts and admirers around the world when she stubbornly turned down $1 million to sell her home to make way for a commercial development died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. She was 86.

No one knows exactly what will happen to the house now. She left no heirs.

– Hat tip: Andrew Sikora

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The above is the provocative headline on a story on cnn.com. After some description of the foreclosures in suburbia, the story focuses on the shifting attitudes of homeowners.

“The American dream is absolutely changing,” (Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution,) told CNN.

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls “walkable urbanism” — both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything — from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

The so-called New Urbanism movement emerged in the mid-90s and has been steadily gaining momentum, especially with rising energy costs, environmental concerns and health problems associated with what Leinberger calls “drivable suburbanism” — a low-density built environment plan that emerged around the end of the World War II and has been the dominant design in the U.S. ever since.

We don’t want to wish ill on the suburban dweller, but times may get tougher out there before they get better.

Read the whole story here.

– photo by respres on Flickr

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Be sure to check these links:

• The New York Times Magazine published an architecture issue titled “The Next City.” It tackles questions such as why are sidewalks essential for democracy and can an instant city ever feel like the real thing?
• City Journal features a story about how New Orleans is rebuilding from the bottom up, and avoids the pitfalls of master planning.

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In preparation of Wednesday’s talk about walkable communities, take a 10-minute stroll through Melbourne. Go here to watch the video. Here’s a paragraph about Melbourne:

There is an invaluable lesson here. In the early 90s, Melbourne was hardly a haven for pedestrian life until Jan Gehl was invited there to undertake a study and publish recommendations on street improvements and public space. Ten years after the survey’s findings, Melbourne was a remarkably different place thanks to sidewalk widenings, copious tree plantings, a burgeoning cafe culture, and various types of car restrictions on some streets. Public space and art abound. And all of this is an economic boom for business.

Check out StreetFilms, the producer of this and many other short films about cities.

photo of Melbourne courtesy of surfergirl143

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The Spaulding brothers do a great service by pointing us to the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, which shows the affordability of your Fort Wayne neighborhood based on housing and transportation costs. As you can guess, everything’s cheaper the closer you get to the core of the city.

As the Spauldings say over on their Web site, be sure to click the Advanced link for more data.

And you can go to the home page and examine the other metro areas the index covers. Chicago is among those included, but not Indianapolis.Similar Posts:

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Scott Greider, over on his personal blog, quotes a portion of the San Jose historic design guidelines that addresses the role of modern architecture in older neighborhoods. (If you’re adventurous, you can download the entire 95-page PDF.)

What does San Jose say? It says, “Bring it on”:

Rather than imitating older buildings, a new design should relate to the traditional design characteristics of a neighborhood while also conveying the stylistic trends of today. New construction may do so by drawing upon some basic building features — such as the way in which a building is located on its site, the manner in which it relates to the street and its basic mass, form and materials — rather than applying detailing which may or may not have been historically appropriate. When these design variables are arranged in a new building to be similar to those seen traditionally in the area, visual compatibility results. Therefore, it is possible to be compatible with the historic context while also producing a design that is distinguishable as being newer.

A modern-style home can be a wonderfully contrasting complement to a historic neighborhood. It certainly beats decay and vacant lots, and it also beats a hundred suburban neo-Colonials with three-car garages in front.

I can’t say the modern home above is my style, but frankly, plenty of older, classical homes aren’t my style, either.

The style of the structure is not the main point. Urbanism is site plan more than architecture. If you bring the house close to the sidewalk, put the parking or garage in the back and make the front wall permeable (that is, not a blank wall), you are strengthening a neighborhood, no matter the style of architecture.

– photo of modern townhouse in Lincoln Park, Ill., by Scott Greider on Flickr

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Above is an artist’s rendering of what a developer hopes will be The Shoppes on Broadway, near the corner of Broadway and Taylor Street.

Leaving aside the fact that it looks like every other suburban strip mall built in Fort Wayne over the past five years, is it a good building for a city street?

The real answer is in the site plan:

Look at the distance between the buildings and the sidewalk, very unlike real urban development. Pedestrians should not be forced to traverse yet another parking lot to reach a destination.

As David Sucher, author of “City Comforts,” said in regards to a different development:

The problem is not a matter of insufficient adherence to particular abstractions, the problem is a rather mundane one of, as I like to put it in the most banal way possible, putting the parking lot in the wrong spot. (emphasis his)

What’s the more interesting side of Broadway: the side with George’s International Market in a shopping plaza, or the side with Munchies and a block of buildings that meet the sidewalk? What side is more urban?

I am an enormous fan of Sucher’s Three Rules of urban design, which have little to do with architecture and everything to do with site plan. The proposed Shoppes of Broadway (and can we please return to American spelling someday?) breaks two of the rules that help create a walkable, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood:

• Build to the sidewalk
• Prohibit parking lots in front of the building

Why? Because neighborhoods are not only for cars. They are for people, too. As Sucher says:

If you question this, consider the places that most people like to go on vacation: New York, Paris, London, Aspen, Carmel, Nantucket, Park City, Friday Harbor, and even Disneyland. Every last one of them is built so that the building walls are right next to the sidewalk.

New businesses should be encouraged to add to the strengths of Broadway’s existing urban site plans. If the shopping center merely moved the parking lot to the side and back, and brought the building to the sidewalk, the Shoppes would be a welcome addition to an urban neighborhood that can use some good news.

– Hat tip: The Around Fort Wayne blog

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(Jon) Next American City points us toward a sobering article in The Atlantic about the effects of the subprime crisis on the nation’s suburbs. “The Next Slum?” says these changes “may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.”

Here are some highlights:

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

(Arthur C.) Nelson (director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech) forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025 — that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

If gasoline and heating costs continue to rise, conventional suburban living may not be much of a bargain in the future. And as more Americans, particularly affluent Americans, move into urban communities, families may find that some of the suburbs’ other big advantages — better schools and safer communities — have eroded. Schooling and safety are likely to improve in urban areas, as those areas continue to gentrify; they may worsen in many suburbs if the tax base — often highly dependent on house values and new development — deteriorates. Many of the fringe counties in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, for instance, are projecting big budget deficits in 2008. Only Washington itself is expecting a large surplus. Fifteen years ago, this budget situation was reversed.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will relax. Stopping a fundamental market shift by legislation or regulation is generally impossible.

Will this happen in Fort Wayne’s suburbs? It’s certainly possible. Is there any reason that the same forces that brought crime and abandoned houses to the inner cities would be stopped at the city limits? Indiana currently has the ninth highest foreclosure rate in the nation.

There should be no gloating on the part of urban advocates. This is a serious situation that will impact real families who thought they had escaped the negative effects of city living. It will be quite a shock if they discover they were wrong.

Related: Check foreclosures in your own neighborhood at RealtyTrac.

– Photo of Las Vegas suburb by Rich Lem on Flickr

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(Scott) Are suburbs the new slum?

Great article at theatlantic.com. Especially page three, where the author predicts the future.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

and

Despite this glum forecast for many swaths of suburbia, we should not lose sight of the bigger picture—the shift that’s under way toward walkable urban living is a healthy development. In the most literal sense, it may lead to better personal health and a slimmer population. The environment, of course, will also benefit: if New York City were its own state, it would be the most energy-efficient state in the union; most Manhattanites not only walk or take public transit to get around, they unintentionally share heat with their upstairs neighbors.

- photo by evetsggod on flickr 

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