In the News
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Washington Post Writers Group
“Back to the City” — Is This Its Moment?
by Neal Peirce
City or suburb? For decades that’s been the choice for most Americans. Suburbs have been the hands-down winners — by the millions, we’ve rushed to the urban edge.
But could we be on the cusp of an historic “back to the city” shift? The case is building.
Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing Magazine, says we’re in the midst of a “demographic inversion.” Check such cities as Atlanta and Washington, he suggests — they’re beginning to resemble historic Vienna or Paris, the centuries-old pattern in which the people of means chose to live near the vital city centers, while the poor were left to live in the less expensive outskirts.
Atlanta, for example, is seeing so many better-off whites move in that its decades-old status as a predominantly black and low-income city may soon be reversed. Conversely, suburban Clayton and DeKalb Counties are already registering black majorities while simultaneously serving as immigrant gateways.
A parallel switch has been underway in Washington, D.C. for several years as young professionals have poured into neighborhoods such as the 14th and U Street corridors that were an epicenter of the 1968 riots. Chicago has registered sensational gains in downtown living. The same phenomenon is being registered continent wide — strong on the West Coast, even cropping up in such Sunbelt cities as Charlotte and Houston.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Michigan Business Review
Urbanism and Density: Residential Building Themes for the Future?
by Paula Gardner
I'm heading into a convention where 100,000 building industry professionals will take four days to focus on sustaining their business during a nationwide building slowdown.
But what kind of building will that be? And what should it look like if it's going to be sustainable into the future?
"The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream" by Christopher B. Leinberger lays out some suggestions, backed up by his research and experience.
Leinberger runs the real estate program at the University of Michigan and he's a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Thanks to Ann Arbor developer Peter Allen, I read a copy of this new book on the plane to Orlando - and found myself obsessing about what kind of opportunity this housing slowdown presents.
Leinberger values the walkable urban environment over driveable suburbanism, and he tracks the emerging market shift toward housing that is more dense and centered in areas where residents can walk or use public transportation for shopping, work, entertainment.
What's scary about that? "Density," of course, which is a loaded word. Don't we all see how anyone outside of a blighted urban area (I'm thinking Detroit here, which welcomed multi-family housing in recent years) feels threatened by allowing more people onto less land?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
GrowthNews
The Option of Urbanism: Investing In a New American Dream, by Christopher B. Leinberger, Island Press, 2008
gulfcoastinstitute.org/growthnews/
In his new book, The Option of Urbanism, real estate developer, consultant, professor, and Brookings Fellow Christopher Leinberger says “the United States faces a conundrum in how to grow and provide a high quality of life that is sustainable. Walkable urbanism is a crucial part of the answer.”
Tracing the history and consequences of drivable suburbanism in the US, Leinberger explains how this “social experiment” aligned itself with the primary economic industries of the day and became virtually the only option for new development in the latter half of the 20th century. Recently, however, the real estate market pendulum has begun to swing back, says Leinberger, and changes in demographics, consumer preference, and awareness of the negative outcomes of a single, automobile-reliant development pattern have created a “pent-up” demand for more lifestyle options - particularly more walkable urbanism - from our built environments.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
New York Times
Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise
by Peter S. Goodman
Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.
Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief.
They still revel in the space and quiet that has drawn a steady exodus from American cities toward places like this for more than half a century. Their living room ceiling soars two stories high. A swing-set sways in the breeze in their backyard. Their wrap-around porch looks out over the flat scrub of the high plains to the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Greater Greater Washington Blog
Consensus and controversy in Rockville's Pike
GreaterGreaterWashington.com
Last night I attended a community meeting in Rockville about "envisioning a great place" for Rockville Pike, specifically the segment from Twinbrook Parkway to Richard Montgomery Drive (just north of Wootton Parkway). This section is almost entirely filled with strip malls behind large parking lots—the cookie-cutter suburban retail that makes Rockville's main street "Anywhere USA," as the consultant team running the meeting put it. It's the retail where, as Christopher Leinberger writes,
During the last fifteen minutes of design, the architect will ask, "Where will this center be located?" If he is told it will be in southern California, a Mediterranean tile roof and stucco will be specified. If it is to be in Washington, D.C., it will have an eighteenth-century Federalist-style brick façade with white pillars.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Charlotte Observer
New Kind of Growth Emerging for Charlotte
by Chris Leinberger
...Metro Charlotte seems to be following a national trend in creating and growing high-density, walkable urban places. The opening of the Lynx light rail line to the south is showing the way. It starts in a re-energized Center City with the one-of-a-kind performing arts center, museums, high-rise temples of commerce, sports venues, a convention center, high-end hotels, the central library, among other regionally significant treasures. There is now a "there there" in Center City.
However, housing is the true sign that a downtown is viable. For years, the few urbanites in Charlotte found refuge in the Fourth Ward, one of the special places in the South. However, resilient, safe and racially and socially integrated housing districts have emerged in the First, Second and Third Wards, as well as the beginning of luxury high-rise living in the heart of Center City. There even are small grocery stores and some of the best dining in the region. You are seeing the emergence of a Big City.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Groovygreen.com
Can We Stay in the Suburbs
by Aaron Newton
The suburbs were born out of an idea that each man could have his own cottage in the forest, his own unmolested paradise outside of the nastys of the industrializing cities and still go to work in those cities each day. (Just how many of the problems we’re facing today are born out of us wanting to both have and eat our cake?) The idea was that a man could still earn a living in the dirty city but return to his pristine piece of land where his wife and children could be free from pollution, crime, brown people, noise and traffic. It never quite worked out that way, which is to say it has, since the beginning, failed to achieve what this experiment set out to accomplish; to say nothing of the negative aspects of this way of developing our countryside. But nevertheless, the end result is that a lot of people live on small amounts of land in communities that aren’t completely paved over with asphalt and concrete. Many of us here in this country have access to land albeit in small amounts. This provides us with the most important resource needed to address the rising cost of food- soil.
Monday, March 03, 2008
The Star
Downtown Density Will Prevail
Over Slums of Suburbia
by Christopher Hume
As Leinberger writes, "Most Americans now live in single-family suburban houses that are segregated from work, shopping, and entertainment; but it is urban life, almost exclusively, that is culturally associated with excitement, freedom, and diverse daily life. And as in the 1940s, the real-estate market has begun to react."
The key phrase here is "culturally associated." Instead of Leave it to Beaver, the suburbs have now become the setting for Desperate Housewives.
Looking back at the postwar conditions that unleashed the explosion of suburbia, it's clear the growth was inspired as much as anything by a desire to escape from the city. Density, associated with danger, disease and decay, was the enemy.
Sixty years later, beset by gridlock, shoddy construction and environmental degradation that can no longer be ignored, density has started to look good again.
March 2007
The Atlantic Monthly
The New Slum?
by Chris Leinberger
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.
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.”
Friday, February 29, 2008
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Tampa's downtown analyzed by Brookings fellow
by Michael Hinman
In the effort to convert downtown into a more walkable area, movement on three museums as well as the growth of the retail district -- including restaurants that now have dinner menus -- is helping, Leinberger said. But it can't stop there.
Of the top 30 metro areas in the country, only Detroit and Tampa fail to have a workable light rail system, Leinberger said. Private interests have come together in Detroit to help put such a transportation system together.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Philadelphia Daily News
Philly's Many Walkable 'Center Cities'
by Chris Leinberger
WALK SCORE, a new Web site popular with urbanists and environmentalists (walkscore.com), rates places for their walkability - the ease of meeting daily needs on foot.
The popularity of the site is an indicator that how the American Dream plays out on the ground has been fundamentally changing over the last 10 to 15 years.
The Ozzie and Harriet drivable suburban version of the American Dream is being supplemented by the Seinfeld vision of "walkable urbanism." Led by late-marrying young adults and empty-nester baby-boomers, many households are looking for the excitement and options living and working in a walkable urban place can bring. With almost nine of 10 new households over the next 20 years being singles or couples without children, this trend promises to continue.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 - 12:31 PM PST
Seattle is nation's sixth-best city to walk, says study
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)
Seattle is the nation's sixth most walkable city among the 30 largest U.S. cities surveyed by the Brookings Institute.
Washington, D.C.-based Brookings, a nonprofit public policy organization, ranked Washington, D.C., at the top, followed by Boston, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Denver and Portland.
Survey coordinator Christopher Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow at Brookings, said rail transit plays a "significant role in catalyzing walkable urban development," with 65 percent of the walkable urban places being served by rail transit service.
Wednesday, December 5,2007
Detroit 18th in national study
Walkable cities are newly desirable
Associated Press
By Sarah Karush
ARLINGTON, Va. --Young professionals are driving a national trend toward more walkable communities, said the author of a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution. The report ranks the Washington region first among major U.S. metropolitan areas in the number of walkable places per capita, thanks to changes over the past 15 years. Detroit ranked 18th.
Christopher Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow at Brookings, set out to quantify the trend by counting regional-serving walkable urban places in each of the 30 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas. Regional-serving means the place is not just a bedroom community, but has jobs, retail or cultural institutions that bring in people.
December 5, 2007
Apple Walks Tall
New York Post
By John Mazor and Rita Delfiner
New Yorkers, strut your stuff - the metro area leads the nation in having the most "walkable urban places."
That's one finding of a new report released yesterday by the Brookings Institution, which ranked 30 of the biggest US metropolitan areas according to the number of "places" where most daily needs can be met within walking distance from your home or by transit.
"The New York metro area has the absolute largest number of walkable urban places with 21 - but not on a per-capita basis - and most of the 21 are clustered in Manhattan and Brooklyn," said report author Christopher Leinberger.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Baltimore so-so for walkablity
Baltimore Sun Online
By Tim Wheeler
Just how walkable are Baltimore and its suburbs? A new report from the Brookings Institution in Washington rates the nation's top 30 metropolitan areas by the number of walkable places or neighborhoods they have. Good ol' Charm City comes in 15th, with just two places -- the Inner Harbor and Fells Point -- meeting the think tank's criteria for inclusion.
"You're in the top 15," points out the report's author, Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use thinker and teacher with a long history as a developer. A visiting scholar at Brookings, he lives in Washington and teaches real estate at the University of Michigan.
November 12, 2007
A step in transit
Troy could become regional center for buses, light rail
By Daniel Duggan
Crain’s Detroit Business Journal
High hopes surround a plan for a $3 million transit center in Troy that is expected to spur walkable development and connect the sprawling suburb to Detroit and other communities.
Regional planners say the center, near the edge of Birmingham, could act like a regional transit point as the area's struggling transportation system develops around it.
December 3, 2007
KCUR News
Urban Walkability in Kansas City
by Sylvia Maria Gross
KANSAS CITY, MO (2007-12-03) A new study by the Brookings Institution ranks Kansas City as 23rd of the 30 largest US cities in terms of walkable urban areas. But the study's author, Christopher Leinberger, sees a lot of potential in some of Kansas City's new development, particularly downtown. Leinberger has been following the region as an advisor to a pair of filmmakers who are documenting the revitalization of downtown. He told KCUR's Sylvia Maria Gross that what's happening in Kansas City could be an example for the rest of the country.
University of Michigan professor and Brookings Institution visiting fellow Christopher Leinberger wrote The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream.
November 4, 2007
A dynamic downtown
Why not in Tucson?
By Rob O'Dell
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
In many ways, the tale of the two downtowns is the same.
Both were hubs of commerce and the center city life in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.
Urban renewal leveled parts of their central cores in the early 1970s, and streets grew deserted as retailers moved out to the malls.
As they fell into disrepair, one downtown revitalization plan followed another as governments tried to turn the tide.
Albuquerque and Tucson — their stories are interchangeable, with one big difference.
Since both redoubled their downtown efforts in 1999, Albuquerque has pulled ahead of Tucson in terms of activities and amenities, nightlife and first-class lodging — despite Tucson's having more than $100 million in state money, a pot that overflowed to $600 million in 2005.
November 4, 2007
Lessons can be learned from Albuquerque
How Tucson falls short on redevelopment of Downtown
By Rob O'Dell
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Since Tucson and Albuquerque both initiated moves to revitalized moribund downtowns in 1999, Albuquerque has surged ahead in amenities, night life and residents, while Tucson remains pretty much as it was.
Downtown-redevelopment endeavors often spend big money on big projects that don't give a "human face" and a sense of place to downtowns, said Christopher Leinberger, one of Albuquerque's first downtown developers, who is now with the Brookings Institution.