Category Archives: cities

Dear Missouri, Please Don’t Cut Your Historic Preservation Tax Credits

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, historic preservation, Jobs, taxes, urban planning

≈ 3 Comments

Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Saint Louis

Missouri, I know you’ve been walloped by decades of deindustrialization and now the Great Recession. You’re being forced to make some terrible choices when it comes to your state budget. On the chopping block is your historic preservation tax credit. It may seem trite to cry for the potential loss of this program. I mean, shouldn’t you be spending taxpayer money on schools and roads and bridges? Yes, but hold on a second. You need to think this through. Where are your historic structures? In the middle of your cities! For the last 50 years, people have been abandoning your cities for the suburbs. In the meantime, you’ve had to build new roads, install new water and sewer lines, build new schools, and take care of this more spread-out infrastructure. Those buildings in the middle of your cities are worth keeping around. Worth investing in. They’re your history. They don’t make ’em like that anymore and it’s not going to be cheap to fix them. But it’s worth it. Here’s why:

1. Your state tax credit helps bring federal tax credits into Missouri. That’s 20% of the money spent rehabilitating National-Register-listed income-producing buildings and 10% for pre-1936 commercial buildings. That’s a lot of free money for your local economy. And, again, where are those old commercial buildings? Oh, right. In the middle of every city and town in your state. Besides that, your state tax credit can be used for residential buildings, too (federal tax credits are only for commercial buildings).

2. This is the only thing that’s going to put building contractors back to work. How many new subdivisions have you seen going up? Shiny new strip malls? Me, neither. That’s because nobody’s buying. You know what some people are doing, though? They’re picking up old historic houses and commercial buildings for a song and fixing them up. You want to keep that going?

3. Jobs in historic preservation are local. When your average developer rehabs a building (if he doesn’t tear it down to begin with), he uses contemporary products. Let’s take the windows, for example. Do you want the contractor to buy 25 vinyl windows for this historic building? Let’s not even take into consideration how bad that would look, since the windows won’t be the right size for the building and you can never paint them and they’ll only last 10 years. Would you rather have a man in China making those windows, or would you rather hire a craftsman from Missouri to rehang the windows, fix a few broken pains and reglaze them? I’m going with the guy that pays taxes in Missouri.

4. People are buying the neighborhood, not just the house. They want to be able to walk to a corner store, ride their bike, sit on a front porch. They want sidewalks and interesting architecture. They want places where people feel invested in the future. Places they can be proud of. Your historic neighborhoods are all those things. Developers don’t build neighborhoods like this anymore, so you’d better preserve the ones you have.

5. Your cities and town governments like these neighborhoods because they’re cheaper to serve. They don’t have cul de sacs; they have grid street patterns that are cheaper to plow in the winter, they don’t get traffic backups, and they’re close to existing fire houses, police precincts, and schools. Their water and sewer systems are under-capacity since neighborhood population is way off its peak. And since people have been investing in your downtowns for the last decade or so, hopefully these neighborhoods are closer to work for a lot of people, too.

6. Historic buildings are energy efficient. Well, they are when you take into account where they are. Historic buildings, like I said, are in the middle of your towns and cities. They require less driving for the people that live there because they’re closer to downtown and, well, each other. Transit systems serve them easier and people can walk to their destinations easier. And have you ever considered the energy it takes to tear down a building and construct a new one? Stuff them with insulation and fix the windows and they’re as good as anything you can build today.

7. These buildings are your icons. Did I mention these building are in the center of all your cities and towns? They’re what people think of when they talk about Missouri. They’re your past. They’re the reason people send postcards. They’re the reason people come to visit and decide they’ll stay. Don’t mess this up!

Advertisement

Parking Lots are Bad Neighbors

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in cities, incremental change, urban planning

≈ 4 Comments

Parking Lot #33 by Jason Brockert

City planning was a reaction to industrialization: smokestacks make bad neighbors, so cities created zoning. Who would want to live near a smoke-belching factory? It was dangerous and unhealthy. And it smelled bad. London had “dark satanic mills.” Pittsburgh was “hell with the lid off.” But, zoning has since evolved to not only separate the industrial from the residential, but to separate commercial from residential, and residential (apartments) from residential (single-family). What in the world is zoning protecting me from there? The way I see it, it’s cars. Well, parking lots. And that’s creating a cycle of urban decline and reliance on oil (and deteriorated water quality, poor air quality, obesity, yada, yada).

We’ve had two themes running through planning for the last 75 years, and where they overlap is in the parking lot. The first theme is, make it easy for me to drive my car anywhere, whenever I want. Second, keep those cars away from my house! Here’s the problem: When you live in a city where everyone has a car, your stores need to have parking lots. But, who wants to live next to a parking lot? So zoning ends up separating your neighborhood grocery from your neighborhood. Then everyone has to drive there. Then it needs a bigger parking lot. Etc.

Right now, most cities have parking requirements built into their zoning codes. Want to put a yoga studio in your house? Good luck. You’ll probably have to supply enough parking spaces as if every person taking yoga with you drove by themselves. (And, be honest — they probably would.) But, big retailers, churches, and office buildings very often supply much more parking than is required. The retailers build their parking lots for the biggest shopping day of the year, churches want enough parking spaces for every seat in the sanctuary, and the owners of office buildings want flexibility for any possible tenant. And when you get a bunch of these buildings next to each other, you get parking lot after redundant parking lot. And you have to drive there.

So, how do we begin to solve this mess and pull our cities back together? It may fix itself, but not in a way that many of us would enjoy. If gas prices rise sharply, people won’t want to drive as much or as far as they do now. In the end, the market will react and we’ll probably see a trend back to neighborhood-scale retail and services. But what if we actually wanted our city policies to create a place where we could choose not to drive?

City policies could squeeze from two directions — do away with some minimum parking requirements and add parking maximums. It probably won’t destroy any neighborhoods to allow businesses up to a certain square footage to rely on on-street parking. And I’m sure we could come up with reasonable numbers for a maximum number of parking spaces for different land uses.

And what if we separated parking requirements from individual buildings? We do that in many downtowns. By virtue of locating in a walkable urban center, building owners are not required to provide parking, and it somehow works out. What if we did that in other places? Just said, we have enough parking here. No asphalt required. Or, no more asphalt, period. In growing suburban areas, it might actually inspire useful development of those empty spaces. And it could discourage tear-downs in more urban neighborhoods, too.

This is an incremental policy change, obviously. But building a city is incremental itself. Without changing the whole framework for city planning, this is how we make better places to live.

Image

What kind of city do you deserve?

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Geography is everywhere, especially in our cities. It’s why the Rust Belt used to be shiny (the Erie Canal) and why my beautiful bungalow was so damn cheap (the schools suck). It’s also the reason you probably drive everywhere even though gas is so expensive (we’ve built our cities in a way that you don’t often have a choice).

Geography answers the question, why there? It’s a useful thing to know if your job is to steer an entity of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people, making individual decisions. “Steer” is too strong a word, though. Educated and influence those who steer my city is more like it.

You see, city planning is ultimately a democratic process. Every decision is voted on by your city council, whose members want to keep their residents happy. If city residents, aka voters, don’t understand how a city works, they can’t be expected to support the difficult decisions their elected officials need to make.

And that’s what I want to do here, just on a bigger scale. I’m a city planner who wants his city to work for all the people who live here. A city should give its residents access — access to jobs, education, community, a safe place to live, good health, and a way to participate. But this blog isn’t so much about my city; it’s about our cities. When you add it all up, we’re talking about big-picture stuff — the environment, the economy, our futures. So, if more of us understand how our cities work, maybe we’ll get the cities we deserve.

Posted by | Filed under big picture, cities, geography

≈ 2 Comments