Streetsblog Capitol Hill

You could say Oskaloosa, Iowa, population 11,000, is a model of small-town livability. Families rent apartments over renovated historic storefronts. Local college students take the bike lane down Market Street to grab a bite in the local restaurants. Visitors travel from distant towns to browse the city’s local bookstore in its revitalized, walkable town square.

Oskaloosa’s vibrancy is owed in large part to Iowa’s Main Street program — a public-private partnership aimed at returning economic competitiveness to historic town centers. Over its 25 year history in the state, this program has encouraged walkability, mixed use development and historic preservation in 47 Iowa communities.

To those who question whether the concept of livability works in rural communities, the answer from Oskaloosa and the Iowa Main Street program is self-evident. The Main Street effort has been credited with attracting $1 billion dollars in private investment — about $79 private dollars for every public dollar — according to an economic analysis commissioned by the program. Hardly an exclusive domain of the Hawkeye State, Main Street is a national program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation — at work in 37 states.

However, some key Republicans have threatened to dismantle efforts to bring these kinds of common-sense investments to communities around the country.

Indeed, Iowa Congressman Tom Latham, whose district is just a few miles from Oskaloosa, is chair of the powerful Transportation and HUD Subcommittee on Appropriations. Latham has questioned whether the concept of “livability” applies in rural communities. And others in the Republican leadership have threatened to cut funding for President Obama’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning program and TIGER grants, efforts that aim to bring important economic and quality-of-life improvements — as well as overall infrastructure cost savings — to both rural and urban areas.

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Slate has posted this map to illustrate the concentration of “food deserts,” where large numbers of people don’t have access to fresh food. The USDA considers households more than a mile from a supermarket and without access to a car to be in food deserts, often with only convenience-store junk food for nourishment. In 2009, the agency found 2.3 million of these households. Here, Slate shows the preponderance of those households in Appalachia and the Deep South, and on Indian reservations.

Access to healthy food is just one reason to build walkable places with a mix of uses and diverse transportation options. The places on this map are where people have been stranded — how walkable can your neighborhood be if you can’t walk to buy fresh produce? Many of the people identified here are poor and can’t afford cars. Some are elderly or disabled and can’t drive.

The most vulnerable members of our communities are the ones most hurt by transportation policies that keep a singular focus on automobile transportation and ignore those who need other ways to get around. What Slate is calling a food desert, you could also call an unlivable neighborhood, where even residents’ most basic needs — like access to healthy food — are denied.

The transfer of power in the House of Representatives gives transportation reformers plenty to wring their hands about. Oberstar’s ouster was a shock, and folks are still synthesizing what it means to have John Mica in charge of the next transportation bill.

But flying under the radar is another big shift with potentially enormous consequences. The Transportation and HUD subcommittee on Appropriations is getting a new master too. And livability advocates are alarmed.

Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) made it onto the League of American Bicyclists’ Trash Talk list this spring when he said every biker is “one less person paying into the transportation trust fund.”

The Final Say on Transpo Funding

If Latham is confirmed as the new chair of the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, he’ll have the power of the pursestrings. After all, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee can authorize any program they want, but if the appropriators don’t fund it, it doesn’t exist.

Latham is a close personal friend of presumptive Speaker John Boehner, who opposes Obama’s infrastructure push and believes he has a mandate to cut government spending. We’ve already heard that Mica wants to revisit discretionary grant programs like TIGER and the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning program, and advocates are bracing for a fight to preserve bike-ped funding.

But the fight won’t be won in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee alone – it’ll continue in Appropriations, where advocates will need to convince a fiscal conservative with little to no understanding of the need for walkability, smart growth, or urban transit. He’s made it clear that his priority in the subcommittee is “the efficient movement of agricultural products” on rural roads and “the importance of maintaining the vast road structures that we have today in rural America.”

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As the Obama administration's inter-agency sustainable communities project commands a growing share of attention and funding in Washington, the response from conservatives and business lobbies has been decidedly less than enthusiastic.

When Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a non-binding statement of support for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, stopping short of setting any "complete streets" standards for federal projects, the National Association of Manufacturers declared the idea "nonsensical."

But that initial backlash may be giving way to an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude among road-building industries. In fact, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) -- state DOTs' voice in the capital -- marked the 40th anniversary of Earth Day today with a new report that depicts roads and highway funding as essential to building more livable neighborhoods.

"While State DOTs support what can be done through transit, walking and biking to enhance 'livability,' what has been missing from the national dialogue is what can be accomplished through road-related improvements," AASHTO executive director John Horsley wrote in his introduction to the report.

Among the 13 developments AASHTO describes as evidence that state DOTs are "investing in community livability," two are not directly related to environmentally friendly transportation: creating jobs and stimulating the economy.

Other items on the list of 13 substantively overlap. For instance, AASHTO separates "green projects" such as the Detroit area's Midtown Loop -- a walking and biking path that got $2.3 million in stimulus aid last year -- from Transportation Enhancements, a 20-year-old program that requires states to set aside 10 percent of federal road formula money for bike-ped facilities or other, related efforts.

Yet the Midtown Loop, like many U.S. greenways, got its federal funding largely from the Enhancements program, which was the U.S. DOT's primary route for promoting cleaner transportation until the Obama administration launched its sustainability push.

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When President Obama signed an executive order in October requiring federal agencies to craft strategies for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, he described the mandate as Washington "lead[ing] by example" on the pollution-reduction front.

And that's true -- but the order also includes language telling federal agencies to get involved in integrating local transportation planning, with a particular focus on selecting sites for government facilities

that are pedestrian-friendly, near existing employment centers, and accessible to public transit, and emphasize existing central cities and, in rural communities, existing or planned town centers;

The overall goal for government agencies, as Obama's order put it, should be to "strengthen the vitality and livability of the communities in which federal facilities are located." Given that more than 2,200 communities host federally owned or leased property, that edict could unleash a lot of local energy for transit and pedestrian improvements.

The order also gives federal agencies eight months to craft long-term sustainability plans focusing on how to implement "strategies and accommodations for transit, travel, training, and conferencing that actively support lower-carbon commuting and travel by agency staff." The White House budget office and Council on Environmental Quality are charged with vetting each agency's proposal.

And as each agency devises those emissions-cutting plans, the Obama administration's push to consider sustainability as a transportation, housing, and environmental issue is given a meaty role in the process.

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The White House's effort to promote sustainable communities has prompted serious (and inadvertently humorous) hand-wringing from conservative pundits who fear the concept of livability will translate into governmental edicts on lifestyle choices. What's the best way to counter such tactics?

The administration's approach, it seems, is to define its goals in clear, digestible fashion. When an AARP interviewer asked Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood what he means by "livable communities," LaHood had a twelve-word answer ready to go: If you don't want an automobile, you don't have to have one.

Not every advocate for cleaner transportation may agree with LaHood's response, but it certainly marks progress in crafting an effective message for the Obama team's nascent livability effort.

The U.S. DOT is also actively touting its contributions to bicycle and transit infrastructure, cheering last week's premiere of the Washington D.C. Bikestation -- 80 percent of which was federally funded -- and calling for an end to the long-standing turf wars between different modes of transportation.

Will the administration succeed in quieting critics of its livability work? If highway lobbyists' latest take on the issue is any guide, it may take some time.

In the meantime, LaHood's full interview in the October addition of the AARP Bulletin is available after the jump. He talks about the White House's Green Cabinet, the stimulus law's slim pickings for transit, and other hot transportation topics.

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Architect Leon Krier has been dubbed the godfather of new urbanism. His work on the U.K.'s Poundbury development project, spearheaded by Prince Charles, has made the Luxembourg-born Krier one of the world's most talked-about urban planners.

When Krier won the University of Notre Dame's inaugural Driehaus Prize for classical architecture, Congress for the New Urbanism co-founder Andres Duany's was quoted describing a Krier lecture that changed the course of his career.

"I realized I couldn’t go on designing these fashionable tall buildings, which were fascinating visually, but didn’t produce any healthy urban effect. They wouldn’t affect society in a positive way," Duany said.

“The prospect of instead creating traditional communities where our plans could actually make someone’s daily life better really excited me."

Krier will be delivering a lecture at Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art tonight on the themes of his work and his latest book, The Architecture of Community. He sat down to speak with Streetsblog Capitol Hill about America, its transportation infrastructure, and his call for cities to consider the "human scale" as they develop.

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There is probably no more beloved figure in urbanism than Jane Jacobs, who fought to preserve some of New York City's most treasured neighborhoods and who gave urbanists some of the field's fundamental texts. As Ed Glaeser notes in the New Republic this week, Jacobs died in 2006 "a cherished, almost saintly figure," while her principal antagonist, Robert Moses, remains popularly reviled as a villain.

But as American cities have outgrown their infrastructure in recent decades, and as political institutions have proven unable to muster the energy necessary to construct great projects, Moses' reputation has enjoyed something of a recovery. Increasingly, he is being actively rehabilitated in new histories and essays, of which Glaeser's review is an example.

These efforts are interesting because they manage to earn a degree of sympathy from urbanists themselves, who have grown increasingly tired of the decades required to navigate a transit line from planning stages to operation.

There is something very attractive about an individual who can drive the stakes and get the project built -- damn the politicians, and damn the NIMBYs.

But this is dangerous territory. In rehabilitating Moses and reconsidering Jacobs, it's important to be clear about where each was right, and where each went wrong.

There are many ways to interpret the clash between Moses and Jacobs: development versus preservation, city versus suburb, design for people versus design for automobiles, power versus powerlessness, and so on. To acknowledge that the balance has swung too far in one direction in one of these conflicts does not at all suggest that the balances are similarly out of whack on others.

Take, for example, one of Glaeser's principal intellectual standbys: that resistance to development slows the growth of housing supply, increasing housing costs. Glaeser says:

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Debate over the incendiary urban policy issue of gun possession came to a head today in the Senate, as a proposal to let individuals carry concealed firearms into states with strong weapons limits -- such as New York and Illinois -- was defeated by a narrow margin.

The gun amendment, proposed by GOP Sen. John Thune (SD) would have let residents of states that permit concealed weapons to carry those guns across state lines, effectively neutralizing stronger laws passed by states that use firearm restrictions to combat urban crime.

The Thune amendment fell short by two votes, losing 58-39 as New York Sen. Charles Schumer (D) and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) led a successful filibuster. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also led a group of urban mayors in lobbying against the proposal.

Late Update: Politico gets New York reaction to Thune's claim that concealed weapons would make Central Park safer, including a cutting quip from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer: "I can't believe someone this ignorant gets elected to the United States Senate."

In November 2006, Danish planner Jan Gehl met Streetsblog Publisher Mark Gorton in Times Square to reflect on the state of the city's public spaces. In this Streetfilm by Clarence Eckerson, EIC Aaron Naparstek catches up with Gehl in the new Madison Square to talk about what has changed in the intervening two years, and what can still be done to make New York a world-class pedestrian city.