Streetsblog Capitol Hill

“A leading voice for better urban design for the sake of good health.” “A public health/social justice hero.” Dr. Richard Jackson, chair of environmental health at UCLA, is a leading voice for transportation reform whose work has linked America’s sprawl to the nation’s high rates of obesity.

The former director of the Center for Disease Control’s Environment Health Department will take to the airwaves Tuesday in an interview with PBS’s Tavis Smiley. The interview will run in coordination with Dr. Jackson’s four-hour documentary series, Designing Healthy Communities (check local listings).

Dr. Jackson spent years researching public health epidemics and zeroed in on car dependence and sprawl as leading factors in America’s diabetes and obesity epidemics.

“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”

He adds: “Two percent of the United States’ gross domestic product goes to the treatment of diabetes. This is a crushing economic impact.”

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UPDATE 1/5/12: Corrects the Congressional district outline.

At a recent meeting of the city council in Celina, Ohio, members considered a request to extend sewer lines to six homes that are currently outside the city’s boundaries. Extending the sewer line 800 feet to the houses would cost the city $40,000. A new water line was under discussion as well, doubling the cost.

The homeowners would supposedly pay back the amount in five years. That would amount to a monthly payment of more than $220 per household, without interest. But in cases like these, the beneficiaries of new utilities rarely pay the full cost.

For a place that’s on the forefront of a heavily-subsidized brand of taxpayer-funded suburban sprawl, Celina is steeped in the kind of conservative politics that generally eschews government subsidies.

Celina sits on the boundary between two of the most conservative Congressional districts in the state of Ohio. Downtown Celina is represented by none other than House Speaker John Boehner, who has been the face of the movement to cut government spending. He’s made it clear that he thinks transportation means highways (not bike lanes) and has been only too happy to slash transportation spending (unless he can get the green light for oil drilling by raising it.)

He’s not as conservative, though, as Rep. Bob Latta, who represents the area just north of Celina, including the six homes that want sewer and water service. Latta is the son of Delbert Latta, who represented the area for 30 years and pushed for Amtrak service in his district. But his son has voted to cut public support for Amtrak, while pushing for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge in order to lower gas prices. He was late to support the 3-C passenger rail service in Ohio, though he eventually did.

And Latta is probably not as conservative as Rep. Jim Jordan, whose district starts slightly east of Celina. Jordan, the head of the far-right Republican Study Committee, proposed a spending-cut bill last year that would have cut $6.5 billion from transportation subsidies, mostly for transit. And he wants to eliminate subsidies for Amtrak altogether.

How do conservative voters and politicians square their hatred for government subsidies with their city-shunning sprawl patterns that suck the lifeblood out of local governments – and taxpayers? Outward sprawl forces jurisdictions to keep building new roads and schools and to extend emergency services farther and farther afield. Sprawl induces driving and leads to more public pressure to expand roads — a vicious circle of new development and new roads. Even in rural areas, one lane mile of new road can cost up to $9 million [PDF].

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We all know sprawl is costly to local communities. Roads, schools, sewers: It all adds up.

But the total price-tag is hard to determine, and that ambiguity undermines efforts at reform. What qualifies as sprawl? How much additional infrastructure is needed to support it?

That’s why it’s exciting that a group of concerned Florida homeowners has tackled this difficult question. Priceofsprawl.com shows that Florida communities pay dearly for “growth” that is often sold as a win-win. In reality, every dollar generated by new development in Florida costs taxpayers $1.34-$2.45. The more rural the setting, the higher the cost.

This project, presented as an interactive map, allows Floridians to see how sprawling development affects their local taxes and home values. Numbers were determined using existing impact studies and local comprehensive plans.

Just scroll over Lee County and the map will tell you that property values are down 54 percent here since 2006. Thirteen percent of the county’s homes are vacant. In fact, this region of Florida — the Greater Fort Myers area — has been something of a poster child for the foreclosure crisis. “There is arguably no single housing market with a worse long-term outlook than southwest Florida, and the Cape Coral-Fort Myers region is the worst of these,” wrote investment blog 24/7 Wall Street last week.

Despite all this, Lee County authorities have authorized a massive amount of new development. Local zoning laws have reserved enough land for new housing development to allow the building of 1.1 million homes, or 228 percent more than the current 346,000 homes. According to Priceofsprawl.com, building out that plan would cost suffering Lee County $3.12 billion in road construction, or about $10,000 per household, plus another $943 million to build the necessary schools. The oversupply of housing further drags down the value of existing homes.

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Last week Streetsblog looked into the suburban real estate moguls who used their public offices to advance the country’s largest sprawl project – Houston’s third outerbelt, also known as the Grand Parkway. But even with all the cronyism and self-deal propelling this project forward, just a few months ago it looked like the Grand Parkway had been stopped in its tracks. The money had run out. The public was balking [PDF].

Then a man named Ned Holmes came to the rescue. A real estate developer, Texas DOT commissioner and prominent businessman, Holmes “found” the $350 million in unbudgeted money needed to move the project forward another 15 miles in its relentless, multi-decade march into the Houston region’s last natural grasslands.

In many ways Ned Holmes fits the profile of the government officials that have pushed this project forward in the past: He’s a real estate developer occupying a public office that gives him enormous power to shape the built environment.

In his public life, Holmes is a well-known pillar of the Texas conservative establishment. According to the Texas Secretary of State, he is the director of the Houston Baptist University, Associated Republicans of Texas, the Greater Houston Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Houston Partnership and the Governor’s Business Council.

In his business activities, however, Holmes keeps a lower profile. He made a fortune in banking, but he identifies himself as a real estate developer, the head of Parkway Investments.

As for what Parkway Investments does exactly, it’s hard to know. The company has no website. There is no public record of properties developed. Holmes declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to email queries. But he did respond through a TxDOT employee, who said Holmes does not stand to profit in any of his business ventures from the completion of the $5.2 billion Grand Parkway.

But the company certainly has a record for actively supporting local politicians. In 2004 alone, Parkway Investments donated $174,000 to a variety of candidates, making Holmes one of the single biggest political donors in the state.

According to data maintained by Texans for Public Justice, Holmes has been a big supporter of Texas Governor Rick Perry. In fact, Holmes donated $192,000 to Rick Perry before the governor appointed him to TxDOT’s powerful Texas Transportation Commission in 2007. (Rick Perry has given 15 appointed positions to individuals who have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns, according to TPJ.)

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“That strip mall just got rezoned for high rise buildings.” “These auto dealerships are going to disappear.”

Those aren’t words you hear very often in suburbia, but if you’re hanging out in Tysons Corner, Virginia, you’d better get used to it. This office enclave, which sits dead center between Washington, DC and Dulles International Airport, is experiencing a rare and dramatic transformation – from traffic-choked “edge city” to walkable urban center.

Fifty years ago this area was dairy farms. But fueled by employment at the headquarters of several major defense contractors, Tysons is now the 12th biggest business district in the country, and the single biggest outside a major city. Even during the recession, office vacancy has stayed comparatively low at 14 percent.

Tysons is also a retail heavyweight, with the fifth biggest shopping mall in the U.S. And no wonder – it sits in Fairfax County, consistently ranked one of the wealthiest in the country.

But even with all these jobs and shopping opportunities, it lacks people. There are 105,000 jobs in Tysons but only 17,000 residents. Nobody lives there.

Almost four years ago, Time gave Tysons this back-handed compliment: “That it is also a strip-malled, traffic-clogged mess does not take away from the fact that it is one of the great economic success stories of our time.”

All of this presents a unique opportunity for planners. How do you take an existing business district — dysfunctional but also thriving in its own way — and re-fashion it into a real urban center? And how do you get community support for a project that’s going to mean decades of disruptive construction and the uprooting of much existing infrastructure?

Fairfax County planner Tracy Strunk admits that re-planning something this big is incredibly ambitious. While they looked to development along the much-lauded Rosslyn-Ballston metro corridor for inspiration, “You get a few blocks from Rosslyn station and you’re in single-family detached. This isn’t going to be single-family detached.”

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They lord over empty parking lots in Hazard, Kentucky; Twinsburg, Ohio; and Lewiston, Washington like the ruins of a lost civilization. Vacant Walmart stores are slowly decomposing in more and more American towns these days. More than 100 of them have been memorialized as part of the group Flickr pool known smugly as “They Sold for Less.”

These empty husks — yet to be filled by any other retail tenant — are part of the detritus left behind by a paradigm shift in the real estate industry. Signs of the changing times, they tell us what kind of society we were before the bubble burst.

Now, as the commercial real estate industry regroups, evidence is mounting that Walmart and other mega-retailers will take a much different form than they have in the past. The new American shopping experience, according to many industry observers, will be less “suburban big-box” and more “urban destination.”

The demise of several mega-retail chains during the recession, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, helped produce a vast oversupply of retail space, particularly that of the giant, boxy, just-off-the-interstate variety. Last summer, the research arm of giant commercial real estate firm Colliers International reported that there was nearly 300 million square feet of vacant big box retail space on the market — 34 percent of total retail vacancy left behind by a recession that walloped commercial real estate almost as hard as housing.

Since 2008 alone, 120 million square feet of big box retail space has become available. To put such numbers in perspective, that is the equivalent of the total shopping center space in Cincinnati, Kansas City and Baltimore combined, Colliers reported.

This period of retrenchment has humbled even the once-mightiest of retail forces. CNN reported last month that Walmart stores suffered their ninth-straight quarterly drop in sales. Another sign of the times: Walmart is no longer enough of a bargain for U.S. consumers, it appears. The mega-retailer has been losing market share to dollar stores.

The situation has apparently reached the point where the retail monolith is rethinking its whole carbon-gulping model. Walmart is joining other retailers in thinking smaller and more urban, says Ed McMahon, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

“What the recession has made completely clear is that we have way too much retail,” McMahon said. “We are going from the era of the big box to the era of the small box.”

Enter the “Walmart Express.”

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The protest movements that have changed the world — for peace, civil rights or labor justice — have always had rallying songs that inspired devotees and informed the masses. The smart growth movement is no exception: sprawl and the general shortcomings of the American suburb have been a favorite theme among musicians ever since the invention of the cul-de-sac.

Rock music over the last five decades literally teems with songs about loneliness, alienation, disaffection, conformity, overbearing authority, and general malaise as they relate to the modern suburban landscape. And as time has gone on, the cries have only gotten louder.

The first musical rattlings of protest began nearly as soon as sprawl itself in the early 1960s. One of the first hits of this genre is Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes,” written in 1962 and made famous by Pete Seeger the following year. More recently, it was picked up by Showtime as the theme song for the suburban melodrama “Weeds.” Like many of its type, the song dwells on themes of conformity, material excess and spiritual poverty.

Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one / And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky / And they all look just the same.

Another classic is Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” recorded in 1970. The song was inspired by a trip to Hawaii. When Mitchell looked out her hotel window, she saw a beautiful vista, marred by a large parking lot. The trip also reportedly included a trip to the Honolulu Botanical Garden, which contained many rare and endangered tropical plants.

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Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government? Most Americans don’t. In fact, most people probably have no idea these agencies even exist, let alone what they do. Yet they are surprisingly powerful and play a substantial role in shaping the places where we live and work.

Led by unelected boards, MPOs and COGs, as they’re known, are a special breed among government agencies. They lack the authority to issue taxes or impose laws. As such, they go largely unmentioned in the media and are mostly unknown to local residents, outside of the most wonkish circles. But the low profile of MPOs and COGs belies their considerable power.

Despite their limitations, they represent the strongest form of regional governance we’ve got in the United States, crossing city and county lines. More importantly, they disperse hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars annually. While these agencies often distribute transportation funds more fairly than state DOTs, many of them are structured in a way that favors sprawl and undermines cities.

MPOs and COGs can be profoundly undemocratic. They are governed by boards of public officeholders, but there is no requirement that they be in any way representative of the region’s population. In fact, the general rule that governs the composition of MPO boards is “one place, one vote,” rather than the more traditional “one person, one vote.” This often produces decisions dramatically skewed toward suburban and rural interests.

For example, greater Milwaukee’s MPO, known by the unwieldy acronym SEWRPC, is governed by a board of 21 members, three from each of the counties that make up the planning region. That means that the city of Milwaukee — population nearly 600,000 — has zero representatives on the commission that distributes millions of dollars for transportation throughout the region. It is not guaranteed any votes. The city’s only voting power comes from the three seats given to Milwaukee County — and those must be spread between the central city and many suburbs. Meanwhile, rural Walworth County — population 100,000 — is guaranteed three votes.

Milwaukee is an especially egregious case. But unfortunately, this general pattern is more the norm than the exception. A 1999 Brookings Institution study [PDF] found that central cities were under-represented in as many as 92 percent of MPOs and COGs.

That bias can have a strong impact on policy, further research has shown. A 2003 study by researchers at Virginia Tech found that for each additional suburban member on an MPO board, there was a 1 to 9 percent decrease in funding for transit — with highways being the favored alternative.

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Youngstown, Ohio has its share of problems.

Once a single-industry steel town, the rust belt poster child has seen its population dwindle from 115,000 residents to barely 67,000 over just three decades. For the better part of the last century, the city was known for its mafia activity, and shaking off the residue of government corruption and violence has been difficult. Its homicide rate — driven upward by a not-yet-recovered economy — puts the city in league with towns three times its size.

But undergirding all of these ills is the problem that might just be Youngstown’s biggest: its built infrastructure is simply to large for its current population.

The starkest example is its excess housing stock. At last count, demolition crews were slogging through some 3,300 vacant houses. But sewers, streets, even stoplights: all of these former amenities linger at a scale meant for the days when the mills were still turning the skies orange and filling the pockets of workers who, in turn, filled the gambling houses.

Now these physical amenities have become liabilities. A diminished tax base limits the city’s ability to maintain its aging streets and sewers. Signals stop drivers on abandoned streets and force them to burn fuel while waiting for the passing of phantom traffic.

Almost a decade ago, Youngstown made headlines by acknowledging this problem. No longer would the city plan for growth, the way every American city had in the history of urban planning. Youngstown was planning to shrink — but to shrink smart. The plan was known as Youngstown 2010.

The city would start by tearing down the abandoned houses that depressed neighboring property values and acted as magnets for crime. Their hope was that some neighborhoods could be depopulated and that the city might even be able to tear out some underutilized streets, in order to dispense with sending around the plows and the patch crews. This revolutionary “right-sizing” concept has since been embraced by cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

The plan was called Youngstown 2010, but now — in 2011 — the city of Youngstown is just getting around to removing its first street. Part of the problem is that the state, regional and national policy framework is still oriented for growth. After all, Youngstown can’t go to the Ohio Department of Transportation and ask for money to tear out roads — yet. ODOT’s money is for building roads, and that fuels a dynamic that threatens what progress has made in Youngstown.

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There’s a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for migratory birds, especially waterfowl.

Over the decades, this 1,000 square mile sanctuary has largely survived the encroachment of farmers and relentless development pressure from neighboring Houston, thanks in no small part to its dedicated supporters.

But the Katy Prairie has never faced a opponent like the Grand Parkway before. Piece by piece, the Houston area has been building a third — yes, third — bypass for the region. And much to the horror of local environmentalists, the next segment is planned to directly bisect this extraordinary habitat.

Development of this pristine land isn’t just collateral damage — it’s the point of the project. Project sponsors make no bones about it: The 15.2-mile Grand Parkway segment through Katy Prairie is a $462 million development project as much as it is a transportation project. Known as “Segment E,” it would be the third phase in a 180-mile “scenic bypass” for Houston. Each of the 11 segments is considered a separate and “independently justifiable project.”

Billy Burge of the Grand Parkway Association says right now there isn’t much need for Segment E, in terms of traffic. Burge and his colleagues don’t shy away from the fact that the project will generate more car trips and sprawl. In fact, they have what you might call a “build it and they will come” philosophy about road-building and traffic.

“There’s real demand in 15 to 17 years to have this,” said Burge, who chairs the association overseeing the project for the state and the region. “Once that link is completed, you’ll have a steady stream of traffic.”

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