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Indeed: those attractive downtown neighborhoods aren't very affordable anymore.
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These neighborhoods are the economic drivers of their cities, often accounting for a disproportionate share of public revenue relative to their land mass. But today, only the wealthiest among us can afford to live in them. That will remain the case until we create many more Dupont Circles – enough to finally bring the supply of walkable urban neighborhoods in line with the demand of all the people who want to live in them.

These numbers all speak to a fundamental change in demand in our cities.

“It wasn’t that many years ago that walkable urban places had a price penalty associated with them, not a price premium,” Leinberger says. “That’s the structural shift. And when you have a structural shift, it’s important to change your public policy to take it into consideration.”

Those “walkable urban places” he’s talking about did not necessarily have people walking around in them 20 years ago (“Maybe they were running around because they were fearful of being mugged,” Leinberger says). These were the inner-city neighborhoods that middle-class city-dwellers abandoned decades ago. Over time, they deteriorated. They became the cheap places to live. And now that trend is reversing.
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atlantic_cities urbanism gentrification affordability

Staggering.
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“The first time I was really able to look at all of these images,” he says, “the thing that jumped out at me the most was that the one commonality among almost all of these prisons was that there was a baseball field there. And the baseball field mimicked the form about these buildings as well. There was something very American about it when I first saw it.”
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prison atlantic_cities images

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While low dense brush seems to increase it, tall broad canopies seem to decrease it. That nuanced conclusion harmonizes with another study published earlier this year, in which U.S.D.A. Forest Service researcher Geoffrey Donovan (who has also linked urban tree coverage to home prices) reports the same mixed tree-crime associations in Portland, Oregon.
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urban_forest urbanism crime atlantic_cities

D'oh. Big surprise - not.
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The activity of driving to work should be better thought of as inactivity, and all that time sitting on your butt is slowly eating away at your cardiovascular health – and probably adding to your waistline.
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cars transportation health atlantic_cities

No surprise, imo:
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[Vehicular traffic] changes the way children see and experience the world by diminishing their connection to community and neighbors. A generation ago, urbanist researcher Donald Appleyard showed how heavy traffic in cities erodes human connections in neighborhoods, contributing to feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness. Now his son, Bruce Appleyard, has been looking into how constantly being in and around cars affects children’s perception and understanding of their home territory.
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atlantic_cities children cars perception isolation

Totally makes sense:
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The eHighway might seem laughable at the moment to all but the most fervent environmentalist, but just wait. Air pollution in Long Beach and Riverside costs these communities an estimated $18 million annually in asthma bills, docking residents on average an incredible 8 percent of their household income. And the toxic stew isn't expected to waft away anytime soon. Here's Siemens infrastructure chief Daryl Dulaney laying out the grim prognosis for the future in a press release:

"When most people think of vehicle emissions, they assume cars do most of the damage, but it’s actually commercial trucks that are largely to blame," says Dulaney. Freight transportation on U.S. roadways is expected to double by 2050, and by 2030, carbon dioxide emissions are forecasted to jump 30 percent due to freight transport alone.
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atlantic_cities trucks pollution catenary e_cars los_angeles

Fascinating interview with William Gibson. At one point he says, "I think we invent ideologies to cope with technologies."
And:
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Gibson also bemoans cities that no longer enable young, artistic, and often not rich people from being able to move in and spur change. He cites both London and New York as places that used to allow this but which have gotten too expensive to be approachable by young creatives and are on their way to being "cooked."

"Once a city is completely cooked, it's more like Paris, where the city's business is not to change," says Gibson. "But it's not a place that actually welcomes innovation."
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atlantic_cities william_gibson interview

Interesting - inner city renewal, courtesy of big tech companies?
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Google’s decision to locate its Pittsburgh operations in the inner city is but one way America’s ever-expanding knowledge economy is changing the real estate sector, something it is expected to continue doing. Not only are high-tech companies looking for unusual spaces that are reflective of their corporate culture, but firms in the knowledge sector are also reviving inner-city neighborhoods, spearheading the drive for sustainability, and even changing the way some new buildings are designed.
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pittsburgh google urban_renewal atlantic_cities

"Appleyard published his compelling research in 1981 in a book called Livable Streets. Sadly, he died the next year — struck by a speeding car in Athens, Greece — and perhaps that is why he is not better known, even among urbanists. But his findings, which have recently been replicated in the United Kingdom, should be part of any discussion about the erosion of social ties in modern society.

Appleyard did his research in San Francisco in 1969, looking at three categories of streets: light traffic (2,000 vehicles per day), medium traffic (8,000 vehicles), and heavy traffic (16,000). What he found was that residents of lightly trafficked streets had two more neighborhood friends and twice as many acquaintances as those on the heavily trafficked streets.

Residents who were interviewed by Appleyard also talked about what they saw as their home territory. On the heavily trafficked street, respondents indicated that their apartment, or perhaps their building, qualified as “home.” On the light-traffic streets, people often saw the whole block as home. They also included much more detail when asked to draw pictures of their streets."

atlantic_cities donald_appleyard traffic cars automobile socialtheory urbanism

The Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) has become gosple of sorts, but there's still lots to do:
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“If the first phase of CNU has culminated in a broader culture acceptance of urbanism as a force for good, the second phase will be defined by successfully pushing for policy and design reform that actually allows urbanism to get built,” says CNU president John Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee.

Big foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, and Kresge are supporting transit and see urbanism as the setting for advancing social justice. Others see great public health benefits. A big focus is to get at the anti-urban policies and standards and rules at the federal, state and local level, Norquist says.

If that sounds like nitty-gritty implementation, and a little bit nerdy, too, CNU has always had a mix of rock-star designers and those among the 1,500 architects, designers, planners, elected officials, developers and others expected for the conference, who like nothing better than a lengthy debate on the merits of different varieties of shade trees.

Still, as unglamorous as it is, re-writing the owner’s manual for urbanism makes sense. It’s what another architectural movement – the Congress International Architecture Moderne (CIAM), after which CNU is modeled – did. Leaders like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius wasted little time embedding modernism in codes and academic curricula.
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atlantic_cities anthony_flint cnu new_urbanism

+1 on more urban trees. Few things improve a streetscape more. It seems that higher urban temperatures help trees grow, and then of course more trees also mitigate the urban heat island effect.
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Despite other conditions that might have influenced this faster growth, the researchers have determined that the hyper-growth speeds are largely attributable to the higher temperatures in the city. They confirmed this hypothesis with seedlings grown in a lab under similar temperatures and conditions.

Trees can provide a number of benefits to urban areas. Their positive impact on property values has been documented extensively. Urban trees have also been found to provide a significant economic benefit to cities due to their role in stormwater treatment, energy use reduction, air quality improvement and carbon sequestration.

Trees have also been found to help counter the urban heat island effect that is apparently helping them grow much faster – a negative feedback loop that suggests planting more trees in the city makes a lot of environmental sense. The warmer temperatures caused by the urban heat island effect are certainly causing problems in cities, but they're also creating what have turns out to be ideal conditions for tree planting.
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trees urban_forest cities amenities atlantic_cities

Great article about how we went from this:
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Browse through New York Times accounts of pedestrians dying after being struck by automobiles prior to 1930, and you’ll see that in nearly every case, the driver is charged with something like “technical manslaughter.” And it wasn’t just New York. Across the country, drivers were held criminally responsible when they killed or injured people with their vehicles.
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to this: "'If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,' says [Peter] Norton. 'That's practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.'"

jaywalking cars cities automobile atlantic_cities

Do they have a lasting impact? That is the question...
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Which raises the question: Are cash mobs anything more than a well-meaning gesture that generates nice media coverage? (It seemed like half the people at By Brooklyn had notebooks and cameras.)

For By Brooklyn’s owner, Gaia DiLoreto, the answer is yes. “It was very uplifting,” says DiLoreto, a self-described “recovering finance robot” who left corporate life at the height of the economic crisis to start her own business. “It’s an incredible affirmation of what I’m doing, that so many people believe in what I believe in.”

DiLoreto estimated that the cash mob just about doubled the business she would have gotten on a typical Saturday. More importantly, “people walked into the store who have never been in my store before.”

For her, the cash mob is emblematic of a new type of business model that she sees taking root everywhere around her. Starting something new in this economy has been tough, but DiLoreto says the support from like-minded people has been "overwhelming." Ideas like "locavesting" may not conform to traditional economic thinking, but that doesn’t bother her. “It’s happening,” she says. “Whether it works out on economists’ worksheets or not. I see it everywhere.” If she's right, maybe you'll see the effects on a neighborhood near you.
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cash_mobs economic_development locavesting atlantic_cities

This sounds like a great idea, except (as a commenter already points out) the bit about replacing windows. No, don't do it, especially not with vinyl window garbage!
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Living City Block’s basic concept is simple. Small buildings rarely have the resources to do a serious retrofit. For most of them, the idea is cost-prohibitive. But what if you combined a small building with 10 more like it? If all of those building owners got together to order high-efficiency water heaters in bulk, or to collectively replace one-thousand windows, could they achieve the kind of economies of scale that the Empire State Building gets?

This sounds feasible, and Riley is sure the idea will work. But he's talking about creating a kind of building owners’ association that has never been modeled before, one in which neighbors who otherwise have very little in common might make common decisions about pooling their trash pick-up, paying their utility bills, and renovating their properties.
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green_buildings green_strategies urban_energy atlantic_cities retrofit

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...sustainability is about more than new technologies. At its most basic, “sustainable” means enduring. A sustainable community is a place of enduring value. Doug Kelbaugh, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Architecture, put it this way, “If a building, a landscape or a city is not beautiful, it will not be loved; if it is not loved, it won’t be maintained and improved. In short, it won’t be sustained.”

Distinctiveness involves streetscapes, architecture, and historic preservation but as Cortright points out, it also involves cultural events and facilities, restaurants and food, parks and open space and many other factors. “Keep Austin Weird” is more than a slogan; it is a recipe for economic success. A distinctive city is a city that the young and well-educated want to live in, that boomers want to retire to, and most certainly a city that people want to visit.
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I have mixed feelings reading this. Victoria BC fulfills some of these criteria, yet Victorians have let their downtown become ugly and empty (they have done everything BUT sustain it), and they neglected the historic preservation of a key piece of industrial archaeology, thereby failing to sustain it (the historic Johnson Street Bridge). Natural beauty is great (and Victoria has plenty of it), but natural beauty has to be enhanced by built beauty, and in that department, some cities fall down, badly. Meanwhile, there are other cities, with far fewer natural beauty resources, that manage to build up beautifully.

beauty sustainability endurance cities atlantic_cities uli tourism

Fabulous...
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In Moscow, it's common for two buildings to have blind walls facing each other over a wide alley. This setup provides the perfect space for a lithe, little office to build itself a perch. The structure fuses onto the neighboring buildings with steel clamps, hovering off the ground so pedestrians can stroll under it. It also glows at night, thanks to a translucent plastic shell, looking like a wasps' nest from hell.
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architecture atlantic_cities russia

Hurrah for urban forests (even if the statistics here may turn out to need a grain of salt before taking...).
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Every tree in urban Tennessee provides an estimated $2.25 worth of measurable economic benefits every year. Might not seem like a lot, but with 284 million urban trees in the state, the payoff's pretty big.
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trees urban_forest atlantic_cities

Yes, much more productive to see both cities and small towns through an economic lens, and to encourage resilience in place and civic engagement.
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“To me, it seemed a little preachy,” he says. “These people who lived in urban areas would come out and tell me how to live, tell me that you shouldn’t enjoy living where you do, you shouldn’t like your job, you shouldn’t feel good about the lifestyle that you’re living because it’s bad, and what we’re doing is good. What you’re doing is dumb and what we’re doing is smart. What you’re doing is sprawl, and what we’re doing is smart growth.”

(It’s interesting here to pause and ponder if “sprawl” is one of those words that naturally sounds odious – like “phlegm” or “yuck” – or if it has just taken on that connotation as a result of so much sneering).

Marohn says he has realized over the past decade that he and the New Urbanists are actually often talking about the same thing. The urban experience and the small-town experience have more in common than people think. And they’ve both been distorted by the suburban experiment. The picture looks different. In cities, it looks like an army of surface parking lots has devoured our downtowns. Small towns have also been hallowed out at the core and nipped at their edges by encroaching subdivisions.

But the effect is the same, Marohn says: an erosion of civic space, which has led to an erosion of the financial viability of communities. And this is the language he uses to talk about planning – the language of economics, of debt and prosperity and gas prices.
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cities atlantic_cities sprawl density

Sounds <ahem> good to me...
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The whole idea here is that we don’t have to accept cities as noisy places, that apartments can be private and roads can be calmer and whole neighborhoods can sound, if not like the countryside, then something more humane.

“To just accept the status quo is turning our back on innovation and design,” Antonio says, “and why we’re doing this in the first place.”
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cities atlantic_cities noise urban_design

Not sure I'm ready for this...
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The built environment, Boltuch and his colleagues believe, is in need of a social network of its own. So today they’re launching one – called Honest Buildings – that could connect people to the physical spaces where we live and work, the landlords (or companies) that own them, and the tuck-pointing guys and architecture firms who want to compete for our business.

The scope of the site is a bit mindboggling; as of this morning, you can type in any address in America on Honest Buildings and generate a page devoted to it. Imagine, in other words, if Facebook came pre-loaded with a basic profile for every name in the phone book.
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socialmedia buildings architecture cities atlantic_cities technology honest_buildings