But there is another reason high speed rail is a good idea: it provides an opportunity for us to create sustainable infrastructure that we can maintain without looking to foreign investment for help.

As a cautionary example of what happens when we fail to plan in this way, one need only look to the burgeoning privatization of U.S. highways. With roads costly to maintain and badly in need of repair, an increasing number of municipalities have turned to multinationals, based in other countries, for help. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, by the end of 2008, some 15 roads had been privatized in 10 different states. Those include the Chicago Skyway, the Indiana Toll Road, and Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway. Skyway and Indiana Toll Road are jointly owned by Spain’s Cintra and the Australia-based Macquarie. In 2006, the firms signed a $1.8-billion, 99-year lease for Skyway; their $3.8 billion lease for the Indiana road ends in 2081. Transurban, also Australian, secured a 99-year lease for its Virginia road. Given our obsession with national security, not to mention our collective fear of outsourced jobs, this type of privatization seems dangerous, and downright bizarre.

Presently, privatization-by-lease means local municipalities can’t determine the amounts charged drivers. (As the Dallas Morning News pointed out, Cintra-Macquarie doubled the toll on its Indiana road.) But other deals out there – U.S. PIRG estimates there are some 79 roads presently up for privatization – would come in the form of outright purchases, not long-term leases. That means that non-U.S.-based multinationals would have the rights and the responsibility to fund vital public services, like police, that operate along their stretches of highway. Would that mean a private police force? Vigilantes for hire? In such a scenario, the potential for absurdity, not to mention vulnerability, is great. ((One is reminded of McKenzie Funk’s Harper’s article about “fire fighters” employed by AIG, who look like fire fighters, and drive fire trucks, but who are paid by AIG and charged with saving the homes of AIG-insurance holders, and standing by as others burn.)

Obama’s high-speed rail gives us a chance to start anew: to develop a system that will enable us to maintain control of our transportation resources, rather than pay other nations to fix a crumbling system. High speed rail also provides a much-needed, sustainable alternative to our highways, which, at the state and municipal levels, we’re increasingly too broke to fix. Put that way, doesn’t high-speed rail sound like something even tea party activists, who define themselves as the “true patriots of America,” can get behind?

Better yet, the VLTs will be split into seven different “neighborhoods”, which each resemble a different New York neighborhood. So far, I have heard there will be a Theater District and a Lower East Side “neighborhood” of video slots. I really hope there will be a Wall Street one. And there probably will be, but it still wouldn’t be the funniest thing about this whole Aqueduct Casino plan. The funniest part is that this was more or less all predicted by Richard Price in his last novel, Lush Life (2008).

The novel starts with a botched robbery on the Lower East Side that turns into a homicide when hot-headed bartender/artiste Ike Marcus won’t give up the goods. The only reliable witness to Ike’s killing is the manager at his restaurant, Eric Cash. I won’t spoil the details, but I must divulge a plot point at the end: Eric Cash finally leaves New York to work for the same restaurant—Berkmann’s—at their new location in a casino being planned in Atlantic City, NJ. In Berkmann’s owner Harry Steele’s words, “You know how in Vegas they’ve got the Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, and whatnot?... Well, these guys want to create a Little New York arcade, historical, three sections, Punky East Village, Nasty Times Square, and Spirit of the Ghetto Lower East Side.”

This was a funny plot point in Price’s novel, which deals a lot with issues of gentrification from the very real—kids getting shot by muggers from nearby housing projects—to the more ephemeral—characters like Eric Cash’s frustration with a younger generation of entitled artists who seem to take the neighborhood for granted. In the book, the casino brings resolution to Eric’s disillusion with New York, in an ironic way: As cities like New York come to imitate playgrounds in their almost all-service based economy, it seems fitting that adult playgrounds like casinos ought to mimic cities. Again, in Harry Steele’s words “the artificiality down there will be the truest part of the whole setup.” The only way he can get through all the artifice is to totally embrace it. I suppose that’s what’s happening in Queens now.

That this has come to pass in reality should come as no surprise, but it’s always shocking when life imitates satire so closely. Then again, Richard Price has always been admired for his incredibly realistic dialogue, and descriptions of police work and dope-dealing. Perhaps it’s not so shocking that he was able to predict something like this. That, or maybe the developers are big Richard Price fans with a good—if not sick—sense of humor. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised.

But there is another reason high speed rail is a good idea: it provides an opportunity for us to create sustainable infrastructure that we can maintain without looking to foreign investment for help.

As a cautionary example of what happens when we fail to plan in this way, one need only look to the burgeoning privatization of U.S. highways. With roads costly to maintain and badly in need of repair, an increasing number of municipalities have turned to multinationals, based in other countries, for help. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, by the end of 2008, some 15 roads had been privatized in 10 different states. Those include the Chicago Skyway, the Indiana Toll Road, and Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway. Skyway and Indiana Toll Road are jointly owned by Spain’s Cintra and the Australia-based Macquarie. In 2006, the firms signed a $1.8-billion, 99-year lease for Skyway; their $3.8 billion lease for the Indiana road ends in 2081. Transurban, also Australian, secured a 99-year lease for its Virginia road. Given our obsession with national security, not to mention our collective fear of outsourced jobs, this type of privatization seems dangerous, and downright bizarre.

Presently, privatization-by-lease means local municipalities can’t determine the amounts charged drivers. (As the Dallas Morning News pointed out, Cintra-Macquarie doubled the toll on its Indiana road.) But other deals out there – U.S. PIRG estimates there are some 79 roads presently up for privatization – would come in the form of outright purchases, not long-term leases. That means that non-U.S.-based multinationals would have the rights and the responsibility to fund vital public services, like police, that operate along their stretches of highway. Would that mean a private police force? Vigilantes for hire? In such a scenario, the potential for absurdity, not to mention vulnerability, is great. ((One is reminded of McKenzie Funk’s Harper’s article about “fire fighters” employed by AIG, who look like fire fighters, and drive fire trucks, but who are paid by AIG and charged with saving the homes of AIG-insurance holders, and standing by as others burn.)

Obama’s high-speed rail gives us a chance to start anew: to develop a system that will enable us to maintain control of our transportation resources, rather than pay other nations to fix a crumbling system. High speed rail also provides a much-needed, sustainable alternative to our highways, which, at the state and municipal levels, we’re increasingly too broke to fix. Put that way, doesn’t high-speed rail sound like something even tea party activists, who define themselves as the “true patriots of America,” can get behind?

Tom Vanderbilt argued in Slate magazine that safe, secure bike parking is the number one improvement that could make the transition from car-friendly cities to bike-friendly cities, and Pittsburgh has been on the move in the past year to increase the amount of bike parking available. It’s easy to spot the official nods to the city’s cyclists: iconic bike racks that demonstrate Pittsburgh’s strong connection to the three rivers that define its landscape.

According to Pop City, Pittsburgh doubled its bike parking late last year by installing 200 additional racks, providing 400 more spaces throughout the city. And last year, a measure unanimously passed the city Planning Commission that mandates a minimum amount of bike parking for new construction. The City Council will vote on the issue on February 9.

Nonresidential buildings up to 20,000 square feet are required to install one space that provides parking for two bicycles. An office of 20,000 square feet holds roughly 60 employees, which means that the new regulations will mandate bike parking for about 3 percent of commuters. While this exceeds the current rate of commuting by bicycle (just over 1 percent), the number of Pittsburghers choosing this sustainable form of transportation is on the rise. From 2006 to 2007, the number of bike commuters in the city grew a startling 37.5 percent, and the city is taking steps with this new regulation to stay slightly ahead of the curve.

Under the proposed legislation, developers are required to install bike parking based on square footage, but are permitted considerable flexibility. If they choose, developers could substitute bike parking for up to 30 percent of car parking. While some initially expressed concern that reducing mandatory car parking would be detrimental to business, Stephen Patchan, the city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, predicted that the measure would not hinder development in the city. Speaking to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Patchan said, “The requirements we set forth still encourage development but would provide expanded infrastructure.” Interestingly, this aspect of the legislation could help to create alliances between cyclists and developers; by exceeding the minimum requirements for safe bicycle parking, developers can support this sustainable form of transportation while cutting costs and conserving valuable space since one car space is considered the equivalent to two bicycle parking spaces.

I spoke to Erok Boerer of Bike Pittsburgh, the city’s bicycle advocacy organization, about the impact the proposed legislation will have on the city’s current and future cycling community. He emphasized the correlation between investing in bike parking and creating a city that is friendly and welcoming to cyclists: “Making a city “bike-friendly” means just that—friendly to bicyclists. Taking that small step to help make sure that our bikes are there when we need them shows that they view the bicycle as the serious mode of transportation that it is.”

“When you look around most cities,” he added, “and see how much of our public road space is dedicated to storing private vehicles in parking spaces, it sends a message that the city is car-friendly. The same can be said for bike racks.”

To encourage healthier and more sustainable cities, it is essential that we support cycling as a valid form of transportation and that our cities do the same by investing in infrastructure that makes biking safe and secure.

Car dealerships and cell phone stores are two of the biggest employers of inflatable advertising in Houston. That is, they were – until this year. A revised section of the city’s Code of Ordinances went into effect in 2010, banning the following: “banners; cut out figures; discs; festooning, including tinsel, strings of ribbons, and pinwheels; inflatable objects, including balloons; non-governmental flags; pennants; propellers; steam- or smoke-producing devices; streamers; whirligigs; wind devices; blinking, rotating, moving, chasing, flashing, glaring, strobe, scintillating [really?], search, flood or spot lights; or similar devices.” Violation of the ordinance could result in a fine of up to $500 for every day one of these “attention-getting devices” is displayed.

The reason for the ban? The ordinance claims that the attention-getting devices “could pose substantial problems of traffic safety similar to and, in many instances, more serious than, conventional commercial advertising signs.” Oh yeah, and they’re ugly. Or as the ordinance puts it, their use “contributes to urban visual clutter and blight and adversely affects the aesthetic environment” of the city.

“To me, they’re trying to be the fashion police,” said Lonnie Mercer, Director of Operations at Texas Boys Balloons. His company has been hit hard by the ordinance, going from about forty balloons to only eight or nine.

Mercer is concerned not only with his own business, but also the small businesses that his company helps represent, businesses that can’t afford other means of advertising. “They have to find a means of advertising that works for them,” he said. “That’s what we provide, a cost-effective form of advertising.” Billboards can cost upwards of $3,000 just to be printed, and that’s before installation fees, permit costs, and the rental of space. In contrast, inflatable ads cost between $1,000 and $1,500 a month, and according to Mercer, can increase a business’s floor traffic by 30%. “But the city is saying, ‘We don’t like the way they look. Take them down.’”

Prior to the full ban, there was an ordinance on the books that regulated the content of attention-getting devices. They were not allowed to be product-specific – for instance, a McDonald’s could not display a huge balloon Ronald McDonald; written signs could only say things like “Big sale!” and “Clearance!” In 2006 Jim Purtee, then-owner of Houston Balloons & Promotions, sued the city over that ordinance, claiming that it was arbitrarily enforced and violated his business’ constitutional right to free speech. U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore agreed, and the city awarded Purtee almost one million dollars.

Many people believe Purtee’s lawsuit has everything to do with the Houston City Council’s decision to ban all attention-getting devices. One of them is David Key, who took over Houston Balloons & Promotions after Purtee. Said Key, “To make freedom of speech and then dictate what kind of advertising you can have, it’s very un-American.”

Key has formed a business coalition to fight the ordinance, and sent a letter on behalf of the coalition to Houston’s new mayor, Annise Parker, asking for the ordinance to be repealed. He has not yet received a response.

A decade later, Landrieu was voted Mayor of New Orleans by an African-American majority. And almost 35 years after that, New Orleans is still feeling the repercussions of this decision. Mitch Landrieu, the son of Moon, decided to enter the 2010 race at the last moment. As soon as Mitch Landrieu jumped in, the history of the Landrieu name was brought to the forefront, again. Landrieu brings forty years of political baggage to the race, and is hoping that during this time of Saints Fever, blacks and whites will choose the name that is most familiar. While other candidates, like James Perry (Ed. note: the author of this piece previously worked as a consultant to the James Perry campaign) have laid out specific plans for their term, Mitch hopes his family name will help him win the election on February 6th. The only problem, he has tried this twice before, and failed.

In 1994, Mitch, a young state representative, ran for Mayor against Marc Morial (son of the first black Mayor). Morial won, and in 2002, he was succeeded by the CEO of Cox Communications, C. Ray Nagin. Nagin, an African-American, was elected by a white majority that believed he could clean up the contracting process and root out corruption. The business council believed he would run City Hall like a business and his entrepreneurial spirit would allow government to do more with less. Unfortunately, Nagin had run a business that had no competitors, and proved to either not have the will or energy to re-inevent city Hall. He has also faced numerous allegations of siphoning city contracts to his cronies. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Nagin commissioned the Urban Land Institute to devise a recovery plan. Hastily trying to meet a deadline, the planners put green dots next to New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and Broadmoor. Infuriated by the implications that their neighborhood would turn into green space, residents organized to fight the plan. Nagin, worried now that he would now lose African-American support from those neighborhoods, retreated from the plan and made the soon to be infamous comment: “Our city will remain a chocolate city.”

In the spring of 2006, New Orleans was still reeling from the failure of the levees that left eighty percent of the city flooded. Nagin, now fighting for his political life, faced off against Mitch Landrieu in a run-off that split the city further along racial lines, although there was one quite ironic twist. Many conservative whites who detested the Landrieu family because of Moon’s civil rights record would end up voting for Nagin, the black candidate. Nagin, with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton at his side, won handily, thanks to overwhelming support from the African-American community.

New Orleans in 2010 is a very different city than when Moon Landrieu was a young state representative. In the late 1960s, New Orleans had almost 700,000 people. By the time school desegregation, the oil crisis and deindustrialization had left their mark, New Orleans only had 450,000 people. This was 2005. In 2010, 330,000 people have returned to a city that still aches from inadequate city services, corruption, and a palpable divide when the political climate intensifies. In November 2009, The Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey on race relations in New Orleans. 79% of respondents said that New Orleans is racially and class polarized. Only 14% of white people in the state of Louisiana voted for Obama. A James Carville study last spring showed that only 5% (with a 4% margin of error) of whites in New Orleans believed the term-limited Nagin was doing a good job

This is the historical context in which the 2010 mayoral race is taking place. For the past forty years African-American political machines have dominated city elections, but will they remain powerful, and, if so, who will they throw their weight behind? The city’s African-American population has decreased since Katrina, and many of their addresses for election day get-out-the-vote drives are no longer applicable. With just a few days to go until the general election in which all candidates will compete for the top two spots, New Orleans’ elections can often turn into one of the greatest political shows in this country. For an in-depth look at the day-to-day drama, here are some good places to get acclimated.

#nolamayor ( during daily forums, attendees have been updating the twitterverse with their opinions about each candidate)

NOLA.com

The Lens

The American Zombie

HumidCity

Blog of New Orleans

Editor’s Note: Next American City does not endorse any candidate for political office.

If the human mind were not wholly capable of carrying on despite contradictions, Expo 2010 might cause heads to explode. Most of the event’s “environmentally sustainable” country pavilions will be demolished after the event is finished. Shanghai expects a flow of 70 million visitors, but will have to find a way to mute the attendant dissent that such a high-profile event stands to invite. Even the medium and the message are paradoxical: Shanghai plans on presenting the most dramatic display of futurism the world has ever seen by way of hosting a World Expo, an anachronistic institution whose glory days came to a halt decades ago. Long gone are the extravaganzas in New York, London, Paris and Chicago. Latter-day Expos are generally unspectacular events ensconced in third-tier cities. 

Flash forward to 2010 and we find the World Expo back on a major global stage. Shanghai has the look of a first-tier world city, a place that offers us ready-built visions of some far off civilization.  “A futuristic city is one that regularly inspires dreams and nightmares,” argues Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom in his invaluable recent book Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, “not just within but also well beyond its borders, and one that is thought of as rich in disturbing portents and also promise.” It isn’t hard to see why Shanghai has the audacity to hold itself up as a model. Wasserstrom — who has seen Shanghai transform since the mid-1980s — pointed out two things to me:  1.) A baby born in Shanghai today has a longer life expectancy than one born in New York, and 2.) Shanghai’s skyscrapers now outnumber New York’s. Shanghai’s myriad landmarks, he says, make it look like a city that has already hosted a World’s Fair. 

The Expo is an obvious symbol of optimism for Shanghainese, but Wasserstrom points out that there are mixed feelings about the Expo and about Shanghai’s pace of development altogether. There is an ample crowd of proverbial have-nots who find themselves left out of China’s marked growth. Moreover, this 21st century incarnation of Shanghai has a new problem: overdevelopment. Wasserstrom points out that not everyone wanted an electromagnetically levitated train beaming through their neighborhoods on a daily basis, and some residents pushed back against it. The Expo itself displaced 18,000 people, according to one estimate. We still don’t know the extent to which “modernization” really means higher living costs and eventual dislocation for people living in the city center. 

These tensions give the Expo lightening rod potential. “The ridiculous silliness that is the Shanghai Expo would of course just be funny if it wasn’t for the vast amounts of money and resources being squandered on the white elephant by both Shanghai and the governments of the world keen to suck up to Peking in any way possible,” writes China historian Paul French. True, preparations for the event raise more questions than answers. How does the Expo’s burgeoning vision of a more comfortable, connected, fast-paced urban life square with China’s deepening class divides? How will the Expo’s embrace of cosmopolitan spontaneity fit with the government’s apparent ambition to keep things sanitized? Either way it will be fascinating to see what Shanghai and 200 participants from around the world really mean by the slogan “better city, better life.” 

Tishman Speyer’s failure stems not only from making a massive purchase immediately before the market tanked, though that didn’t help; their other mistake was buying a housing project and expecting to be able to treat it exactly like any other luxury housing development. Not only is a housing project not as appealing as a condominium (we will get to that later)—but people already live there. Lots of them. Tishman Speyer saw this as a mere bump in the road; their plan for raising enough revenue to pay back their massive loans—the purchase was 80% leveraged—was to turn rent-controlled apartments into market-rate apartments. Curious what a market-rate one bedroom costs in a former MetLife housing project just above the Lower East Side of Manhattan? $2850 a month. With more than 11,000 apartments in the two complexes, ranging from one to five bedrooms, Tishman was poised to make a lot of money. But, on top of a recession-generated lag in the rental market, the rent-controlled tenants filed suit against Tishman, arguing their actions were illegal, and actually won. Tishman Speyer’s business model was ruined, and they are now forced to default on $4.4 billion in loans. For anyone familiar with San Francisco current events, this is a cluster-site, New York-scale version of what happened with the Lembi group. This confluence really makes one wonder how many real estate investors got the capital for their highly-leveraged purchasing sprees by telling their investors they would boot rent-controlled tenants.

Megan McArdle wrote about the historically large default in this month’s Atlantic. She also points out that renting out a housing project as luxury downtown real estate has some inherent problems:

“The buildings simply weren’t build as deluxe rentals—the mosaic tile in the public areas has been replaced by marble, but in the cramped vestibules and narrow hallways, the effect isn’t luxurious; the buildings just look like they’re dressed up for Halloween. With mostly tiny kitchens, and no room in the lobbies for a doorman, these apartments were never going to command the kind of rents that would justify the partnership’s bid. Even though many of the apartments have been decontrolled, net income has barely risen.”

McArdle makes an excellent point about the cheap feel of the buildings. I have been to a handful of apartments in the complex, and had the same impression. But she stops just short of saying what really needs to be said: this is a housing project—even if it isn’t public housing—with the same design as those just a few blocks downtown, and just a few minutes away in Brooklyn. I don’t think there’s a place in the world where these hulking Corbusian monoliths have any sort of cachet. From les banlieues of Paris, to the panelaky estates of former Czechoslovakia, and even in Canada (shameless promo: Michael Summerton has an excellent piece about Toronto’s slab tower problem in our upcoming issue), this form of housing, which was quite popular in the housing shortages post World War II, is seen as problematic, not to mention cheap and dull. And I doubt anyone pays three grand a month to live in any of the above mentioned places. But in New York, investors were willing to gamble that people would—and should—pay that much to live in what is, in essence, a housing project.

Ultimately, they didn’t. I’d argue it’s in part because this type of housing is suburban at heart, which might seem ironic. Obviously, the density of housing projects like Stuy-Town are anything but suburban, as are our associations with them. But, the separation between residential, commercial and retail uses is quintessentially so. As a result, unless you live on the 14th Street or 1st Avenue side of the development, you could really be anywhere. And people don’t pay exorbitant rents to live in Manhattan because it offers an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life.

Tishman Speyer’s mistake was to take a form of housing that is inherently cheap (this is the stuff we give away for free!), and to try and repackage it as the precise opposite. They were forced to illegally remove rent-controls from a form of housing that is rarely rented out at market-rate—because it is typically not part of the normal housing market—and that’s what ultimately sunk their ship. It would be poetic justice if so many people weren’t losing their pensions as a result.

Mara D’ Angelo:
I’m still at Smart Growth America, but early this year, the primary program I’ve been working on, the National Vacant Properties Campaign, spun off into its own organization called the Center for Community Progress. I’ll be staying at SGA, so this is a bittersweet change since it will mean so much more funding and stature for the work that the Campaign’s been doing, but shifting to a liaison rather than staff member relationship to that work. I won’t be lacking for urban policy intellectual stimulation, though. The Partnership for Sustainable Communities between HUD, EPA, and DOT, the Livable Communities Act, and HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods pilot have all been exciting developments in the smart growth world, and I’ve gotten to dive much deeper into federal brownfields and housing policy this year, which has been great. I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of 2010!

Manni Marquez:
Well for the past year I have been working on a quality of life plan for the Clarke Square neighborhood located in Milwaukee’s Southside. As part of the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative, working with other organizations, resident, and city officials we have developed a plan to revitalize a neighborhood that historically has been plagued by crime, little employment opportunities, and poverty. In 2010 we are working on implanting the plan which consist of nine strategies: 1) Community-School Partnership, 2) Life Long Learning, 3) Employment and Job Training, 4) Youth, Parks, and Recreation 5) Social Connections, 6) Public Safety, 7) Neighborhood Beautification, 8) Housing, and 9) Economic Development. Leading our efforts is the Clarke Square Council, established to operate like a board of directors to oversee the implementation process. The council is composed of a mixture of resident and organization leaders. For full details on the plan please go to znimilwaukee.org

Michael Freedman-Schnapp:
I left the New York Industrial Retention Network over the summer to work full time for the campaign of Brad Lander, who successfully won a seat in the New York City Council representing the Cobble Hill/Park Slope/Kensington area in Brooklyn. Some of you might know Brad from his work as an affordable housing advocate and as the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. He was inaugurated this month and I started as his Policy Director a couple weeks ago. We’re eager to get started on working on city planning and sustainability issues, while making sure we find ways to make an impact on the quality-of-life and economic justice needs of our city. Brad was named the chair of the Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses subcommittee, so we’ll be able to use our planning backgrounds in the process.

Joah Spearman:
Since I last saw you all, I’ve immersed myself into Austin even further if you can imagine that. What I mean is that I’ve scored myself an office just downstairs from the Mayor Lee Leffingwell (elected last year). Technically, it’s not an office though, it’s my store Sneak Attack, where I sit pretty much everyday in the only retail space in Austin’s City Hall building. Along with launching Sneak Attack, I’ve maintained my literary career, including the release of Real Role Models (UT Press) this week. I’m now working on a second book, titled Indisputable (Greenleaf), about Austin’s live music scene.

Sylvie Gallier Howard:
As for me, I am still working in Philadelphia as a consultant. Over the past year I have gotten to work with a great bunch of non-profits. The work thatI am doing is mainly organizational development (resource development, board of directors, strategic planning.), generally with grassroots non-profits. I am working on issues such as public school reform (badly needed in Philly), helping immigrants find legal, decent employment when they arrive to Pennsylvania, after-school programming in a mostly Latino disenfranchised community, and more. This year I will work with two other groups focused on immigrant communities, specifically the Latino community and the Cambodian community. I am excited to learn more about these communities because Philadelphia’s neighborhoods have become more and more interesting and vibrant over the years as we’ve seen our immigrant community grow. On a non-work related front, I’ve got baby bun number two in the oven, due June 2010, and my other little one is a fireball toddler!

Jeff and Randy Vines:
We have some exciting news on the STL-Style front. On January 3, 2010, we took our labor of love (www.stl-style.com) to a whole new level by moving our St. Louis-inspired apparel design company into an historic storefront in one of the city’s most up-and-coming creative commercial districts. STYLEhouse, as we call it, enables us to expand our line of merchandise, increase our production output and offer a live retail outlet for our historically web-based company. The space will also double as a hub of civic advocacy and community engagement by hosting various events that aim to improve the quality of life in our beloved city. We are also proud to carry Next American City at our shop!

Solving the four-year standoff between the state and FEMA is just one part of the formula, though. The question now is how it will be spent. It’s already being reported that the $474 million award will go towards a new hospital that will cost at least $1.2 billion – some say that is a conservative figure, and that it very well may end up costing upwards of $2 billion. It will also cost the city about 70 acres of real estate, including historic homes and buildings, with many of those units razed for parking lot space. There is another option, and that is to rebuild the hospital back in its original shell, which still stands tall and wide near downtown New Orleans today. Doing this would cost the state hundreds of millions dollars less by anyone’s estimates.

In some ways, this ruling is bad news for advocates of rebuilding the original hospital. In order to get FEMA to fork forward more money, it had to be proven that extensive damage was done to the building, which is exactly what the state, and the Louisiana State University which controlled it, was arguing to keep it shut down. Now that it has been effectively argued that damages were bad enough that the higher FEMA reimbursement award was necessary, it will be that much more difficult to fight the creation of the neighborhood-dissolving new medical facility.

There is hope for the Charity Hospital that generations of New Orleanians are already familiar with. High-ranked state legislators, including the state’s treasurer Jack Kennedy, are taking a serious examination at shelving the new hospital plans and preserving the current one. And many of them, like Kennedy, have voiced statements in legislative hearings that sound favorable for that preservation.
Meanwhile, at a time when authoritative research tanks such as the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center are reporting that there is still a huge void in housing units available for low-income families, there’s still a push to knock down even more units for a new facility. Whether Charity comes back in its old body or a new one the result of its completion will be hundreds of new jobs – thousands if you count the upstream impact of an improved medical system on the region’s overall workforce. So then, what will the state do about housing those new workers?  They can’t live in parking lots.

Brentin Mock is a reporter for The Lens in New Orleans. In 2008, he wrote “Charity Case,” a feature article about the Charity Hospital dispute that appeared in Issue 19 of Next American City. The text of this article appears below. You can read the article in its entirety here.

CHARITY CASE

On the second day of Hurricane Katrina, doctors and patients in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital began breaking windows that had withstood the fury of the storm. They needed ventilation in Unit 11, the third floor mental health ward where water surrounding the hospital had trapped registered nurse Marva Guillemet, a small team of other nurses and doctors and a dozen patients, one of whom was pregnant.

Without electricity, chaos impending, Guillemet and the hospital staff braced themselves, relying on procedures not taught in medical school. Food and water quickly grew scarce. Guillemet and the nurses fed the patients their own packed lunches. Toilets stopped up, so trash bags became makeshift waste outlets, stored in the hospital stairwell after use. Many people would have collapsed in such a crisis, but Guillemet could not afford to with patients who depended on her. The building stood equally strong: Charity Hospital, a facility dedicated to the poor and uninsured, saved the lives of more than 200 patients and caregivers while hundreds of other buildings throughout the city buckled.

Today, Rev. Avery C. Alexander Charity Hospital, also known as “Big Charity,” is closed. Although only its basement sustained major damage, Louisiana State University’s Health Care Services Division condemned the 21-story facility. Before Katrina, Charity allocated 97 beds to mental health patients and employed a substantial mental healthcare staff. As of March 2008, LS U has sprinkled ersatz health facilities throughout the city to substitute for Charity: a few clinics providing primary and limited special care here, a converted Lord & Taylor department store there. LS U opened 20 emergency psychiatric beds in small units near University Hospital and 10 in the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, which was built to treat minors, not adults.

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Briggs, a widely known academic and practical expert on issues of social justice in the city, is on leave from the faculty at MIT. He offered an extemporaneous and wide-ranging discussion of how various government budgeting policies impact urban experiences. His office was one of the leading forces behind last summer’s guidance on place-based policies for the FY2011 budget. Briggs explained how the impacts of the federal government on cities and regions go well beyond the obvious policies and practices at the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Transportation (DOT). “First,” he said,” we should strive to be less duplicative and onerous” on our local government partners. He also outlined sweeping goals for changing the feds’ procurement practices to stimulate specific regional economic engines and for improved asset management by the military and the General Services Administration (GSA), which serves as the federal government’s developer-cum-landlord.

For a frame of reference as to how sweeping this budget guidance is, the last time there was a comparable practice in place came with President Carter’s 1978 Executive Order on Urban and Community Impact Analyses. That policy, in theory, required federal agencies to conduct an analysis of their policies’ impacts on urban areas and report that to the OMB, which would then evaluate that agency’s budgetary and legislative requests, eliminating the proposals with the worst impacts on cities. In practice, a 1981 General Accounting Office assessment of the program found that it had been “only minimally effective.” So Briggs and the new budget guidance have a significant task ahead of them.

As an example of the kind of responsibility for cities and communities that Briggs feels the feds should be taking, he cited the work underway to turn the mostly vacant psychiatric hospital at St. Elizabeths in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., into the new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security. (That agency, with over 140,000 employees, is 15 times the size of HUD.) Briggs described the project as a “historic opportunity to figure out how to maximize community benefits,” saying “This is not a once-every-ten-years kind of opportunity…this represents a once-every-fifty-years kind of opening.”

During the discussion session following Briggs’ remarks, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter asked Briggs about how a city might contact the right people at GSA regarding opening new federal office facilities in a city. Briggs responded by stating that they are trying to give that agency “more of a customer service focus” so that a mayor would know whom to contact. Nutter also asked a more pointed question about a proposal he said that he already floated to his legislators and people in the White House Office of Urban Affairs that would allow cities to borrow money for pension obligations directly from the federal government, allowing them to save millions of dollars a year off commercial lending rates. Briggs considered the somewhat complicated proposal on the spot, and said that while he couldn’t offer the mayor a full response that night, he could outline the concerns the federal government would have — how long would the loan terms be? Why were cities worthy of being extended such enormous credit?, etc.

After Briggs finished his thoughtful response, Nutter added, “With all due respect, when you speak about the “credit worthiness” of cities, I’d point out that the City of Philadelphia has been in business longer than the federal government.”

Briggs was completely engrossing and totally impressive in his intellect, candor, and obvious broad understanding of how hundreds of federal policies and programs affect the American urban situation, but the exchange with Nutter demonstrates how even the most competent and committed administration officials face a challenge in rendering the administration’s commitment clear beyond the Washington beltway.

Musings about elevators by the health department may sound weird, but so too is the problem: Today the majority of adults and nearly half of the elementary school children in New York City are overweight or obese. And the underlying causes of obesity – physical inactivity and unhealthy diet – are, after tobacco, the leading causes of New York’s premature deaths, disproportionately affecting the city’s black and Latino communities.

New York may be America’s thinnest city, where cars are becoming as passe as smoking, thanks to healthy doses of density, public transit, open space and, increasingly, bike lanes. But only a quarter of city residents get regular exercise, Farley estimated. “This is a great city for moving around,” says David Burney, the city’s commissioner of design and construction. “But we have a lot of opportunities for improvement. There’s a conspiracy of small things we’re doing that can make the city better.”

This week, officials in the Bloomberg administration are issuing a hefty set of recommendations called the Active Design Guidelines, which call for a design revamp that could get the city on a daily regimen of body moving. “It’s not necessary for us to go to the gym,” says Dr. Lynn Silver, assistant health commissioner, who helped write the new handbook. Instead, making stairwells more attractive, building “supportive” walking routes, creating access to fresh produce, and “animating” streets to make them more pedestrian friendly can encourage all the exercise a New Yorker needs. It’s LEED green building standards meets P.E. class. “People will get exercise wherever they can,” says Rick Bell, who runs the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which also collaborated on the guidelines. “The role of designers is to figure out how to give them those choices.”

The link between public health and urban design in New York harks back to the 19th century, when infectious disease was the city’s leading public health scourge. It was a concerted effort between city officials from both sides that brought light and air into the city’s dank, dark tenement neighborhoods, developed sewage systems, established zoning that divided industrial from residential areas, and built a subway system that relieved downtown congestion. Long before the High Line was a paragon of green cool, Fredrick Law Olmstead’s Central Park wasn’t just a leisure space when it opened in 1857: It was hailed at the time as “ventilation for the working man’s lungs.”

A century and a half later, a number of city agencies are engaged in what Burney calls “the battle for a quality urban environment, a battle that’s fought street-by-street, block-by-block.” Part of the fight, already underway through the city’s PlaNYC program, is inspired by “that Jane Jacobs thing about the diversity of the city,” which puts residents within walking distance to amenities like parks, healthy food and libraries, and allows for a certain amount of lively urban chaos. But to create a really green city, Burney sees less obvious steps. “Good lighting, traffic-calming features, bike racks, water fountains, benches along walking paths – anything that gets people out and walking,” he says.

And then there are the stairs. Officials like Burney want to return New York’s stairs to their pre-elevator grandeur, before they were dingy, narrow and tucked into the backs of our office buildings, to be used largely in the event of fire. For a healthy counterexample, officials needn’t look farther than City Hall, with its gorgeous symmetrical staircase (“There’s an elevator and nobody uses it,” says Burney), or even the mayor’s company’s headquarters on Lexington Ave., which boasts a luminous central staircase that almost everyone uses to get between floors. The benefits aren’t just physical, says Bloomberg’s Judith Czelusniak. “The stair encourages interaction and conversation, and at the top and bottom of every staircase you’ll see beautifully designed seating areas to encourage ad hoc meetings and idea sharing.”

Boosting interaction was also the thinking behind the city’s most innovative elevator-killer, the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis. Located across the street from Peter Cooper’s original 1858 building – which included the world’s first elevator shaft – the new building hinges around a central atrium that begins with a grandiose cubist staircase and ends in a sky-lit series of catwalk stairs. The architects aren’t just inviting people to walk up, but nearly mandating it too: the elevator only stops on the third and eighth floors (the handicapped can use a swipe card to access a regular elevator). The building isn’t the first to use a “skip-stop” elevator—Baruch College’s Newman Library in Manhattan and Josep Lluís Sert’s Riverview housing in Yonkers have similar systems—but it’s the boldest yet. To get people taking the stairs, Victoria Milne, the Director of Creative Services at the Dept. of Design and Construction, also suggests elevators be made to move more slowly; she calls this “the naughty strategy.”

The biggest doubters of a “fit city” aren’t, surprisingly enough, handicapped rights groups. “This is about encouraging people across not only age groups and ethnicities but body types as well to engage in exercise,” says Matt Sapolin, who heads the mayor’s office for people with disabilities. “As long as we abide by code, active design can benefit everyone.” The real obstacles may be the city’s developers, who see initiatives like making room for more stairs as taking away from rentable space. Vishaan Chakrabarti, the former chief of city planning for Manhattan who now serves as a top executive at the Related Companies, brushes aside that concern for another one. “You can end up inadvertently promoting much lower density because people want to use stairs and not use elevators. I think it’s fine to say, ‘let’s see how you can use stairs across a few floors in an office building. But practically speaking, you’re never going to get past a few floors without using an elevator.”

Then again, simply reminding New Yorkers that stairs exist may be enough. In one experiment conducted by the Department of Health and the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, simply posting a sign at a housing project in the South Bronx (“Burn Calories, Not Electricity – Take the Stairs”) led to a 42 percent increase in stair walking over nine months. Says Dr. Silver, “It turns out this is actually something people get pretty easily.” That brings up another potential adversary: the city’s fitness companies. No wonder Chakrabari’s Related Companies sounds like they could be running a little scared: they’re also the owner of the city’s Equinox gyms.

Smog kills. Just ask any E.R. doctor or air quality expert. And many—including states, scientists and environmental groups—are not happy with the nation’s current smog standards, so many that the E.P.A. recently proposed tighter regulations for the pollutants that cause smog. If approved, the new reg will have a significant impact on the health of millions of Americans. The E.P.A. estimates that it will save 12,000 lives per year from premature deaths from heart and lung disease, and that thousands of nonfatal heart attacks and cases of bronchitis and asthma will be prevented.

Here is what the EPA is proposing: that the ground level ozone (smog) limit be set anywhere from 0.060 to 0.070 parts per million. In 2008, the Bush administration set the limit for smog at 0.075 parts per million – a standard that the EPA’s scientific panel warned was too weak. If the new proposal is approved, the changes won’t take effect overnight – the new rule wouldn’t go into effect until 2014. And the agency is allowing two decades for compliance. To boot, regions with the worst smog problems, like Southern and Central California, Houston, Texas, and the Northeast, would have even longer to comply.

The new smog rule is expected to be costly: Many counties across the nation that are now in compliance will become out of compliance, and will need to use new technologies to reduce smog-producing emissions from coal-fired power plants, manufacturing plants and motor vehicles. The penalties for being out of compliance, as the New York Times reported earlier this month, will include fines and loss of federal highway financing. The E.P.A. estimates the cost to industry will be in the area of $19 to $90 billion annually by 2020, though some say those estimates are high.

Next American City recently spoke with Janice Nolen of the American Lung Association to get their reaction to the proposal. The association has been a vehement clean air watchdog for decades. Nolen is the Assistant Vice President of National Policy and Advocacy. (Pictured at right; photo courtesy of the A.L.A.)

Next American City: Can you say specifically how the A.L.A. may have impacted the E.P.A.‘s decision to reconsider their 2008 smog decision?

Janice Nolen: We took them to court. We filed [a petition] against them in May 2008 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. We had agreed in the spring of 2009 to allow time for the new Administrator to review the case and see if she wanted to reconsider the decision her predecessor made. We agreed to allow E.P.A. to stay the case as of September 16, 2009 when the E.P.A. filed [smog standard reconsideration] papers with the court.