Noodling Florida, Moses, and Housing

The Designer Class Just Went “Poof”

Richard Florida is the darling of the urbannistas. He declared through a couple of his books (The Rise of the Creative Class) and hundreds of speaking engagements (nice gig there), an important contributor to the revival of urban neighborhoods is the in-migration of artists, LGBTs, designers and professionals. This group, The Creative Class, would save these urban areas and change how we live in cities. In an interesting and thought provoking  article by Frank Bures of the Twin Cities’ new magazine Thirty Two, he challenges this whole concept GO HERE. While a fan of the concept, I wonder if there really is enough of these ‘successful’ creatives to really make a difference and why they would even go to some towns on the cool list?

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (6-26-12)

Two interesting articles are posted there. Back when I was a young planner I fell into The Power Broker  by Robert Caro (he is the author of the ongoing multi-volume saga of Lyndon Johnson). In this book I met Robert Moses, a man who more than any other individual in New York City’s history physically changed it. For better or worse his goal was a city for the people and the people be damned. This interesting take on the man, in an article by Thomas J. Campanella, is how Moses was also a bike guy – “a keen advocate” of the two wheeled device. Go here for an interesting take and New York’s attempt to become a Paris-like “free bike” paradise. GO HERE 

Also:

Housing Made in China

The world of housing and politics got larger, much larger. In this article and video by Dinny McMahon and Robbie Whelan, GO HERE  they alert us to the fact that Lennar Corp (3rd largest American home builder) and China Development Bank (large bank in large country) are in talks for a large loan of $1.7 billion to help jump start two San Francisco based projects, Hunters Point Shipyard and Treasure Island. Both these projects are in difficult straits and Lennar needs all the financial help it can find to push these projects through and, with the assistance of a mayor with Chinese ancestry, they may have it. They have already invested too much to walk away. They are also into partnerships with other San Francisco based development companies (retail and commercial) to help get these projects ramped up. As all things development in San Francisco, I would keep a hand on my wallet and plan for how your grandchildren will benefit.

Housing Roller Coaster

Housing is up in value, housing prices drop, who really knows? People are fleeing cities and moving to the suburbs and small cities according to our keen demographer and essayist, Joel Kotkin and alternatively cities are outpacing suburbs in growth GO HERE.  What is it, and does it make a real difference? As always I am in the Kotkin Camp, demographics are the drivers of growth and change. More people equals more growth, growth begets demand, demand expands business, business expansion means jobs, and jobs means stability and stronger economies, both personally and publicly.

Never Been to Russia (with Love)

Found this time-lapse of Moscow, it is intriguing and makes you wonder what it would be like to visit:

Stay Tuned . . . .

Do We Still Need Cities?

Believe it or not, there is a debate centered on whether the American future depends on the city. The two leading cultural and social debaters, Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin take very different views of where we are heading. Florida, in his recent book The Great Reset, believes in the dense megaregion to drive the development of new industries and technologies and the creation of a whole new way of life. Joel believes in demographics and that people still have a choice, and they currently are voting with their feet and walking away from the denser urban centers toward “opportunity” regions.

The politicians and bureaucrats have to believe that the future is in our dense urban regions, and are focused on the major cities (I would too if that’s where the most votes live). They believe in the return to the city and like Richard Florida, opine that this is where the future will evolve. Maybe, maybe not.

Unlike most other countries, Americans, Canadians, and some European countries do not have to rely on the core urban city to move forward. But in other regions, it is the city where the jobs, ports and commerce centers, and many of the universities are. What affects the poorer countrysides in India, China, Vietnam, and Brazil more than anything is that their cities are where jobs and modern infrastructures exist. Say what you will about the futures of these countries, but it's their severe lack of stable and supportive infrastructures (poor roads, unsafe water, intermittent electricity, along with subsistence living conditions), that will doom these countries for years and years. They must depend on the urban region to exist in the Twenty-first Century.

Do we have to depend on the city for the American future and growth? We are now seeing how incredibility complex these urban centers are; aged infrastructures, poor quality housing, excessive taxation, almost criminal school systems, and above all incredibly bad management, this does not portend a great future for the city. For these and many other reasons, people vote with their feet.

Cities, while amazing physical structures, are the most fragile social ecosystems humans have created. For almost 7,000 years people have used cities as centers of commerce. The oldest seem to have been founded in the Levant, the region around Lebanon, Syria, and Israel; a crossroads in the trade routes of north-south and east-west commerce. Our American city building efforts pale in comparison to other great cities that have grown to maturity, like Athens and Rome, only to fail, rebuild, fail, then rebuild again. Others cities have maintained an increasing world importance for two thousand years, like London. Others are being created out of nothing but desire and intense amounts of capital, like Dubai. To foolishly believe that a city is permanent, we only have to look at Berlin in 1946, or Lisbon in 1755 when it was essentially wiped off the map of world by an earthquake, is to see how easily they can be destroyed. Great plagues gutted Medieval European cities; these plagues were the neutron bombs of their time, a city without people is only architecture. One could even argue that the greater and more intense the population, the greater its risk to disease and infection.

My belief is that current Western culture allows for and in fact demands a more flexible human network. Cities will exist and will grow, but the citizen does not have to physically live in and participate in the city. Economic costs are too high for all but the wealthy to live well in the city; all other residents in the urban core require the support, through taxes and investment of this smaller but wealthier group. It is like Paris where the taxes of the rest of France support this incredibly costly city. If these fortunate and wealthier citizens aren’t supported and encouraged to participate, they will leave. The city will become poorer and more dangerous, both financially and culturally, look at Detroit.

Florida can believe in the future of the megaregions, the creative class, a less auto-centric culture, and high speed rail as the ultimate savior; but he will have to tax the suburbanite and the small town citizen to make them work. As we see now, they will rebel. All the research and “fact” collecting won’t divine the future of a wealthy society that has the ability to make cultural and economic choices outside of the demands of the “State.” People in a free society will make decisions in their own self-interest. If this changes, no matter what government carrots are hanging out there, we may be in trouble.

Stay Tuned . . . .