Category: Opinion

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CNU 22: Ken Greenberg Outlines Challenges to 21st Century Urbanism

The opening plenary of the 22nd annual Congress of the New Urbanism opened to an audience of over one thousand attendees. Keynote speaker Ken Greenberg, a Toronto based urban designer and author of the book Walking Home: the Life and Lessons of a City Builder addressed the audience. His message is that even though New Urbanists have accomplished much in the 22 years since the founding of CNU, there is much to do and that new urbanists need to change to meet the coming challenges of the 21st century.

Greenburg highlighted the many challenges facing urbanism today. The first is the oft cited decline in the use of automobiles. “We are seeing the back of cars,” he told the crowd. Total miles traveled is down and young people are delaying getting their drivers licenses at a significant rate compared to a generation earlier.

Second is the growing gap in income inequality between urban places and suburban places. In Toronto from 1970 to 2005 a majority of the city’s low-income population moved from the urban core to suburban communities while the core experiencing prosperity.

Greenberg CNU22Ken Greenberg addresses the CNU. Photo by Paul Knight.

This divide is happening in cities across North America as urban cores have become desirable, and suburban areas experience decline. These trends were reported by UrbanCincy last month in Atlanta.

Greenberg goes on to say that this growing divide is also resulting in a political divide where urban places are not politically strong enough to demand for better urbanism because in most cases political power is still held in the suburbs and rule areas. As money grows scarce, money for urban areas dwindle. Urban areas are increasingly competing against the suburbs for scarce national resources. This is a familiar issue in many cities, including Cincinnati.

“All things public are under intense stress,” Greenberg argues, “just when we need them the most.”

Greenberg’s message to political leaders is, “There can be no national vision without a vision for cities.” Politicians should eliminate the “perverse subsidies” that continue to encourage costly, difficult to adapt and non-resilient infrastructure.  He equates changing the direction of what he called the “sprawl industrial complex” to trying to turn an aircraft carrier: It will happen slowly.

The divide is allowing cities to both create good urbanism and bad urbanism because policy is so hard to change, good urbanism is often done by granting exceptions to policy.“We have plenty of examples of good urbanism. The challenge is to change that from being the exception to being the rule,” he told the crowd.

However the challenges remain tough.  Greenberg urges that urbanists need to stop operating in silos and unite to build good policy. The threats of climate change and an increasingly urbanized world mean that cities are a necessary part of the future. He argues that we should embrace them and build them right.

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News Opinion Transportation

PHOTOS: The Impressive Urbanity of Colombia’s Third Largest City

Colonial Era Neighborhood on the Edge of Downtown Cali

If Medellín is the clean, gem of Colombia, Cali is the working man’s town. Visibly grittier than Medellín, Cali sports an incredible amount of assets that match and sometimes outshine Medellín.

Surrounded by mountains on one side, Cali’s skyline is more impressive than that of Medellín, while also seeming more original. Everything in Medellín is new, it seems.

While no rail transportation exists in the city, a large and extensive system of bus rapid transit allows traveling easy. In addition to their bus rapid transit system, Cali also has a system of bike lanes, although no bike share system.

They have impressive grand boulevards and arterials all throughout the city as well as grade-separated highways more impressive than those I saw in Medellín. In the downtown area, the city capped over a highway running along the river and made it a pedestrian and bus-only boulevard, following the river on the left and providing easy access to the center city and many historical buildings.

For a city with a reputation as being dangerous, it was incredibly efficient and had an impressive number of assets, including an incredible park system affording many breathtaking views of downtown Cali and the city sprawled out around it.

In the first official episode of The UrbanCincy Podcast, we were joined by Natalia Gomez Rojas, a city planner from Bogotá, to discuss Colombia’s pursuit and implementation of bus rapid transit. The discussion also touched on a number of societal issues facing Colombia’s cities as they continue to develop and evolve in a post-drug cartel era. You can subscribe to The UrbanCincy Podcast on iTunes for free. You can also read more of our coverage regarding bus rapid transit here.

This two-part photo series on Colombia’s second and third largest cities was put together during a four-month assignment by Jacob Fessler, during which he was based out of the city of Barranquilla.

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Development News Opinion

GUEST EDITORIAL: Paycor’s Brand New Headquarters in Norwood Misses the Mark

Paycor's New HQ from Above (Google)

Paycor recently moved their headquarters from Queensgate to Norwood’s Linden Pointe on the Lateral. Norwood pulled out all of the stops to ensure that they brought these jobs (and the tax dollars that come with them) from the City of Cincinnati.

When moving into their new digs, employees were literally crying out of excitement for their new workspaces. The open design and floor-to-ceiling windows are complimented by walking routes that allow employees to walk the perimeter of the floors for exercise.

However, once they step foot outside the front door the only thing any Paycor employees will be walking to are their cars.

Let’s back up though; the first phase of Linden Pointe actually had some great features. From sidewalks, crosswalks and bike parking, this development was well thought-out (other than the buildings being so far off-set from the street).

The Paycor development has absolutely no resemblance to the relatively pedestrian-friendly phase one. There are no sidewalks connecting the Paycor building to any local roads. Bike parking is also seemingly non-existent. But the biggest slap in the face to good design is Paycor’s complete disregard of the crosswalks already built in phase one towards the new development.

Instead of leading to a tree-lined sidewalk that runs to Paycor’s front door, these crosswalks lead to nowhere, seeming to indicate deliberate decisions taken by Paycor to avoid connecting their site to the rest of the development.

We can’t just blame Paycor for this mess though. Norwood’s Planning Commission & City Council approved the site plans too. The plan shows the crosswalks from the original development leading nowhere. The plan also shows no sidewalks connecting Paycor to any of the three nearby streets.

The plan does show a nice shiny building that will house lots of additional revenue. It is likely the City of Norwood did not want to push back too hard because the Paycor move was likely not a done deal. This is a shame though, because a better design would have benefited the surrounding neighborhoods and Linden Pointe as a whole by allowing for a comprehensively connected center instead of disjointed cul-de-sac style parcels.

James Bonsall recently moved, with his wife, to Norwood from New Albany, Indiana. In New Albany James served on the city’s planning commission. He has a B.S. in Business from Indiana University and currently works as an IT business analyst for a major health insurance company. You can connect with James on Twitter at @LouisvilleJames.

If you would like to have your thoughts and opinions published on UrbanCincy, simply contact us at editors@urbancincy.com.

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Business News Opinion

OPINION: U.S. Trade Policy and Its Impact on Urban Economies

View of Center City from Queensgate [Brian Spitzig]

The United States has consistently run a trade deficit since the 1980s. In 2013, the trade deficit averaged a staggering $40 billion per month. While much of this deficit has to do with oil imports (which will be offset in coming years), the nature of the U.S. trade deficit is astounding.

The nations with whom the United States runs trade deficits, and in which products it runs them, defeats common sense and makes one severely question what, if any, trade strategy the United States is pursuing.

Take the United States’ trade relations with Mexico. Although the United States has a highly developed economy at the forefront of industrialized nations, America ran an almost $64 billion trade deficit with Mexico in 2012, and has consistently run a trade deficit with Mexico since 1995.

Looking closer is even more eye-opening. The three most-imported products from Mexico include electrical equipment, vehicles, and machinery. While our most-exported products to Mexico include machinery, electrical equipment, and mineral fuels – with vehicles in fourth – the U.S. still runs a deficit in every one of those products. The value of vehicles exported to the U.S. from Mexico ($54 billion) is more than double what the United States sends in vehicles to Mexico ($20 billion).

Of America’s 15 largest trading partners, the United States runs a trade deficit with all but two. Even if you remove states from which America’s trade deficit is skewed by oil imports (Canada, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela), the vast majority of trading partners enjoy a trade surplus in their relationship with the United States.

Overall, America runs trade deficits in peculiar industries such as machinery, electrical equipment, mineral fuels, vehicles (excluding rail), pharmaceutical products, and steel. In fact, some of the few heavy industries in which the United States runs surpluses are in aircraft and plastics.

Heavily industrialized and mature economies like that of the United States should be successful in the export of heavy manufactured items like those stated above. While competition with other industrialized nations like Germany is understandable, large trade deficits in manufactured products with economies much less-developed than America’s is perplexing, at best.

For cities with a history and a base in heavy manufacturing, like Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis, policies like these only continue to chip away at the economic health of large sectors of these urban areas.

While it is imperative for industrial cities like these to diversify, unnecessary degradation of well-paying, already-established industries is detrimental to the creation of metropolitan economies steeped not only in new-age tech industries but also in a healthy industrial sector.

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News Opinion Politics

EDITORIAL: What Cranley’s Clever Budget Means for Urbanists

As has been widely reported thus far, the budget proposed by Mayor Cranley’s Administration is not as bad as many had expected it would be. That is, the administration’s proposal that is predicated on a massive reduction in required pension contributions is not that bad.

Should the proposed reduction to 14% in pension contributions not be accepted by a federal court, then all bets are off as to where this budget will actually go, since the vast majority of its balancing comes from that assumption. This is a major assumption, and one that will not be clarified until later this summer.

One of Cranley’s interesting moves relates to the Focus 52 program, established under Mayor Mallory’s Administration, that targeted funds for economic development projects throughout every city neighborhood. The fund relied, in part, on $3,000,000 in casino revenues to pay for its capital projects, which oddly enough were included in the Operating Budget in prior years.

The proposed budget shifts these Focus 52 projects from the Operating Budget to the Capital Budget, but the $3,000,000 in funding does not move along with them. As a result, the $3,000,000 is being used to help balance the Operating Budget, thus eliminating funding for all Focus 52 capital projects, or requiring cuts elsewhere in the Capital Budget to cover the costs.

The clever ledger shift allows Cranley to essentially eliminate the Focus 52 program without a special hearing process, and thus free up $3,000,000 annually for the Operating Budget that would have otherwise gone to support these neighborhood economic development projects.

City of Cincinnati Personnel Changes Since 2013

The City will have its first public hearings on the budget proposal starting tomorrow. For those of you who care about urbanism, UrbanCincy’s editorial team has gone through every page of Cranley’s budget proposal and identified the following major items of concern:

  1. Public Safety (police and fire) would consume 65.8% of the Operating Budget. While consuming two-thirds of the Operating Budget, only one-third of the City’s overall staffing would be made up of Public Safety personnel.
  2. Since the year 2000, Public Safety will have seen its personnel levels decrease by 4% (87 FTE), while all other departments will have collectively seen their personnel decrease by 17.7% (803 FTE).
  3. The City of Cincinnati would not repay $2,000,000 in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) dollars to Cincinnati Public Schools as previously agreed.
  4. The Cincinnati Area Geographic Information System (CAGIS), which is a shared technology and mapping service between the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, would see its funding reduced by $335,560, bringing its total funding down to $4,448,000.
  5. An additional $279,100 would be allocated to repair an estimated 8,000 potholes. This money would come at the expense of $154,100 in funding previously programmed for solar trash receptacles/compactors and $125,000 for a customs house at Lunken Airfield.
  6. Even though the Department of Planning & Buildings generates more in revenues than it has in expenses, and has won national accolades the last two years, it would see its Neighborhood Studies fund completed eliminated ($81,700).
  7. The Bicycle Transportation Program would be completely modified to only include funding and staff time for off-road trails, and eliminate all funding and staff resources for the development of any bike lanes, sharrows, bike racks or other on-street bike facilities.
  8. The Office of Environment & Sustainability would have $77,500 cut from its budget; while the Urban Forestry (street tree) Program would see its funding increase $46,650.
  9. A whopping 1,954 vehicles out of the City’s total 2,419 vehicles are out of life cycle because they have exceeded the established standards for maximum mileage, age or maintenance costs.
  10. The Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority would continue to receive $700,000 for operations, but would receive no money for capital projects as had been anticipated following the cancellation of the Parking Modernization & Lease Agreement that would have otherwise provided the Port Authority with a funding stream for capital projects.

While this budget proposal may technically be “structurally balanced”, it does so by craftily moving budget items around from one ledger to the other, defunding programs that either generate or save money over the long-term, and overly relying on what could be considered this year’s one-time budget fix – a reduction to 14% pension contribution that would equate to $7,100,000 in savings annually.

The City should fulfill its payment obligations to Cincinnati Public Schools, fully fund all aspects of its revenue generating Department of Planning & Buildings, renew the Bicycle Transportation Program to its originally intended goals established through an extensive public engagement process, restore funding to CAGIS and the Office of Environment & Sustainability, return the funds programmed for solar trash receptacles/compactors, and shift the funding associated with Focus 52 capital projects to the Capital Budget along with the projects.

Outside of this budget process, the City should also move forward with a comprehensive effort to fix its outdated fleet of vehicles, provide a stable and substantial revenue stream for the Port Authority and balance its budget in a way that does not create a police state.

The clever maneuvers demonstrated in Cranley’s first budget proposal show ingenuity, but UrbanCincy would prefer seeing that ingenuity being used to solve the actual problems present instead of relying on financing tricks.