Tag: public policy

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NYC’s Queens neighborhood aiming to transform stretch of railway into park

NYC’s Queens neighborhood aiming to transform stretch of railway into park.

The dramatic transformation of the High Line in Manhattan has been so successful that it has influenced other urban communities to re-examine what they’re doing with their unused railroads. Just across the East River, however, Queens is aiming to transform a stretch of train track, that has been abandoned for 50 years, into what advocates are calling the QueensWay. More from the New York Times:

Now, the three-and-a-half-mile stretch of rusty train track in central Queens is being reconceived as the “QueensWay,” a would-be linear park for walkers and bicyclists in an area desperate for more parkland and, with the potential for art installations, performances and adjacent restaurants, a draw for tourists interested in sampling the famously diverse borough.

Unlike the High Line, the QueensWay would welcome bicycles. While the trestles are relatively narrow, long stretches are wide enough — up to 25 feet — to accommodate walkers and bicyclists. New bike paths could connect the park to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the north, as well as an existing bikeway in Jamaica Bay to the south. About 250,000 residents live within a mile of the proposed park, and its backers see all kinds of ancillary benefits, from health to traffic.

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Development patterns appear to be not so free market-driven after all

Development patterns appear to be not so free market-driven after all.

There tends to be agreement among Americans that the way our communities are built is due to free-market demand. But as it turns out, government incentives have long influenced the way our communities develop, and have long favored suburban development patterns. More from The Atlantic:

According to a new report released by Smart Growth America, the federal government influences our real estate sector – with tax credits here, loan guarantees there, grants and other programs – to a tune of more than $450 billion a year. All that money (and the incentives implied by it) subtly skews what we build. Meanwhile we keep talking about about other, more obvious interventions in the real estate market, like regulation through zoning codes and infrastructure decisions about where to put roads and sewer lines.

Stepping back and looking at the whole collection, it’s clear that the federal government has favored many types of development at the expense of others, often with weak or outdated logic. The government dramatically favors homeowners over renters. Its support is heavily skewed toward single-family homes over multi-family developments (the FHA, for instance, funneled just one-tenth of its $1.2 trillion in loan guarantees over the past five years toward multi-family housing).

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Business Development News

Great Traditions breaks ground on phase two of Stetson Square

Nearly seven years after phase one of the $84 million Village at Stetson Square development opened, developers stood with city and neighborhood leaders in Corryville this morning to celebrate the groundbreaking of the project’s next phase.

Once fully complete, phase two will include a total of 18 condominiums in four different buildings, with prices ranging from $200,000 to $275,000.

In order to help compliment the development, the City of Cincinnati will be contributing $340,000 towards infrastructure improvements in the immediate area. The development team expects the first residents to begin moving in by August 2013.

The Stetson Square development got off to a fast start with its large first phase. Until phase two designs were revealed in May 2012, the second and third remaining phases of work had been left undeveloped and up in the air with regards to when they would get started.


The second phase of work at Stetson Square kicked off today – nearly 13 years after the original plan was developed for the project in 2000. Image provided.

“We are very proud of Stetson Square and what it has contributed to the Corryville neighborhood and Uptown area,” explained Jamie Humes, Vice President, Great Traditions Land & Development. “It is an exciting, transformative time for people to live within the City of Cincinnati.”

In addition to adding new owner-occupied housing units to the Corryville neighborhood near the booming medical research block, the developers are also pursuing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

In December 2012, Cincinnati City Council passed new measures overseeing the tax incentives distributed for LEED-certified project.

But while phase two is finally getting started, the prominently located phase three has yet to have its future defined. When asked about the future of phase three, Humes stated that there is no definitive plan or use for it yet.

“Our perspective is that the marketplace will ultimately determine what the best land use and timing for development will be,” Humes clarified. “Corryville Community Development Corporation (CCDC) will then make the decision on how to proceed.”


Phase two of Stetson Square is considerably smaller than phase one, and will welcome its first residents by fall 2013. Rendering provided.

In 2006, Great Traditions informed UrbanCincy that phase three would eventually result in either apartments or condominiums, with a preference for additional owner-occupied units if the market would allow. The undeveloped lot sits at the corner of Martin Luther King Drive and Eden Avenue, and the CCDC currently retains ownership of the property.

Great Traditions touts that Stetson Square has 100% of its 79,000 square feet of office space and 92% of its 15,000 square feet of retail space occupied, more than 400 people living within the first phase’s 53 condominiums and 205 apartments.

The extended period it has taken to build out the development may be attributable to a sluggish economy, or even the fact that Stetson Square was Great Tradition’s first major foray into the urban real estate market.

“When Stetson Square was originally conceived, it was designed not only to be a great project, but also to serve as a catalyst for the revitalization of Corryville,” Humes told UrbanCincy. “To have the opportunity to translate this concept into an urban context with Stetson Square has been a natural and exciting progression for our company.”

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New York City, Chicago rapidly advancing progressive transport policies

New York City, Chicago rapidly advancing progressive transport policies.

New York City and Chicago are blazing a progressive path towards a sustainable transport network. Cincinnati has made minor strides with regards to bicycle infrastructure and Complete Streets, but much is being left on the table in the Queen City and elsewhere. More from Grid Chicago:

I hadn’t been to New York since 2008 when I checked out their Summer Streets ciclovia. Since then Manhattan has gone through an amazing transformation under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik Khan. Besides implementing the bike lanes, they pulled off the ultimate road diet on Broadway, removing car lanes and shutting down sections of the island’s main diagonal thoroughfare to calm traffic and make space for some amazing new car-free spaces. And I didn’t even have time to check other first-rate bike facilities in Queens and Brooklyn, or the new segments of the Highline, the sleek, 1.5-mile elevated linear park which paved the way for Chicago’s Bloomingdale.

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Residential zoning laws may be preventing natural economic evolution

Residential zoning laws may be preventing natural economic progression.

The “convergence” theory suggests that poorer states like Mississippi should have caught up to richer states like Connecticut over time. This economic projection held true in America’s history until about 1980, and some researchers blame overbearing residential zoning laws. More from the Boston Globe:

During the 100 years of high convergence, Americans moved in droves from poorer states to richer states in search of higher wages. As more people crowded into richer states, average wages there began to fall in response to the relative oversupply of workers; meanwhile wages in the poorer states began to rise for the relatively few workers who remained behind, creating a kind of economic balancing effect between American regions.

Theoretically this process should have continued until Mississippi and Connecticut were more or less equally desirable places to work and Shoag and Ganong propose a three-step explanation why it did not: Convergence stopped because labor migration stopped; labor migration stopped because housing prices in the richest states grew so out of whack that low-skilled workers could no longer afford to move in; and housing prices skyrocketed in response to zoning laws written in the 1970s that artificially restricted the amount and type of housing that could be built in richer locales.