Sustainable Mayberry.

Impeded by byzantine zoning regulations, compliance with historic preservation standards, or anti-density community activists (aka NIMBYs), infill development is typically challenging enough to implement in an urban setting.  Auto-dependent cities in America—which are the majority—remain littered with parking lots wedged between two older, surviving structures that pre-date the car.  Those lots serve as a reminder of the venerable old buildings that once stood in their place.  When cars emerged as the primary means of getting around by mid 20^th century, finding an easy place to park often became more critical to downtowns than retaining the buildings that had long been the primary downtown destinations.  Today, after much maneuvering and militant compromises from the original vision, developers have succeeded in filling in some of the gaps in the downtowns of the more economically healthy cities, particularly those that have recrafted their city centers as a hub for entertainment and fashionable urban living.

But what about the small towns?  Most of their downtowns suffered at least some of this spot demolition in order to accommodate car parking and to compete with the mega-markets that ran roughshod across the cheap land near the outer highway (Wal-Mart being the favorite culprit).  But only a select few of these small downtowns have enjoyed any sort of economic renaissance; even fewer have stimulated new infill development.  Will these towns ever fill in the gaps, and, if so, how?

The community of Oberlin, Ohio, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland and with a population of 8,200, might offer a solution.  It seems to have defied conventions.  It’s not the seat of Lorain County, so it cannot ascribe to the Midwest prototype of a central courthouse square surrounded on all sides by commercial buildings.  But it does have an easily identifiable old commercial center.

The shape of Oberlin’s downtown demonstrates another method by which it bucks the trends.  Unlike most towns of its size, it does not consist exclusively of a linear-oriented main street.  The map below highlights the presence of commercial buildings in the town, using the purple outline.

While the epicenter of Oberlin’s small downtown clearly sits at the convergence of College Street and Main Street, the configuration is unusual.  The commercial buildings like the one featured in the top photo do not spread evenly in each direction to form a cross or a plus sign; rather, the buildings only stretch to the south side of the College Street axis, essentially forming a T-shape.  One block of South Main Street contains commercial and civic buildings on both sides of the street, as seen in the photo below:

Meanwhile, College Avenue’s commercial corridor only rests on the south side of the street, which includes buildings such as these:

But a pivot to the northwest at the intersection of College and Main presents the following view:

It’s Tappan Square, a centrally located park.  The Google Streetview provides a wide-angle perspective which shows the main-street typology depends exclusively on one side of the street.  It wouldn’t be the first pedestrian-oriented commercial corridor to succeed despite a lopsided axial development pattern: Bexley, Ohio, which I explored extensively in the past, features a thriving commercial artery on the north side of East Main Street and, along much of the south side, the greenery of Capital University.  So does Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey, from where I have written much of this essay: the north side is a very upmarket retail district; the south side is Princeton University’s primary campus.

If isn’t obvious already, Oberlin’s tiny downtown offers a similar dichotomy.  In this case, the north side of College Street hosts the campus of Oberlin College, the esteemed liberal arts school that assures this municipality a high-profile cultural role belying its small size.  And single-loaded commercial corridor phenomenon might also explain this streetscape about a block east from the town’s core intersection, along College Street:

The building in the center of the above photo caught my attention, because it was clearly much newer than the adjacent building (to the right in the pic), as well as pretty much every other building in Oberlin’s central commercial “T”.  What was its story?  I made my first assessment based on its appearance alone.  As buildings in downtown Oberlin go, it’s big.

It smartly abides by the urban design typology of its kindred downtown buildings, encouraging retail on the ground floor through the accommodating fenestration, while reserving upper floors for other uses.  The photos above confirm the considerable width of the building along the College Street frontage, but it extends southward as well:

The back of the building could easily have assumed the obvious butt-end function reserved for parking, mechanics, or garbage collection, all presided over by a featureless wall.  But it doesn’t. The architects have programmed the alley space behind the building into an interior courtyard.

A smaller, ancillary building featured in the second of the two photos helps enclose the space, shielding it from the unsightly parking lots that predominate the backsides of neighboring buildings, like this example:

I also appears that the designers have cushioned the space between the sidewalk and the street with some enhanced landscaping.

Judging from those thick thirsty grasses, the greenery here should help capture and absorb stormwater runoff, putting it to more productive use than in the municipal storm sewers and preventing it from flowing back to the watershed in a more polluted form.  The landscaping offers both street-level aesthetics and an environmentally sensitive alternative to all the paved imperviousness around it.  Lastly, the building’s retail frontage seems to welcome bicyclists…

...though perhaps still not quite enough, since the myriad bikes parked on the day I visited almost evoked Copenhagen more than an American college town.

From my own non-expert evaluation, this is a smartly designed complex, not out of place in a trendy district of a major metropolitan area.  But somehow it ended up in little Oberlin.  And, to top it off, it is obviously an infill project.  I patronized Café Sprouts, a vegan deli, bakery and juice bar on the first floor, to see if I could get more information.  One of the employees informed me that the site had hosted a drive-thru Rax Roast Beef restaurant in the past, but it had been vacant for years and had reduced that arm of the downtown “T” to a dead zone.  The current Google Streetview, from September 2008, perfectly captures the “before” vision, when site planning for the infill development had just begun.  The employee also pointed me to a sign I had up to this point somehow overlooked:

This told me everything else I needed to know.  It took no time at all to find a bevy of articles, such as this one, to get even more background on the project.   Three relatively recent Oberlin grads formed a development partnership called Sustainable Community Associates just blocks from their alma mater.  Their goal was to inject life into a long dormant corner of downtown with a high-density, mixed-use, mixed-income development that also employed environmentally sustainable practices.  The $15 million result, with 33 condos and 20,000 square feet of retail, is seeking LEED-Neighborhood Development Gold status and hopes to stimulate further densifying infill in Oberlin where the opportunities arise.

Needless to say, I was taken by this project, which I had inadvertently stumbled upon during an impromptu first-time visit through the town.  It’s enough to marvel at how it achieves a superior urban design configuration to 90% of the new developments that have taken place in my hometown of Indianapolis in recent year.  (To an extent, that is a subjective judgment call on my part.)  What’s less open for dispute is that such infill is virtually unheard of in towns of Oberlin’s size.  Surrounded by cornfields in all directions, it is close enough to Cleveland to fall within the metropolitan area, but still too far to qualify as a suburb or even a reasonable exurb.  But the town owes most of its idiosyncratic character to its adjacent college, whose history of left-leaning political activism competes broadly with its reputation for academic excellence.  While it certainly helps that the brains behind Sustainable Community Associates went to school there and no doubt forged strong connections to the community, it’s not every Ohio town that can muster support for a sizable new LEED certified building, let alone one that accommodates bicycles more visibly than cars.  But most small towns in Ohio also wouldn’t support a vegan bakery/juice bar called Café Sprouts.

The symbiosis between the developers and the small, like-minded community helped transcend zoning stipulations or not-in-my-back-yard obstructionists.  It is hardly surprising that college towns like Oberlin, regardless of their size or the character of their rural purlieus, often prove the most successful laboratory for experimentations in infill.  They might offer a smaller canvas on which to operate, but they generally benefit from a more homogenous population and a smaller artillery of regulations to thwart the savvy designers’ visions.  I am fully confident that another five years will introduce to Oberlin a similarly chic infill project.  And I won’t be at all surprised if I find a Kabbalah Center in the retail on that first floor.

The state house makes the laws; the state takes it for granted.

I’ve observed in the past how, almost instinctively, we come to expect a certain degree of monumentality in major seats of government, usually the prominent display of a central building that hosts those administrative offices.  In the typical Midwestern county seat, the courthouse provides that landmark—an elaborate masonry building resting in the center of a park-like square, often with a clock tower at its highest point.  Opposite the square on all four sides rest commercial and office buildings that date from the town’s original founding.  My earlier essay noted that Muncie, Indiana has essentially undercut its monumentality because it demolished the historic courthouse, replacing it with a brutalist-influenced concrete structure that offers no embedded landmarks or ornamental features to attract the eye.  As a result, Muncie has lost much of its “centered-ness” in its downtown, because no single remaining building offers a compensatory visual prominence.

But Muncie is a simply the political center for Delaware County, a mere one out of 91 other counties in the State of Indiana.  What if the visitor is looking for the most prominent landmark in a state capital—a higher tier of governance for a much larger, more populous body politic?  If a sightseer searches for a clear visual center in Trenton, New Jersey, this capital of the Garden State (with a 2010 population 8.8 million) is not likely to impress.

Despite several decades of population loss, Trenton is hardly a small city: it has stabilized in recent decades, down from its 1950 peak of 128,000 but generally locked at around 85,000 since 1990.  It is the state’s 10^th largest municipality and the hub of the Trenton-Ewing Metropolitan Statistical area, which includes all of Mercer County (with a 2010 population of over 360,000).  Trenton sits in an unusual position nearly mid-way between the teeming metropolises of New York and Philadelphia.  Up to the 2000 Census, Trenton belonged to the Philadelphia Consolidated MSA.  However, after determining that a preponderance of commuters linked Trenton and Mercer County more heavily to the New York City CMSA, the US Census Bureau shifted its alignment.  Now Trenton identifies as the southwestern arm of the nation’s largest metropolitan area, even though it is still geographically closer to Philly and belongs to the Philadelphia media market.  Perhaps most importantly, it is the seat of government of the nation’s 11^th most populous state and one that, by most measurements, ranks among the three wealthiest.

Nonetheless, Trenton assumes a low profile among national capitols.  Even most New Jerseyans will claim they have connection to the city unless the State employs them.  Perhaps it is no surprise that the New Jersey Statehouse does not immediately catch the eye.  But did it have to be quite so unobtrusive?

It sits quietly on West State Street, along the middle of the block, as evidenced by the Google Map below.

Unlike most statehouses in the country, it does not boast an expansive lawn or a bold processional; the setback from the street might be slightly more than usual, but it is still so modest that a motorist could drive right past the building without even noticing it.  (That’s what I did the first time I visited Trenton.)  The central cupola, a feature most capitol buildings in the US share, glitters on a sunny day, thanks to its gold finish.  But it’s not particularly tall and is situated far enough in the center of the massive building that it isn’t easy to see it from the State Street address.  It certainly doesn’t assert itself as a visual landmark.

At the very least, the opposite side of the street could offer some visual cues: a long boulevard or another state building of elevated visual prominence.  But it really doesn’t.

The handsome 18^th and 19^th century buildings (about two-thirds of which are in good condition) hardly suggest that the seat of the state’s government sits squarely across the street.  In fact, they conspicuously recall a conventional post-revolutionary residential neighborhood.

In Trenton’s defense, the space directly across the street from the cupola does host a modest plaza with a war memorial.

This opening ostensibly provides some decent views of the statehouse, but as this Panaramio photo indicates, the viewshed still isn’t great enough to see more than a portion of the sprawling edifice—one that grew in subsequent years after multiple expansions.  And this little plaza appears to be contemporary installation, evidenced by the blank walls on the buildings that sandwich it.

The impressions of the structures that previously abutted the centuries-old residences on either side of the plaza recall what used to stand there: similar residential structures that subsequent generations of Trentonians allowed to fall into neglect.  In time, demolition seemed like the best option.  Thus, this war memorial plaza is an afterthought—an insertion to fill a gap in the old building stock.  And it offers a modest view, but hardly an expansive one.  Even the winter’s denuding influence does little to enhance the views of the New Jersey State Capitol; this recent photo of State Street a bit to the east only reinforces how unobtrusive the building is.

A pedestrian can barely see that gold cupola.  Meanwhile, a back-seat view of the state house, from Lafayette Street to the southeast, is hardly better.

Sure, the cupola pokes out a little bit from behind the Revolution-era Hessian encampment in the foreground to the right, but the view is still widely obscured.  In fact, the only unobstructed view of the entire New Jersey State House is from the south looking northward, across the Delaware River, from the town of Morrisville, Pennsylvania.

I admit that I cheated in my first photograph in this essay, which also shows the Trenton skyline, but panned at a different angle that deliberately blocked the statehouse.  But even in the rare perspective when the structure features prominently, the photographer’s vantage point obviously requires quite a distance.  This photo took some effort on my part: it sits on a quiet residential street in Morristown, and I had to climb up a levee to get the photo.

And pivoting to see the levee, as well as the houses on the Pennsylvania side, which enjoy little real view of Trenton or the river from their front doors:

As capital cities go—both in the United States and throughout the world—Trenton is the antithesis of self-referential ostentation.  Founded in the first two decades of the 18^th century, this New Jersey city predates the nation’s capital by nearly one hundred years.  In his book Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century, Wolfgang Sonne recognizes that George Washington famously commissioned the military engineer Charles Pierre l’Enfant to plan a centrally located capital for the young nation, along the banks of the Potomac River.  The French-born ally of American Revolutionists believed that the scale of such a city should parallel the political greatness of the state, so he modeled it after the Baroque details of Versailles.  After designing a hilltop government center, l’Enfant organized the remainder of Washington DC along a comprehensive grid system, punctuated with radial streets that emanate from the two principal centers: the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Despite his devotion to a clearly articulated vision, L’Enfant died in relative obscurity, though his legacy enjoyed a resurrection a century later, when James McMillan, chair of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, proposed the comprehensive revitalization of Washington DC using European capitals as inspiration.  Jon A. Peterson, in The Birth of City Planning in the US – 1840-1917, identifies the overriding political purpose of the McMillan Plan: it transformed the city into a place of national identification, and he convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to adopt it.  This time around, the reinforcement of a political center inspired a number of other American cities to introduce a similar degree of monumentality to their downtowns, even though many of them weren’t even state capitals.  In the years following the McMillan Plan, the contagion of the “City Beautiful” manifested itself through smaller civic center proposals in Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo and (most famously) Chicago, as well as state capitals such as Hartford, St. Paul, Indianapolis and Providence.  The prevailing view at the time seemed to be that sweeping diagonals rebelled against the monotony of the gridiron, which was the street configuration to which the majority of American cities already adhered.  In addition, the insertion of a processional or a mall-like passageway offered lengthy vistas that would typically terminate at a site of manifest importance.

But Trenton has none of these.  When it became the state capital in 1790, it was already a mature hub of industry—not a preconceived political center, as is characteristic of Washington DC and a fair number of capitals to the west.  It is also the second oldest state house in continuous legislative use, a fact no doubt abetted by the fact that New Jersey is one of the thirteen original colonies (Annapolis, Maryland hosts the oldest house).  So is this humility characteristic of the colonial states, most of which already hosted a number of industrial centers at the time of US independence?  To an extent, it is.  Look at the New Hampshire state house in Concord:

The lawn over which it presides lends a certain majesty that elevates it in comparison to the New Jersey equivalent, but the structure itself is modest in size, and it mimics the town green commonplace in just about every New England city.

Attractive but conventional commercial buildings frame the other corners of the state house plaza:

But nothing about Concord as a state government center would strike the average visitor as sublime.

Concord and Trenton surely owe part of their restraint—their workaday industrial character—to a deliberate capitalist gesture borne out of anti-imperialist sentiment in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.  Virtually every major European capital, though presumably organically conceived (rather than overtly planned like Washington DC), remains saturated with references to its monarchic heritage.  Particularly in western Europe, the majesty that totalitarian leaders imbued in their capitals contributes generously to their aesthetic appeal in this day and age—just as it obviously did for James McMillan a century ago, or Pierre L’Enfant another century prior.  The malls and plazas and palaces may evoke centuries of virtual despotism, but it was all done in such good taste that we overlook the subjugation upon which these magnificent vistas depend.  Scrolling across the US in search of its variegated state capitols, one can discern our collective conflicted relationship toward political power and urban design.

We probably never will sort this relationship out, as both political monumentality and references to the City Beautiful movement poke their heads up at random locations from time to time, through sundry downtown revitalization initiatives.  And while little Trenton may not ever hold its statehouse aloft, at least another landmark has more than helped the city retain some notoriety.  Just a hundred yards from the Delaware River levee is the US Route 1 bridge, and from that bridge is an uninhibited view of the neighboring “Trenton Takes” bridge, with the city skyline in the background.

The nighttime view, in which these letters (dating originally from 1935) glow a fierce orange, provides one of the most signature entrances to any city in the country and has won Trenton a ticket to immortality through features in numerous TV shows and movies.  Trenton itself may not seem to embrace the spirit of its parent Garden State—it is, after all, one of only two capitals that physically borders another state—but it cynically tips its hat to its industrial past and post-industrial grit with aplomb and (dare I say it) Jersey attitude.

Predicting the future by turning back the clocks.

In an essay from the past, I shamelessly stretched the definition of the term “land banking” to suit my own purposes.  How?  By showing two examples of the deliberate assembly of contiguous parcels with the purpose of building something new, but the problem is, neither attempt at parcel assembly consisted of vacant land, as is the customary use of the term.  The land banking was (as I indicated) retroactive, because the parcels themselves already had structures resting on them.   The owners of contiguous buildings had let the buildings remain vacant, long enough that some were falling into disrepair.  But these two examples were in the heart of walkable downtown Bloomington, Indiana and auto-oriented Greenwood, Indiana—economically healthy environments where it made no sense to abandon the real estate, since the landowners could easily find reliable tenants.  In due time, I knew that these dowdy buildings would get demolished, once parcel assembly was complete, and the developer would ideally rebuild something better than was there before, making a higher and better use of this coveted land.

Well, I was wrong.  I guess I learned my lesson in speculation.  Or did I?  The example in urban Bloomington warranted a follow-up essay about five months later, because the developer, who had hoped to build a large condo building on Kirkwood Avenue on the site of multiple smaller structures, ultimately decided simply to upgrade and improve the appearance of the existing structures when the condo market went bust.  In truth, I wasn’t wrong about the land banking process—it just didn’t work out the way the developer had anticipated.  Meanwhile, the suburban Greenwood example simply foretold the replacement of old retail outparcel buildings (mostly drive thru restaurants) with newer, flashier ones, like a contemporary Chick-fil-A.  So I was wrong on that, but maybe the intention was for a larger retail structure that again flopped, since the economy made it harder to secure financing for more ambitious projects.

Either way, I’m at it again, speculating on another land banking initiative, exploiting the term once more.  I may be wrong once more, but I’m more confident than ever about my guesswork because of the setting: this time it’s in densely populated downtown Philadelphia, usually referred to by the locals as Center City.

By most measurements, the squat, nondescript building in the photo above appears to be in good enough condition, but it sure doesn’t seem to have much luck at securing tenants.  It sits at the intersection of South 15^th Street and Walnut Street, and its prime storefront is glaringly vacant:

And the first photo was misleading; it revealed the entire frontage along South 15^th Street, but despite the various signs for a coffee shop, hair salon, and Korean restaurant, the reality is far less promising:

The Panache salon has vacated the first group of windows on the photo above, while Elixir Coffee House—

Gone as well, relocated a mere half-block to the west.  Finally, it would appear that Miga, the Korean restaurant at the end, has closed altogether.

However, a small sign in the window indicates that the business hopes to reopen soon…presumably in a new location.  Meanwhile the second floor of the building doesn’t look much more active:

The pictures don’t fully capture this, but in the few places where the curtains are drawn, it is clear that the offices are empty, and the thickness of dust across all the windows suggests that they haven’t been used in quite some time.

The frontage on Walnut Street is no better.

Lush, the upscale purveyor of soap and cosmetics, used to occupy that street-level space in the adjacent two-story building, but it has apparently relocated as well.  And a bit further down the street, the furniture rental store has also relocated, in yet another low-rise structure.

The first floor apparently used to contain a Rite Aid Pharmacy, but it too has terminated its lease.  In short, the building appears to be completely vacant.  The absence of pedestrian traffic along 15^th Street only confirms the building’s lack of appeal.  An outsider might draw the conclusion that this is succumbing to blight and disinvestment, but anyone remotely familiar with Philly would know otherwise.  15^th and Walnut just blocks from the heart of Rittenhouse Square, long Central City’s most vibrant park space and the name of the prestigious surrounding neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Walnut Street is the most heavily-trafficked retail corridor, widely sought after by national upscale brands.  If anything, it seems a bit strange that a low-end furniture rental company would voluntarily pay the exorbitantly high rents along Walnut Street, especially considering that directly across the street from this building is the following tenant:

It’s hard to think of many retailers choosier than Armani Exchange.

In short, this group of three vacant buildings in a posh part of town bespeaks the quiet transfer of titles among speculators who no doubt believe this corner deserves a higher and better use.  The tenants didn’t depart because the location was bad.  A Google Streetview from reveals that both the 15^th Street segment and the WalnutStreet cluster of three façades were fully tenanted as recently as August of 2009.  More likely than not, the owner(s) did not allow them to extend their leases into a new term.  In this case, the land speculator has assembled multiple adjacent parcels with the hopes of building something with potential to earn greater income, no doubt benefiting from a higher Floor Area Ratio (FAR) than the meager two and three stories that the current buildings offer.  In order to build anew, this developer will need to demolish the existing structures; in order to demolish, he or she will obviously have to vacate.

I have based this entire essay on a hunch that I barely noticed in passing through the city briefly one afternoon, in which I guessed what was about to happen by peeling back the layers, thereby figuring out the current phase of an ongoing development trajectory.  I was first taken by the conspicuous absence of pedestrian traffic around the building fronting 15^th Street—

—particularly in comparison to all the streets around it, or even the opposite side of 15^th:

Moments later, it occurred to me that most if not all of the storefronts were vacant, despite the signage.  Then I noticed the architectural details of this building, or the lack thereof.  I’m hardly the most well versed architectural historian, but usually I can at least approximate the date of a building from its appearance.  Not this time.  It almost seemed as though the designer had eschewed any ornamentation (or even a deliberate absence of ornamentation, which can be an enhancement in itself) that could give it away or distinguish it.  The landlord even let Miga, one of the former tenants, paint its section of the façade black.

Ugly ugly ugly.  My suspicion is that this building comes from a time when the economy of urban Philadelphia was so feeble that even Rittenhouse Square was struggling, and the risk-averse developer chose unimaginative and low-slung construction, because that was all the weak market could support.  The 1970s or early 1980s, perhaps?  Since that time, Rittenhouse has reclaimed most if not all of its luster, and the time is right to build bigger and better.  Am I right?  Will these buildings soon face demolition?

A modest bit of internet research vindicated my suspicions: all those other tenants left because these buildings will soon come down.  The replacement?  A four-story mega-structure, with each floor devoted to a separate retail tenant.  The buzz on the Naked Philly website reveals, not surprisingly, a fair amount of disappointment: a premier corner such as 15^th and Walnut could easily support a 16-story mixed-use building, octupling the FAR rather than merely doubling it.  But we are still in the midst of lean economic times, forcing developers and their equity partners into far more modest decisions than they otherwise would make.  At the very least, this latest example of “retroactive land banking” demonstrates that the machinations of a relatively unregulated land market are helping new construction to chug along, against all odds.  If a blighted blemish sits squarely in a sheet of polished platinum, rest assured that someone with deep pockets has already pounced on the disparity, ready to invest in a way that could level the playing field…even if only aesthetically.

It may take a village, but what if the village is the taker?

Virtually every metropolitan area in America, both large and small, consists of more than one incorporated municipality, usually with a shared boundary.  Typically the “core” city after which the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is named is the oldest, most industrialized, and the most populous city.  The surrounding, contiguous cities—the suburbs—are the inverse: newer, lower population, less of an industrial heritage. Beyond this dichotomy, the relationship between the core city and its suburbs will probably vary greatly from metro to metro.

 

Lest I insult the intelligence of my readers, I won’t belabor the obvious any further.  The municipalities in an MSA will differ greatly, like the variegated colors in a mosaic, and not just because they comprise discrete planes.  Ideally, they offer varying approaches to self-governance that directly reflect the wills of their electorates.  No two municipalities in a metro area are likely to adopt quite the same approach to the financing of various core services—police, fire, public works, and so forth.  It is for this reason that we might witness core differences between in infrastructure between two adjacent municipalities: they choose different street signs, lighting, or even paving surfaces, let alone the tax structures used to finance them.  I observed an example of this in a recent blog post in which a road that formed the boundary between two Cleveland suburbs.  Meanwhile, most constituents will assess the aptitude of their executives through two basic means: the election process at a microcosmic level, and maintaining a residence in the municipality over the years, at the macrocosmic level.  This duality provides the chief incentive for a mayor and his staff to perform their duties capably: if they want to keep their jobs, they will strive to perform well enough to get elected, and a well-managed city is far more likely remain desirable enough to keep its tax base than one that is not.

But what happens when a town’s leadership chooses an ethically or legally dubious management practice?  One Cleveland suburb in particular has acquired a certain reputation over the years:

East Cleveland abuts the core city to the west and the north, and parts of this suburb are older than certain neighborhoods in Cleveland proper.  In terms of the built environment, the boundary between the core city and its suburb is indistinct: the historic “millionaire’s row” stretched along Euclid Avenue in both municipalities, with little regard for where one began and the other ended.  A century ago, the City of Cleveland unsuccessfully attempted to annex East Cleveland on two occasions; these days, Cleveland is not likely to perceive its eastern neighbor as much of a prize.  East Cleveland fell on hard times during the widespread deindustrialization that took place throughout the Cuyahoga Valley in the second half of the twentieth century: since 1970, it has lost more than half of its population.  What was once a predominantly white suburb is now almost exclusively black, with only about 6% claiming any other race in the 2010 Census and nearly 40% of the population falling below the poverty level.

Not surprisingly, East Cleveland’s impecunious population does not offer the sort of taxable income with which the City can provide fundamental services.  So what does the City do?

It shifts the burden to motorists passing through by tackling them with hefty speeding tickets.  While visiting Cleveland, friends had warned me that the 2.5 mile stretch of Euclid Avenue that passes through East Cleveland was a fierce speed trap—even a few miles per hour over the limit will result in a ticket.  Now this sign on the sidewalk confirms it.  The City no doubt decided to deploy cameras in order to preclude law enforcement officers from squandering time on petty moving violations, especially considering East Cleveland’s traditionally high rate of violent crime.  A few blocks away, an unusually large sign announces the approaching school zone, which no doubt has even more onerous speeding restrictions—and steeper fines.

At least the City of East Cleveland is candid about its method of generating revenue.  The same can’t be said about another Ohio municipality: New Rome, a suburb of Columbus.  This tiny village comprises only about nine city blocks (approximately twelve acres), and even at its peak, no more than 150 people called it home; the 2000 Census estimated its population at 60.  It would probably occupy little more than a footnote in Columbus’ cultural history if it weren’t for a 4-block stretch of U.S. Route 40 (West Broad Street in Columbus city limits) that falls within the corporate limits.  I don’t have any firsthand photographs, but this Google Streetview captures the essence of New Rome well enough.  This 1000-foot segment of one of America’s oldest highways is a notorious trap, where the speed limits drop from 45 miles per hour to 35.

The New Rome Police Department unapologetically issues $90 to motorists going 42 mph within this speed zone; since this is a clear violation, it is entirely within the department’s right to do so.  But, according to an April 2003 issue of Car and Driver magazine, speeding tickets only account for about 12% of New Rome’s citations on U.S. 40.  The citations for the remaining tickets explain why the village has achieved such notoriety: fines for cracked or excessively tinted windshields, dirt on the license plate, chipped taillights, faulty mufflers, no front license plates, tailgating, and driving too slowly, among others.  Officers routinely ask stopped motorists where they work, and failure to pay in time may result in an arrest at the workplace.  This village of approximately a dozen ramshackle houses, three apartment buildings, and a handful of small businesses earns nearly all its revenue (nearly $400,000 in those last few years) from traffic citations.  Since the town has no other real amenities (a fire department, library, or parks) all of this money pays for the police force—an operation that exists to fund itself and the village council.  The municipal building is a double-wide trailer.

New Rome’s command over its speed trap helped it achieve a reputation far more insidious than anything the much larger East Cleveland could muster.  Motorists had started using alternate routes in order to avoid the gauntlet, often traveling through residential neighborhoods unequipped to handle the traffic in terms of road width.  Businesses in the area actively voiced concern that their enterprises were suffering as motorists consciously circumvented New Rome.  A few neighbors eventually grew so frustrated about the situation that they launched the website New Rome Sucks in order to let more people voice their Tales of Woe.  Further research on the village’s internal operations revealed that the speed trap was just the tip of a relentlessly corrupt iceberg.  City leaders inappropriately used a federal grant from 1996 intended to fight burglaries and vandalism to fund yet more traffic enforcement.  This police force has at times employed as many as 14 people (almost one quarter of the 2000 population), all for the sole purpose of citing motorists and collecting the fees.  Furthermore, the village didn’t even abide by its own standards for its executive and legislative branch: it had not held elections for the village council since 1979, and it went seven years without mayoral elections.  Past audits revealed multiple instances of embezzlement by various council members, virtually all of whom are related to one another.  The State Highway Department claimed that the Village’s sudden speed limit drop on U.S. 40 from 45 to 35 is unjustified.

At last, in 2002, a neighboring business owner, angered by New Rome’s influence on the driving culture of Columbus’ west side, moved to an apartment building in New Rome and successfully ran for mayor, winning with 6 votes against zero.  However, the town council refused to recognize his victory, with one member calling him a carpetbagger.  This controversy, well chronicled like so many others on the New Rome Sucks website, eventually attracted the attention of the Franklin County Prosecutor and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who determined that, after decades of corruption and incompetent management, New Rome should be abolished.  Not surprisingly, the village’s constituents voted against dissolution.  By the end of the year, Petro convinced the Ohio General Assembly to pass a law that allowed the state to seek dissolution of a village under 150 people if the State Auditor found that it provided fewer public services and demonstrated a pattern of wrongdoing.  When village officials challenged the dissolution statute as contrary to the home rule provisions of the Ohio Constitution, a judge ruled in favor of the State in July of 2004 that the New Rome electorate had allowed key offices to remain vacant for such long periods of time that the village had effectively dissolved itself.  By September of that year, the Village of New Rome had ceased to exist, irrevocably absorbed into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.

[While the New Rome incident originally earned national media attention, the majority of coverage today comes from the Columbus Dispatch newspaper and has reverted to archives, so the Wikipedia article (never a preferred source of mine) offers the most detailed chronology of events.] 

New Rome provides an interesting contrast to most other representatives of the multifaceted suburban mosaic referenced at the beginning of this essay.  In most municipalities, good governance is a selling point, and the election process allows constituents to transmit their will onto their representatives by either voting the preferred candidate or voting with their feet.  However, New Rome’s incompetence and malfeasance was equally a reflection of the will of its constituents: they got exactly the sort of racket that an ostensible majority of them wanted.  And eventually the village forfeited its very existence.

If the story of New Rome sounds just a few tweaks away from an episode of The Twilight Zone, the sad reality is that similar communities sit scattered across the country.  New Rome may be extreme, but the New Rome Sucks website allows commenters to recognize other tiny municipalities with similar reputations for speed traps.  Most of the listed towns are nothing more than hearsay, but the American Automobile Association does designate the title “Traffic Traps” to two other communities (both in Florida) that it believes specifically employ enforcement measures with the purpose of raising revenue rather than promoting road safety.  And the USA Today article recognized that a number of states have defined speed traps as towns that generate more than 30% of revenue from traffic fines.

The suburb of East Cleveland is a struggling “Community of Strict Enforcement” that may not have quantitatively high road fatalities, but the existing conditions of the city give it few other options to generate the revenue it needs.  I am by no means claiming that it approaches anything near the corruption of New Rome, but I have no doubt that the placard on the sidewalk owes its existence to the debacle that brought about the demise to that inconsequential suburb of Columbus.  The Ohio Attorney General no doubt eyes the practices of communities like East Cleveland with suspicion, in light of what happened with New Rome.  A brighter future for East Cleveland could involve a certain rediscovery of its walkable streets and venerable historic housing stock (at least what survives of it), but the crime rate and conditions of its public schools do not augur well for this happening soon.  In the meantime, the struggling municipality needs to fund its very busy police department.   The combination of school zones and cameras are a good start, and candor about this questionable process may be the most satisfactory conclusion.