Streetscapes get a much-unneeded boost.

In recent years, communities large and small have sought new approaches to restore the vitality of their historic business districts.  By this point, virtually everyone can think of a municipality with an old downtown that really does feel like it’s the center of it all: fully occupied buildings, people milling about.  The success stories exist.  But that doesn’t mean it’s getting any easier.  By no means are they abundant, and, after decades of disinvestment, I suspect we’ve lowered our standards for what constitutes a flourishing city center.  A town of 10,000 with five operational restaurants in the old downtown buildings is cause for celebration, and rightfully so.  Twenty years ago, such conditions might have seemed unattainable.

But even a 50% occupancy rate for the old business district has eluded many other cities and towns.  Over the decades, factors contributing to downtown disinvestment have become increasingly complicated and the design solutions ever more nuanced.  I’ve written before about the negative influence that automobile dependency had on small towns, but it clearly isn’t the only phenomenon that contributed to their virtual demise.  The basic cadences of consumerism have changed in the last half-century; the greater dependence on wholesale merchandising and standardization cataclysmically altered the requisite size and internal configuration of stores.  Now much of our shopping takes place at big boxes that front a vast parking lot.  The growing dominance of online shopping is likely to foment another retail revolution, and, if the Internet eventually dictates how the majority of us shop, it remains to be seen how our built environment will adapt—if it is even capable.  Meanwhile, as more small towns seek to repurpose their old commercial centers so they become a viable destination once more, many civic leaders are finding that a well-scrubbed streetscape and a good PR campaign just won’t cut it.

Thanks to persistent technological innovations and unforeseen sociopolitical considerations, the very dimensions that governed good urban design have irrevocably changed.  The most obvious manifestation of this cultural seism is the availability of parking: since the majority of people now depend on private vehicles to get around, will these old downtowns originally designed for pedestrians ever be able to accommodate cars with the space they need?  Is demolition of some of the old downtown buildings the only real solution to open up more available space?  And, if so, won’t the absence of those demolished buildings create fewer opportunities for the commerce necessary to convince people to visit the downtown in the first place?  Countless municipalities of all sizes have squared off with this conundrum, finding answers with varying degrees of success. 

A town like Bastrop, Louisiana in the photo below, benefits at the very least from having a clearly articulated center.

It is the seat of government for Morehouse Parish, evidenced by courthouse resting in the dead center of town.  And like many towns of its size (approximately 12,000 inhabitants), older commercial buildings wrap around all sides of the central courthouse square.

In a more heavily urbanized part of the country such as the Lower Midwest, this configuration is the standard for county (or parish) seats.  In Louisiana, it is comparatively rare, with three primary explanations.  First of all, the more rural parts of the state have such sparse populations that the seat of government may be less than 2,000 people—not large enough to justify a downtown with a full central square and four blocks of perimeter commercial buildings.  Some parish seats are little more than a cluster of buildings stretching on both sides of the street near the rail depot, crowned by a humble administrative center.  Secondly, Louisiana parishes do not always centralize the government in a single municipality: sometimes the judiciary sits in one community and the governing arm (usually called a “police jury” in Louisiana, just as it is in Morehouse Parish) sits in another.  The scattering of government buildings across multiple locations in a parish further dilutes the likelihood of businesses and administrative services aggregating in a well-developed downtown.  Lastly, Louisiana is among the less incorporated states in the country.  A higher proportion of governance takes place at the parish level than even most southern states, because the state has relatively few incorporated municipalities.  Compared to neighboring Mississippi, where even the most rural counties have at least one incorporated town (and usually two or three, if not many more), several parishes have no incorporated areas, including the parish seat(s).  A paucity of municipalities translates to fewer city halls or other civic buildings that typically occupy a downtown.  In having most of the characteristics of a parish/county seat, Bastrop is unusual by Louisiana standards, particularly the more rural northern half of the state.

Downtown Bastrop is therefore more urbanized than many other towns.  It has a solid architectural fabric to work with—maybe not as many multi-story buildings as you’d see in a county seat in Yankee country, but the structures still front the street and collectively form a downtown that is suitable for pedestrians and easy to navigate.

Nonetheless, Bastrop faces formidable challenges in revitalizing its downtown, because the prevailing economic tide in the region isn’t just encouraging migration away from the old town center—people are leaving the region altogether.   The city’s biggest recent blow took place in 2008, when Memphis-based International Paper Company announced the closing of its Bastrop mill, which forced over 500 workers out of jobs and no doubt sent many ancillary businesses into retreat.  Meanwhile, a number of poultry plants in surrounding parishes closed down in the ensuing months.  State subsidies managed to staunch some of the hemorrhaging jobs by incentivizing one poultry company to purchase the shuttered factory of another, but the census reports cannot conceal the fact that both Bastrop and its environs are struggling: Morehouse Parish has been losing people since 1980, and it shed 9.8% of its population in the last decade, a new high.  Neighboring parishes aren’t faring much better: East Carroll Parish to the east and Richland Parish to the southeast have also lost population from 2000 to 2010.

Despite these hurdles, downtown Bastrop shows evidence of streetscape enhancement projects that typically intend to add a new sheen to downtowns.  The west side of the courthouse square particularly caught my attention:

It features a generously wide sidewalk, with a protective wrought-iron gate stabilized by brickwork separating the pedestrian path from the street.  Healthy street trees at equal intervals provide an additional buffer.  But there’s something strange about how these are arranged, which the above photo deliberately obscures somewhat.  The next two photos, however, do not.

That’s right.  The sidewalk is at an entirely different grade than the street level, with a difference of close to two feet.  Those gaps in the wrought-iron gate?  Access points with a few stairs.

I find this bizarre, because the sidewalk is merely meeting the elevation of the entrances to all the buildings on this block of downtown.  For some reason, the doorways to the commercial buildings on this block of downtown Bastrop are at a different grade from the street—different enough to require stairs for access.

Bastrop, like most of Louisiana, is not exactly a city of rugged topography.  And none of the other blocks that front the courthouse square have such a grade change.  Look at the northeast corner of the square, for example.

Nothing unusual about the curb separating the street from the sidewalk.  (This photo also gives me opportunity to promote two older blog posts: the 1950s-era Googie façade to this old building recalls an essay from not so long ago on Thibodaux, Louisiana, while the probable Jewish last name evokes an older, extensive exploration of Jewish settlements in the rural South.)

So why are the sidewalk and the storefronts elevated on the western block?  In terms of the buildings, I’ve exhausted both my gray matter as well as Hercule Poirot’s and can’t really come up with anything; perhaps some dusty city archives would explain the rationale for this, but it has lost me completely.  As for the sidewalk, it obviously has to meet the buildings to provide access, but this streetscape improvement seems a bit too au courant to date from the same time period of the buildings.  At the same time, it neglects one crucial consideration visible in most “improved” downtowns: access for persons with disabilities.  Those little stairs leading from the on-street parking to the sidewalk aren’t the least bit compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Fortunately, the corner crosswalk seems to be compensating for this major oversight:

But this must be a recent modification; the cement doesn’t even look fully dry.  At least a ramp allows people in wheelchairs access to the handful of occupied storefronts along this block, but the lack of any further ramps means people in wheelchairs are trapped along a sidewalk/corridor, at least until the block ends at the next corner.

Is this observation of mine a niggling one?  Absolutely.  I’m not going to begin to advocate that Bastrop Public Works should perform invasive surgery on this attractive sidewalk at this point.  The engineers have made corrections to mistakes from the past, and the sidewalk is broadly though not optimally accessible.  But the interventions demonstrate how relatively fixed, immobile infrastructure cannot simply mould itself to shifting cultural values.  In 1920, when downtown Bastrop no doubt was the retail/commercial epicenter of Morehouse Parish, a sidewalk with a huge grade change posed a burden to practically no one; you would deal with it simply by stepping up.  By today’s standards, such an approach excludes a significant enough portion of the disabled population that it became codified as ADA in 1990.  Now such a design is unacceptable, and even ADA has undergone modest modifications since its enactment to accommodate other constituents previously ignored.

I have no doubt that somewhere in America, right at this moment, a construction team is building a publicly-supported project that a future generation will recognize as a flawed design.  It might even become unlawful.  We aren’t prescient, but we should at least remain aware that we will never fully reach our goal, because the process of achieving them will only elicit further hurdles.  And we must temper our nostalgia for old-timey downtowns with a recognition we really cannot go back; in many regards, we wouldn’t want to.  All the words we apply—“revitalize”, “restore”, “revert”, “return”, “reinvent”—use the Latin prefix re-, which can mean either “again” or “backwards”.  The eye must remain on the future, not only for the sake of our evolving downtowns, but that is where a city like Bastrop, still sore from recent job loss, can throw the rest of its skin in the game.

No need to move mountains; just plant the right kind of trees.

Across the country—but particularly in the heavily industrialized Northeast and Midwest—smaller cities have confronted the grim realities of the unflattering “Rust Belt” moniker, and all of its associated characteristics, with varying degrees of success.  With an aging work force, difficulty in retaining college graduates, and a frequently decaying building stock, the challenges they face are formidable.  Cites from between 30,000 and 80,000 inhabitants typically boomed due to the exponential growth of a single industry, and, in many cases, the bulwark of that industry left the municipality nearly a half century ago, for a location (possibly international) where the cost of doing business is much cheaper.  Essentially, everything the smaller Rust Belt cities had to offer is completely tradable in a globalized market; the resources that provided the town’s life blood are either depleted or are simply to expensive to cultivate further.

Reinvention is the only condition likely to save many of these cities from persistent economic contraction, but, with an overabundance of retirees and older workers, these towns lack the collective civic will that could be expected in larger communities with more diversified economies.  An absence of young people intensifies (and, to a certain extent, justifies) the low level of civic investment in one’s own community; after all, if a resident is six months from retirement, how likely is it that he or she would support public investments intended to improve quality of life for twenty or thirty years into the future?  For that matter, how likely will a population of retirees remain engaged to encourage or challenge major private sector investments as well?

By no means am I intending to denigrate needs and ambitions of the senior population; I’m merely observing that a stagnant Rust Belt city with this demographic profile will demonstrate vastly different priorities from a city rife with young families.  While every Rust Belt city large and small must avoid obsolescence that results from the spoils of globalization, the smaller cities—which have tended to be dominated in the past by a single thriving industry—are less likely to claim alternative sectors and labor pools if their primary manufacturing lifeblood fails.  A dying city of 80,000 may not exert the same impact within a region (particularly in the densely populated Midwest and Northeast) that a city of 500,000 would, but it is far more of black eye for the state than a town of 2,000 that has lost its raison d'être.  This conclusion is obvious.  Many of these small cities must reordering of their economies comprehensively; while the state, the county, or private foundations may offer some outside help, the constituents of these cities themselves are typically the best equipped to understand how their city should evolve.  Unfortunately, many of these communities aren’t yet even aware of the need for this reinvention, let alone which avenue to pursue in order to achieve it.

It is with no small amount of reassurance that I can assert that Kokomo, Indiana is not one of these latter cities.

No Rust Belt complacency on display here in the City of Firsts.  Though a recently as 2008 it was on Forbes’ list of America’s Fastest Dying Towns, a recent visit shows much more evidence than I’ve seen of some comparably sized cities in the region that the civic culture is neither resting on its laurels nor wringing its hands about how much better things used to be.  In fact, one of the Indianapolis Star’s leading editorialists, Erika Smith, recently visited the city, and, after receiving a tour from the Mayor, was pleasantly surprised by how proactive it has been in implementing precisely the type of quality-of-life initiatives largely perceived as necessary to help a historically blue-collar city stave off a brain drain or descend into irrelevancy.

I, too, recently received the Kokomo tour, followed by a meeting with Mayor Greg Goodnight, and I can also recognize some of the city’s most impressive achievements at shaking off the post-industrial malaise that saddled the city with double-digit unemployment rates as recently as a few years ago.  Since then, the city has introduced a trolley system at no charge to users; prior to this initiative, the city had had no mass transit for decades.  The Mayor pushed successfully to annex 11 square miles in the town’s periphery, therefore elevating the population by about 10,000 people.  The Mayor’s team worked to convert all one-way streets in Kokomo’s downtown to two-ways, recognizing that accommodating high-speed automobile traffic in a pedestrian-oriented environment only detracts from the appeal.  The team has restriped several miles of urban streets to incorporate bike lanes, and it has converted a segment of an abandoned rail line into a rail-with-trail path, branding it by linking it to the city’s industrial heritage.  They have deflected graffiti from several bridges and buildings through an expansive and growing mural project.  They have upgraded the riverfront park with an amphitheatre and recreational path. They have introduced several sculptural installations, the most prominent of which is the KokoMantis, a giant praying mantis made entirely of repurposed metal and funded privately.  And my personal favorite: with the support of the City, the school superintendent has integrated a prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB) program to the public school system, including an international exchange program for young men from several foreign countries (a girls’ program should arrive in the next year or two) who live in a recently restored historic structure in Kokomo’s walkable downtown, attending demanding courses that bolster their chances of admittance in a coveted American university.  Most impressively, the City of Kokomo has achieved all of this without incurring any public debt in the past year.

Obviously the individuals offering me this tour are going to make sure their Cinderella is fully dressed for the ball, and I recognize that not a small amount of the securing of certain infrastructural projects and transportation enhancement grants requires a political savvy that the current civic leadership has in abundance.  And I don’t want to rehash Ms. Smith’s article, which more than effectively chronicles this approach at a macro level.  In addition, Erika Smith recognizes, as do I, that very few of these initiatives (the IB foreign exchange program notwithstanding) are really particularly earth-shattering.  But when most other similarly sized cities in the Midwest seem to be engaged in a race to the bottom, luring new industry through generous tax breaks (often initiated at the state level), Kokomo seems to recognize that a town lacking any amenities outside of low cost of living has to compete with dozens of other cities in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in Indiana, that offer the exact same brand.  Whether this investment yields a long-term return remains to be seen, but it certainly demonstrates the right gestures necessary to instill civic stewardship in a place whose decades of job loss have seriously scratched its mirror of self-examination.

What ultimately struck me about Kokomo—which Erika Smith only touched upon—was the level of design sophistication evident in some of these civic projects.  I need only focus on a single location in the city, in which two particularly laudatory techniques are on display.  At the intersection of Markland Avenue and Main Street, just south of downtown, the Industrial Heritage Trail begins its journey southward.  Here’s a view as the trail terminates at its junction with those two streets, looking northwestward:

Here is a view in the other direction:

Continuing a bit further in this direction, one encounters this painted wall:

And, pivoting slightly to the left, another mural that is still in progress:

This photo series identifies two amenities that stand out for the astute decision-making that apparently took place during the implementation.  The Industrial Heritage Trail clearly operates a railway corridor, but it is not a rail-trail.  Unlike the more common rail-trail conversion, this Kokomo trail did not incorporate the removal of the original rail infrastructure.  The Rails to Trails Conservancy would label this approach a rail-with-trail, indicating that the trail shares the railway easement, typically separated by fencing.  Rail-trails such as the Monon Trail in metro Indianapolis are still the more common practice.  However, a growing number of communities are embracing rail-with-trails, not only because they obviate the need for costly removal of rails, ties, and ballast, but they reserve the rail infrastructure for the possibility that a railroad company may reactivate the line in the future.  If the sponsors of Kokomo’s Industrial Heritage Trail had removed the infrastructure, the possibility of ever reintroducing rail along the corridor would be virtually nil.  As it stands, the only conceivable disadvantage to rail-with-trails is that, in the event a rail company reintroduces train service, its close proximity to the path may prove hazardous to bicyclists or pedestrians.  Otherwise, the decision to retain the railway not only helped to diversify options, it most likely saved a considerable amount of money.

The other smart decision was the site selection for those murals.  The ones featured in the photos above are part of a growing mural campaign that the City of Kokomo introduced, and every one that I recall shows real foresight in the locational decisions.  What makes them so good?  The murals in the photos above front a public right-of-way, minimizing if not completely precluding the chance that later development will conceal them.  I blogged a few years ago about an excellent mural in Indianapolis that showed wonderful care and craft in the entire implementation process…except where the conceivers chose to locate it.  Not only did they paint on a cheap, cinder-block building that will likely tumble down if market pressures encourage new development in the neighborhood, but the mural also faces a vacant lot which is large enough to host a new structure that would block it completely, no doubt frustrating the community and pitting them against a developer.

Compare this to Kokomo’s murals.  Here’s one a little further south on the Industrial Heritage Trail:

Again, it fronts the trail itself—not a chance that a developer will try to block it.  And here’s another along a bridge underpass for the recently completed trail along the Wildcat Creek:

The original intention of the mural was to repel vandals at spot that previously suffered from it frequently; this approach has proven successful in locations across the country.  But it also sits in a park along a new greenway, so it should remain in perpetuity.  Granted, Indianapolis has plenty of murals along retaining walls and buildings that front the aforementioned Monon Trail.  Those, too, should survive far into the future.  But in recent years, the City of Indianapolis has encouraged countless murals on the side walls of commercial buildings—sites where a blank wall faces a parking lot, where a building once stood.  While these bare walls often scream for some ornamentation to help distract from what used to be there (another adjoining building), in many instances the parking lots will likely fall under increasing development pressure in upcoming years.  Will the locals thwart development in order to save the mural?  This remains to be seen, and I don’t want to base too much of an analysis on speculation.  But it’s hard to deny that these public art investments seem less astute than the once I witnessed in Kokomo.

One could argue that Kokomo is merely taking advantage of the fact that it is jumping into the game relatively late; it benefits by learning from the mistakes of others.  But decisions that stand the test of time also contribute their fair share to foster civic goodwill.  Taxpayers are rarely too forgiving of poorly conceived projects, and several successive blunders, no matter how small they may be, demonstrate poor accountability.  Only time will determine the return on investment, but Kokomo certainly has a leg up on many of its competing small cities,  My suspicion is, if these projects stimulate the discussion and enthusiasm for proactive leadership that they suggest (Mayor Goodnight was re-elected last year by a landslide), the citizens of Kokomo are only beginning to stoke the fire.

Even test-market suburbs get caught in the tidal wave of low-income housing.

With a constantly changing tenancy, it is no surprise that apartment complexes and renter-occupied housing age quickly—usually much faster than owner-occupied housing.  The disparity between these two fundamental housing contracts (renting and owning) owes a great deal to basic human psychology: we are more impelled to take care of property if it belongs to us and we perceive it as an investment.  But does this distinction alone explain why so many rental units from the 1960s and 1970s are in terrible condition, when the owner-occupied housing nearby—dating from the exact same time period—remains for the most part tidy and well-maintained?

The montage below shows the Westminster Apartments in metro Indianapolis, and it won’t take much narrative on my part to get my point across; the photos speak for themselves.  But keep reading anyway, because without the explanatory material I will include, it could easily seem as though I’m exploiting the poverty and substandard living conditions of the residents who still call this complex home.  That obviously isn’t my goal, but it is important to delineate what I have observed.

The architectural style for the Westminster is pretty standard for suburbs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the mansard roof and garden-level units.  Some landscaping would certainly help the appearance here, though it would also significantly impede sunlight to those garden apartments—an unappealing feature that later generations of apartment designers have conspicuously avoided.  Newer units rarely have garden apartments.

Yellowed newspaper substitutes for curtains in quite a few of the units, and the Venetian blinds are routinely mangled, as evident on the top floor windows.  More often than not, the fencing in the back yards is ready to tip over.

Gutters and various ornamentation on the upper levels is bent and sagging, as obvious on the upper left unit in the photo below:

Just a little bit further in that direction, the same unit has a deck in which the stability of the wooden floor appears significantly compromised, either through termites or simply wood that rots under the deteriorated finish:

None of these defects in isolation may seem like a serious concern, but discriminating buyers (or renters) are going to notice them and, with a wealth of other available apartment options in the area, will look elsewhere.  The result?  The Westminster Apartments cater to those who lack the ability to choose, whether due to lack of income or another limiting condition.  It is no longer a desirable place for middle-income households, and the apartment sags further under the weight of the stigma of being a place for social deviancy—for those who cannot or will not make a respectable living, even if this reputation is undeserved.  By no means am I implying that everyone at Westminster is a criminal, but the empirical evidence suggests that it might have more of a problem with behavior that the middle class generally finds unacceptable.  Take this fence, for example:

The white spray paint conceals was almost undoubtedly another layer of spray paint—an act of graffiti.  And there’s more:

And another subtler example, this time on one of the actual buildings:

(If you can’t see it in the photo above, check the slightly different paint color on the bricks just above the gas main and to the left of all those meters.  This time the property managers chose a more appropriate color of paint to hide the vandalism.)

It’s impossible to know what this graffiti signified, but anyone with a soupcon of urban savvy would infer that it could be a gang tag.  Even if it is nothing more than a budding Matisse testing out his or her incipient talents on the first available canvas, what middle class person is going to take a risk with this complex, when dozens of other complexes in the area don’t show any evidence of graffiti or gang tags?

I covered this topic years ago in one of my first essays, focusing on Berkley Commons, an apartment complex on the south side of Indianapolis.  Like the Westminster, it has shown its age and no longer attracts a middle class clientele.  This high-speed depreciation happens routinely in metropolitan areas large and small: a large proportion of apartments constructed during the Johnson or Nixon administration (or Ford or Carter) have already devolved to low-income housing.  Why?  In the older essay, I referenced how accounting and tax filing standards dictate that the standard depreciation schedules for multifamily apartments is 27.5 years.  These Westminster Apartments clearly outdate this duration, suggesting that, without a significant renovation, the structures would no longer remain in good enough condition to attract anything but renters who cannot afford anything better.  Presumably the cost of living at either Berkley Commons or Westminster is well below the median contract rent for the area, resulting in developments filled almost exclusively with low wage-earning households or those heavily dependent on government aid.

This downward spiral becomes the normal trajectory for apartment complexes in economically integrated municipalities, where the school districts might not boast as good of a reputation as the more homogenous outer suburbs.  Berkley Commons sits in the Indianapolis Metropolitan School District of Perry Township—not a terrible district by any means (certainly a better reputation than Indianapolis Public Schools), but still a middling one compared to the suburbs.  Young families with economic wherewithal would never choose Berkley Commons in Indianapolis, when they can easily find higher quality rental units in suburbs with good schools…or they can procure a mortgage in this persistently affordable metro area.

But there’s a clincher here: Berkley Commons, from the earlier article, might have been in a questionable Indianapolis school district.  The Westminster Apartments, however, are not.  They sit just south of County Line Road, in Greenwood, Indiana, part of a suburban public school system that, while not the best in the state, certainly ranks well above the average and boasts an overall strong reputation.  Greenwood Public Schools have enjoyed consistent growth over the years, while enrollment at Perry Township and Indianapolis Public Schools have flattened or declined.  School districts, in turn, are one of the most influential factors in determining the desirability of a certain area, as well as the cost of housing.  Given the strong reputation of the schools, why would the property managers of Westminster allow it to fall into such disrepair?  It looks as bad, if not worse, than quite a few of the apartments in Indianapolis city limits.  Berkley Commons, though in an inferior district (and thus less likely to command high rents), didn’t have sagging gutters or graffiti tags.  Why don’t the landlords at Westminster use the housing deposits they collect from tenants to keep the units in good running order so that they can continue to attract a wealthier demographic that is able to pay more?

My speculation two years ago was that rental deposits simply don’t cover enough to stave off depreciation.  Sure, they can pay for paint and shampoo for the carpet, but what about new kitchen appliances or bathroom sinks?  What about the fact that modern households tend to prefer expansive “great rooms” with minimal walls, while most old apartments still feature galley kitchens?  The attractiveness of rental housing deteriorates quickly, not just because of wear-and-tear caused by tenants, but the general aging of the entire package renders the unit less desirable as a consumer good.

Even still, Westminster’s management could easily justify shelling out a little more money for heavy renovations every fifteen years, to keep it desirable enough for the market-rate crowd, especially given the quality of schools in Greenwood.  But I suspect that a certain federal program serves quite unintentionally as a disincentive for restoring the apartments to market-rate quality.  The Housing Choice Voucher Program, better known to the public as Section 8, allows qualifying low-income tenants to receive a voucher that gives them a significantly reduced burden in rental payments.  Eligible Section 8 tenants receive the voucher, and after finding a rental unit that accepts Section 8 (meeting certain federal standards), the tenants pay their small share to the landlord, while the federal government covers the rest.  (MassResources provides a more detailed explanation within the context of this particular commonwealth’s laws.)  The program has been tremendously efficient at ensuring that low and moderate-income households can still access housing in areas where the market-rate prices might otherwise prevent it.  It also has proven a goldmine for landlords.  They often love Section 8 because essentially the federal government pays most of the rent, and HUD always pays on time.  The Section 8 contract forges a relationship between the landlord and tenant that rarely requires an eviction.  But it also embeds an excellent justification for the property managers to slack on maintenance and improvements of the facilities.  With Section 8, there’s no need for them to fix the units so that they stay market rate; instead, they can command just as good of rent (often paid more reliably) thanks to the federal government paying the lion’s share.

I’m not going to try to determine if Westminster has turned into a purely Section 8 housing complex, but most visual evidence would suggest it.  Why would market rate tenants want to live not just in an area where potential gangs are staking their territory through graffiti, but these Section 8 neighbors are paying a fraction of the official rent for the same units?  As a result of this unsavory disparity, many of these complexes continue to spiral downward, turning into derelict concentrated slums and potentially scaring away buyers from the heretofore-stable owner-occupied neighborhoods around them.  For all the virtues of Section 8, its tacit deficiencies all too often go ignored.

But there may be hope for Westminster after all: it appears to be undergoing some renovations.

To a certain extent, these improvements weaken my overall argument.  My initial conclusion, when I first discovered this apartment complex (and it showed no sign of renovation plans) was that even the stable, middle class suburbs like Greenwood are not immune to apartment decline.  We’ve come to expect this of older apartments in Indianapolis; after all, the school systems aren’t usually as good, and the pool of low-income students is high enough that Section 8 often seems like the easy solution.  In Indy, formerly stable auto-oriented complexes from the 1960s and 70s have devolved into some of the most impoverished and crime-ridden parts of town.  A few required city interventions because the conditions had gotten so poor; some have been shuttered and bulldozed.

But once I was ready to take photos, I discovered that this suburban complex is undergoing a large enough renovation that several buildings are completely unoccupied for the time being.  Notice the stickers in the windows from the one above.

It is surprising to witness an incremental restoration process, where some buildings remain occupied, while construction material sits outside on pallets, ripe for the pilfering.

If I am in the Indianapolis area within six months to a year, I hope to revisit Westminster to judge the thoroughness of these improvements.  The current owner, Van Rooy Properties, an established management company with a largely market-rate portfolio closer to the urban center, may very well invest enough to revert the units back to a market-rate status.  After all, the complex sits within walking distance of the eternally successful Greenwood Park Mall; location could serve as a major selling point.  Then again, most of the retail jobs at the mall pay moderate wages at best, so it may be advantageous to have affordable housing close by.  And the vast suburb of Greenwood still has enough shiny new complexes that only a complete gutting of the Westminster apartment units could allow them to compete.  It’s highly probable that Van Rooy will reserve at least a portion of the units as affordable, potentially even as Section 8, because of the program’s airtight reliability.  Regardless of the fate of Westminster, it provides solid evidence that apartment complexes are a beacon for decentralization: usually the first housing to decline in safety, they can in turn squander an entire district’s desirability if the management doesn’t implement regular improvements—or if the feds provide enough of an incentive to speed the depreciation along.

Urban lipstick on the suburban pig.

In the large American cities that lack a robust public transportation system—which is most of them—we justifiably celebrate every minor victory toward shifting development away from auto-centrism.  Mid-sized cities in the Midwest and South seem to be among the most susceptible: most of them have a “Midtown” district that predates the automobile.  If it is already on the affluent side of town, this district probably hosts some of the city’s best historic architecture, all remnants from the time when it was a fashionable commercial hub.  At this same time, the aforementioned architecture in these Midtowns has struggled from a period of neglect and perceived obsolescence during the peak of decentralization to more auto-oriented suburbs.

These days, many Midtowns are patchy at best, with parking lots interspersed to serve the surviving old buildings, juxtaposed with some more recently constructed retail structures that serve both the neighborhoods’ residents, as well as commuters zooming down these streets on their way to the fashionable suburbs several miles out where they live.  Those new structures don’t fit in, not only because they eschew high-quality brick or limestone materials, but because they are often identical to the same structures those commuters would find in the hinterlands where they live: drive-through fast-food restaurants, drug stores, or automotive service centers.  There’s nothing wrong having them in urban settings: at the peak of decentralization, city leaders were no doubt happy to have investors in their struggling Midtowns and welcomed the construction, regardless of how incompatible it was with the older neighborhood buildings.  After all, transportation in private vehicles were the way of things, and these old districts had to adapt.

But, more often than not, the Midtowns also boast classically walkable street grids, high-quality older housing, and mature tree canopies.  They are sometimes a quick bus ride or even bicycle ride from downtown.  And they are hip again.  As a new generation of urban admirers has begun to rebel against the still-dominant suburban archetype, many advocates have tried straddling between the ideological extremes of either blocking all incompatible infill development or permitting anything and everything for the sake of bolstering the tax base.  The result of this push-and-pull manifests itself in a variation of a classic old form: the pseudo-urban infill, like this Chick-fil-A in Birmingham, Alabama from the photo below.

It sits at a prominent intersection in the city’s Five Points South neighborhood, about a mile from downtown and one of the more popular destinations in the metro for pedestrian-oriented nightlife.  Just a block from the Chick-fil-A is the heart of the neighborhood, characterized by its unusual intersection and the wonderfully surreal Storyteller Fountain.

What distinguishes the Chick-fil-A in this first photograph from the freestanding buildings in the suburbs?  The biggest feature I can detect is the placement of the building in relation to the parcel: it more or less stands flush with the property line.  (I say “more or less” because there does appear to a bit of gap between the building and the sidewalk, presumably reserved for outdoor seating or bicycle parking.)  A pedestrian can approach the building’s entrance directly from the sidewalk, without having to walk in the path of a vehicle.

In addition, looking at the side of the building, it does not appear to offer a drive-thru window.

Instead, this Chick-fil-A features a parking lot that abuts a sleek “arcade” along a widened, landscaped sidewalk, exactly where a drive-thru lane would normally cut across in join with the street.  These two modifications might seem modest, but the site plan for this storefront would contrast significantly with the typical suburban configuration, which would include multiple rows of off-street parking in front of the structure, thereby forcing the building far from the street.

It might not seem like a dramatic gesture, but, barring the necessary zoning regulations, it is extremely difficult to effect this sort of change in typology for a typically suburban, automobile-oriented establishment.  And Birmingham does not have the regulations in place, at least not here at Five Points South.  A review of the city’s Zoning Ordinance and Zoning Map places this part of town in the B-3 Community Business District zone.  Buildings within the district have no true minimum front, side, or rear yard regulations, meaning that setbacks are not required—unless a parcel sits next a lot in a different zoning district that regulates dwellings, a building in B-3 can bump up right against the lot line.  Meanwhile, the rules in Zone B-3 for commercial parking lots require one space for each 200 square feet of floor area (Section 5-1, item 19, but halved because of the standards of B-3).  The City of Birmingham’s zoning ordinance allows for an urban structure to be built with zero setbacks, but it doesn’t require it; the regulations have set the minimum yard sizes at “none”, but they have not set a maximum.  The regs also have a minimum required number of parking spaces that is less strict that most other regions in the city, but it has no maximum space requirement.  So any developer who chooses to build here has the option to build a structure with relatively high lot coverage without seeking a variance to the rules, but he or she could just as easily build a quintessential suburban building as well.

I confidently suspected, back when I took these photos, that this Chick-fil-A adapted to this configuration only after significant wrangling with the City.  In light of these standards, it turns out I was right: the City’s Design Review Committee rejected some of Chick-fil-A’s initial proposals for the site back in 2010.  Why did the Committee reject them?  Because Chik-fil-A wanted to insert its suburban design typology smack in one of Birmingham’s most economically healthy urban neighborhoods, complete with a drive-thru in an area thick with both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.  Chick-fil-A’s initial design submission met zoning standards; the company’s team did nothing wrong.  But a combination of the Design Review Committee and concerned members of the Five Points South neighborhood fought the drive-thru option, claiming it would induce more traffic and—most importantly—was not “in keeping with the character of Five Points South.”  The Committee and Five Points South Association risked scaring off Chick-fil-A altogether as an investor in the neighborhood, but they weighed their risks and decided it was more important not to sacrifice the walkability of the area, especially since this new restaurant was replacing an equally suburban-minded predecessor: a shuttered Ruby Tuesday that also did an adequate job of respecting the urban character at the intersection, as indicated in a Google Streetview from June 2008.  After some further revisions, Chick-fil-A agreed to build at the corner without a drive-thru. 

And so it goes.  In most medium sized cities with weak mass transit, the national chains must face higher neighborhood and City-led scrutiny before they can plop their suburban buildings in a Midtown that is valiantly trying to recover from decades of decentralization and disinvestment.  Sometimes the zoning regulations are strict enough to prohibit building under anything but a supremely urban configuration, with minimum off-street parking, no drive-thrus, and zero setbacks.  However, out of fear of repelling virtually all potential investors, few cities yet enforce such draconian standards.  If a Walgreens or CVS or McDonald’s or Jack-in-the-Box thinks a certain urban setting is lucrative enough, it will probably jump through the hoops that the City throws at it, just as Chick-fil-A apparently did.  The result generally appears to be a win-win: a previously vacant (and potentially blighted) parcel gets filled with a reliable national retailer, and the surrounding community is content with the final appearance.

But there’s always a clincher.  Take a look at that one side of the Chick-fil-A—the side opposite the street intersection:

It’s still an awfully big parking lot for an average-sized restaurant.  Without counting the spaces (and without knowing the exact square footage of the building), I’d venture to say this Chick-fil-A has well more than the minimum of one parking space for every 200 square feet in the building’s floorplate.  It’s a suburban-sized parking lot.  And, even though the building is virtually flush with the parcel’s edges, it’s hardly dense in comparison to the environment around it: it’s still a squat one-story structure with a single use.  So, after all the negotiations between the City, the neighborhood, Chick-fil-A, and who knows what other parties, the result is still a one-story structure on a prime intersection, lacking any mixture of uses.  Not terribly urban, and certainly not in keeping with the type of buildings that Five Points South would have supported during its initial heyday back in the 1920s.

And so it goes…yet again.  Most of these Midtowns get buildings like this—urbanism with the bar set incredibly low.  It’s still better than a drive-thru fast food that sits smack in the middle of a sea of parking lots.  But—it seems ironic now—this is my second article in a row for which the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” seems appropriate.  One of Birmingham’s most attractive neighborhoods received this mediocre building in 2011, when it is possible that, given the likelihood that the neighborhood’s attractiveness will only increase in the future, it could have fought for a two or even a multi-story building at some point down the road, when land values are high enough that developers can’t justify such a big parking lot, or such low FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), or the zoning regulations insist on a high-density structure rather than simply permit it.

Obviously, I’m not faulting the City of Birmingham, or any other party, for that matter.  No one can gamble on the future when we reflect upon the vast array of interweaving temporal and spatial evolutions our cities have experienced in their relatively short lives.  Who would have perceived in 1950 that Atlanta would end up five times the size of Birmingham?  Back then, they were about the same size.  If one can imagine that Birmingham may someday surge into the stratosphere the way Atlanta did, this modest Chick-fil-A is a mere “bookmark” for the high density mixed-use building that will eventually replace it.  And, as placeholders go, a slightly modified suburban prototype is still better than a vacant building, or a massive parking lot.  My guess is that, in the intervening years, other national chains will stake their claim to vacant lots in Five Points South, and the negotiations will continue but under increasingly stricter design parameters with each iteration.  Eventually this bureaucratic routine might even encourage Chick-fil-A to partner with residential or office developers for a collaborative design process in urban settings.  Until then, Midtown Birmingham gets a new restaurant, and the commuters who shun it for its lack of a drive-thru still have plenty of other options—out in the burbs where they live.

Modernism and self-reflection.

My latest post--a long one--is up at Urban Indy.  Over the past few weeks, a winning proposal for a development to replace an Indianapolis Fire Department station on prime real estate has generated quite a bit of controversy, no doubt in part because Tax Increment Financing will help to subsidize the result.  Here's what it will look like:

By most measurements, the urban design for this proposal is good—flush with the parcel’s edge, reasonably high density, significant space devoted to street-level retail, smartly concealed parking underground.  But opinions on the appearance—“Mickey Mouse”, “screams 1990s”, “trendy blah”—not so flattering.  However, the project's defenders take umbrage at such name-calling, so the debate continues on various blogs ad nauseam.
It amuses me to no end how people try to couch their personal opinions in referential context in order to endow them with the weight of objectivity.  A recent Pop-Up Mod Tour sponsored by Indiana Landmarks, provided an interesting contrast to the online friction generated by the above proposal.  In this tour, architectural experts provide historical background and context that defend the design and aesthetics for buildings such as the one below:

It's the Barton Tower, an Indianapolis Housing Authority development from the late 1960s, which, incidentally, sits directly across the street from the fire station redevelopment posted above.  Whatever architectural interest the Barton Tower might offer, it interrupts the continuity of the otherwise thriving Mass Avenue commercial corridor (which undoubtedly hosted handsome Italianate commercial buildings at this very site) through an unengaging, tower-in-the-park typology that characterized some of Chicago's most notorious public housing.  While Barton Tower isn't going anywhere soon, the unused, neglected green space that surrounds it will soon host a development of its own:

Yes, a five-story apartment building will soon completely surround the Barton Tower, raising the ire of its most ardent supporters but getting little more than a shoulder shrug from everyone else.

The divergent responses to these various projects (both existing and proposed) highlights some of the most interesting dichotomies in taste culture when applied to architectural aesthetics.  This is the focus of my blog post, and while it makes most sense to people familiar with downtown Indianapolis, the arguments about hierarchies of taste and aspirations for objectivity could easily apply anywhere.  I welcome your opinions, as always.


Two other quick points I'd like to raise:

- Now and then I still get comments on significantly older blog posts.  Keep them coming!  I welcome them, and every response gets sent right to my e-mail Inbox, so that I can easily provide comments for a post, no matter how old it may be.

- I deliberately do not screen my posts, and if someone wants to criticize me anonymously, go right ahead.  I try to keep as much of an open door as possible.  The only comments I erase are those that are clearly just trying to embed a link to another commercial website where goods or services are sold.  These are not legitimate contributions so I treat them as spam.  But heated disagreements or corrections to my mistakes will remain online.