A new domain!

This is my final post for American Dirt....at this website.

I now have my own domain with WordPress, with a much more elegant layout, bigger photos, and greater flexibility.  It has been over a year in the making, but at last, the day has come for American Dirt.

Please visit dirtamericana.com for all future blogging on landscapes and the built environment.  As always, I welcome comments and am happy to respond.

Who knew that the City That Never Sleeps had a narcoleptic neighbor?

As I prepare for some upcoming significant changes to my blog, I provide a sort of “placeholder” article as make the final modifications, which I will soon publicize.  The placeholder motif extends to the content of this blog entry, where a window sign serves much the same purpose within its respective storefront.

It’s simply announcing a lunch special.  The restaurant itself?  As indicated at the top of the sign, it’s Bertucci’s, an Italian chain common in the northeastern US.  Though the restaurant’s target market is consistently suburban middle class, it seems as though Bertucci’s restaurants routinely occupy urban settings, in storefronts that directly face the street, rather than a sizable parking lot.  Such is the case with this location.

The sign itself isn’t really remarkable on its own terms.  The only thing that distinguishes it is a condition that these photographs could not begin to capture: the day of the week.  The advertisement for this lunch special is taking place on a Saturday morning, and it’s a good deal: good enough to suggest that this Bertucci’s is struggling to get people in the door on a quintessential weekend day without some real incentive.

Is there something wrong with this Bertucci’s?  Probably not, at least in terms of management and menu—after all, it’s a chain, and if chains lose their consistency for too long, they croak.  So why is this one deserted?  It might have something to do with its surroundings.

The translucent sheen of the contemporary buildings that flank this Bertucci’s comprises one of the busiest commercial centers in Jersey City, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw across the river from New York City.  The Garden State’s second largest city (just behind Newark), it’s also old, settled as a garrisoned Dutch village in the middle of the 17^th century. Yet you’d hardly be able to tell from looking at its coruscating skyscrapers in the Newport neighborhood, seen here in the photos, as well as Exchange Place, directly south of Newport along the waterfront.  It all looks like it could have been built last week.

But the focus for this blog is the larger Newport neighborhood.

Constructed across 600 acres on the old Erie Lackawanna Railway yards, Newport helped galvanize Jersey’s City’s resurgence after its 1986 groundbreaking.  Built as a master-planned, mixed-use community, the intent of its creator, Samuel J. LeFrak of The LeFrak Organization, was to intermingle high-rise residences with office, retail, and entertainment facilities.  The site capitalizes on its pivotal location, adjacent to the Holland Tunnel (with direct vehicular access to Manhattan), as well as I-78 and, not so far away, the New Jersey Turnpike. Newport is also easily accessible by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, PATH, New Jersey Transit bus routes, and a ferry service across the Hudson River.

In other words, this is prime grade real estate.  And, by most metrics, it has transformed into a successful locus of commerce, while over a dozen apartment towers house the neighborhood’s approximately 15,000 residents.  By the 25^th anniversary of Newport’s establishment, the high density community also boasted a marina, waterfront parks (one with a beach), two hotels, schools,  and the Newport Centre Mall, a regional shopping center whose retail mix ostensibly caters to a broad and diverse socioeconomic base, spread across over 1.1 million square feet and three floors.  This Simon-managed mall also sits squarely within Jersey City’s Urban Enterprise Zone, thereby halving the sales tax rate on goods (only 3.5% instead of 7%) and waiving it altogether for clothing, which no doubt has helped cushion it from the steep decline so many malls across the country have faced.

But for all its amenities, Newport does not seem to have yet mastered the art of fostering a vibrant streetscape.

Sure, there are some people out.  And more people might have been impelled to stroll Washington Boulevard if it weren’t for the blustery conditions on an otherwise mild April morning.  But the fact remains that Newport has metamorphosed into a district with a high concentration of activity in an already active city (Jersey City’s density is well over 15,000 people per square mile, ranking it among the 30 most dense American municipalities).  Nonetheless, this Bertucci’s, sitting right on the neighborhood’s main arterial has to devise special sales to attract visitors to a weekend lunch.  This restaurant’s valiant effort to lure customers only serves to reaffirm what empirical evidence already suggests: that Newport is only lively from 8a to 6pm on Monday for Friday.  Then it hibernates.

The two sons of the late developer Samuel LeFrak strive to continue to his legacy through the family business, but they also hope to improve upon some of the past architectural missteps.  Visual evidence confirms that, aside from the spectacular views of Manhattan from the waterfront, Newport is generally not a terribly desirable setting for people to get out and walk around.  It doesn’t help that ungainly, austere parking garages sit between the occasional storefronts.

Or, for that matter, that one of the primary hotels fronting Washington Boulevard includes a big enough setback to allow for considerable vehicle loading/unloading, as well as some spaces for off street parking.

Obviously, the majority of American hotels—including those in our city centers—include these exact same driver-friendly features.  But the vast majority of American cities cannot boast the sort of multi-modal or mass transit access of Jersey City.  Such a configuration would be virtually unthinkable in Manhattan, and, to this day, even many smaller American cities—often with significantly weaker transit systems—would still include zoning stipulations that vociferously discourage off-street parking lots for hotels within the central business district.

Perhaps, however, the biggest hindrance to Newport ever succeeding as a round-the-clock active urban district is the land use just two blocks away from this photo series.

As Washington Boulevard continues northward of Newport Parkway (the road that rests directly above the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan), the vista changes completely.

Gone are the highrises, replaced by a series of suburban-oriented big box stores (Target, Staples, Best Buy) and replete with off-street parking lots.  The map below shows that this area in Jersey City offers a host of shopping options that one would just as easily expect to see in an automobile-oriented suburb.

Incidentally, this cluster of big box retail sits just south of a huge rail yard, easily visible on the map.  And north of the rail yard is the border for Hoboken, another densely populated waterfront suburb, but one with a vibrant commercial main street, filled with retail and pedestrians at all times of day.

(And, somewhat ironically, Hoboken’s thriving commercial corridor is called Washington Street—a contrast from Jerseys City’s inert Washington Boulevard.)

To be fair, Newport is hardly the alpha and the omega when it comes Jersey City’s retail centers.  The historic downtown to the west of the waterfront consists primarily of two to four-story 19^th century buildings, with numerous street-level storefronts along Grove Street and Newark Avenue.  Many blocks in the older, “real” downtown of Jersey City boast an activity level on par with Hoboken.

If anything, the uninspiring streetscapes of Newport most likely reflect the mindset driving development during the time of the district’s founding.  Back in 1986, when the LeFrak family’s vision first started to take root, much of Jersey City was down on its luck, having left the doldrums of the 1970s in its wake—a time when the city lost a staggering 14% of its population.  At that point, this inner-ring suburb of New York City had been shrinking ever since the Great Depression.  Though a far cry from its 315,000 peak, it has posted an increase in population for the last three decades.  But no one could have anticipated that in the 1980s, when The LeFrak Organization took a chance by purchasing land in a district of dilapidated warehouses amidst a field of creaky, neglected railroads.  At a time when even Manhattan’s future appeared murky, suburban living still seemed like the solution, so it comes as no surprise that the land uses surrounding LeFrak’s bold move still reflect the demands of a mostly suburban clientele.  The mall, the bargain department stores, the wide streets, the visible parking lots—all of these in the 1980s seemed like essential gestures to attract a population seemingly incorrigibly averse to urbanism.

The times are changing, but the remaining boxy Staples and Best Buy, monolithic amidst their generous parking lots, feel more like the final unpainted portions of a canvas, rather than a byproduct of lackadaisical urban design.  By this point, Jersey City’s escalating land values promise a higher and better use in the near future, particularly for a struggling national chain like Staples.  If the chain folds, it’s a matter of time before a savvy builder puts something with a higher Floor-Area Ratio in its place—that is, a taller building that yields a higher rate of return.

In the meantime, until the stronger economy forces developers to strategize on their urban design, Newport will continue to limp along.  It’s still a killer place for an office, and I have no doubt that Bertucci’s can fill its tables during a Thursday lunch.  But this abundance of youthful skyscrapers in an environment that remains steadfastly car-centered looks less like a satellite of New York City and more akin to Dubai.  (Or, at least, everything except the historic center of Dubai, which still remains pretty pedestrian friendly.)  No matter how great the density of jobs and residents, no matter how robust the mass transit, the fundamental character of the buildings and streetscape in Newport does not lend itself well to pedestrianism.  What it does yield, however, is a perfectly extreme application of urban transect modeling, in which the form skips several typological layers, going directly from an urban core zone (in the heart of Newport) to a suburban zone north of Newport Parkway, where the Staples first appears.  But Newport’s atypical renaissance places it at odds with most theories on urban form, even if the results are less than meets the eye.  If the developers make sharper decisions as they continue to invest in the area, maybe sometime they’ll be able to promote a level of energy to the streetscape that will convince people to walk around.  And Bertucci’s won’t have to deploy placeholder signage to make up for the sluggish weekend business.

When public spaces reflect modern life--by not reflecting anything at all.

Just over a month ago, the City of Indianapolis eagerly heralded the opening of a new Marsh grocery store downtown—the second within the Mile Square, which has in recent years exploded in apartment construction.  The other, older store still loosely refers to itself under the name of O’Malia’s, a smaller Indianapolis shain bought out long ago by Marsh, though a handful of stores survive today under the O’Malia name.  It’s only about six blocks away, on the edge of the Lockerbie Square neighborhood, in a converted old Sears and Roebuck Department Store building.  The new Marsh occupies two floors and 43,000 square feet, as part of the five-story Axis mixed-use development near the Canal Walk.  Although the Lockerbie Square O’Malia’s has long tried to satisfy the downtown grocery demand, it was much more in keeping with a neighborhood corner grocery store and never had the feel of a regional supermarket.  It was satisfactory but hardly poised keep pace with the rapidly growing downtown population, as well as the increasingly spendy denizens of surrounding gentrifying neighborhoods.  In short, central Indianapolis apparently had far greater income density that the spread of grocery stores would suggest, and it was underrepresented.

Thus, enter the new Marsh.

At the time of these photos, the facility had been open about six weeks, even though the apartments within the Axis building are not yet complete.  I didn’t spend enough time roaming the aisles to get a sense of the quality of its offerings.  But aesthetically, it almost definitely fills a demand niche.

The Marsh’s interior is like slicing open an avocado, and maybe a tomato right next to it. It’s not a bad idea, and those shades of green (and the occasional bright red) certainly seem au courant enough.   Shiny and new is critical, because the Marsh Supermarkets brand has lagged considerably in recent years, though it was once the defining grocery store of the Indianapolis metro.  Former CEO Don Marsh’s opulent life, rumors of mistresses and financial mismanagement escalated from the late 1990s until around 2006; the company inevitably dominated news headlines for all the wrong reasons, and its share of the local grocery market plunged below Kroger, Meijer and Walmart.  Its nadir may have been the late 2006 purchase by Sun Capital, a private equity firm out of Florida.  Whether the new owners successfully re-branded it or its image was strong enough to prevail on its own, Marsh has endured, though still at a shadow of its former self.  It shuttered all of its Illinois locations, reigned in the majority of Ohio stores, discontinued its spin-off brands like LoBills (and most O’Malia’s) and announced another wave of closures at the beginning of this year.  Nonetheless, through the Marsh/O’Malia’s at Lockerbie and this new location, the declining chain dominates Indianapolis’ downtown grocery market, at least for the time being.  And this latest is definitely trying to splash a new coat of paint on the company’s overall image.

The aesthetics of grocery stores is something that I suspect resonates in our unconsciousness, far more than the blogosphere suggests.  After all, supermarkets seem more resilient to the encroaching dominion of online shopping than a lot of other retail.  Sure, some people feel confident ordering groceries online.  (Indianapolis is home to a successful cybergrocer; Green B.E.A.N. Delivery has grown into a multi-state enterprise.) But most people still prefer choosing their own groceries, particularly when it comes to selecting the produce, meats, and baked goods firsthand.  Thus, how a store looks can influence heavily how much people are willing to patronize a store.  And this Marsh looks contemporary—a stark comparison to the surviving Marsh locations in less chic parts of town, most of which have interiors that evoke the 1970s when they were built.  My suspicion is that renovating a grocery store is particularly capital intensive.  And since they sell such a large quantity of non-durable goods, with new shipments arriving daily, it is nearly impossible to upgrade a supermarket and keep it operational for its customers.  And when a location completely closes, even if just for a couple months, most of its clientele will find somewhere else…and they may never return.  Thus, grocery store interiors across the country are particularly likely to remain frozen in time.  Far more likely than, say, apparel stores, which also have to stay fresh to fight off that online competition.

From murals of the soon-to-change Indianapolis skyline to its subtle mezzanine that may go mostly unused, the new downtown Marsh in the Axis is as effective at conveying trendy urban living today is it is likely to look dated in fifteen years.  What seems particularly telling—and most reflective of the importance of novelty in design—are those public restrooms.

The swimming-pool-mosaic look has taken over in recent years, as popular a tactic in domestic kitchens as it is in gym locker rooms.  It will seriously date itself by the year 2020, but doggone it, it looks good right now.  These small, antiseptic restrooms in the new Marsh also reveal a certain feature that may not go out of style quite as soon.

The restroom is more significant for what it lacks: a mirror above the sink.  More and more businesses are opting to exclude mirrors from their restrooms altogether, much to the chagrin of the narcissists out there.  Why?  It could be because of a growing concern for privacy and the use of restrooms for unlawful voyeurism; after all, stories routinely hit the local news about cameras installed in public restrooms to spy on people.  Mirrors only expand the potential lines of sight that peeping toms can exploit.

But the bigger problem with mirrors in public restrooms is, unfortunately, the vandals out there.  This observation is probably axiomatic to anyone who has ever had to use a public restroom in a busy urban setting—which covers the vast majority of the adult population.  Mirrors harbor graffiti and its companion, the scratchitti, in equal measure.  In most restrooms, they’re right behind the interior stalls for suffering from various markings and tags.  Most Marsh locations are much more suburban, whereas this one, occupying the street level of a building with zero setback, is far more likely to receive walk-in pedestrian traffic that exclusively uses the restroom.  Thus, these restrooms will get more users, they’ll be harder to monitor, and the vandals will soon come out of the woodwork.

Or at least they would.  Removing the mirror deprives them of a popular canvas—a small omission that inconveniences a few people while allowing one more safeguard against any chances of diminishing the store’s aesthetic integrity.  Six weeks after its opening, the Indianapolis Marsh remains free of nail polish tags on its mosaic tiles or messages on the men’s room stalls.  And the ambiance of a fresh bowl of guacamole pervades.  Bon appétit.

When a street is not a road.

My year and a half in Afghanistan working under the US Air Force confronted me with a new acronym almost every day.  One of the bases for which I wrote a comprehensive plan required a “Glossary of Acronyms” in order to sort them all out, ballooning to several pages in length.  It was exhausting.

And then there are the words made up on the spot.

Generally speaking, I leave neologisms to the likes of Buckminster Fuller.  And even though acronyms don’t qualify as newly minted words, they can serve largely the same semantic function.  It’s hard not to scan the cultural forces that help to elicit both acronyms and neologisms with a certain level of amusement.  I’ll admit that I’ve deployed a new word from my artillery from time to time.  (I’d like to think I coined the term “popera” long before it achieved musical relevancy, but no one will see me phoning my lawyer.) Even though the output of fabricated labels within the discipline of urban studies pales in comparison to the Department of Defense, I still find that I’m rarely in the up-and-up when it comes to new trends or the modish terms to describe them.

Which brings us to the stroad.  I wasn’t aware of what a stroad was until just a few months ago.  Semantically, it seems just as inaccurate as the façadectomy that I have referenced a few times in the past.  After all, “stroad” is a portmanteau of “street” and “road”, used to characterize an arterial that seems to share features of both, but also nullifies their intrinsic advantages.  But aren’t “street” and “road” synonymous?  According to a recent City Lab article, Chuck Marohn, a “recovering traffic engineer”, coined the term “stroad” to describe any right-of-way that “moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector development”.  Therefore, a stroad tries to achieve the most desirable characteristics of both roads (for their ability to move vehicular traffic quickly) and streets (for their ability to link neighborhood features in an aesthetic manner that remains safe and appealing for all users).  It fails on both counts. According to Marohn, “anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour [as is typically characteristic of a stroad], you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.”  Marohn has created a video through his nonprofit Strong Towns that offers a visualization of an archetypal stroad. 

My long-repressed English major has turned me into an insufferable semantic nitpicker.  Here I criticize Marohn for placing two words—street and road—into tidy, discrete semantic boxes…two words that for most people are fungible.  Beyond that, I need to chill out, because Marohn’s neologism is effective in pretty much every other sense.  Regardless of whether or not a stroad blends a street and a road, as anyone else would define it, it still feels like a hybrid of two types of right-of-way.  Perhaps it cold be called an arterial and a collector (a “collecterial”?), but then those two terms are fully entrenched in the lingo of transportation engineers.

“Stroad” really conveys another key point.  It’s one ugly sounding word—clipped, aggressive and vulgar.  It almost sounds like a blend of stoat and toad, two largely unloved animals.  And, in my first real-life encounter with a stroad (at least at a point when I knew what the word meant), the first thing that occurred to me was the unattractiveness of the landscape.  Here it is:

I’m looking eastward down Michigan Avenue, in the Great Lake State’s capital of Lansing.  And it’s obvious that this major street, which connects downtown Lansing to the campus of Michigan State University in nearby East Lansing, has enjoyed a number of investments that attempt to make it a more attractive environment for pedestrians.  Notice the vintage lamps hugging the curbs.  Another angle reveals some “bulb out” sidewalk designs intended to lower the section of the street necessary for walkers to cross at a given crosswalk, as seen below:

And, to be fair, quite a few of the structures on the north side of the street (to the left in these photos) date from a time period when most buildings directly addressed the sidewalk.   But the side on which I was standing—the south side—shows the fierce competition that those handsome old two-story buildings must face.

To be fair, real estate speculators have caught on to the notion that this is a redeveloping area, and someone is trying to market this corner parcel to capitalize on what is ostensibly an emerging district for young professionals.

I wish this developer the best of luck.  He or she may very well succeed.  After all, just a half-block to the west, on the north side of the street, sits the Cooley Law School Stadium, an apparent recent addition that has prompted certain civic boosters to brand this stretch of Michigan Avenue as the “Stadium District”.

And on the otherwise desolate south side of the street, another obviously recent mixed-use development sits just a little further to the west, ostensibly capitalizing on the Stadium District name.

And, another block to the west, an old industrial building has benefited from a repurposing into a mixed-use facility with restaurants on the first floor.

Perhaps Michigan Avenue will come together wonderfully as a corridor with densely interwoven different uses.  It doesn’t hurt to be optimistic.  After all, this stroad terminates just a few blocks further to the east, at the Michigan State Capitol. 

The elongated dome of the Capitol is visible in the distance.  So this Stadium District is just a football toss away from Lansing’s downtown and the center of Michigan’s government.  (But, incidentally, not the Ingham County seat.  Lansing is among the only state capitals that is not also the center of government for its respective county.)  But compare Michigan Avenue to another, smaller commercial thoroughfare in central Lansing:

The above pictures reveal the streetscape for Washington Square, a street perpendicular to Michigan Avenue that runs just a block east of the capitol.  Both roads are visible on the map below:

On Washington Square, cars can still get where they need to be, but never while careening at 50 miles per hour.  The abundance of on-street parking—most of it occupied on a lazy Saturday afternoon—integrates peaceably with the copious sidewalk-oriented buildings, resulting in an environment that is far more likely to foster higher concentrations of pedestrians.  Compare once more with Michigan Avenue just a few blocks away:

Churck Marohn recognizes that stroads often boast superlative investment.  But to what end?  The sidewalk on the right looks great, with decorative brick pavers, street trees, and wrought iron gates.  But the gaps between all the buildings on the right suggest that most landowners in this area still prefer setting aside plenty of space for off-street parking. Meanwhile, on the left, abutting the Cooley Law School Stadium, is another big parking lot.

And since parking lots are not exactly a high-intensity land use, chances are the land values along Michigan Avenue are significantly lower than Washington Square.  Admittedly, Washington Square is in the heart of downtown, but Michigan Avenue’s effort to assert itself as a competing Uptown district isn’t bearing the same fruit.

On his stroad video, Marohn asserts, “Parking lots don’t employ anyone, and parking lots don’t pay a lot of taxes, so this environment becomes very low-yielding.”  Frankly, it’s amazing that this stroad has even achieved what we see now.   But the investment to get here has been formidable, and it’s hard to imagine that the buildings that flank this seven-lane arterial will ever host sufficient density to make it hot real estate that can attract college students away from the much better, stroad-less street network in MSU’s hometown of East Lansing.  The only conceivable way to scale down this stretch of Michigan Avenue would be to turn it into a full-fledged street—or at least Marohn’s definition of a street—by giving it a road diet that invites the superfluous lanes to accommodate bicyclists, pedestrians, carefully deployed greenery, or mass transit stops.  But that, again, would require more infrastructural investment—the exact sort of Pyrrhic victory that has borne so many stroads in the first place.  By this point, that sort of money would go to better use in a complete urban dictionary.  Or a guide to the US Air Force acronyms.

Aging at home: does it have to be an uphill climb?

Baby Boomers remain the largest generation by volume of any recorded in the history of the United States.  This label, part of common parlance from coast to coast, imposes artificial bookends upon a group of people whose only real commonality is that they were conceived in the years following World War II—a spike in the birthrate that gives them gravitas, almost tautologically, again thanks to their formidable numbers.  They have shaped everything, particularly as they grew up and passed legal voting age, but then they continued to do so as they amassed wealth and earned a previously inconceivable purchasing power.  And their influence will undoubtedly continue in their wake after the last of them dies out.

Grim as it may be to talk about death, the first baby boomer became eligible for social security on October 15, 2007 (turning 62 on January 1, 2008), and, while a generation widely characterized by ambition and upward mobility is likely to defer retirement, eventually old age will catch up with it.   The widespread proliferation of extended care facilities, senior communities, and the younger “active adult” subdivisions is evidence that a sizable portion of the population is demanding a residential typology that scarcely existed 50 years ago, when most people were only expected to live a half dozen years after retirement.

But how do we respond to those who have no desire to leave the places they have called home for most of their adult lives?

A house like this, in the working class Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, downriver from the Motor City, may at least shed a flicker of light on what’s happening.  And, as is often the case, I’m making assumptions with little more than my own peepers: I have no idea the age or family make-up of the folks who call this tidy bungalow home.  But the outside evidence suggests they are contending with the forces that father time imposes on our muscles, bones and joints.

The contraption leading to the front door should make it clear what I’m suggesting: it’s a wheelchair ramp.  And it’s an elaborate one.

More often than not, they have to be elaborate. Homes dating from this time period (between the 1920s and 1940s, I’d suspect) rarely accommodated people who depended on wheelchairs for mobility, partly due to lack of any organized advocacy on behalf of disabled people and heavily due to lack of demand.  Not only were people with access or functional needs less likely to expect navigability or self-sufficiency, the world simply had fewer of them around.  The life cycle simply didn’t mesh well with disabilities, and disabled people likely depended on either family or hired caretakers.  Times have changed, and homes with an extensive ramp like this one in Lincoln Park have grown increasingly common.

Aside from the physicality of the house itself, the space around it could pose a huge challenge.  Wheelchairs require a very gentle grade change of 1:12.  Otherwise, most users don’t have the strength to apply the needed torque to proceed up the slope, or their caretakers may be unable to push.  While motorized chairs can mitigate against topography to some extent, they are undoubtedly more expensive and may not be desirable for those who have enough upper-body capability to wheel themselves around.  Thus, to get the ramp they need to their front doors, many homeowners must sacrifice a good part of the front yard.

What’s interesting about the house in Lincoln Park is that it ostensibly has enough room, even though it rests on what would typically be a small parcel in a relatively dense, walkable pre-war neighborhood. While most of the homes in Lincoln Park claim narrow lots, this homeowner has ample space for a ramp on the one side.

But why would there be such a gap between homes, when the normal configuration for neighborhoods from this time period is much closer-knit, with minimal side yards?

It would appear that this modest little yellow house used to have a neighbor.  Just beyond the handicapped parking sign—to its left in the photo above—is a curb cut, with a paved strip wide enough for a car.  It’s hard to imagine any other purpose for that than a driveway that once led to a garage…to a garage that once served a house.  The house almost definitely was demolished, and enough of the pavement was removed to clear the ground for fresh turf.  All that remains is the strip between the sidewalk and the curb cut.

It’s neither possible nor reasonable to postulate that the owners of the yellow house bought the adjacent property, then demolished it, in part to expand their yard and to provide enough room for the handicapped ramp.  That former home could have befallen a million different fates.  But unlike Detroit, where demolished homes have routinely induced gaps in the streetscape, a lacuna such as this is rare in Lincoln Park.  And the generous side yard addresses what otherwise could have been a great enough engineering challenge to preclude this family’s ability to remain in their house.

Sweeping wheelchair ramps in front yards may not jump out to the unattuned eye—after all, we’ve seen the proliferation of accessible commercial and public buildings over the two decades since ADA passed—but it’s easy to surmise that their numbers are growing.    After all, those baby boomers may soon start facing the mobility impairments that accompany old age, and few houses, both old and new, meet the sundry requirements that allow households to age in place.  Aside from replacing all stairs with ramps, wheelchair friendly structures require significant additional retrofits.  Hinges must allow doors to pivot across a broader space in order to accommodate the gentler turn radii of wheelchairs.  Cabinets cannot be placed too high.  Knobs on stovetops—and the burners themselves—can’t be out of reach from a seated position.  Toilets need ample room and often bars for leverage to allow ingress and egress.  The operability of the most mundane household objects no longer seems so benign.   And I can’t begin to guess how the wheelchair-dependent person at this Lincoln Park house manages to get up to the next floor.   It may be little more than an attic or auxiliary space.  But if the bedroom’s up there, it’s probable that the family had to retrofit a room on the first floor to serve as the bedroom.  And since many older homes only have one bathroom, that spatial arrangement could also pose a huge problem if the loo is on what we Americans call floor two.

“Aging in place” may soon become a household term as this populated generation faces access and functional needs in an array of houses not built to accommodate them.  Americans with Disabilities Act standards are already ubiquitous, and HUD provided accessibility guidelines for affordable housing, coincident to the passage of ADA.  Could this cohort’s demand for ramps and broad bathrooms reach such an apex that it actually hurts the overall market for conventional housing?  Will the younger, less populous, able-bodied generation seek out a glut of homes entering the market?  Perhaps the boomers will resort to the tactics on display in these photos.

A colleague at a recent conference cogently observed that we rarely see sweeping ramps to front doors in high-income neighborhoods.  They dominate blue-collar areas.  A variety of cultural shifts over the next decade could corroborate if the aging in place phenomenon is socioeconomically driven, but it’s easy to speculate now whether such an assertion is true.  More affluent neighborhoods use their homeowners associations to create covenants attached to the deeds, which can restrict major modifications that could vitiate the aesthetics of the community.  These covenants may therefore require homeowners to find subtler and more expensive means of solving mobility problems.  Affluent homeowners may amortize their loans at a slightly earlier point in life, giving them more leverage in selling and moving to an appropriately suited domicile after retirement—one that better allows them to age in place than the one they enjoyed during their career years.  Lastly, affluent adults generally boast superior access to doctors and preventative care specialists, meaning they could be slightly less likely to face mobility impairments caused by common conditions such as stroke, since heart disease or cardiovascular-related ailments routinely affect lower-income people more often and at younger ages.

Regardless of how the baby boomers’ silver tsunami shapes future sociological studies, a fixed asset such as real estate will have to adapt to our morphing, creaky bodies.  The development world’s response to an as-of-yet undetermined demand shift could exert a profound impact on the shape and appearance of residential communities.  And we won’t always be able to bulldoze the home next door to make way for a new entrance.