Development Neanderthals Need to Know the Real Meaning of ‘CAVE’

If you read the propaganda in today’s St. Louis Business Journal on development you might think the term CAVE is “Citizens Against Virtually Everything.” Instead, it is actually Citizens Against Vulgar Environments. And vulgar is what we often get from the developers complaining in the journal.

In the face of hundreds of millions of dollars of redevelopment activity in the St. Louis area in recent years, a vehemence against commercial development has risen to new levels.

Just in the last month,

Paul McKee Jr. has been accused of planning to “bulldoze the ghetto,” and Chris Goodson’s site for a new development on downtown’s edge was picketed on the same day plans were unveiled. Gundaker Commercial Group’s Mike Hejna denounced the new force in development: “CAVE” men, or “Citizens Against Virtually Everything.”

Hejna made the comments to a group of real estate brokers Feb. 6 after detailing the several-years-long process of getting his and Duke Realty’s $750 million Premier 370 business park approved in St. Peters.

Read the above again, it is all about the money. Dollar signs are all they see. If millions of dollars are being “invested” it must therefore be good. The developers like McKee and Hejna can’t have a discussion about pedestrian-friendly design, planning for various modes of transportation, and sustainable development. Lisa Brown continues:

Anti-development sentiment has risen to a level beyond civil discourse, to a point where developers have received threats at their homes. And this opposition is harder to overcome with the Internet as a tool — it’s hard to fight an opponent you can’t see or identify.

“Because of the blogosphere, it exaggerates things,” said Stephen Acree, president of the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance (RHCDA). “The folks that are most vocal on the blogs are not necessarily part of the neighborhood organizations that are working in the community to build it.”

Many of the blogs, such as mine, are well identified. In fact, we are often more identifiable than the Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) these developers employ to keep their identities hidden from public scrutiny. We wouldn’t want our prominent citizens being connected to a string of properties being left open to vandals, arsonists, homeless and the elements.

And Mr. Acree, you are correct. Many of the bloggers such as myself are not part of the neighborhood organizations. Why? As an example, when I tried to get my neighborhood organization to help save a historic building they refused to act because their funding is tied to the alderman that was in favor of demolition. This is St. Louis you know and politicos can be be spiteful if crossed. Acting outside the organization you can, in my view, have a bigger inpact. By the way, the building was saved (despite claims it could not) and is being converted to condos.

Fears over eminent domain and the proliferation of blogs on the Internet have created a difficult environment for developers, said Marian Nunn, chief operating officer of St. Louis-based THF Realty, one of the largest private commercial developers in the country.

“There seems to be heightened alertness on the part of the public when you need to tear anything down, even if it has to be torn down,” Nunn said. “The Internet has really created a whole new venue for people who are misinformed to communicate on a large scale. It’s very mean spirited, and they don’t have to do it face to face or face rebuttal.”

You want a face to face rebuttal? Name the time and place and I will be there. Shall we have that face to face meeting in the massive wasteland THF calls Maplewood Commons? Or we could debate the value of the development THF placed in the flood zone in the Chesterfield Valley? Talk about “mean spirited” — these developments are absolutely horrid in every possible category. Would I have stopped those projects dead in their tracks if I could have? Yes!

[Update 2/16/2007 @ 11:35am — I just left a voice message for Ms. Nunn inviting her and her developer friends to a face to face discussion on development practices. If she accepts, I will arrange for a meeting room at St. Louis University where the public can be invited.]

Trust me Ms. Nunn, I am not at all “misinformed” on development. It is the likes of you and others that are clearly misinformed about good design, sustainable development and anything remotely resembling a true walkable community. The interesting thing is most of you are all members of organizations such as the ULI (Urban Land Institute). You must get the monthly manazine and simply toss it in your lobby. I’ve got a suggestion — open it up and actually read the articles. Attend the workshops, not just sponsor them. Once you’ve managed that perhaps actually buying some of the books published by them and the APA (American Planning Assocaition). Same goes for Ms. Brown and the others at the Business Journal — who knows you might actually learn why that big ugly parking garage next to your office is not a good thing for the long term future of St. Louis.

Of course, these developers are not in it for the long haul. Sure, they may retain all their “projects” but that is all they are to them. They boil it down to so many leasable square feet and how much it cost to build. When it gets old they either sell it or return to the local government and hold out their hand for more tax money to retrofit the now-obsolete project.

Myself and others are not anti-commercial development as this article attempts to paint us. I happen to be very pro-development, but not any development just for the sake of development. Unlike these wealthy developers who are complaining about being challenged on their projects, some of us actually know the difference between good and bad design. We know what makes an area sustainable in the long term which is a different goal than short term profits. But the whole issue of good vs. bad development is not agreed upon by everyone so it is time to have that civilized discussion about what constitutes good design for our community.

This is where the developers and people like Mayor Slay’s staff (Barb Giesman & Jeff Rainford) go running. For decades development has happened in a vacuum, with little oversight into the process. Today, in 2007, the situation is different. People, believe it or not, actually care about their physical environment. Yes, we live in a city or suburb for a reason. I did not move to a city consisting of gridded urban streets to have it change into low density sprawl like Ballwin. If I would have wanted that I would have moved there. So we are standing up for what we want, the choice is yours. Either sit down at the table now and lets work through some good zoning for the city (tossing aside our 60-year old auto-centric codes) or be prepared to see an escalation in the level of opposition at every turn.

Jeff Rainford, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff:

We simply have to stand up to the very small number of people who are fighting progress for their own financial or political gain.

Boy, that is rich! Who is seeking financial or political gain here? The funny thing is any population gains the city might be seeing are from people who want to actually live in a city, not the city re-made into some bad suburb. Once again, politicians define “progress” as so many millions of dollars being spent. A wonderful dense urban neighborhood could be built at Pruitt-Igoe but if a medical waste facility were to cost another $10 million they’d probably consider that more progress and go that direction. We need people at the top that actually have a clue. After all, good urban design is not rocket science, even a caveman could do it.

We, the Citizens Against Vulgar Environments (CAVE), need to stand up against a very small number of small-minded people who are, through their prehistoric development practices and political positions, holding back the true potential of the City of St. Louis and the St. Louis Region.

BJC/Forest Park Lease is Simply Par for Course

St. Louis has a serious lack of leadership at the top. Following the lack of a second yesterday on a motion to accept the BJC/Forest Park Lease Mayor Slay indicated he was “disappointed.” Well, Francis, welcome to my world. I am disappointed daily by you and pretty much every other elected official out of city hall.

I am disappointed in fellow members of the Board of Estimate & Apportionment, Jim Shrewsbury and Darlene Green. I’m not disappointed because they wouldn’t go along with the current deal, but because they, like the Mayor, are reactionary. Board President Candidate Lewis Reed and all his followers on the Boad of Aldermen are no better. BJC is not really the bad guy here, nor is Shrewsbury or Green. The culprit is how we do business in this town.

The notion of having to maintain Forest Park cannot possibly have been a new concept in 2006 when BJC floated this idea past the mayor’s office. Forest Park Forever, the non-profit group that raised so much money for the restoration of the park, was started in 1986 — two decades ago! Did nobody stop to think, “hey we are going to need to find a way to maintain all these improvements” along the way?

The lack of leadership from City Hall has brought us to this point today. BJC is now issuing threats to the citizens that they will look elsewhere if they don’t get their way. Maybe BJC is the bad guy too. Don’t threaten me, I don’t care how big you are. Take your ugly buildings, your closed off streets and those aweful parking garages you’ve littered the landscape with and hit the road. Yeah, that’s right. Get lost you big f*cking bully. I’m calling your bluff — something the spinless folks at city hall would never do. Proof? The St. Louis Cardinals got a new stadium downtown.
Sometime in the last 20 years we should have had a discussion about paying for Forest Park, and all our parks frankly. Does anyone recall Mayor Slay making this a priority during his 2005 re-election campaign? What about Ald. Roddy? Nope.

Good leadership would have said, “OK folks, we’ve invested millions in the renovation of Forest Park but now we need to find a good way to keep it up for the long haul.” A panel could have been formed to investigate options, a town hall could have been held. Something, anything. Instead they waited until re-elected and then turned BJC land-grab into a immediate crisis, designed to scare voters into submission. You know, something President Bush might do.

I’ve never come out fully against the idea of BJC getting that land for future expansion — it was the process I disliked, not the basic land concept. Again, good leadership from city hall would have told BJC, “We can’t take this to the people until we figure out how & where to replace the open space lost and ammenities.” You can’t take away over 9 acres of park used by nearby residents without figuring out how to accomodate their needs. Yet, when this came up last year the issue of replacement park land was one of those “oh we’ll figure that out later items.” Uh, no! We’ll figure it all out or we won’t do it at all. The Kiel Opera house was one of those “later” projects that still hasn’t happened.

Our city operates in a vacuum, looking soley at a project at a time. Whether it is paying for park maintenance or a master plan for a blighted section of South Grand we simply don’t plan ahead. We sit back or wait for a sweet-looking deal to arrive and push for it. Ald. Florida was all in favor of a McDonald’s drive-thru without once doing a master plan for a mile-long stretch of Grand blighted some 10 years earlier. What is the true cost to maintain our parks and if we did the BJC lease would that solve everything? Doubtful. We need to have discussions about commercial cooridors and park funding before we have an impending proposal on the table.  Only then can we possiblly hope to have a rational discussion about the future of our city.

Given the way our leaders continue to operate, I don’t give this city much of a future.  The potential is here, but we continually squander what we have and push those with creative thinking to other cities.  This region is not growing, at least not by much.  Sure, we are building stuff on the edge of the region but that is not the same — I’m talking population and jobs, not sprawl.  The city has to fight with the Census annually to show we’ve stabilized our population rather than continue the decades-old downward spiral.  Other regions in the U.S. have their act together while this region sticks its collective head in the sand.  We are so far behind and all the folks we elect can do is point fingers at each other.  Well, I’ve got a finger for them…

5th Annual Bicycle Swap Meet and Classic Bike Show, Sunday January 28, 2007

From my friends at the St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation…
5th Annual Bicycle Swap Meet and Classic Bike Show
Hosted by the St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation
Sunday, January 28, 2007
12:00 Noon – 3:30 PM

Gateway Center
One Gateway Drive
Collinsville, IL 62234
(just 12 minutes from the Arch)

NEW THIS YEAR: Members of Circus Day Foundation’s St. Louis Arches youth circus troupe will perform using bicycles and unicycles combined with an array of circus tricks and skills at 1:00 p.m.

For more information: e-mail: swapmeet@stlbikefed.org, or phone: 314.707.5001
For directions and a map, click here [UrbanReviewSTL: it does say you can get to the center via bus or metrolink but I have not verified the route(s)]

Riding your bike to the Swap Meet? Click here for maps & cue sheet.

$5.50 admission fee starting at noon (free to St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation members and we’ll have a table where you can join at the event. Always free for children under 12)
Early Bird Entry: $10.50 will get you in the door at 10:30 a.m.
All admission fees include a $.50 surcharge for Gateway Center.
Hosted by St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation.

Individuals, bike shops, non-profits, and bike-related businesses will have booths with all sorts of bike related goods. Display your vintage bike, or vote for the best of the classic stingrays, balloon tire, middleweight, and special interest models. Enter a raffle for a brand new reproduction purple Stingray! Expert bike fitter, Tim Ray, will do bike fittings for a fraction of his usual fee. All proceeds from bike fittings will benefit the Bike Fed.
For some additional information and pictures of prior swap meets visit the official website.   To read about some of the 14 bike shops with booths at the meet continue below.
… Continue Reading

St. Louis’ Schools Need Middle-Class Students

A couple of days ago I did a post about government’s role in shaping the suburbs through federal lending policies, including an excerpt from the excellent book, Cities Without Suburbs, by David Rusk. Today I bring you more from Rusk, this time on education:

In 1966, sociologist James Coleman released his path-breaking study, Equality of Educational Opportunity. Sponsored by the then-U.S. Office of Education, the Coleman Report concluded that the socioeconomic characteristics of a child and of the child’s classmates (measured principally by family income and parental education) were the overwhelming factors that accounted for academic success. Nothing else – expenditures per pupil, pupil-teacher ratios, teacher experience, instructional materials, age of school buildings, etc. – came close.

“The educational resources provided by a child’s fellow students,” Coleman summarized, “are more important for his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board.” So important are fellow students, the report found, that “the social composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any school factor.”

In the four decades since, nothing has changed. There has been no more consistent finding of educational researchers – and no research finding more consistently ignored by most politicians and many educators. They will not challenge the underlying racial and class structure of American society.

I have conducted a dozen such studies myself, charting the dominant impact of socioeconomic status on school results. The most recent is my study of all elementary schools in Madison-Dane County, Wisconsin. The study finds that

• Pupil socioeconomic status accounts for 64 percent to 77 percent of the school-by-school variation in standardized test results and that
  
• Poor children’s test results improve dramatically when surrounded by middle-class classmates. Move a poor child from a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are also poor to a neighborhood school where 80 percent of classmates are middle class would raise the chance of that child’s scoring at a proficient or advanced levels by 30 to 48 percentage points – an enormous improvement.

In other words, where a child lives largely shapes the child’s educational opportunities – not in terms of how much money is being spent per pupil but who the child’s classmates are. Housing policy is school policy.

This is not really earth shattering news but among all the discussions about the St. Louis Public Schools — the performance of the long list of recent Superintendents, divisions on the school board, low test scores, and calls by Mayor Fracis Slay and others for state takeover of the system the idea of the home-life envinronment for the bulk of the school kids has been lost. This is not to say the kids have a bad or abusive home life but one in which perhaps their parents are poorly educated themselves and are working many hours to provide for their family.

The basic argument is this — the St. Louis Public Schools will continue to under-perform regardless of who is in charge as long as the social issues of concentrated poverty, lack of nearby jobs and poor housing remain unchanged. Ballpark Village is not going to change this situation in the neighborhoods. In the past I’ve said something to the effect of we don’t need school age kids — they are a financial drain anyway. Well, I was wrong. We do need kids — lots of middle-class kids.

But how is that possible? Parents are not going to move to the city until the schools improve and the schools are not going to improve until we get more kids. A costly busing system is one avenue but I don’t think that is a good long-term solution. The answer? Consolidation! No, not a city-county merger of municipalities but of school districts.

Between the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County we have 25 school districts. In many less fractured regions of the country, that same area would have 1-3 districts. Of course, large districts can have their issues as well but that is more about leadership. So what to do? Well, I’d probably combine all the small districts that are fully within the I-270 loop (see map of districts) — this includes St. Louis, Riverview Gardens, Jennings, Normandy, Ritenour, University City, Clayton, Ladue, Brentwood, Maplewood-Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, Affton, Bayless, and Hancock Place. A number of districts are mostly within the I-270 loop and could be included as well — Ferguson-Florissant, Pattonville, Kirkwood, Lindbergh and perhaps Mehlville.
Could this happen voluntarily? Probably not, state action would be needed. But, I would argue this is necessary to help the region — the St. Louis Public Schools are acting as a drain on the regions growth but the solution, more middle-class students, is outside the grasp of the St. Louis School Board and the administration. And yes, as long as poor folks are concentrated in the city and older inner-ring suburbs like Wellston we will need some busing to move people around. But as a single district this would be easier to accomplish — less of the “us” vs. “them.”

Another factor is if we had a single school district for the city and most of the county we could eliminate the “I won’t live in the city because of the schools” claims. Of course, some might argue this would drive folks to Illinois, St. Charles County or Jefferson County even faster but I’m not so sure. After the initial shock of it all I think it might go pretty well and then parents would not see the city limits sign as a big barrier. A strong city is good for the region and especially good for St. Louis County, which continues to lose population to surrounding areas. Such a school system consolidation could help both the city and county. Discuss.

Rusk: Feds Institutionalized Discrimination

Over the years I’ve read various books that talk about the federal government’s role in the suburbanization of America, most are overly technical explanations or just exceptionally lengthy. But, David Rusk in this third edition of , does an excellent job summarizing the issue:

“For Whites Only” was the sign that the federal government hung out as America’s suburbs exploded with millions of new families in the postwar decades. The federal government did not create discrimination in America’s housing markets, but it institutionalized it on an unprecedented scale.(1)

In 1933, as millions of owners were losing their homes during the Great Depression, the New Deal created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). To help struggling families meet mortgage payments, HOLC offer low-interest, long-term mortgage loans. HOLC developed a ratings system to evaluate the risks associated the loans made to specific urban neighborhoods. HOLC designated four categories of neighborhood risk; on its “residential security maps” the highest risk areas were colored red. Black neighborhoods were always coded red and were “red-lined”; even those with small black percentages were usually rated as “hazardous” and residents were denied loans.

HOLC’s loan program was small, but the impact of its discriminatory practices was enormous. During the 1930s and 1940s, HOLC residential security maps were widely used by private banks for their own loan practices. When the Federal Housing Administration (1937) and the Veterans Administration (1944) were founded, they embraced HOLC’s underwriting practices. The 1939 FHA Underwriting Manual, for example, stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that the properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”

FHA and VA largely financed the rapid suburbanization of the United States after World War II. The federal government’s regulations favored construction of single-family homes but discouraged the building of multifamily apartments. As a result, the vast majority of FHA and VA mortgages went to new, white, middle-class suburban neighborhoods, and very few were awarded to black neighborhoods in central cities. Historian Kenneth Jackson found that from 1934 to 1960 suburban St. Louis County received six times as much FHA mortgage money per capita as did the city of St. Louis. Per capita FHA lending in suburban Long Island was eleven times greater than in Brooklyn and sixty times greater than in the Bronx.

Such government practices died hard. As late as 1950, FHA was still encouraging the use of restrictive racial covenants two years after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled them unconstitutional. FHA’s red-lining continued overtly until the mid-1960s, when Robert Weaver became the first African American HUD secretary. The weak Civil Rights Act of 1968 finally outlawed housing discrimination. However, the full extent of discrimination in mortgage lending was only revealed after passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975), and significant mortgage funds began to flow back into inner-city neighborhoods only with vigorous enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act (1977).

Extreme segregation of America’s housing markets was not the result of some natural process of self-regulation. For decades it was force-fed by discriminatory rules of the game from federal, state, and local governments.

Rusk has one misstatement above that should be noted. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a St. Louis case, Shelley vs. Kraemer, that it was unconstitutional for the government to enforce racially restrictive covenants. The covenants themselves as private agreements, however, were not ruled unconstitutional. The 1968 Civil Rights Act, as Rusk indicated, outlawed housing discrimination based on race.

In cities such as St. Louis, by the start of the Great Depression some of the oldest areas were already showing signs of excessive wear. Combined with the depression and the inability to obtain a mortgage many people simply had no choice but to move to the suburbs. Generous terms on these new mortgages often made it cheaper to live in a new house in the suburbs than to rent an old apartment in the central city. Government policy, not natural market forces, accelerated the shift to the suburbs.

The only money central cities saw for many decades came from federal “Urban Renewal” programs, a misnomer if ever there was one. The renewal was not needed investment in basic maintenance neglected during the depression or updating structures with wiring and plumbing, but wholesale clearance and replacement. Today one of those areas targeted for replacement of its “functionally obsolete” housing stock is one of the highest demand areas, Soulard. Soulard’s structures, once thought to be of no value, have been reborn as new living spaces. offices, restaurants and retail stores. The term functionally obsolete continues to be used today to justify destructive policies of demolition, land clearance, and auto-centric development. Whenever you hear (or read) the phrase functionally obsolete from developers, engineers, politicians or others, do so only with many grains of salt.

Historically cities, going back centuries, were a mix of economic classes. St. Louis’ 19th Century neighborhoods exemplified this with streets of more affluent housing around the corner from the housing of the common workers. Long before the car became so dominant in our society, the feds determined neighborhood stability depended not upon centuries of history but on a new idea of separating people based on “social and racial classes.” This false notion of neighborhood stability has undermined inner-city neighborhoods for decades since and has helped create wealthier suburbs and concentrations of poverty in cities. Again, this is not born out of natural market forces — this was the result of poor public policy.

This is not to say that we would not have seen suburbanization or class/racial divisions without these federal lending policies — we must certainly would have. But we have to wonder to what extent our cities, namely St. Louis, would have been different had black areas not been red-lined so that they could receive loan guarantees. And what if the FHA guidelines would have been open to all types of housing, not just single-family detached, would suburbanization have taken on a different form that included multifamily buildings and corner stores? We most certainly would have taken to the car post WWII regardless of these lending policies but with so many far-flung new houses being built as a result of these policies one has to wonder if the adoption of the car would have been slowed if lending policies were at least neutral or favoring a more dense development pattern?

Today’s decisions seldom consider the long-term consequences. If decision makers had been told in 1937 their neighborhood security map would lead to devestating & costly consequences for America’s cities over the next 5-6 decades they may have revised their thinking. In reality, concerns about the consequences would have likely been ignored as politicians then, as today, look mostly to short-term solutions. This is why we must carefully consider those people we elect to public office.