A Demolition Dictionary

In 2011, the City of Baltimore’s Housing Department oversaw the demolition of more than 300 unsafe structures throughout the city, including a seven-acre demolition site on the city’s east side. In 2010, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing promised to demolish 10,000 of the city’s most blighted and dangerous properties before his term ends in 2013. And in Youngstown, Ohio, a shrinking population has left the city with 4,000 vacant structures, most of them slated for demolition.

What Baltimore, Detroit, Youngstown and an increasing number of U.S. cities with shrinking populations have in common is a problem Americans are unused to solving: How to creatively and safely deconstruct our cities. In places like Baltimore—which has lost a third of its population since 1950 and where, depending on who you ask, almost 20,000 properties sit vacant—this breaking down and reinterpreting of place is already happening.

Suggestions abound from artists and policy-makers alike. A 2002 Brookings Institute/CEO for Cities report highlights a number of plausible solutions to promote faster and better development of vacant properties, many of which we are now seeing implemented. Some of these solutions—like vacant lot revitalization programs, data visualization to increase transparency and creative financing strategies—are attempts to address the very complex problem that is urban redevelopment.

But in the haste to attract developers and their money, many cities have overlooked a most important and essential component of responsible redevelopment: Communicating the potential health hazards, necessary health precautions and contractor’s responsibilities to the people who live and work near a demolition site.

In a 2011 report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation defines “Responsible Development” as “an approach that combines economic, community and human development strategies to provide area residents, businesses, and the surrounding neighborhoods with the maximum benefit from the revitalization efforts.” This definition and the tactics outlined for getting there—including “using strict safety protocols to minimize the health hazards for residents of neighborhoods affected by demolition activities”—is a big step toward gaining national standards and protocols for urban demolition, which the U.S. has yet to establish in any meaningful way.

As a result of the lack of national standards, cities and contractors are left to make it up as they go along, often creating standards on the fly or after the fact. This was the case in St. Louis after a 2007 study found that children living in low-income areas with significant demolition activity “showed significantly higher levels of lead in their blood than in children where no demolition had taken place.” The report goes on:

Despite such findings, federal laws and regulations provide no protections to ensure that lead exposure is minimized during demolition… likewise, states and municipalities typically do not require contractors to ensure lead exposure is minimized.

That contractors and developers are left to police themselves is a little like asking food manufacturers to decide what to include on nutrition labels. It is not only inefficient and ineffective, but an egregious conflict of interest.

And yet, this is exactly what happens in cash-strapped cities across the country. Desperate for any development to take place in deteriorating neighborhoods, municipalities are uncharacteristically timid—reluctant to require, for example, even the most basic forms of communication with residents near a demolition site. Sure, some cities have spearheaded such initiatives, but most are spotty and half-hazard at best.

Responsible redevelopment benchmarks—like public health standards—must include a standard set of communication protocols that publicly and clearly articulate potential health risks, necessary precautions local residents should take, and the contractor’s responsibilities and protocols. It is the onus of the city (and its elected officials) to protect and inform its residents of any city-permitted activities that could potentially impact their health.

To be sure, urban demolition is a complex, risky and exhaustive endeavor for cities and developers. It is expensive, logistically challenging and just plain ugly. But—for now—it is a necessary part of the creative deconstruction of many great American cities. And so rather than look the other way, we should increase transparency around the demolition process both for the sake of residents and developers. By creating a national standard for best practices around demolition—including standardized, public-facing communication protocols—we make it easier for contractors to do their job right and for cities to protect the health of their residents.

This post was originally published by Next American City on February 1, 2012

Needs-based Innovation

I’ve lived in Baltimore for barely a month but I know two important things already: Snow Balls are the local delicacy and place matters. Ask any local and they can tell you exactly where one neighborhood ends and another begins down to the corner (even if those lines are debatable). That is, in Baltimore it’s not just place that matters but neighborhood, block, and street that matter.

Today at the Living Cities summit two big themes have emerged that I think warrant mentioning: the idea of “city as petri dish” and “doing what you can with what you’ve got”. Both have merit but may mean very different things depending on where you are.

Steven Johnson, author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From and more recently The Innovator's Cookbook, talked about how the serendipitous bumping up against one another in cities is what creates the context and environment for innovation (an idea first espoused by Jane Jacobs, later by Richard Florida and more recently by science). While this is most certainly true within middle and upper middle-class contexts I wonder if the theory holds weight in poorer neighborhoods and in cities that are not brimming with what Florida has famously called “the creative class”. Take the East Baltimore neighborhood where I currently reside. Though the unemployment rate is officially 9.2% this does not take into account those who have dropped out of the workforce all together. For those outside the workforce the prospect of re-entering it becomes ever more daunting with each passing month. And for those actively looking things are not especially optimistic: I’ve spoken with people in my neighborhood who have sent out hundreds of resumes and have not received a single call back.

All of this is not to say that innovation isn’t important in low income communities or that the unemployed are not finding creative solutions to address their economic hardships (it is and they are). It is more to say that in cities where there is chronic unemployment people are facing vastly different circumstances than those living in cities that are thriving (however we are currently defining that). Jobs may in fact be more important in East Baltimore than, say, Palo Alto.  Context, place (and yes, street) do matter when thinking about the kinds of things that will move communities forward. In other words, innovation must be needs-based.

And this is why the other theme that has emerged today feels spot on when thinking about places like Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland. Walter Wright summed it up quite nicely this morning, “it’s about using what you have and finding new ways to reconfigure it”. Or what Andrew Plepler acknowledged in the afternoon, “We don’t have the luxury of experimenting anymore for the sake of experimenting”. That is, we must do what we can with what we’ve got, we must find—as Johnson later noted—“the adjacent possible”.

This post originally appeared on Next American City, September 27, 2011

a snow falls in buffalo

American landscape architecture is largely rooted in the ideals and creations of one man: Frederick Law Olmsted. One of the visionaries behind Central Park, Olmsted was, in his time, a kind of tolerable radical, a person who inspired big ideas and plenty of opposition but in the end mostly got his way. He introduced concepts to Americans (public parks and parkways, for example) that would, over time, come to define how we think about public space.

One of his most lasting contributions is his style of integrated design—the way in which he worked with the existing landscape to create places that were organic, albeit modified, expressions of their natural state.

In the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands, a misfit cum avant garde landscape architect (in the form of a young Johnny Depp) descends on his neighbors' manicured, mid-century lawns, prompting them to reconsider not just their landscaping but their lives. And when, in 2008, Fritz Haeg attacked our front yards armed with eggplants and kale his message was clear: Landscapes need not be places of conformity.

Still, when we think of landscapes we mostly think green. "It has been said that we live in a permanent summer mindset," writes Sergio López-Piñeiro in the introduction to his project Olmsted's Blank Snow. "Winter is perceived as a temporary season, while summer is portrayed as an everlasting condition. Lawn is an urban material, while snow is not. In contrast to summer's green spaces, I would like to propose winter's white spaces." The University at Buffalo architecture professor's "snow plow master plan" will transform what had mostly been considered a public nuisance into a public space over the course of the winter. "Our region tends to welcome the snow in a contradictory manner...We react by salting all outdoor surfaces and starting up noisy snow plows and blowers," he says.

Instead, this winter, choreographed snow plows will build fifteen seven-foot tall snow mounds creating areas for sledding, people watching, and wandering. And in a nod to Olmsted, Front Park's winter design will provide a constant opening of new views, allowing pedestrians unique vantage points of Lake Erie not available in warmer (snow free) weather.

Images from Olmsted's Blank Snow, courtesy of Sergio López-Piñeiro

This piece was originally published by GOOD on December 3, 2010

In Praise of Staying Put

There's something very American about mobility. We like our freedom to roam, to follow opportunity, to move westward as the saying goes. We like our mobility so much that 40 million of us will relocate this year. It's not at all unusual for a single family in a single lifetime (or for a single person in their twenties) to move at least a few times.

"The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India,” writes Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America. “The earliest explorers were looking for gold which was, after an early streak in Mexico, always somewhere farther on.”

Back in the days of family farms we tended to stay put. Families had lots of babies—the better to raise a barn with. Those babies had more babies and small towns grew up, like the one where my grandparents have lived in Kentucky for the last 80 years and their grandparents lived for 80 years before that. Then the Industrial Revolution happened and people flocked to cities, those bulging engines of opportunity.

A hundred something years later, smack dab in the middle of an information revolution, we can supposedly be anywhere and work from any place. Yet with ever more frequency, hoards of us leave the places where we grew up and converge in one of five major metropolitan areas, the cultural and economic hubs of America. That gravity lured my own father to leave a small Kentucky town, and the urban engines continue to attract human, creative, and economic capital. But if cities are self-fulfilling prophecies, what happens to places like Maceo, Kentucky; Youngstown, Ohio; and Braddock, Pennsylvania, when our grandparents die?

Braddock, Pennsylvania (population 2,500) is a town people often point to when talking about what's wrong and right in America. Home to Andrew Carnegie's first free public library, and once more densely populated than Brooklyn, New York, it has, like many post-industrial cities, lost much of its population, housing stock, and businesses—in Braddock's case 90 percent of it. But the closure of its hospital in January— with it the only ATM and sit-down restaurant—might be the most frustrating loss for John Fetterman, the tattooed, Harvard-Kennedy-schooled mayor. Fetterman has been in office for five years and he's fed up with the continued collective memory loss of small town America.

When will places like Braddock get a little attention from urban theorists like Richard Florida, author of The Creative Class, wonders Fetterman.“Hey Dick, why don't you get out and push instead of driving around in your Land Rover?"  It's been a long day, one can assume, and Fetterman, understandably, has a bone to pick.

For Fetterman, Florida's school of thought feels too theoretical: It's not grounded in the realities of places like Braddock. Before we add another bike lane in Portland or MUNI stop in San Francisco, he wonders, why don't we get a grocery store for Braddock? A job or two for Gary? How about fixing those broken windows at Union Station in Detroit? "Why keep gilding those lillies," asks Fetterman. Florida's bestsellers do not represent the realities of much of the United States—the Braddocks or the Gary, Indianas."

“Let [Florida] do the sociological nose jobs. Let him be the plastic surgeon. I'd rather work on the serious diseases,” says Fetterman. While it may be unfair to compare Florida to a plastic surgeon, thinking of Fetterman as an oncologist is actually a pretty useful metaphor. What he's dealing with is more like a malignant cancer—spreading beyond Fetterman's borough to places like Ravenswood, West Virginia, and Youngstown, Ohio. Braddock, it seems, is not just Fetterman's problem.

But Florida is not exactly a provocateur. His premise seems almost obvious. “Where you choose to live will greatly affect everything from your finances and job options to your friends, your potential mate, and your children's future,” he writes. “The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being.”

Much of Florida's work focuses on the five most economically successful regions of the United States, how they got there, who got them there, and why you, urbane 21st century city dweller, should be there or mold your city after them. “In the United States, more than 90 percent of all economic output is produced in metropolitan regions, while just the largest five metro regions account for 23 percent of it,” Florida writes. “A growing number of us have the opportunity to choose a place that truly fits our needs.”

Or do we?

Surely there are millions of people who couldn't choose to live in one of these clusters even if they wanted to, which by the way, could be a good thing. A migratory, mobile, and “footless” population as E.F. Schumacher called it in his prescient, 1973 classic Small is Beautiful, may be a boon for the economy in the short term but bad for our society in the long term.  

“They freely talk about the polarisation of the population of the United States into three immense megalopolitan areas,” wrote Schumacher. “The rest of the country being left practically empty; deserted provincial towns, and the land cultivated with vast tractors, combine harvesters, and the immense amounts of chemicals. If this is somebody's conception of the future of the United States, it is hardly a future worth having.”

And therein lies Fetterman's bone. The thriving, 21st American cities that produce most of our economic output are the “it cities.” They continue to monopolize the resources and capital (both human and financial) that places like Braddock so desperately need and they continue to the polarize the population, leaving smaller towns like his in crisis. But could cities suffer from their own hyperbole? If where we live has become another way of branding ourselves and we continue to move to urban centers with like-minded people, color coding our states according to political affiliation, do we encourage the kind of polarization that FOX News and MSNBC trade on?

I like my neighborhood. I like the fish taco place on the corner. I like that my mechanics play Bach. I like that I can get a croque monsieur or Korean BBQ in a short walk, and I especially like that I can buy— or borrow— almost any kind of book my heart desires whenever my heart desires it. I live in a walkable, bikeable, liveable place: the kind of place Jane Jacobs might like, if it wasn’t in Los Angeles.

But it is not the place where I learned to ride a bike or where I ate tomatoes from my grandmother's garden. Like many of my peers, it is among a handful of places I have called home in my twenties. And that may be most damaging part of our city fetish: the pervasive “footlessness” that it inspires. And while places like Braddock need the artists and students to move in, they also need those people to stay, to pay the taxes that fund schools and crosswalks and libraries—the things that build sustainable, local economies.

“This thing we are calling mobility keeps people from learning their lessons,” noted Wendell Berry in 1999. “Their idea is that you can completely mess up somewhere and then go somewhere else, or you can completely succeed somewhere and go somewhere else. In either case you don't know what the effects are. Sometimes people cause worse effects by their success than they do by their failure. Gary Snyder said the right thing: Stop somewhere, just stop.”

This piece was originally published by GOOD on April 22, 2010

A Neighborhood Canvas

When Assata Richards moved into one of the newly renovated row houses in Houston’s Third Ward in the winter of 1996, she knew her life had changed. Richards had been living with her young son and eight other people in a two-bedroom apartment in the “Bottoms,” the most economically depressed area in one of the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods. Eager to go back to school after a several year hiatus, she jumped at the opportunity to join the Young Mother’s Program, an arm of Project Row Houses, the community revitalization and public art endeavor. Richards, one of the first five women in the program, recalls the immediate impact of moving into her new home. “It was like being in a smoky room and walking into fresh air,” she says. “I knew that things were going to be ok.”

Project Row Houses was born when a group of high school students visited artist Rick Lowe’s studio in 1992 and challenged him to make art with community impact. Lowe, then a practicing painter, was convinced that his art needed a practical application and spent the next few years building a small coalition of volunteers, fellow artists and community organizers to rehabilitate an abandoned 1 1/2 block site of twenty-two shotgun style houses in Houston’s Third Ward. “I treated it like I would any art project,” says Lowe. “Are the essentials there? The first thing I did was find people to support the project.”

Lowe’s inaugural endeavor– cleaning up that first block– was not glamorous or a textbook interpretation of art, but one not without precedent. One of Lowe’s biggest influences, German artist Joseph Beuys, planted 7,000 oaks throughout Kassel, Germany with an army of volunteers; in the process initiating a conversation around civic action, social change, and artistic expression. Lowe works with Project Rowe Houses’ staff and residents to help them understand that they are making creative acts. “We were art in and of itself,” says Richards. “We were creating art. We were changing ourselves.”

Over the last seventeen years Project Row Houses has evolved into a smorgasbord of art and social services considered by many to be one of the most visionary public art programs in the country. “You begin to see that art is not this static thing that sits on a wall but something that has relevance,” says Richards. Throughout the year Project Row Houses hosts visiting artists, after school programs, even urban garden installations.

Several of the houses are dedicated art spaces hosting interactive installations focusing on issues critical to Houston’s Third Ward. The Young Mother’s Program, which moved Richards from a cycle of crisis to earning her PhD, has helped 50 young mothers through a comprehensive approach including deeply subsidized housing, weekly workshops (on topics like financial literacy), and counseling. Many of these women go on to careers as artists, accountants or in Richards’ case, professors.

Other cities have adopted Lowe’s “art in the shape of neighborhood redevelopment” tactic. Edgar Arceneaux, the artist behind the Watts House Project, studied under Lowe before incubating the project on LA’s south side. Lowe’s vision will extend next to Anyang, South Korea where he will lead a project to empower small business owners and displaced residents. When he returns to Houston, Richards, who now heads the Young Mother’s Program, will be there along with a new round of installations, the recently donated, solar powered Zerow House and a community of visiting artists and residents. “Project Row Houses took on this enormous endeavor, to revitalize this community,” says Richards. “But the revitalization was within ourselves.”

This piece was originally published by GOOD on March 3, 2010.