At the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, a suburb north of Seattle, an adaptive reuse project already in progress suggests that America’s vast stock of fading shopping infrastructure could indeed get a second life as places to live. Such transformation could even bring malls closer to the “village square” concept they were initially envisioned to become.
Developers are turning a wide swath of the 41-year-old shopping center into Avalon Alderwood Place, a 300-unit apartment complex with underground parking. The project won’t completely erase the shopping side of the development: Commercial tenants will still take up 90,000 square feet of retail. But when the new Alderwood reopens, which developers expect will happen by 2022, the focus will have shifted dramatically. One of the mall’s anchor department stores, Sears, shut down last year; in a sense, the apartment complex will be the new anchor.
“This project is a great example of evolution in the shopping center industry,” says a spokesperson for Brookfield Properties, which owns the property and is collaborating with AvalonBay Communities, Inc. on the residential component. (Brookfield declined to offer a cost estimate for the project.) “Today, people prefer to live in smaller spaces and want walkable developments rather than relying on vehicular transit. This project caters to these needs.”
The Lynnwood project exemplifies how the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t as much changing real estate as accelerating existing trends. Randy White, CEO of White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group, a consulting firm focused on location-based entertainment, says the Alderwood project is smart, because it’s envisioning a world where we can digitally shop and entertain ourselves at home. “Right before the pandemic, a lot of these malls thought restaurants and entertainment would be their savior, the new anchors,” he says. “Those hopes are dashed. There’s even a question if movie theaters are going to survive.”
Lynnwood may offer an ideal testing ground for the long-term opportunities in large-scale suburban mall-to-housing conversion. The suburb of roughly 40,000 people is a commuter bedroom community for Seattle, which has been struggling mightily with a severe housing shortage. The mall had plenty of vacant real estate needed for new homes. And a planned expansion of light rail from Seattle to Lynnwood in 2024, part of the region’s Sound Transit Extension Phase 2, will make market-rate apartments even more attractive for residents who commute to jobs downtown or at the Boeing or Microsoft campuses.
“There have been some great examples of this kind of redevelopment, such as Tyson’s Corner in Virginia, but it’s very specific to individual cases, and very expensive,” says Nick Egelanian, president of retail consultancy SiteWorks, who predicts up to a third of malls will be vacant due to the economic fallout from the pandemic. “If it’s a good location, you can backfill that with residential, hotel, office and entertainment.”
Lynnwood has always seen the mall as a regional growth center, says David Kleitsch, the city’s economic development director. Ever since the end of the Great Recession, the city has planned for residential growth around the shopping center, including upzoning to encourage more dense housing, pushing for Sound Transit extensions, and investing in streetscapes and connectivity. “We see this as a catalyst for future growth, and housing will be a big part of that,” says Kleitsch.
Brian Lake, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation who focuses on housing issues, believes that, minus the hurdles put up by zoning regulations and red tape, such commercial conversions should be happening everywhere. From a construction standpoint, conversions are simple. “We need to open up every opportunity possible to develop new affordable housing,” he says. “Fannie Mae estimated we need an additional 2.5 million units just to satisfy the long-term demand, and that’s before this year’s crises.”
Mall owners and operators, such as Brookfield and Simon Property Group, have had a brutal 2020: Shifts in consumer behavior have been gnawing away at the classic enclosed suburban mall format for many years; then the pandemic completely upended in-person shopping. Mark Hunter, managing director of retail asset services at CBRE, says operators suddenly had to shut down, then coordinate with numerous government agencies on how to reopen with stringent new sanitation and safety protocols, not to mention overcome challenges with furloughed staffers and out-of-season inventory.
Even as fresh Covid-19 outbreaks race across the suburbs, in June Brookfield managed to reopen every single one of its nearly 170 locations in 43 states. But “normal” is a distant memory amidst a massive wholesale shift in commercial real estate. Consider the recent fate of two much-touted new flagship shopping developments of the last year: The American Dream Mall in New Jersey now hosts a Covid-19 testing facility, and struggling Manhattan mega-development Hudson Yards lost its big anchor, Neiman-Marcus.
“Before the Great Recession we had too many retail spaces; now we have way too many retail spaces,” says White. “It may be we’ll only be left with the A malls. Before the pandemic, I thought the B-plus malls would survive. The outdoor lifestyle centers will survive — they’re perceived as safer than indoors. But it’s hard to escape the fact that we’ve trained people to fear the world, and that it’s going to have long-term impacts on their behaviors.”
Converting commercial real estate to housing may be the best use of land in such an over-retailed country. Big shopping centers tend to be centrally located and connected to transit. Hunter sees excess retail space at malls becoming more adaptive, and filling uses that aren’t hospitality focused, such as residential, or even flex or warehouse space. During a time of housing shortages, Lake believes that transforming empty commercial buildings is a “moral imperative.”
The Alderwood redevelopment brings challenges that Kleitsch and other local officials are trying to get out ahead of as construction, which restarted in mid-May, continues. Lynnwood is a middle- to low-income suburb, with lots of service workers, so the city is working on a housing action plan to make sure social services and education arrive in the community, not just new apartments. The mall may be evolving, but the desire, and challenges, in creating a community-oriented development still remain.
“You can have acres and acres of housing, but without a community, is it a place?” Kleitch says. “Does it fulfill somebody’s experience? We want to be more than that.”
For Chicago-based architect and designer Craig Stevenson, it’s always been vital to work with, not for, the community.
Stevenson is director of the Chicago’s chapter of the Open Architecture Collaborative (OAC)—a national nonprofit that does pro bono work designing buildings and placemaking projects for local communities. The realities of working in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, and the recent wave of protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, have made outreach and community engagement even more essential tools for facing an “existential crisis.”
“It’s an interesting challenge to design when fear and grief is prevalent,” he says.
Stevenson is part of a team working on Under the Grid, a kind of reverse High Line for the North Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago that aims to turn vacant lots underneath rail lines—specifically a stretch of the Pink Line of the city’s elevated train system—into a park, community green space, and gathering place. The ongoing project seeks to spark interest and re-emergence in art and the business corridor—a place for farmers markets, basketball, and dance events, created in concert with community groups, local businesses, and residents. To do so, the group has been holding hackathons and meetings with community groups as part of OAC’s goal to democratize design, flatten hierarchies, and dispel myths about just who understands how to shape public space and how it can best serve a community.
“We’re not here to impose solutions on people,” he says. “It’s about figuring out how the community wants to solve the immediate need for public space, and the best solutions to bring people together.”
A New Challenge
In coming years, architects will be challenged like never before to help disadvantaged communities rebuild after these crises. Neighborhoods across the nation have been irrevocably changed by coronavirus and protests, both of which have altered perceptions of public space.
Listening, responding, and shaping future designs around neighborhood needs will become even more vital. And while some might see the time and effort involved in garnering feedback and engaging in community-led design as a luxury, that would be a mistake, according to architects and designers who place equity, community feedback, and social justice at the center of their practice. When resources are scarce, the value of truly reflecting the community in design, hearing about their struggles and trauma, and getting their buy-in is immeasurable.
“Architecture often sets itself up to be an expendable service, a luxury,” says Liz Ogbu, a designer, urbanist, and social innovator who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. “We should do work that’s vital to people’s day-to-day ability to live their life. During the last recession, I worked for a small nonprofit, and while there was a culling of the industry—a third lost their jobs—I never feared, because the work we were doing was essential. Community-based work is about creating tools that let people thrive and live their best stories. That’s what success looks like to me.”
It’s a priority that the profession as a whole is being increasingly challenged to meet. “Democratizing the decision-making and design of the built environment is critical to both the future relevance of our profession and a truly equitable society,” says William Bates, FAIA, 2019 president of AIA.
It’s instructive to look at the Great Recession of 2008, and the birth of placemaking, as architects adjust to new financial realities, Ogbu says. With city budgets on hold back then, the DIY/guerrilla approach created an opening for smaller street-level projects. In the coming years, communities recovering from historic disinvestment, a pandemic, and the loss of so many small businesses will look to the kind of rapid response design, such as parklets and pop-ups, that flourished in the early 2010s.
This approach also offers quick ways to help neighborhoods recover. Coronavirus has exposed long-standing social inequities, says Sara Aye, executive director of Greater Good Studio, a Chicago-based social design practice. People of color and low-income people, who were already marginalized, have been further marginalized in the management and containment of the outbreak. Any project purporting to help needs to first engage with these uncomfortable truths.
“If you design something for a group of people, but not with them, you’re not doing it for them, you’re imposing upon them,” Aye says. “You’re assuming the role of a savior, that your expertise outweighs their lived experience. These assumptions aren’t just dangerous, they add up to irreparable harm.”
For Aye, whose specialty—like a recent multi-city collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help local groups design children’s health programs—is process, what’s required now goes beyond the typical methods of listening and outreach. Design teams can’t rely on the traditional engagement checklist and community meetings, which typically exclude those who can’t take time off or obtain childcare, and often favor louder, more organized, and more white voices (Katherine Einstein, a Boston University professor and researcher, has analyzed who speaks at public meetings and found a significant racial divide and under-representation of people of color).
Language is key to engagement, Aye says. Don’t ask about problems someone faces, projections of the future, or the needs or dreams of a community at a time when compounding crises make that sound slightly tone deaf. Start with questions that honor the moment and ground feedback in lived reality, with inquiries about daily activities, fears, attitudes, and small improvements.
As fears of coronavirus make some of the preferred methods of in-person outreach—listening sessions, setting up pop-up booths at fairs and public events, door-to-door surveys, and small group meetings—impossible, digital means have become more prevalent. That’s created fear of a digital divide, says Katherine Darnstadt, AIA, architect and founder of Chicago’s Latent Design. But it’s not so simple. Done right, digital meetings can actually encourage more interaction, and they can be recorded and remain online well beyond the live event, inviting more feedback from those who can’t attend.
“Establishing a digital footprint doesn’t solve every access issue, but it can make it easier for a larger number of people to connect,” Darnstadt says. “But more doesn’t always mean better. Policymakers need to change the status quo of how they intake and utilize feedback.”
Seizing the Moment
As cities and neighborhoods begin to reopen, rapid prototypes and small-scale projects for commercial districts will be a focus due to changing regulations, the growing needs of local businesses, and evolving health guidelines. Darnstadt believes architects need to seize the moment and advocate not just good design, but for reforming processes and cutting costs that further benefit the community. How can policies be nudged in a direction that allows for quicker deployment of car-free streets, outdoor dining areas, public space, or pick-up and drop-off zones? Can designers reappropriate common items, such as sawhorses or other materials used by municipal authorities, for other purposes? For instance, in early June, Darnstadt offered to do pro bono work to help damaged businesses rebuild, which required design from a licensed architect; can that process be accelerated?
“We need to look at temporary solutions that allow us to critically analyze what a more permanent solution looks like,” she says. “It’s not a fixed, start-and-stop process.”
Darnstadt’s Boombox project, a series of small, 8-by-20-foot portable pop-up shops for small Chicago businesses, exemplifies her vision for mobile, malleable design. To create these low-budget, floating storefronts for small businesses and entrepreneurs out of shipping containers and cement board, Darnstadt met with potential operators and nonprofits to learn about their needs, in terms of interior space and layout; compliance with city regulations (she helped write an ordinance that legalized the pop-ups); and how to best take advantage of outdoor space.
Originally introduced in 2015, the project has continually been refined over time; Boombox offers design services for businesses, in addition to managing and leasing the spaces. Darnstadt sees an even bigger future for these structures now, when businesses seek new ways to deliver goods and services in neutral locations, and buyers are wary of shopping indoors. With budgets tighter all around, there’s great need for multi-functional small space and points-of-service hubs in communities.
“We fell into a common trap, thinking that we had a representative sample after a few interviews, and later found that there were so many organizations that felt left out, that couldn’t afford good design,” she says. “You need to constantly evolve to make the project work.”
Buildings that reflect community need and engagement can also bolster local economies via community labor and business collaboration. Patricia Gruits, director with the Boston and Rwanda-based nonprofit MASS Design Group, says their design process always looks at ways to tap into local materials, labor, skills, and ingenuity. The firm has extensive experience working in Rwanda and other developing nations—work that has been informed by a core framework of collaboration as a way to improve the value and impact of a project. Gruits points to a number of decisions made in past projects—for the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, built in 2011, hiring local laborers instead of bringing in a bulldozer cost the same amount of money and provided local jobs; and relying on locally found or reclaimed material, from volcanic stone in Rwanda (used on the Butaro project) to beetle-killed pine in the U.S. (used during a propsed 2015 dorm project for Colorado College), help support local business and industry.
A Neighborhood History Lesson
The added value of tapping into community skills and vision can take many different forms. In Los Angeles, another chapter of OAC has spent the last two years designing a renovation of the Avalon Carver Community Center. According to Sarah Loy, a member of the LA chapter of OAC, the first six months were a neighborhood history lesson, gleaned from extensive community conversations and interviews, aided by Jamivo Elder, the director of the community center. Built in the ‘50s after being championed by local activist and civil rights leader Mary B. Henry, who helped found the Head Start program, the building has always been a progressive nexus for the South Central neighborhood. Loy and her collaborators sought to infuse that history with the neighborhood’s new vision for its future (a colorful new mural on the building’s exterior recalls woven fabric, a nod to Henry’s vision for a space that weaves together the neighborhood). The pending final design now includes a music production space for local artists and students, low-income housing, a STEM learning center, and a shelter for transitional youth.
“Typically, projects like this involve communities working directly with a contractor, which means they don’t have designers who can translate community vision into something concrete,” says Loy. “In this case, we can step in and really help them define their new space and environment, and by listening, we can help shape their voice.”
That may be the core lesson to deploy when working with communities in need; don’t just assist or aggregate ideas, amplify their experiences.
“We have a role to play, and it’s not that we’re all powerful, it’s that we’re complicit in either healing or harm,” Ogbu says. “This is a point where we might radically change how we practice.”
Stevenson, of Chicago OAC, says that he sees the community-led design process as akin to running a church, something he did while growing up. He wants his designs to be something that people interact with, because there’s shared ownership and vision. It’s hard to build the relationships needed to accomplish that over a small period of time.
“We’re not going to show up for 24 hours [and then leave],” he says. “You need to be embedded enough to care whether the solution works or not. I approach outreach by thinking, ‘I would like our grandchildren to be solving problems together.’”
During this extraordinary time in America’s cities — weeks of coronavirus lockdowns followed by mass protests against police violence and racial inequality — one theme runs through the twinned crises: the power and value of public spaces.
The nation’s parks experienced a surge of use during the pandemic that closed stores and businesses and kept so many Americans isolated in private. Since March, when coronavirus restrictions in the U.S. were enforced en masse, still-open city park facilities saw soaring numbers of visitors. Popular trails in Dallas, which tracks visitors, saw usage climb from 30% to 75% in march. In Minneapolis, during the still-cold month of March, trails experienced summertime levels of usage. Erie, Pennsylvania’s Presque Isle State Park saw visitor numbers jump 165% year-over-year during the third week of March.
“Parks are the most valuable resource in the city at this point,” says J. Nicholas Williams, director of the Parks, Recreation and Youth Development Department in Oakland, which has also seen an uptick in visitors in the last few months.
Then came the protests over the killing of George Floyd on May 25, triggering a wave of mass demonstrations that, in venues such as Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and Cal Anderson Park in Seattle, are using these same public spaces as stages for protest. That, too, is part of the critical role they play in urban life.
“The thing I tell people about parks and public spaces is they can be platforms for equity, and the events of the last week in America show the public realm is the essential platform for equity,” says James Hardy, Akron, Ohio’s deputy mayor for integrated development, who focuses on parks and public space. “It’s especially evident when the press and disregarded members of our community need these spaces to communicate truth to power.”
But amid this rediscovery of the value of parks, steep budget cuts now loom: City tax revenue is drying up, the need to provide additional protective gear for staff is expensive, and funds from special permits and fees, from athletic events to large outdoor concerts, may be small or non-existent during this socially distanced summer. The ongoing protests against police brutality and inequality both highlight the importance of public space for civil action and engagement and likely add to repair and maintenance costs.
A survey from the National Recreation and Park Association in mid-April of more than 300 park commissioners found half had been asked to make budget cuts this year between 10% and 20%, and many have already instituted hiring freezes or laid off part-time and seasonal staff. New York City faces a $61.3 million cut in its park budget. Coming shortfalls may mean delayed maintenance, shelved plans and deteriorating facilities.
“This is a critical time for public space, perhaps more than we’ve seen in past decades,” says Bridget Marquis, director of the Civic Commons Learning Network, a national nonprofit initiative focused on public spaces. “We’re seeing the gaps and how we’ve let them erode in many places.”
According to Parks and the Pandemic, a report issued last month by the Trust for Public Land, cities are repurposing this open space in ways that aid the civic response to the coronavirus. Toledo, Ohio’s botanical garden, for example, has been transformed into a Covid-19 test site. The report also highlights how the coronavirus, and the nation’s response to it, has accelerated existing divides and inequality. Despite big investments in signature parks like the reconstructed Brooklyn Waterfront or the $100 million expansion of Klyde Warren Park in downtown Dallas, a widespread lack of equitable access to green space remains. That gap stands to widen further with Covid-related budget cuts.
But there’s some cautious hope here, too: This convergence of crises could ultimately help convince local leaders and the public to reconsider the importance of public space, and even see parks as part of a broader plan for economic and social recovery.
“We’re optimistic and excited around the top-to-bottom interest in this issue,” says Benita Hussain, director of the Trust for Public Land’s 10-Minute Walk campaign. “There are challenges, but there is a lot of hope, because the will politically to make public space and parks remain a priority is there.”
Hussain leads the Trust for Public Land’s signature initiative, which calls for making sure every American is within a 10-minute walk to a public park or green space. That goal is far from being realized, with 100 million Americans, and 27 million children, lacking such access. In some cities — such as Charlotte, Oklahoma City, and Mesa, Arizona — less than half of residents live that close to a public recreation facility.
“We haven’t been investing in civic infrastructure, parks, and trails,” says Marquis. “I hate to say there’s a silver lining to Covid-19, but it’s a time to recognize what we prioritize in this country. I hope part of the legacy will be an equitable and resilient investment strategy in the public realm.”
It’s not hard to find examples of the public’s new appetite for public space in the midst of a pandemic. While so many places to congregate have closed or changed, parks and public spaces still provide places to relax and decompress while maintaining social distance.
“The Covid-19 response, while clearly necessary, created a huge burden of cabin fever, loneliness, anxiety, stress, and personal loss,” Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, told the report’s authors.
Before the coronavirus crisis hit, park finances were on the upswing, according to Charlie McCabe, a city parks researcher with the Trust for Public Land. Public funding for city parks hit roughly $8 billion nationwide in 2019, a slight increase from the last few years, as the robust pre-pandemic economy allowed some cities to invest in improving and reconstructing parks, McCabe says, spending money on newly popular amenities such as dog parks and splash pads, as well as recreation and senior centers.
This resurgence was long delayed: After increasing 15% between 2003 and 2007, city spending on parks plummeted 22% as the Great Recession arrived in 2008, according to the NRPA. Spending was slow to recover. By 2013, parks represented just 1.9% of local government spending, down from 2.2% in 2000.“Part of the reason people have been protesting is disinvestment in public spaces to begin with, especially in black neighborhoods.”
Coronavirus has forced city park departments to respond to fast-changing public health rules and needs. In addition to opening up trails, adapting space to social distancing, and converting golf courses to parks, a third of park and recreation departments are also offering emergency services, says Kevin Roth, vice president of research, evaluation, and technology at the NRPA. This includes converting recreation centers to shelters, delivering meals, setting up testing sites, and providing day care to children of first responders and health care workers.
“It’s really quite challenging now,” says McCabe. “Many amenities, especially the ones that have been invested in heavily in recent years, have closed due to concerns over close contact, while parks have needed to quickly adapt to provide enough access to walk and bike on trails and open fields, which often get crowded.
Hussain says many park departments are cutting costs by engaging citizens to help; Rochester, New York, has instituted a pack-in pack-out trash policy, similar to what’s seen at national parks. There’s also a legislative push in Congress to get the Great American Outdoors Act, which would add $900 million annually to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and help address the maintenance backlog for the nation’s parks.*
Still other park advocates and staff see this moment of crisis as the right time to make the case for parks as key parts of larger economic recovery, and community investment plans, especially commercial corridors hard hit by both the pandemic and damage during ongoing protests. It’s not just savvy political thinking, but a smart way to integrate smaller, community-focused green space in neighborhood-level development.
In Detroit, where the city faces a $348 million budget shortfall over the next 16 months, park officials point to the ongoing Strategic Neighborhood Fund, a public-private initiative focused on building up commercial corridors across the city, as a model that can help make parks part of broader initiatives. The program, which has made parks and streetscape improvements pillars of the process, aims to make green spaces part of inclusive economic development; that may mean including parks in housing programs, and looking beyond traditional standalone “trees and recreation” thinking to figuring out how parks can fit into larger projects.
“The city just emerged from bankruptcy five years ago, so we’ve been doing economic recovery here ever since,” says Alexa Bush, a design director for Detroit.
Akron’s newly created Office of Integrated Development also focuses on making parks part of larger investments in neighborhoods and civic infrastructure. Hardy, the city’s deputy mayor for integrated development, says that parks programs by themselves can struggle to get funding but fare better when included in larger programs about job access and the quality of public space.
Despite facing an estimated 20% decrease in municipal funding this year, Akron plans to focus on projects and priorities in traditionally redlined and lower-income neighborhoods first, says Hardy. It’s all about being strategic and prioritizing the places that need it the most. Parks, community centers, and libraries are always the easiest to eliminate, Hardy says; he cautions that policymakers desperately need to do the opposite, doubling or tripling investments in public space. He fears that city leaders may look at the protests of the last week and see parks as a thing to cut, to limit the liability that comes from mass civic action. That mindset will only deepen the inequality.
“Part of the reason people have been protesting is disinvestment in public spaces to begin with, especially in black neighborhoods,” he says. “Parks and park access are part of the large narrative of racism and discrimination against African Americans.”
To the extent possible, Akron is trying to say no to cuts, and view recreation as an essential public service. That’s a paradigm shift, and one that, post-Covid, park managers hope becomes standard practice.
“Parks are as important as roads and bridges, they’re not something to get to later,” Hardy says. “They’re where people from different backgrounds come together and find themselves on equal footing. They’re essential to the American experiment, and this is a great opportunity to make that argument.”
For Dan Dhooghe, a summer isn’t complete without family trips to the Wisconsin Dells. The self-proclaimed “Waterpark Capital of the World” has offered generations of Midwestern kids, including Dhooghe’s two boys, an enticing combination of water slides, fudge shops, duck boats, and kitschy entertainment, like Tommy Bartlett’s water ski and jumping boat thrill show.
Dhooghe, a retired deputy police chief in Aurora, Illinois, and his wife, Linda, have made this central Wisconsin destination their annual vacation spot for the last 20 years. Sons Jason, 23, and Sean, 21, have long since traded amusement rides for golf courses, but they still look forward to spending a week or two unwinding at the family’s condo at the Wilderness on the Lake resort.
This year, the Dhooghes, like so many families, find their seasonal escape uncertain at best.
“It would be nice to be able to get away, but with this pandemic, you can’t go anywhere, no matter where your vacation home is,” he says. “It’s frustrating; you just can’t make any plans.”
The American summer vacation is in limbo, caught between a pandemic and a patchwork of policies attempting to balance sagging economies and public health risks. With spring gone and summer in peril, towns that rely on tourism dollars face an unprecedented economic challenge.
Emina Cardamone, director of forecasting for Tourism Economics, says she’s “never seen a decline like this” in the travel sector. Her firm’s baseline estimate for the U.S. travel industry is a 45% drop in business, or $651 billion in lost revenue. The American economy might be headed to a recession, but the travel industry is already in a depression, says Tori Barnes, executive vice president of public affairs and policy at the U.S. Travel Association. Last year, the industry employed more than 15 million people; by May 1 this year, this sector had already shed 8 million jobs.
Wisconsin tourism secretary-designee Sara Meaney says that the state as a whole has already lost $1.75 billion in tourism revenue this year. But getting the region’s vacation economy back on the road to recovery stands be more complicated than merely lifting stay-at-home rules. Governor Tony Evers’ orders closing businesses statewide had been set to expire May 26 but were struck down by the State Supreme Court on May 12, setting off a rush of planning by business owners to figure out how to, and if they should, reopen. (Some bars in the state opened immediately) Cases statewide have trended up since then, with 2,802 new cases in the week after the orders were lifted, with a new daily record of 528 reported on May 20.
For communities like the Wisconsin Dells, it’s far from clear when people will again feel comfortable in places like waterparks, theaters, and other attractions. Is an open sign enough? In the absence of clear government and health department orders, it’s been left to consumers to decide if it’s safe to load the family in the minivan.
Right now the Wisconsin Dells region, including the small city of Wisconsin Dells and towns like Baraboo, would have typically been coming off a busy spring break season, and gearing up for Memorial Day weekend. Within a few hours drive of cities like Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee, the area functions as one of the Midwest’s vacation engines. In 2019, the Dells posted its highest tourism earnings ever, $1.2 billion, according to Romy Snyder, CEO and president of the Wisconsin Dells Visitor and Convention Bureau.
“It’s become a generational thing,“ Snyder says, “Grandparents who came here in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s a real pleasure for them to bring their grandchildren and give them a glimpse of something they enjoyed as a kid.”
Instead, as Darren Hornby, executive director of the Baraboo Area Chamber of Commerce, told a local paper, hotel occupancy is “close to nonexistent.” Chula Vista Resort plans to be the first to open its indoor water park on Friday, May 22, the start of Memorial Day weekend, Mt. Olympus Hotel and amusement park plans to welcome guests May 23, with others following in the coming weeks. Paul Schaller, a senior vice president at the Bank of Wisconsin Dells, which mostly serves the small mom and pop businesses that make up the bulk of the local economy, says they’ve already sent out $35 million in loans to 314 area businesses, via the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the federal government’s efforts to save small businesses.
“A full shutdown in an area like this is catastrophic,” he says. “Spring break is three to five weeks of business, which they won’t get back. We’re probably going to miss Memorial Day weekend, too. These are key, critical periods.”
The loss of tourism income ripples out across regions that depend on the industry, according to Chris Pike, an economic development analyst at Tourism Economics. When tourism shuts down, the businesses that serve those businesses — the bankers, printers, cleaners — all suffer. The combination of a loss in sales and lodging taxes, and a loss of income taxes, leads to a second wave of unemployment.“What business? It’s a ghost town here.”
Rick Wilcox, owner of a popular magic theater and attraction on Wisconsin Dells Parkway, a main strip lined with other attractions, had to cancel his spring break shows, and hasn’t performed tricks publicly since businesses were ordered closed on March 25 (he’s been doing a daily magic show on the company website to entertain fans). “A lot of people are canceling their vacation plans, and I don’t blame them,” he says. “We really don’t know what’s going to happen yet. Most of the people living in this town run a tourism business, and if nobody comes this summer, a lot are going to go out of business.”
Even with the courts invalidating the governor’s stay at home order, he won’t immediately open his doors. He says he’s figured out ways to run a show in the 600-person theater by spacing out seating and eliminating any potentially dangerous audience interaction. But he needs potential customers in town to justify the cost.
“What business?” he says. “It’s a ghost town here.”
State tourism secretary Snyder says that Dells waterparks like Noah’s Ark and Kalahari, part of larger national chains, are working to deliver a safe experience to guests (neither would speak to CityLab), but it all ultimately depends on when families feel comfortable returning. A recent outbreak of coronavirus in a dorm meant for seasonal vacation industry workers didn’t inspire confidence.
“The Dells is the waterpark capital of the world for a reason,” says Meaney. “It’s a highly regulated industry, and all these businesses understand their livelihoods depend on protecting their customers.”
But state guidelines on reducing capacity and sanitizing rides between each use, along with policy suggestions put forth by the U.S. Travel Association, won’t bring people back to vacation towns if guests aren’t ready. Dhooghe and his family are wary, but he says he’ll rely on government guidance to decide if he should come.
“If the local authorities say it’s cool, we’ll head up there, as soon as we get the word to go,” he said a few days before the court’s decision. “We’ll wear masks and be socially distant, and as long as everybody else is doing the same, we’ll go on with the new normal.”
Plenty of other households that have made commitments to visit beach rentals and theme parks and other summer attractions are similarly clinging to their hopes. But the medium-term future of the family vacation remains deeply uncertain. And when summer destinations do reopen, they might well be transformed by the pandemic and the economic disruption it’s brought. Tourism Economics’s Cardamone says that any extended slowdown will threaten the colorful mom and pop retailers that define resort-town culture, potentially leading to consolidation. But there also may be an upside for lesser-trafficked destinations that can offer space and seclusion.
That’s the new pitch coming from Wisconsin state tourism, according to Meaney, which has changed its message to highlight the outdoors and the state’s natural resources, pushing the state’s forests, roughly 15,000 lakes, and outdoor recreation activities. The Dells region may benefit by pushing stays at nearby Devils’s Lake State Park. Camping revenue won’t come close to making up for lost dollars at theme parks, however.
Omer Rabin, a managing director for the Americas at Guesty, a global property management platform, has a guess as to what may happen to the traditional summer vacation. Like so many other events on the 2020 calendar, summer might just be pushed back a few months. His firm is seeing record-setting advance bookings for the winter holiday season, including a 40% increase for Christmas reservations. Families are booking big houses in places like the Catskills in New York, Tahoe, or Napa Valley — markets within driving distance from big cities — for two-to-three week blocks, hoping to get multiple generations together. The optimistic assumption: By wintertime, it might finally be safe to be a tourist again.
From the first time you encounter trainer Cory George in the gym, it’s immediately evident why he’s the one demoing the workouts. A 6-foot-3 former football and volleyball player from Grass Valley, California, the muscular 27-year-old looks like a personal trainer created by an algorithm (his unerring form during ab exercises and cardio-heavy warmups betrayed no hint of effort or exhaustion).
His form, in fact, is copied by hundreds of thousands every day, across the globe, most of whom he’s never met. George has become the body behind F45, a rapidly expanding Australian workout class that claims to be the globe’s fastest-growing fitness franchise, boasting 300,000 active members worldwide.
Every gym — from the first location, which opened in 2012 in Sydney, to the Venice, California, location where George teaches — plasters the walls with flat-screen TVs showing recordings of the trainer demonstrating that day’s routine, one of roughly 30 different sets offered by F45. George knows exactly how varied the constantly evolving routines can get; in 2017, he filmed every one of the then-3,800 exercises in F45’s repertoire over a 2.5-month period in an LA warehouse.
A 45-minute, high-speed series of punishing, “functional” exercises that engage multiple muscle groups — hence F45 — the Down Under export currently has 1,300-plus outlets across the globe, with 570 gyms active or planning to open in the US. For comparison, Pure Barre has roughly 460 US locations, and SoulCycle has 88 studios. I’ve attended F45 classes in the Venice studio and saw George’s face and form onscreen, modeling perfect burpees, effortless squats, and nonchalant hammer swings, before I met him in person.
The program feels a bit like a workout designed by a computer. Everything is optimized, from the ever-changing routines — which involve circuit training across a series of stations stocked with barbells, ropes, rowing machines, and more — to the curated hip-hop playlists that shake the room (Saturday classes feature a live DJ). During classes, the screens that catch George in an endless loop count down each and every second of each and every exercise. The constantly changing workout, George believes, motivates members, many of whom socialize over the latest F45 fitness challenge or via meetups outside the gym that George and other instructors organize.
“Nowadays, people lift in big-box gyms to look good,” George says. “It defeats the purpose. You should exercise to feel better.”
Taking advantage of a titanic shift in the fitness world
F45, as founder Rob Deutsch says via email from Sydney, succeeds by offering effective, and in many ways mindless, workout routines. Members are challenged as they exercise together in a team training scenario, but one of the big attractions for the mostly 21- to 35-year-olds who shell out $200 to $250 per month for classes are the preset routines, guidance from trainers, and ruthless efficiency.
“Everyone is time-poor these days, so the efficient nature of a 45-minute workout, where a member can just enter their studio and start, is a real time-saver,” he says.
Many workouts and fitness programs have, to varying degrees, tried to incorporate the personalization, tech, and community aspect of social media into a space long dominated by big-box gyms and crash-and-burn trends. As F45 expands to new cities this year, including Austin and Nashville, as well opening locations within colleges and universities, it’s seeking to be the more friendly, accessible, and tech-accentuated routine for the Fitbit generation. It’s also the latest concept, from CrossFit to SoulCycle, seeking to capitalize on an industry navigating a changing business and cultural landscape.
“Fitness is going through a titanic shift,” says Bryan O’Rourke, an industry veteran and president of the Fitness Industry Technology Council. “The idea of fitness just being brick-and-mortar locations that charge people for [gym] membership isn’t going to be the definition of the market anymore.”
“Think of what’s happening to music; consumers get what they want when they want it,” O’Rourke explains. “More and more, it’s about personalization, community, and convenience: F45 has done a good job of bringing together all these trends.”
The rise of HIIT
If F45 sounds like CrossFit, that’s because both are based on similar research and science, and can be categorized as the same style of workout: high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. As the name and acronym suggest, HIIT consists of a rapid-fire sequence of different exercises, which rotate through different muscle group and shock the body into shape.
CrossFit, which started in 2000, branded itself as a more extreme, exclusive version of HIIT training, offering classes in black, industrial-style gyms nicknamed boxes — critics complained of a cult-likeatmosphere and strenuous and injury-prone workouts. F45 tries to sell itself as a more accessible style of communal exercise than CrossFit; not a lifestyle in itself, just an easier way to optimize the one you already have. As Deutsch says, the workouts are about “training smarter, not harder.”
Ryan Roth, the lead industry analyst for IBISWorld, a market research firm, predicts that the personal training segment of the fitness industry, which includes HIIT classes, will expand, due in part to the decreasing time Americans spend at the gym. Despite rising awareness and spending on a fitter lifestyle — one study suggests millennials spend more on fitness than on college tuition — the overall time Americans spend on leisure and sports declined over the past five years by 0.2 percent. It’s a small drop, but one that Roth says is indicative of the need for speed in such a time-sensitive culture.
Americas aren’t just becoming busier; they’re also trying to find connection within fraying social networks. The entire fitness world is trying to instill some feeling of community within their offerings, says Pam Kufahl, editor-in-chief of the fitness industry magazine Club Industry. CrossFit popularized the concept of fostering tight-knit groups that would cheer each other on. Now, boutique studios have tried to match that blend of intensity and teamwork — witness Peloton turning exercise bikes in living rooms into a link to a larger community — while lowering costs.
“CrossFit showed a way to do it cheaply,” says Kufahl. “That’s why you’re seeing these new studios pop up so much: They take less square footage, the rent is cheaper, and you don’t have as many employees. It’s a more efficient use of your money. There may be fewer members, but they’re all paying more money.”
“If I’m spending money at a studio or gym, I want to make sure I’m seeing my results and can track my workout, but if the instructor doesn’t know my name when I walk in, I’m not going to come back,” she says.
The company is also ruthless about efficiency (Deutsch was an equities trader before launching F45). Scripted-to-the-second workouts, with names such as Brooklyn, Abacus, and Wingman, aim to provide a sense of community to more members with more video guidance, just a handful of trainers per class, and lower expenses (labor is the industry’s biggest recurring expenses, per IBIS). No-frills locations without locker rooms make turnover quick, and the gear is relatively inexpensive, largely consisting of ropes, weights, and mats. The most expensive items are basic stationary bikes and rowing machines. The company’s recurring eight-week group fitness challenges, which combine workouts with diet recommendations, highlights this approach; F45 leverages community without adding much in the way of overhead.
My experience with the Venice location, at a modest 1,200 square feet, suggested it works; despite crowded classes (and a low ceiling) that forced you to be very aware of whoever was swinging a hammer next to you, every class covered a lot of ground and always left me exhausted.
Tech and the efficiency scale
Deutsch believes F45 combines elements of Apple and Amazon: the elevated look and style, merchandise offerings, and engaging interaction and experience of Apple, as well as the tech and efficiency focus of Amazon.
F45’s embrace of technology isn’t new for the fitness industry. In 2013, Anytime Fitness created Anytime Health, which enables users to track their fitness progress and compare with other community members. Orangetheory, another HIIT franchise with roughly 1,000 US locations, also uses video screens to remind users of routines and exercises.
What F45 does well is create a seamless experience, says O’Rourke. The best franchises and facilities are the ones that have simplified their technology in a way that makes it very efficient for the user. A club with 2,000 members that offers everything from classes and weights to cardio has a hard time with technological integration.
“While there’s nothing new with F45, it’s a great user experience,” he says. “One of the advantages of being a focused offering is that you can incorporate the technology in a meaningful way.”
Last year, F45 offered nearly 700 new exercises, as well as four new pieces of equipment, all sent to 1,300 studios around the world. O’Rourke says this year, they plan to add stretch-based sessions, as well as a similar number of new moves. He also hinted at a new form of gamification within F45 workouts but wouldn’t provide more details.
Franchises riding economic trends
Analysts believe F45 and its franchise model have room to grow, in terms of both expanding the workout routines and community engagement and making a bigger impact on the fitness landscape. IBISWorld’s Roth says there’s growing demand for franchise fitness locations, which allow a local owner to invest and open a business, as opposed to starting from scratch, capitalizing on industry growth and low interest rates.
It’s no accident the Aussie chain, which has recently made big inroads in Canada and the UK, chose red, white, and blue for its logo and gym decor (“We actually made it look Americanized because we always wanted to take it to the US,” Deutsch said in an interview). The company, and franchises, seeks to grab a larger portion of the US gym market. Gyms, fitness clubs, and fitness franchises comprise a $37.1 billion chunk of the United States health and wellness industry, according to IBISWorld research, with nearly 61 million Americans paying for membership.
Pete McCall, host of the All About Fitness podcast, compares the growth of these franchises to Howard Schultz’s strategy with Starbucks; spend on new locations, instead of advertising, and explosive growth becomes the story.
He sees reasons to be hesitant, with recent signals of a wider economic downturn hinting at a recession. But McCall has no doubt that F45, and studios and programs like it, will increasingly shape the fitness landscape.
“HIIT is going to be here for a while,” says McCall. “It’s effective, and there’s explosive growth. Adam Smith and Charles Darwin would have liked the fitness industry. It really does favor survival of the fittest.”
Small businesses and streetscapes, boulevards and bodegas: These aren’t the typical aspirations of up-and-coming architecture firms. But the self-described “scrappy Angelenos” at the helm of LA-Más, a nonprofit architecture and policy practice, see things differently.
The name alone—which translates to “Los Angeles more,” as in, amplify the characteristics, personalities, and businesses at the heart of this sprawling city—says it all. For LA-Más, what makes Los Angeles great isn’t big budget mega-projects and neighborhood makeovers, it’s what’s organically happening on the sidewalk.
A shaded seating and play area installed at the Lacy Street neighborhood park, part of the Go Ave 26 streetscaping project.
“Beautification is a Band-Aid approach,” says architect and co-executive director Elizabeth Timme. “This city faces serious issues. Many people can’t afford to stay here. Pretty things aren’t good enough. We’re here to do something for those who don’t have a voice and deserve more.”
That work begins at a smaller scale, at home and at work. Since LA-Más opened its studio in the northeast Frogtown neighborhood in 2014, its has measured success one block—or small business—at a time, working on streetscaping, signage, and design for entrepreneurs and public projects, sometimes with four-figure budgets that would barely purchase a used car.
But LA-Más believes that working on a micro-scale can create sustainable change.
“It’s great to work with small-business owners because they are putting their heart and soul into delivering something the community needs,” says Helen Leung, a planner, policy wonk, and co-executive director of the studio. “They’ve been doing that work for decades. To be able to add something that reflects their investment is an incredible gesture.”
Timme and Leung’s diverse backgrounds—designing places, and creating the policies that do (or don’t) make those places possible—are at the heart of LA-Más’s street-level approach. Architecture thrives when cities provide a framework for experimentation and community involvement; regulations and rules need design to take shape—and make an impact—at street level. A holistic vision, ones that pushes back against bureaucracy and restrictive rules, makes all the difference.
Simple streetscaping, part of the Go Ave 26 Project near the Lincoln/Cypress Station on the Metro Gold Line, created a more pedestrian friendly environment.
“We can all be NIMBYs if we don’t get to shape growth,” says Leung. “It’s not that residents of the communities we work in don’t want anything big done. It’s that they want it to benefit the people who are already here.”
The studio now numbers about a dozen, and includes architects, planners, fabricators, and part-time research fellows. They work out of a rehabbed building near the Los Angeles River—a former halfway house and weed dispensary that once served as a recording studio for James Brown—which now functions as an office and woodshop.
Timme, a third-generation architect, moved to LA from Houston in 1994. During her time as a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—and, later, during formative experiences working in Rwanda and Liberia on hospital projects as a development officer for MASS Design Group—Timme reveled in the possibilities of low-budget projects unconstrained by onerous rules.
Leung is a second-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the William Mead Homes, a public housing project near LA’s Chinatown, as well as Frogtown, and has seen gentrification’s impact firsthand. She worked in then-councilmember, now-mayor Eric Garcetti’s office for community projects, focusing on neighborhood outreach. During a successful effort to open a community garden in Hollywood, she began to appreciate the numerous players and people involved in a seemingly straightforward effort, and how complex issues like affordability and accessibility can’t be solved with pretty park space alone.
During the Watts Community Studio project, LA-Más helped redesign signage for small businesses on Wilmington Avenue in Watts.
Many of LA-Más’s early projects focused on signage and street redesign in underserved neighborhoods. During a project in Watts, LA-Más interviewed store owners along a central artery in the area, Wilmington Avenue, to create engaging new hand-painted marquees.
Faded block lettering and plastic banners became eye-popping images of pinatas, bike chains, and deli meat. A bodega in MacArthur Park beamed with an interior and exterior paint job, highlighting the fruits and vegetables available through the citywide Healthy Neighborhood Market program. A flashy redesign of the menu and facade at El Atacor #8, a Mexican restaurant in Montebello, that helped emphasize the restaurant’s healthy options made the owner literallycry with joy; finally, a facade that showcased his values.
Their efforts went beyond skin-deep cosmetic change: LA-Más worked with council members and local officials in Watts to integrate design with impactful business assistance. The Wilmington Avenue project helped them realize that businesses also need to redesign their websites, navigate the permitting process for new signage, and feel empowered to demand more attention. Accordingly, many of the group’s subsequent projects include education and training components—so community members, not the firm, become the hubs of knowledge.
For Hollywood Pop, LA-Más installed custom-built cartoon-like structures at an empty lot at Selma and Ivar avenues.
“We want to combine design expertise with common sense,” says Timme, “to give people the ability to [claim] more power. This is where we get into issues of displacement. Small business owners aren’t just competing with Amazon and big -box stores. They need to have a voice to talk to councilmembers.”
The same approach, marrying policy changes and proactive, pedestrian-friendly design, has informed their public realm projects like art walks in Frogtown and sidewalk redesigns on Reseda Boulevard that added furniture, new awnings, and repainted sidewalks to illuminate a commercial strip.
The recently completed Go Ave 26 streetscape project, which remade a desolate stretch of sidewalks near the Lincoln/Cypress Station on the Metro Gold Line, added wayfinding and safety features to help improve access, navigation, and pedestrian safety. This low-cost effort to take back the environment for pedestrians took policy and political muscle, since numerous agencies and local groups, like Caltrans, needed to be brought on board.
This redesign of a family-owned bodega in MacArthur Park drew attention to healthy food options, part of a larger effort to highlight healthier diets in underserved neighborhoods.
LA-Más continues to seek out knotty intersections of policy and the built environment where they can make a difference. Currently, the firm is focused on Welcome to Western, an effort to improve public space on a stretch of Western Avenue between Melrose and 3rd Streets, working with an array of Korean- and Latino-owned businesses and community members. They’ve also been pushing for local legislation that would allow for accessory dwelling units, backyard additions they believe can help existing homeowners expand households without having to move, or make more money renting out part of their property.
“Growing up in LA, we’ve heard a lot of promises for the city,” says Timme. “We’re pragmatic idealists, and we want to see a future for LA that’s inclusive and progressive. But we’re not interested in any bullshit.”
Enrique Jaime moved to Bloomington, California, in 2008 seeking something different. The 75-year-old retiree was sick of the traffic and pollution that came with living in Lynwood, near the ports, freeways, and refineries of Long Beach, and decided to move with his wife, Carmen, 64, to this more peaceful and rural area in San Bernardino County, about 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
“We wanted to enjoy a better life, with no traffic hassles,” he said.
Everything was good until the warehouses came. In the last decade, as the rapid growth of e-commerce has created a seemingly insatiable demand for logistics facilities, this portion of Southern California has become one of the nation’s largest hubs for warehouses. Even though it measures just 6 square miles, Bloomington already has four large warehouses within its boundaries, and plans were approved in 2017 to build a 680,000 square-foot facility 260 feet from Walter Zimmerman Elementary School.
Last September, the county approved construction of the Slover Distribution Center, a 334,000-square-foot facility set on 17 acres of re-zoned residential land at the corner of Slover and Laurel avenues, 550 feet from a high school and 50 feet from the property line of nearby homes, including the Jaimes’. “With this particular warehouse,” Jaime says, “our health will be diminished because of the diesel fumes.”
“There’s no bigger hotbed for this issue than the Inland Empire area of Los Angeles, which has seen a massive proliferation of warehouses,” says Adrian Martinez, a staff attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “There’s an appetite for more and more warehouses, taking more and more cargo. It’s under the guise of adding jobs, but if you look under the hood, it’s exacting a big toll on communities, and changing the landscape of the area.”
On October 26, 2018, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the San Bernardino Board of Supervisors on behalf of the local Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, alleging that the review process for the Slover project, specifically the 292-page environmental impact report, doesn’t meet the standard of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and didn’t properly factor in air pollution and traffic impacts. On December 2, 2019, Cyber Monday, environmental groups and residents will stage a large protest at an Amazon facility meant to push the company, rumored owner of a new $200 million air cargo logistics center at the nearby San Bernardino International Airport, to sign a legally enforceable Community Benefits Agreement that will help reduce pollution.
The lawsuit—which was settled earlier this year, without being able to stop construction of the Slover facility—and the cargo center protest highlight how, in a retail economy increasingly dictated by e-commerce and home delivery, the downsides can often be out of sight, and out of mind. The quickening pace of warehouse development—an additional 16.8 million square feet of warehouse space broke ground nationally during the third quarter of 2019, according to Cushman & Wakefield—and increased truck traffic, is often concentrated in smaller, rural areas, especially those near large metro areas.
“This will be one of those things, part of the shifting landscape of American consumerism,” says Martinez. “People often don’t think about, how does this package from Amazon, or rug from Target, get here. All along the way, there’s places where toxic pollution is essentially poisoning communities. There’s a growing frustration that this industry isn’t doing enough to clean up its act.”
Just like the Bloomington Industrial Facility, seen here, the Slover Distribution Center will be close to homes and schools.
How the warehouse boom is impacting rural communities
According to San Bernardino county’s public information officer, David Wert, logistics activity is a big factor in the county’s recent job growth. In Southern California, nearly all the fulfillment centers serving the e-commerce industry are in San Bernardino, he says. in 2017, the county’s logistics centers added 12,000 new jobs, a steep increase from the 4,500 added the year before, with a median pay of $48,000. The county has added roughly 84,000 jobs in the warehouse and logistics industry in the last decade, reshaping the local job market. Real estate brokerage CBRE said land costs in the county rose 35 percent in 2018 due to high demand.
The developer behind the Slover project, JM Realty, told the San Bernardino Sun that the project will generate $6 million in general fund revenue for the county by 2029 and create 290 temporary and permanent jobs.
Wert also says these new projects bring much-needed infrastructure upgrades to an unincorporated area with few sidewalks aging streets, and no sewer system. Every project is responsible for street improvements, landscaping, as well as intersection improvements and traffic control improvements.
According to Anthony Victoria-Midence, communications director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ), the local group that was party to the Slover lawsuit, that’s not enough.
“This is not pioneer development, this is polluting development,” he says. “The pollution outweighs the economic development. We don’t think it’ll provide any benefit. It may bring a couple new sidewalks or pave a couple new roads, but it won’t provide any real solution, it’ll provide more issues.”
Opponents of these warehouses point to the dangers of diesel pollution from a constant stream of trucks coming to and from these large facilities. Health studies have shown that children who live near heavy traffic, and are exposed to particulate pollution from heavy trucks and diesel engines, develop higher incidences of health problems such as asthma. Some physicians have gone so far as to call areas near distribution centers and highways “diesel death zones.” The Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Slover Project, which will have 162 truck docks, predicted the distribution center would add more than 1,000 trips per day to and from the busy I-10 and I-60 corridors. Victoria-Midence’s groups has gone so far as to ask for pollution caps for facilities and the electrification of delivery vehicles.
The Inland Empire is far from alone in feeling the effects of this industry’s rapid expansion. In Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Miami, the number of warehouses has grown by 20 percent since 2003. Due to their size and cost, there’s great economic incentive to locate them in less desirable, more inexpensive, suburban or rural areas. According to a study of warehouse locations in the greater Los Angeles area by Quan Yuan for the Union of Concerned Scientists, “low-income and medium-income minority neighborhoods contain a vast majority of warehouses and distribution centers.” A Brookings Institution report found that despite recent growth in the region, “a series of economic booms and busts have left the region with more residents but fewer good jobs.”
Bloomington has been hit particularly hard by the warehouse boom, according to Victoria-Midence. Warehouses have sprouted up in nearby Rialto and Fontana, serving companies such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart, which bring in increased truck traffic. Between San Bernardino and nearby Riverside County, Amazon has 14 large facilities in the region—the most of any metropolitan area in the U.S. In a region with scattered farmland and horses running through fields, these large warehouses are taking root close to schools and residences.
These areas have some of the worst air pollution in the state, so increased road usage, as well as idling diesel engines at warehouse facilities, contributes to an already-serious problem.
Bloomington residents who are against the warehouses—a 2017 survey by local economic development group IE2030 found that 75 percent of residents don’t want warehouses near homes—also argue they aren’t being fairly represented. Since the town is located in an unincorporated part of the county, which lacks a mayor or city council, land-use decisions are made by the County Board of Supervisors.
The region’s state representatives, Senator Connie Leyva and Assemblymember Eloise Gomez Reyes, agree, writing in a op-ed in the Inland Empire Community News that “the approval of the proposed warehouse in Bloomington by the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors will further erode our quality of life and have serious health impacts on the hardworking community that will be most directly impacted by this project.” Local school board member Abigail Medina wrote an op-ed last week that “It is time for us to demand better for our schools, our children, and our community.”
“The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors acted with inconceivable neglect by approving a warehouse project that fails to consider the health and safety of Bloomington families,” Ericka Flores, senior organizer at CCAEJ, said in a statement. “Land use decisions should be made to benefit working class communities, not harm them.”
Bloomington residents protesting outside the San Bernardino County Government Center in February 2018.
The side effects of e-commerce
The Slover facility represents just one project in the region’s continuing logistics boom. UPSstarted operating five cargo flights a week out of San Bernardino International Airport (two package handlers were killed in a tragic accident at the facility last week), and Ontario International Airport will allow service from Frontier and international carrier China Airlines, developments expected to fuel future growth. The forthcoming Eastgate Air Cargo Logistic Center and will add at least 24 around-the-clock air cargo flights and 7,516 vehicle trips daily, including 500 daily truck trips, according to estimates from CCAEJ.
A coalition of community groups, under the banner of San Bernardino Airport Communities, are asking for, among other things, soundproofing, air filters and double-paned windows for schools and residents, zero-emission delivery trucks, and limits on truck idling to reduce pollution.
According to Victoria-Midence, this isn’t just a Bloomington or San Bernardino issue. Areas such as Fresno have also seen rapid growth in logistics and warehouse facilities.
“We’re not pushing back against logistic workers and those involved in the industry, because it does provide a lot of jobs in our community,” he says. “At the same time, a lot of decisions have been made that aren’t responsible, the jobs aren’t as stable as promised, and the community hasn’t been consulted.”
When asked about the traffic impact of the warehouses last fall, Wert said the county would normally order order traffic studies on a project-by-project basis, so they’d have information on what would be needed to mitigate impacts, such as wider streets, altered traffic signals, and new freeway interchanges. But the county was currently in the midst of a massive update to the general plan, and is currently reviewing the entire road networks, warehouses and all.
“Short answer: We don’t have data that measures that, but we’re working on it,” he wrote.
Victoria-Midence says that the Jaimes aren’t alone; a number of Bloomington residents moved there from the LA area in search of a quieter lifestyle. The Jaimes specifically asked about the big, empty lot next to their home when they purchased their current house, the future site of the Slover project, and were told a home would be built there in the future.
Carmen has found that the traffic and pollution irritates her, and she has trouble breathing. Now the Jaimes are considering moving.
“When we lived in Lynwood, the traffic from trucks and trains and refineries had a huge affect on my respiratory health,” she said through a translator. “Once we moved to Bloomington, I was able to live and breathe better, and the environment is more peaceful and nice. That’s why I’m fighting hard against the warehouses in the community. It’s coming to the point where I’m going to have to choose to live in an area with cleaner air, or breathe in this toxicity.”
But Houston isn’t just encircled by roads, it’s symbolically, and literally, being choked by cars. It’s consistently ranked as a top city for traffic congestion,ninth-worst for ozone pollution according to the American Lung Association, and a tragic nexus for deaths from car crashes. The annual death toll, according to the Houston Chronicle, is equivalent to “three fully-loaded 737s crashing each year at Houston’s airports, killing all aboard.”
According to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the solution is more roads, specifically, a multiyear, multibillion dollar project to widen and expand the city’s highway infrastructure in an attempt to ease persistent bottlenecksthat clog downtown traffic.
This isn’t a small upgrade: in the name of accelerating commutes, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP) will widen and rebuild nearly 25 miles of highways in the city’s downtown, expanding some to be as wide as the length of two football fields. In addition to years of construction, the “Texas-sized” expansion would displace four houses of worship, two schools, 168 homes, 1,067 multifamily units, and 331 businesses that account for just under 25,000 employees, impacting mostly people of color in low-income neighborhoods.
It would add more impermeable concrete and asphalt infrastructure, plus future maintenance costs, to a city that is still recovering from some of the worst floods in recent memory. Resilience is a serious concern post-Harvey, and as flood maps are updated as flood risks evolve, the addition of concrete to the landscape could make the next storm’s impact worse. Houstonians still recall how highways became channels of water that cut off neighborhoods from aid during the worst of the flooding.
To critics, the I-45 project, named after the main highway that will be impacted, is an urban renewal reboot, a modern version of the freeway expansion projects that wrecked neighborhoods and divided cities in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Why would more urban highways and lanes of traffic—especially at a time when many cities are actively removing or capping their highways—be a foregone conclusion in any effort to mitigate Houston’s serious congestion problem?
Why a “highway boondoggle” is business as usual
Transit and community activists have painted the project as a symbol of all that’s wrong with transportation planning, and a sign of how focusing on cars instead of more efficient, affordable ways to move residents across the Houston area, will cost the city in terms of air pollution, congestion, affordability, and even resiliency.
The Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, a nationwide nonprofit declared the project one of its annual “highway boondoggles,” projects that define needless and wasteful spending. This highway project will not only not solve the problems it claims to solve, the group claims. Additionally, since it doesn’t includeright-of-way costs (paying property owners for the right to travel through or above their land), the $7 billion price tag is simply a best-case scenario.
Houston recently became a poster child for what’s called induced demand—a transportation planner term that basically means if you add more roads, cars will fill them. The $2.2 billion widening of the Katy Freeway, making it one of the biggest in the world, ended up increasing average commute times for roughly 85 percent of drivers who used the 23-lane road.
“It’s ludicrous to me that with such a perfect case of induced demand sitting right in front of them, they’d come back to the same idea and think that would work better,” says Bay Scoggin, a member of Texas PIRG.
Recently, however, the project received a major vote of confidence. On July 26, the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s (H-GAC) Transportation Policy Council (TPC) approved a $100 million down payment to begin to rebuild Segment 2 of I-45, which runs from I-10 to North Loop 610. Despite this green light for redevelopment, community groups still believe they can push back against the plan and make needed changes to the infrastructure change, and make their voices heard at community meetings across Houston this summer.
“The community needs to know this isn’t going to improve Houston’s transportation, it is going to make the air worse, and it is going to displace families,” says Scoggin.
Houston highway interchanges.
Putting cars first
A big reason for the I-45 expansion is the philosophy behind TxDOT. The agency didn’t answer Curbed’s questions about the project, but has released a wealth of information and held numerous public meetings throughout the project’s long life, which dates back to 2002.
The agency has underscored that the project came about after an unprecedented amount of public engagement and meetings, including coordinating with local governments and transit agencies since the early 2000s.
It’s part and parcel of how TxDOT views transit in Texas. Agency studies suggest that 94 percent of Texans use a car as their predominant mode of transportation. Therefore, addressing all forms of road congestion, via the anti-congestion Clear Lanes Initiative, is the priority. If I-45, one of the 15 most congested highways in the state now, needs relief—average Daily Traffic (ADT) volumes are projected to increase along this already heavily traveled corridor by up to 30 percent by 2040, and the city’s population will double by 2050—why not build more lanes? The I-45 project also seeks to address safety concerns by straightening out some sections of roadway, and allow for more bike and pedestrian connections around the highways.
It’s the transit version of if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When the incentives are geared toward building roads, that’s where the money tends to go, according to Leah Binkovitz, the senior editor at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. In addition, many local politicians don’t want to lose their opportunity to get funding to tackle the highway issue. As TxDOT moves ahead with its larger vision for regional transportation, Houston can’t risk losing billions, even if it’s billions with strings attached.
“We have to vote on it now so we don’t lose our place in line for TxDOT dollars,” says Binkovitz. “What would we do without these dollars? That kind of imagination just isn’t there.”
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who after entering office gave a 2016 speech where he called for a paradigm shift away from highway expansion, says that he supports going forward with the proposal. He has directed the city’s Planning Department to “elevate community concerns,” and recommend ways to improve the project: “It is TxDOT’s responsibility to design a project with positive impacts for the community, the City of Houston, and the greater region,” he recently wrote to the regional planning council. “We will, without hesitation, not support the project if these items are not accomplished.”
TxDOT says the project does include pedestrian and cyclist-friendly aspects, and points to a proposal to potentially cap part of I-45, creating a new neighborhood greenspace. But Binkovitz say that without including funding for the park in the budget, it’s not clear whether this will be built.
“It’s still a park between lots of fast-moving lanes of traffic,” she says.
For example, the project will add new lanes on I-45 includes new high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes in the middle of the highway. TxDOT, which has been a huge proponent of HOVs as a cheap way to cut down solo car trips, says the entire project is about multimodal solutions: “It is NOT based on a debate whether Houston needs more highways or transit or cars & buses over bike and pedestrian facilities. Houston needs it all,” writes Quincy D. Allen, TxDOT Houston District Engineer.Others look at lanes that could have potentially been used for a bus rapid transit system or even a rail line, and instead, see a project that locks in more highways, more emissions, and if history is any indication, even more congestion.
“These high-occupancy vehicle lanes are being sold as commuter rail on two wheels,” Oni Blair, executive director of Link Houston, a regional transit advocacy group, says of the new high-capacity lanes. “But a highway does not equal transit.”
How opponents plan to make I-45 better
A coalition of community groups formed the Make I-45 Better Coalition and plans to continue to push to change the project. They see a few major issues with TxDOT’s current plans, in addition to relocation and displacement.
TxDOT’s own Draft Environmental Impact Study says the highway expansion “would cause disproportionately high and adverse impacts to minority or low-income populations.” A Health Impact Assessment by Air Alliance Houston found that the expansion would bring at least 26 existing school and daycare campuses within 500 feet of the highway, “a distance that research has associated with increased risks of asthma, impaired lung development, and childhood leukemia.” The concentration of benzene, a carcinogen, would rise 175 percent for some of the impacted schools.
This plan will also lock the region, and more residents, in a car-centric future, Blair believes, which will exacerbate the housing crisis. Affordable units are increasing located far from jobs, and living in those areas, without public transit options to reach work, puts extra strain on low-income Houstonians. The AAA estimates it costs $8,000 a year on average to own and operate a car; for someone making $30,000 a year, that’s a significant investment.
“The challenge with investing in highways is that it requires a vehicle to utilize them,” says Blair. “We could be potentially making an investment in affordable things like transit to enable a better quality of life.”
Advocates plan to continue to challenge city government. Since the mayor has ordered regional transportation groups to come up with their own plans for the project and submit recommendations, it’s not clear what happens next if those recommendations conflict with TxDOT’s blueprint, which will be finalized by 2020.
This project represents a significant investment in Houston’s transportation future, as well as how it thinks about issues like flood resilience and climate change. The city’s leaders may talk about multimodal transportation, resilience, and cutting climate emissions. But it’s budgets and where resources are allocated that tell the full story
“We’re becoming more urban, and this is a good indicator of whether or not we’re changing how decisions get made, and the types of decisions we’re making,” says Binkovitz. “We’ve talked about flooding, worsening storms, climate change, and resilience every day since Harvey. But what does it mean if we’re making decisions like this?”
Dallas is a booming city within a booming region. The epicenter of the Metroplex—a constellation of cities, including Fort Worth, that saw its population grow 35 percent between 2000 and 2014 and added 717,000 jobs—Dallas, and its surrounding cities and suburbs, is swelling with new arrivals from coastal cities and other countries. The region is constantly evolving and reinventing itself.
But Dallas is also, as Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster describes it, a “Paradox City.” A survey conducted by the Congress for the New Urbanism found that 68 percent of Dallas residents want to live in walkable neighborhoods with clusters of stores and other amenities reachable by foot—but only 4 percent of the metro area’s geography qualifies.
This is a car-centric city, with 11-story interchange ramps, the infamous Mixmaster exchange, and the Texas Doughnut, the name given to a common housing development that’s basically a multistory parking garage wrapped in apartments. Dallas is also a mercantile city on a large scale, shaped by big-name developers such as Trammell Crow and run by the business class, “the headquarters of corporate headquarters,” Lamster says. How quickly can a Metroplex built to be big embrace small-scale, incremental urban development?
“Dallas is especially confusing and contradictory,” Lamster says. “We’re making efforts to change it, but it’s hard to turn around an ocean liner.”
Outsiders taking stock of Dallas focus on stereotypes and size—the city’s tourism slogan is “Dallas Big”—and easy symbolism like the gargantuan new Cowboys stadium. The city alone takes up 340 square miles. But they miss the ways Dallas has come to reflect the rest of the country, via an influx of immigrants, growth in families (it has had the highest growth in its child population of major U.S. cities), and the increasing numbers of its Hispanic population, part of growing diversity in the Metroplex. An amalgam of cities and metros connected by ribbons of roads, the Dallas metro area has a profile akin to Los Angeles, without the movie stars and sky-high real estate prices. (An average home here costs just$265,000.) The middle-class, family-friendly “American Dream” is alive and well here relative to other cities.
“It doesn’t hurt to have an economy that’s booming and a lot of land to develop,” says urbanist Joel Kotkin. “It allows Dallas to innovate and create a variety of housing that people in their 20s and 30s actually want. Compare that to California. You have people living with roommates at 35 who just turn and leave. Product just isn’t there at an affordable price.”
Another surprise to those who think of the city as spreading ever outward are the pockets of increasing housing density.
“People who don’t follow these things closely don’t see what’s happening,” says Rik Adamski, principal of local planning and design firm Ash + Lime. “It’s an exciting time to be in Dallas.”
He counts off numerous places where development is different. New high-rises and hotelsare helping the booming Design District go vertical. Places like Uptown are becoming rivals to downtown. And there are plenty of suburban examples as well. Draw a 50-mile radius from Dallas, and you’ll hit 83 downtowns, many of which, like Garland, are starting to recognize their potential.
Dallas will build the second-most apartment units of any major city this year, 24,000, just behind New York’s 27,000. Paradox City is changing. But how fast, and for how many?
“There’s not a silver bullet that can get you better neighborhoods overnight,” Adamski says. “It’s about getting a lot of the little things right.”
Incremental isn’t in Dallas’s DNA. Because it’s set on flat plains in North Texas, no mountains or waterways block the city and region’s sprawl, and for decades, it favored low-slung, single-family development. Caught up in the same highway-first urban renewal fever as the rest of the country, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was christened the Metroplex in the ’70s, after the federal government defined the region by building a single airport for the spread-out area. Since then, the growing airport, lax regulations, and corporate relocations have helped the city bloom.
“Dallas is always chasing the chance to be a modern, cosmopolitan city, and not to be thought of as a small country town,” says Jason Roberts, a local urbanist. “We tore down our building stock and pushed modernity. There’s always been a desire to be seen as a player and force on the world stage, along with a lack of self-awareness.”
Downtown symbolized this type—or lack—of urbanism. Candy Evans, a real estate writer who runs a local site called CandysDirt.com, recalls that when she moved to Dallas in the early ’80s to work at a local TV station, she was amazed at how the city rolled up its sidewalks at night. Everyone got in their cars, hit the highways, and went home to single-family residences throughout the Metroplex. Even during the day, there wasn’t much there there; writer Norman Mailer once described the city’s skyline as “a collection of Kleenex boxes standing on end.”
“Dallas evolved at the whim of developers—just buy land and plop a building down here and there,” she says. “They got whatever they could wrestle out of the city. Downtown struggles with that.”
Attempts at remedying the sprawl have had mixed results. DART, the regional rapid-transit and light-rail system that started construction in the ’80s, famously boasts that it has the most miles of rail, 93, of any comparable agency in the country. But, spread out over the 13 cities that contribute funds for DART, it’s a mixed bag, with stations far from housing, low ridership, and holes in the service map where municipalities have refused to participate.
“Transit is just miniscule in this city,” says Kotkin.
The overwhelming architectural response to the city’s current growth spurt, according to Lamster, is “terrible, five-story brick-and-stucco beige things.” They’re not unique to Dallas—most cities have no shortage of similarly uninspired structures—but in a flat, spread-out city, where there’s so little connectivity and walkability, they stand out, and not in a good way.
“The good news is that more of these are going up, and two standing next to each other look better than one,” Lamster says.
While many developers have continued these bad habits—local developers can get “moderately rich” with mediocrity and low expectations—a counter-current has begun to slowly reshape parts of Dallas. A wave of urbanists and more socially conscious developers have, over the last few decades, helped bring a small-bore, nuts-and-bolts approach to designing the city. One of the places this started was the former warehouse district of Deep Ellum.
Established at the end of the 19th century, Deep Ellum, a warren of warehouses and music clubs, emerged as a commercial district for immigrants and African Americans. The neighborhood was the site of a Model T factory, hosted blues and jazz clubs for decades, but the I-45 highway, finished in 1973, cut it off from downtown. White flight and suburban expansion soon emptied it out, and artists and musicians took over in the early ’80s, turning it into a nightlife and gallery district.
Deep Ellum neighborhood.
Dallas has a long history of destroying its history, but entrepreneur Brandon Castillo saw promise in the brick boxes of Deep Ellum, one of the few places in the Metroplex that held onto its stock of old buildings, classic signage, and tree-lined sidewalks. In 2010, he opened the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market, a showcase for local makers and businesses, to give the neighborhood more activity than bars and clubs.
“When I opened the market at 8 a.m., there was nobody on the streets,” he says. “I’d pretty much be the only person out other than wedding photographers doing engagement photos. They intrinsically knew it was just a cool place, but nobody else was there.”
Seven years later, others have followed Castillo’s lead. New businesses are flourishing; multifamily projects, such as the Case Building and the $250 million multi-use project the Epic, are under construction; and one of the neighborhood’s largest landlords, 42 Real Estate, plans a pedestrian-friendly makeover with new public plazas. A proposal to tear down the adjacent I-345 would be a developer’s dream. Touted in tour guides and popular with young renters, it’s become a walkable, desirable place to live and work—a towering, $25 million, 7-story mixed-use project is about to break ground—and an inspiration for other developers and neighborhood advocates. But as far as Castillo is concerned, real repetition is rare.
Stores in Deep Ellum.
“Much of what’s going on now is ugly concrete slabs, like Soviet apartment buildings,” he says. “Just because you market them as live-work-play doesn’t mean you’re creating the street life that Jane Jacobs would appreciate.”
For Castillo, translating the desire for more Deep Ellums into a true development strategy means starting small.
That’s Roberts’s approach. Roberts, founder of tactical urbanism non-profit the Better Block, is most famous for helping spur more street-level development in his neighborhood of Oak Cliff in 2010, including painting DIY bike lanes and pushing for walkable streets and a trolley line under the rubric of the Oak Cliff Transit Authority. Now, when walking (or riding) down Zang Boulevard, Roberts says the impact is immediately apparent. New businesses have opened and cranes swing overhead, helping assemble apartment buildings.
While Roberts’s block has taken shape, and he’s seeing dense, walkable, mixed-use development happening, it’s too slow to meet the need and demand (others have said the same about the streetcar line, which cost $50 million for a rail line that covers the equivalent of four bus stations). His work has helped inspire the city and its Complete Streets Manual, which has embarked on a number of trial projects in an effort to create more sustainable, healthy, and walkable transit options.
Other big U.S. cities have it easier. “New York and San Francisco have great bones,” Roberts says. “But in Dallas, we have to fix the bones, too.”
Monte Anderson, who run Options Real Estate, says he’s simply a “South Dallas guy with a 10th grade education doing it out of desperation.” A former motocross racer, he got into construction and eventually real estate when he couldn’t get financing for a motorcycle store he wanted to open. But for many urbanists in the city, including Castillo, Roberts, and Adamski, he’s a forward-thinking folk hero.
Tyler Station, coworking village.
Instead of gentrification, Anderson believes in what he calls “gentlefication,” or creating affordable projects that offer local entrepreneurs and business owners the chance to build capital and succeed. In a city known for developments with million-dollar swimming pools and entertainment districts, his portfolio stands out.
At Tyler Station, a transit-oriented development at the Tyler/Vernon DART stop in Oak Cliff, he gutted the old Dixie Wax Paper Company factory to create what he calls a coworking village. Inside are dozens of community-based businesses, from yoga studios and wedding planners to a brewery, with cages separating offices instead of walls. Anderson once turned a Kmart into a tortilla factory, and planned to add trailers to mall parking lots to create a denser, more active commercial space.
“We’re way too wasteful when we tear down buildings,” Anderson says. “And we can’t afford to do it. Instead, I just add dividers and create a bazaar-like space. It’s a way of repurposing the big boxes.”
Other developers have found success with similar projects, creating new types of communities near transit hubs. Zad Roumaya, a former tech investor who runs Buzzworks, just opened a new development called Digit 1919, a transit-oriented development on South Akard Street at the Cedars DART stop, in the middle of a burgeoning neighborhood of the same name.
Squarely aimed at high-income millennials, the “young managerial” types that come with corporate relocations, units at Digit 1919, which start at $1,200 a month, are smart home-enabled. But this place doesn’t boast the typical high-end amenities of traditional Dallas developments. The building has a bike share and a coffee roastery across the street, as well as online parcel management for residents shopping on Amazon.
“This isn’t about the traditional amenities,” he says. “People don’t care. That’s for institutional investors. The magic sauce here is bringing all these craft purveyors to the area. You see people walking back and forth, and the knitting of a neighborhood starts to occur.”
Urban infill, focused on the millennial move-ins who want to be close to bars, restaurants, and amenities, is a big draw. Carl Anderson, a partner at Larkspur Capital, says that’s the inspiration behind their new townhome project on Elsbeth Street, 16 three-story units with rooftop decks near the Bishop Arts District, a small cluster of old homes and shops 10 minutes from downtown.
“Two years ago, this was barely on the citywide radar,” he says. “People on the other side of the Trinity River wouldn’t even come here.”
Bishop Arts is what Evans is calling one of the city’s new “depot” areas, a flowering of stores, small businesses, and multifamily buildings around Dallas’s major intersections. After artsy shops and local restaurants and bakeries set the stage, multifamily projects have moved in, such as the $57 million mixed-use development by Alamo Manhattan. Anderson credits these changes to new form-based zoning, the improved accessibility created by the addition of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge over the Trinity River, as well as the extension of the streetcar line.
“What’s driving development is increased accessibility,” he says.
What should Dallas do as a city to feed the hunger for more walkable, urban lifestyles?
“It doesn’t come without density,” says Roberts. “Single-family homes don’t make it happen. We don’t have the land use to support that kind of infrastructure.”
Roberts does see some important steps forward, focused on the street-level work that needs to happen for walkable, mixed-use development. Since Dallas became one of the last big cities to get bike share, dockless bike-share systems have become a hit. The DART board, for the first time, finally has some people who use public transit: Patrick Kennedy, an urbanist famous for his blog, “Car Free in Big D,” about living in Dallas without a car, is now helping shape city policy. Mark Brown, the city planner behind the city’s Complete Streets push and a future traffic-calming manual, says more protected bike lanes are on the way, one of many transit and streetscape programs trying to make it easier to live car-free. And the city’s new manager, T.C. Broadnax, who comes from Tacoma, Washington, has been hailed for a no-nonsense approach not beholden to traditional political alliances.
“We’re learning the wrong lessons from the examples of success in our city,” says Castillo. “Deep Ellum and Bishop Arts are successful; we need to build on top of it. But in Dallas, it seems like the bigger and more expensive always get the attention.”
In fact, slowing—and scaling—down may be the best solution.
“If you lift, you lift from the bottom up,” says Monte Anderson. “Is it a world-class city if you have a big, shiny building or bridge right next to a neighborhood where kids don’t have a basketball court to play on, or where somebody can’t afford health insurance? I don’t want to fix it fast. I don’t want to run the drug dealers off. I want to help them become entrepreneurs.”
Bernardy and Tiblanche St. Fleur have seen a lot from their perch on Miami’s Second Avenue, where they have run a modest grocery store for the last 25 years. Down the block from the famed Mache Ayisyen, a marketplace in the center of the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood, the couple sells food and beauty products that offer immigrants links to their Caribbean birthplaces.
But a short walk from the St. Fleurs’ front door, another community is set to radically change the look of their neighborhood. Magic City, a planned billion-dollar commercial and residential district targeting startups and entrepreneurs, got the go-ahead from city commissioners to break ground last June. The 18-acre mixed-use development was, as of last November, mostly just purple signage, a few scattered office buildings, and a warren of old warehouses. (Magic City’s developers have said no residents or existing businesses will be displaced.) But over the next 15 years, MCID Developers plans to erect buildings as tall as 25 stories, along with a pop-up theme park designed by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté; one of the developers told the Miami Herald in 2018 that it can “be the engine that pulls the Little Haiti train.”
“We have nothing against the developers,” says Bernardy St. Fleur. “Maybe it brings more business, maybe rent goes up. There’s been lots of activity, but we’re not anxious yet.”
The shifts coming to Little Haiti fit the traditional big-city displacement narrative, and commercial rents and home prices have already risen sharply in recent years. But activists and advocates see another force at play: a rising tide of climate gentrification.
“People won’t say climate change is the primary reason developers are buying in Liberty City or Little Haiti,” says Meena Jagannath, cofounder of the Community Justice Project, a local nonprofit that focuses on legal aid in service of racial justice. “But it’s increasingly becoming a major factor.”
Felton Pierre marches during a rally against the proposed Magic City Innovation District, Thursday, June 20, 2019, in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami.
But documenting the cause and effect of climate gentrification—linking the flow of money and investments to the flow of water onto our coastlines—is a much knottier proposition. Little Haiti, for instance, borders Wynwood and the Design District, glitzy areas filled with hip restaurants, boutiques, and Instagrammable graffiti murals. Jesse Keenan, a researcher on the Harvard study, tells Curbed that “developers aren’t necessarily making decisions with climate change as a first-order consideration.”
Either way, Miami neighborhood activists are sounding the alarm about development pressure. “Gentrification is coming forcefully: developers buying the major corners, raising the rents, forcing renters onto month-to-month leases,” Haitian playwright, activist, and Little Haiti bookstore owner Jan Mapou recently told Hyperallergic. Miami has the most cost-burdened renters of any major American city; half of renters pay at least half their monthly income for housing, and the city’s tourist-driven economy keeps wages low.
“Gentrification is a cycle that’s been around before I was here, and will be after I’m here,” says Kilan Ashad-Bishop, a biomedical scientist and a vice chair of the Miami Climate Resilience Committee. “I want to talk about how we prevent the most vulnerable among us from becoming more vulnerable.”
“Profit and equity have a very hard time co-existing”
Climate gentrification is one predicted result of what many analysts say is a coming coastal real estate crash. A 2018 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that most coastal real estate in the U.S. doesn’t factor future flooding risk into its present value. That’s terrifying for two reasons: By 2045, increased flooding is expected to lead to $135 billion in property damage and force 280,000 Americans to adapt or relocate; and two, property that floods, or is seen to have a significantly higher flood risk, will eventually become unwanted, unsellable, and uninsurable, a stranded asset weighing down investors and the national economy. (Some have used the term blue-lining in discussing this new rash of flood-prone properties that won’t be able to get insurance.)
Climate gentrification, therefore, is about not wanting to be left holding coastal land when the music stops. While it’ll be years before we get a better sense of the speed at which cities and markets will react to this phenomenon, Keenan says the first sign will be how soon banks stop offering mortgages and development capital in flood-prone areas and start fleeing to higher ground, and how quickly insurance rates rise due to climate instability.
“I’ve been telling members of the business community to sell low, buy high” says Philip Stoddard, an environmental activist, biology professor, and mayor of nearby South Miami, in reference to land elevation.
As that shift takes place, Keenan says, local governments, many of which are already facing financial pressure, have to make tough choices. Can they replace tax revenues that formerly came from pricey coastal homes? What’s the best place to invest limited infrastructure money as some neighborhoods become untenable, and would building expensive sea walls in effect bail out rich property owners? What’s the best way to assist marginalized and displaced people, either from flooding or the flood of new inland investment? In a perfect world, Keenan says, cities would take advantage of the crisis to upzone and densify on higher ground to create “defensible urban corridors,” with blocks of new affordable housing connected with better transit. For instance, Miami has created a $400 million Forever Bond program to invest in infrastructure and housing for a climate-impacted future, with $100 million set aside for affordable housing, part of the 12,000 total affordable units the city plans to build by 2024.
A plan for Magic City Innovation District is shown in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami. The billion dollar mixed-use development will take up to 17 acres of land, is set to be built in this historic neighborhood and has inspired hope and fear among the residents.
But making that shift quickly enough is a challenge, especially for Miami. Florida doesn’t allow local personal income taxes, so property taxes make up the bulk of local budgets, leading to an overreliance on real estate revenue to fund the city’s budget. That has resulted in a developer-friendly economy and political climate that will be hard to change.
“The rule of thumb is, let developers do all they want, to be honest with you, so it’s hard to have a forward-thinking conversation about this,” says Ashad-Bishop. “Developers are thinking of profit, and profit and equity have a very hard time coexisting.”
Is climate gentrification changing Little Haiti?
Projects like Magic City send signals to the larger development community that there’s opportunity in the neighborhood, and eventually force current homeowners and commercial tenants to compete against developers who believe they can bring in a wealthier set of tenants.
“I think there’s a lot of quiet buying taking place right now in areas around Magic City,” Jagannath says. “From 2017 to 2019, there was a considerable jump in commercial prices around Magic City, and homes in the area are being advertised as being great investment properties.”
Jagannath’s own firm found that numerous real estate listings last summer that referenced Magic City and used the phrase “this opportunity won’t last,” “huge investment opportunity,” and “the best opportunity in the area.”
Her group has represented retail tenants who don’t have enough business to keep up with increasing rents for their stores. She believes it’s the first wave of displacement as the neighborhood becomes more popular and landlords feel they can charge higher rents. (Down Second Avenue, a newly opened food hall, the Citadel, represents another big development that seems aimed at the Wynwood crowd.)
A study of land-use patterns by the University of Miami Office of Civic and Community Engagement bolsters the case that investors are sensing opportunities in immigrant neighborhoods. According to senior program manager Jorge Damian de la Paz, one in every five homes or duplexes in Little Haiti is owned by investors via limited-liability corporations or other business ventures—business entities that can make tracing ownership complicated—with names like World Dominations Enterprise LLC, Strictly Profits LLC, Premium Elevation LLC, and Vulture Property Investments.
Similar patterns are seen in Little Havana and Liberty City. Allapattah, named for the Seminole word for alligator, has been dubbed “the next Wynwood.” Long home to Latin American immigrants and industrial warehouses—the average income is $22,600, 77 percent of households are renters, and roughly a quarter of residents are undocumented immigrants, according to the Biscayne Times—Allapattah has rapidly become a target for developers. Last March, the city commission gave the go-ahead to transform an old produce market into a 1.4-million-square-foot development featuring thousands of coliving and apartment units designed by Dutch architect Bjarke Ingels, and the Urban X Group is in the midst of completing a $425 million River Landing apartment complex. Developer Lyle Stern envisions the area ”transforming from industrial to trendy,” like Chicago’s Fulton Market or New York’s Meatpacking District. A Colliers International South Florida study found that land prices rose from $58 per square foot in 2014 to around $275 per square foot in 2018.
But even some climate activists aren’t ready to say it’s all just climate gentrification at play.
“The fundamental question is, what is the main driver of that gentrification?” says Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the CLEO Institute, a Florida nonprofit focused on climate change education. “Some say climate and sea level rise, some say it’s purely gentrification.”
“It just so happens that communities of color sit at a slightly higher elevation than the coast,” says Robin Bachin, who runs the University of Miami Office of Civic and Community Engagement. “But to say right now that we see evidence of climate gentrification that’s absolutely clear and you can distinguish that from any other form of gentrification, that’s not clear.”
Bachin and her team do see this as the right time to start building policy solutions to address gentrification of all types. For instance, while mapping out land-use patterns, they discovered areas where unused city, county, and school board property sit adjacent to each other. An overlay with transit maps shows areas where different governments could, by combining or swapping land, create real estate holdings ideal for dense affordable housing near transportation. In effect, it provides a roadmap for transforming areas like Little Haiti and Allapattah in ways that would promote equity and opportunity.
“We need to focus on everything you can do to protect equity in a neighborhood like Little Haiti so it doesn’t become a Disneyfied version of Little Haiti,” says Bachin. “There are real people who live there.”
How investors view climate gentrification
If climate gentrification is taking place, it would follow that local developers and builders would be consulting flood maps and long-term forecasts before making deals. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Jorge Perez, a billionaire South Florida developer known as “the condo king” who built an art gallery in Allapattah recently, told journalist Jeff Goodell that he doesn’t think about sea-level rise on a daily basis. “In 20 or 30 years, someone is going to find a solution for this,” he says. “If it is a problem for Miami, it will also be a problem for New York and Boston—so where are people going to go? Besides, by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”
The industry hasn’t changed how it operates in response to climate change, according to Jennifer Wollmann, the president of the Miami Association of Realtors. Her organization and others, including the Army Corps of Engineers, have pushed for investments in resiliency and protecting land and investments (it’s the focus of a recent issue of the organization’s magazine). But she points to robust sales figures in December—the sale of $1 million-plus condos was up 48 percent, month over month—as a sign of healthy interest in waterfront property. There are lots of investors seeking opportunities in South Florida, she says, which is why there’s been so much interest in building new apartments lately.
“I haven’t seen any issues with 30-year mortgages in at-risk areas for flooding,” she says. “We’ve been hearing about the market changing in reaction to climate change for years, but we just haven’t seen it yet.”
Sebastian Jaramillo, a partner with the Miami-based boutique firm Wolfe Pincavage, which focuses on real estate, has been surprised by the industry’s lack of foresight around climate change. Not only doesn’t he think investors are picking Little Haiti because of its elevation, he worries that they aren’t factoring the issue in at all.
“Lenders haven’t been acting at all when it comes to giving 30-year mortgages for properties that potentially could be heavily affected by rising sea water in the next decade or two,” he says.
For developers, a project timeline from conception to selling a building usually takes two to five years, meaning there isn’t as much incentive to look far into a future altered by climate change. If the lending and financing part of the industry doesn’t step back and caution buyers, it’s business as usual, Jaramillo says. Only once a large storm hits will buyers get a preview of what the future may hold.
Katie Walsh works for the risk analysis firm CDP, a nonprofit that examines climate risk for hundreds of local governments and corporations across the globe. She says she’s starting to see more awareness of this issue among municipal bond investors, who are making bets on 50- to 100-year time frames and are less eager to invest in cities with substantial climate risk. One of her main concerns is that cities already facing budget crises aren’t moving fast enough to address climate change risk.
“There have been so many cuts to their budgets,” she says, suggesting cities won’t have the resources to invest in new infrastructure, resilient buildings, or any large-scale adaptation plans. “They’re already in such a constrained situation to just provide basic services. Adding climate vulnerability further exposes them.”
How climate justice and housing justice go together
Regardless of how much gentrification is due to flooding fears, our climate future is increasingly shaping thoughts about urban policy.
Ashad-Bishop wants the city to create a better framework for research—which currently isn’t a strong suit for Miami’s local government, she says—so that committees like hers can create more integrated, holistic policy recommendations. Bachin’s colleagues at the University Housing Resiliency project are working on creating new designs for the city’s most common affordable housing designs that factor in resilient features, such as better cooling and elevated living quarters, so new buildings can withstand a changing environment.
“We need to focus on everything you can do to protect equity in a neighborhood like Little Haiti so it doesn’t become a Disneyfied version of Little Haiti.”
Keenan points to the Green New Deal for its recognition that climate gentrification, inclusionary zoning, affordable housing, transportation, and resilience—the idea that buildings and landscapes can be redesigned and fortified to better cope with rising waters and changing weather patterns—are all linked.
“Everything going forward is about trade-offs,” says Keenan. “By promoting this idea of resilience, that we can engineer our way out of this, are we delaying the inevitable need to move, are we delaying in a way that traps people? Resilience isn’t a perfect good.”
Jagannath thinks that inclusionary zoning can be a useful tool to create more resilient communities. In the future, Miami will need denser housing in high-elevation areas—flipping the current landscape, with its small homes inland and high-rises on the beach—and those larger projects need to be open to different income levels and built sustainably.
Magic City has a community benefits agreement which will see the development pay $40 million, including $31 million in community benefits that will be overseen by a trust composed of local residents and $9 million in impact fees. Jagannath, who did some early analysis for the agreement with community groups, but was ultimately left out of the final negotiations, believes it lacks the foresight and fairness to set an example for future agreements (an initial plan to require 550 units of affordable housing was scrapped during the final negotiations). Last summer, the Community Justice Project sued the city to block the development on behalf of a local renter and activist, Warren Perry.
“Very little in that agreement looks at the climate vulnerability of Miami,” says Jagannath. “If it did, it would have been more specific about including more workforce and affordable housing directly on site.”
Bachin says the issue is bound to shift how politicians think about environmental issues, and that there’s broad consensus that affordability and environmental risk are significant regional problems (though Miami’s Republican Mayor Francis Suarez told CNN last summer that “we haven’t seen any direct evidence of [climate gentrification] yet”).
“Political leaders are making affordable housing and climate resilience a centerpiece of their platforms this year, which they never have before,” she says.
Ideally, centering climate policy on climate gentrification, and the issues it raises, would not only create a city that can better react to environmental change, but one that can call itself more equitable.
“What I care about is not only that you’re taking people away from their neighborhood and their neighbors and where their kids go to school, it’s that when you do that, you put them in harm’s way,” says Ashad-Bishop. “This is climate change. We don’t have the time to try and fix it, do it in a flawed way, and troubleshoot and do it again.”
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