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Curbed

November 2018

Calling the Minneapolis 2040 plan ambitious is an understatement.

The plan, which is expected to pass City Council scrutiny early next month, is the furthest-reaching such proposal from a U.S. municipality, and comes after nearly a year of heated debate. The updated policy would upzone nearly the entire city, which will allow taller buildings with more units to be built in areas that previously only contained single-family homes (at present, more than 75 percent of city residents live in areas that only allow single-family residences or small multifamily housing).

Like the rest of the nation, Minneapolis faces an affordable housing crisis that is expected to get worse. More than half of the city’s residents rent, and half of those renters are cost-burdened. The city has added 83,000 households since 2010, while building just 64,000 new homes, and is expected to welcome another 233,000 households by 2040, according to its Metropolitan Council. With Minneapolis 2040, officials hope to head off the housing shortage, all while showing how land-use policy can address critical climate challenges and the city’s history of racial inequality.

Combined with a proposed $40 million investment in programs that support renters and combat homelessness planned for by recently elected Mayor Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis 2040 plan positions the city as one of the few in the U.S. proposing—and likely passing—a large-scale plan to tackle the pressing problems facing American cities.

“Affordable housing is a right,” Frey has tweeted. “Addressing our housing supply—and shortage—is going to be a key part of realizing that right.”

“Freyplexes” and the future of Minneapolis

The Minneapolis 2040 plan was introduced to the public earlier this year, and aims to attack the city’s housing shortage by increasing density and constructing new housing.

Updated zoning guidelines proposed in the plan would allow triplexes to be built across much of the city—and allow even denser developments in transit zones. The proposal has been dialed down since it was announced earlier this year; initially, the plan called for allowing fourplexes, or what opponents have called “freyplexes,” everywhere.

Perhaps predictably, the plan has been subject to fierce debate. At dozens of open forums about Minneapolis 2040, neighbors have complained that the upzoning would ruin the character of their neighborhoods. Others say the plan is a giveaway to developers and won’t really lower the cost of producing affordable housing. Some activists and YIMBYs feel it doesn’t go far enough in upzoning. The planning office has received more than 11,000 comments.

What all sides of the debate can agree on is the need to tackle the city’s increasing affordable-housing crisis. The problems facing Minneapolis—a rapid increase in the number of new households that hasn’t been met with new housing construction; a 2.2 percent apartment vacancy rate; and a corresponding rise in homelessness—have exacerbated racial and income inequality.

”I’m only a few rent hikes away from being priced out of the neighborhood that I was elected to serve,” Blue Delliquanti, a renter and representative of the city’s South Uptown Neighborhood Association, told Minnesota Public Radio. “We’re facing [a] housing and environmental crisis in Minneapolis, and it’s no longer appropriate to fuss over a neighborhood’s character when new residents aren’t able to stick around long enough to build their own character.”

They are problems nearly every city in the United States currently faces. Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, have also examined large-scale upzoning proposals, while in housing-poor California, a widely heralded bill to mandate transit-oriented development statewide was defeated in the state legislature.

Can Minneapolis be a model for how to break through traditional gridlock when it comes to local limits on the housing supply?

More than 75 percent of Minneapolis residents live in areas zoned for single-family homes.

How Minneapolis 2040 will, or won’t, work

The city’s shortage of affordable units isn’t due to a dry spell for the city’s builders. According to Minnesota Public Radio, the city has issued $5 billion in construction permits over the last five years. But much of that has been for luxury developments. Since 2000, the city has actually lost 15,000 affordable units; while 7,000 such units were added over the last two years, overall rents have increased 15 percent.

Minneapolis 2040 believes the solution is simply more: more construction, more high-rises, and more triplexes. The comprehensive plan update would create new zoning categories across the city. In addition to allowing triplexes, the new rules would allow developers in most residential areas to build four stories high. It would also eliminate off-street parking requirements, which add to the cost of a new project without increasing density.

This update didn’t come out of nowhere; city planners update it every decade. According to Minneapolis’s long-range planning director, Heather Worthington, this year’s update just happens to be more ambitious, seeking to tackle big goals, like climate change, housing choice and affordability, and racial equity.

“We know Minneapolis is facing some of the deepest and most challenging disparities in the nation,” Worthington said during a recent episode of the Streets.MN podcast. “Today’s zoning is built on those old redlining maps.”

In many ways, it’s a market-oriented answer to artificial scarcity: More supply meets demand, brings down housing costs, and allows more workers to live close to jobs and other opportunities.

The updated plan would allow for more construction for the future, while Frey’s plans to invest $40 million in programs to help those suffering from the impact of high housing costs would help expand the safety net today. Initiatives like Stable Homes, Stable Schools, which would support homeless children and teens in Minneapolis Public Schools; a fund to help upgrade existing affordable housing; a tripling of the $6.5 million Affordable Housing Trust Fund; and money for tenant legal advocacy would provide immediate assistance as the changes envisioned by Minneapolis 2040 begin to take shape.

View from an apartment in Minneapolis’s North Loop.

A major change, or just a “meh sandwich”?

While the plan may be a big leap forward compared to what other cities are proposing, many think it doesn’t go far enough, saying that it’s a “meh sandwich” that lacks the ambition to match the scope of the problem. According to advocates from Neighbors for More Neighbors, a YIMBY group pushing for greater density, watering down the upzoning proposal was a step in the wrong direction.

“The much-discussed fourplex proposal was a small step toward ending exclusionary zoning, but even then was a compromise that only went part way toward ending the historical inequities enshrined in the zoning code,” wrote Matt Lewis, a group volunteer.

“If Minneapolis is serious about achieving its climate goals, then enabling more people to live along transit corridors, near daily destinations, in places where living without a car is a realistic choice, is an obvious first step.”

Others have attacked the plan for its “open the market for more density, and affordability will come” mindset. Greater density will replace starter homes with boutique housing, or will simply give developers more opportunity to build high-cost units without truly adding to the supply of affordable housing, they argue. At a community forum about the plan, former city planner Tim Keane said the plan is “a radical social engineering experiment without a shred of empirical data to support its shifting goals.”

The balancing act of better zoning

As the plan nears a final vote in early December—members of the city council will debate and suggest final adjustments to the proposed planning update beginning this week—the feeling that its proponents have of being attacked from all sides will likely get worse. Many council members have discussed introducing changes to further increase density, support transit, mitigate climate change, and reduce racial disparities, including adding an inclusionary zoning policy, which would mandate that every multifamily project include a certain percentage of affordable units.

While these changes may bolster the original goals of the plan update, they may further strain support. Those fearing how upzoning will change neighborhood character, the traditional NIMBY argument, will be further alienated. Environmentalists supportive of density and transit-oriented development are wary changes may alleviate some sprawl, but at the cost of urban parks and green spaces. Local builders have said they would push back against inclusionary zoning, since it may make many planned affordable projects financially impossible. Developer Kelly Doran said the inclusionary zoning proposal would drive up rental costs at his under-construction Expo project by $100 a month.

Changing the direction of a city is, naturally, a balancing act. Minneapolis’s planning department will not meet all its goals with this overhaul, and will likely create additional issues to settle in the future.

But at least the city, unlike many of its peers, is having a substantive debate about density, affordability, and—especially in the wake of the National Climate Assessment last week—the environment.

“We are heading toward the greatest housing problems for low-income people since the Great Depression,” said Alan Arthur, CEO of nonprofit Minneapolis developer Aeon. “It will cost billions in private and public dollars. We just can’t argue policy tweaks.”

Curbed

December 2018

A wave of sameness has washed over new residential architecture. U.S. cities are filled with apartment buildings sporting boxy designs and somewhat bland facades, often made with colored panels and flat windows.

Due to an Amazon-fueled apartment construction boom over the last decade, Seattle has been an epicenter of this new school of structural simulacra. But Seattle is not alone. Nearly every city, from Charlotte to Minneapolis, has seen a proliferation of homogenous apartments as construction has increased again in the wake of the financial recession.

Twitter query seeking to name this ubiquitous style was a goldmine. Some suggestions seemed inspired by the uniformity of design in computer programs and games: Simcityism, SketchUp contemporary, Minecraftsman, or Revittecture. Some took potshots at the way these buildings looked value-engineered to maximize profit: Developer modern, McUrbanism, or fast-casual architecture. Then there are the aesthetic judgement calls: contemporary contempt, blandmarks, LoMo (low modern), and Spongebuild Squareparts.

“Part of what people are responding to isn’t the building themselves, it’s that there are so many of them going up so quickly, all in the same places in the city,” says Richard Mohler, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington.

Many of the replies to the Twitter call simply pointed out that these buildings are housing, and much-needed housing at that. Though they can be defined or classified by aesthetics, this wave of new apartments is perhaps best described as a symbol of today’s housing problems: a lack of developable land; rising land, material, and labor costs; and an acute need to find more affordable places for people to live.

“At the end of the day, if you line up multifamily apartments from Boston, San Francisco, and Miami that have been built in the last decade, you’re going to see a very strong pattern,” says Scott Black, senior vice president of Bristol Development, a Nashville-based firm that develops apartments across the Southeast.

Good architecture should always respond to the local context. In the case of these buildings, the local economic context just happens to be the same in just about every major U.S. city.

“Critics don’t understand what we’re working with, the parameters and the financial constraints,” says Black. “It’s like any other business: If you’re selling autos or selling widgets, there are certain costs, and a certain profit you need to make to do business in the future.”

It boils down to code, costs, and craft

Perhaps the biggest constraint in the urban U.S. apartment market, a $61 billion annual industry, is the amount of available space. Many cities zone with an overwhelming preference for detached, single-family homes, with small corridors in downtowns or dense areas set aside for large, multistory towers. In Seattle, for instance, roughly three-quarters of residential land is zoned for single-family homes. That means new apartments are forced to cluster in small areas of the city, amplifying the impact of a rash of new, similar buildings.

The buildings themselves are an effort to fit within the small niches made available by local building and zoning codes. According to Mohler, due to height limits and safety/fire requirements, most of these structures are what’s known as “5 over 1” or “one-plus-five”: wood-framed construction, which contain apartments and is known as Type 5 in the International Building Code, over a concrete base, which usually contains retail or commercial space, or parking structures, known as Type 1. Some codes also mandate a modulated facade, or varying exteriors across adjacent buildings to avoid repetition.

Cities’ design review boards can add to the pressures caused by zoning. Ideally, these groups work with architects and developers to improve upcoming buildings and make them more compatible with the neighborhood. Mohler says that’s not always the case; in some cities, there’s a tendency to rubber-stamp structures that have already proven themselves, leading to a formulaic feel.

Code constraints, which allow construction on restricted areas, help create the second major restraint: cost. The reason our cities are filled with so much of the same kind of building is because it’s the cheapest way to build an apartment. In this case, that’s light-frame wood construction, which often uses flat windows that are easy to install; a process called rainscreen cladding to create the skin of the building; as well as Hardie panels, a facade covering made from fiber cement.

The need to cut costs limits facade options, says Black. Hardie Panels run roughly $16 a square foot, roughly the same cost as brick. The next upgrade, metal siding, costs from $25 to $50 a square foot, potentially more than triple the cost.

“Since we’re facing a housing affordability crisis, it makes a certain amount of sense to build a building as affordably as we can,” says Mohler.

According to Black, variation is costly. Many units get made to a standard size, say 12-foot-wide bedrooms. Repeat that a few times per floor, maximized to create rentable space, and you start a domino effect toward generic architecture, because the floor plates end up very similar. Once the interior is laid out, there are ways to make the exterior look more interesting using setbacks, materials, and massing. But giving up space for units and creating more complicated construction plans cuts into profitability.

“The bigger issue is construction costs have escalated pretty significantly over the last two years,” says Black. “We need to deliver a product within a price point. People don’t always understand the margins we work with. We really do want to build something that’ll sparkle and shine and look great from the outside. At the end of the day, we feel like we’re able to do that.”

Some critics dismiss the cost issue as a small piece of a larger problem. Michael Paglia, a writer for Westword in Denver, penned a popular piece about his city’s rash of bad design, “Denver is Drowning in Awful Architecture.” He feels architects aren’t just cost-constrained, but are being left out of the equation. Computer-aided design has led to a degradation of the role of architect, Paglia argued, replacing a noble craft with a series of equations that wring every last bit of value out of a site, aesthetics be damned. Formulaic floorplans are cost effective, while good design is considered an unaffordable luxury, concentrated, like so much else, among the 1 percent.

“I don’t think you can call the designers of these buildings designers or architects,” he told Curbed. “I think accountants are designing these buildings.”

The art of design has become a science, he says, and that’s created another important, but less tangible, constraint on new construction—the loss of construction craft. Paglia feels that construction standards, and the expectations renters have of new buildings, have diminished.

“Many of the renters living in those buildings don’t even know they’re terrible,” he says. “And as far as cost constraints go, talk to someone in Florence, Italy, where there are numerous constraints on development. Nothing is an excuse for bad design.”

Mohler agrees that there are tangible difference between the apartments of today and yesteryear. Older apartment buildings have something that the Hardie-clad structures lack, a certain texture and materiality.

“Today’s flat window may be a great product, easy to install and cost-effective,” he says. “But the depth of facade on older buildings offers a whole new level of detail and scale.”

History judges architecture on a curve

Since the constraints creating the conditions for this generic apartment architecture show little sign of abating, cities may be stuck with buildings like these for the foreseeable future. New construction slowed this year after peaking in 2017, but that still means 283,000 new apartments are expected to be finished by the end of the year, many in this generic style. What happens to them further down the road, decades and generations from now?

“I don’t think these buildings will be around in 40 years. They’ll collapse and be maintenance problems,” says Paglia. “We’ll remember the small sliver of good architecture being built today.”

Mohler, though, thinks time will play a trick on detractors of today’s bland, boxy buildings. He points to neighborhoods of identical bungalows, celebrated and often enshrined as historic districts. At the time they were built, in the early half of the 20th century, they weren’t the product of forward-thinking architects seeking to create character-filled dwellings for today’s homeowners to drool over. They were factoring in cost, code, and craft, and creating their own equations to maximize profit and product. Placing them above today’s building, often meant to meet contemporary needs for affordable housing, can be, as McMansion Hell’s Kate Wagner wrote, a form of “aesthetic moralism.”

“Many of these houses were the same, and many were completely identical to each other because they were being built by a single developer,” Mohler says of past urban developments. “At the time, it was criticized for wasting land and all looking the same. Looking identical today means neighborhood character. If it’s old and looks the same, it’s good, but if it’s new and all looks the same, it’s bad.”

Even Mohler doesn’t say these boxy builds will be celebrated in coming decades. But, arising from an era with an acute housing shortage, perhaps they’ll have kitsch appeal, or be appreciated for what they represent: a part of the solution to today’s housing crisis.

“I’m optimistic that people’s opinions of these buildings will change over time,” he says. “Will they be celebrated? Not likely. But will they be more accepted? Probably.”

Curbed

January 2019

When Cameron Crow, 29, contemplated a move back to his native Boise, Idaho, three years ago, his friends reacted with confusion. At the time, Crow was a data analyst working in San Francisco, the nation’s tech hub; why would he leave that for a small city in Idaho?

Crow said it took a single sentence for them to see the light: “You can easily own a home, have a 10-minute commute to work by bike, and drink $4 craft beers downtown.”

Three years after Crow returned home, becoming a Boise boomerang and starting his own analytics firm, he’s realized he’s in a much different city than the one he grew up in—and the one he pitched to friends. The picturesque metropolitan on the Boise River has boomed. New businesses—and, yes, breweries—have changed the core of a city that’s earned rave reviewsfor its livability and proximity to nature.

The Boise metro area (population 700,000) has also experienced the downsides of rapid growth. Idaho, now the fastest-growing state in the nation, and Boise, a boomtown by many measures, have felt the strain from the city’s recent success. Downtown is straining under traffic problems, and housing costs have skyrocketed. The state projects the region will add another 100,000 residents by 2025.

As Crow says, when people thought of Boise, or Idaho, they usually thought of potatoes, the signature blue field used by Boise State University’s football field (“Smurf turf”), or the film Napoleon Dynamite. Increasingly, the city is also known as a destination for new arrivals, many of them from California, Seattle, and Portland.

Like other smaller Western cities, like Reno, Nevada, and Spokane, Washington, an echo boom—driven by West Coasters priced out of their increasingly expensive metros—is exacerbating the problems of economic growth and a tight housing market. According to the most recent census data, of the roughly 80,000 new Idaho residents in 2016, 17,000 (roughly 21 percent) came from California (hence the term “Californiacation”), and 9,300 came from Washington. Realtor.com found that last quarter, 86 percent of all out-of-state views of Boise listings came from the Golden State. These homebuyers, especially retirees, who cashed out at California or Seattle prices and want to buy in and around Boise, have helped increase the cost of real estate.

The median home price for Ada County, Idaho, which includes Boise, was $209,990 in October 2014, according to Boise Regional Realtors president Phil Mount. Last month, it was $324,950, an increase of nearly 55 percent. The median price jumped 15.2 percent last year alone.

According to Don Day, publisher and writer for BoiseDev, a site that covers local development news, the region is now more sprawling and expensive. Smaller suburbs like Nampa and Meridian are booming and farm roads are being repaved to make way for planned communities. While locals can see the rising housing values, they, unlike new arrivals, can’t trade up.

“At the end of the day, people experience growth personally, through how hard it is to park downtown, how long it takes to get to work, or if their kid can afford a home nearby,” says Jen Schneider, a professor of public policy at Boise State. “I was born and raised here when it was a sleepy town. You can still climb the foothills in the morning and not see anybody. If you start to see those things change, especially due to competition from people coming from California, it’s not just NIMBYism. It’s people holding on to something that’s dear.”

“They’re trying to throw gas on the fire of growth”

Evidence of Boise’s boom is ever-present, according to longtime residents: Microbreweries and condo complexes have sprung up downtown, and dockless electric scooters zip through increasingly congested streets. Tech firms like Payocity have relocated here, boosting the established tech industry in a region historically known as Treasure Valley. Near the Zions Bank Building, a recent addition to Boise’s skyline, the tech investment firm Clearwater Analytics and the Boise State University computer science department are just a few floors from each other at 777 Main Street. Talk about an experiment in synergy.

And more is coming. Expansive planned communities, including a development in nearby Syringa Valley boasting 2,000 homes, seek to turn around the area’s housing shortage; the Boise region has seen a continuous month-over-month inventory decline for the last four years. Two large public projects, including a multipurpose stadium and a $100 million-plus riverfront library designed by Habitat 67 architect Moshe Safdie, would symbolize significant investment in the city’s civic infrastructure. To many, they also symbolize how Boise is changing too fast.

“People are concerned the city is trying to throw gas on the fire of growth,” says Crow. “People think they’re taking any opportunity to grow Boise.”

Boise has experienced booms and busts before, especially during the ’80s and late ’90s. The city’s experience with urban renewal in the ’70s was the subject of a famous Harper’s magazine article, “Tearing Down Boise.”

”If things go on as they are, Boise stands an excellent chance of becoming the first American city to have deliberately eradicated itself,” wrote journalist L.J. Davis. “Downtown Boise gives the impression that it has recently been visited by an exceedingly tidy bombing raid conducted by planes that cleaned up after themselves.”

The current expansion may not even be as big, percentage-wise, as other city growth spurts, says Schneider. But as housing developments and sprawl turn formerly detached suburbs into extended parts of a larger metro area, new industries expand, and new arrivals settle in, the change that many feel is as much about character as population figures.

“People see remote workers here, and worry if this place is becoming an extension of Silicon Valley, in a way,” says BoiseDev’s Day. “People are worried about feeling the same impacts as Palo Alto or the Bay Area, that the new arrivals are hurting their standard of living.”

“The spigot is turned on, stop promoting growth”

Boise’s economic growth and skyrocketing housing prices have many factors beyond an influx of new arrivals from San Francisco and Los Angeles: Low costs, a business-friendly state government, and a backdrop of forests and foothills have each exerted a strong pull. But new Boisians are easy to point to when discussing the region’s increasing affordability problem.

With median home prices north of $300,000, and the median Idaho income measuring roughly $51,000 a year, people may soon be priced out, says Samia Islam, an economics professor at Boise State University. Islam points to the shortage of medium- and high-density housing, as well as the housing consumption gap: Local homeowners can get a great price when they sell their homes, due to recent appreciation, but trading up to accommodate a larger family becomes more challenging. Realtor.com found that someone making the median income could only afford 13 percent of the homes on the market.

“Building condos downtown that are priced at $425,000 and above for single-bedroom downtown apartments are also not reflective of the purchasing power of the average local resident by any measure,” she adds.

Rising prices and rapid change created the perfect conditions for Vanishing Boise, a group founded by Lori Dicaire that bills itself as a collection of smart-growth advocates seeking to preserve the city’s small businesses, landmarks, and farmland in the face of rapid change.

Dicaire argues that, in addition to losing the region’s heritage, the “urban growth machine” is threatening affordability, green space, and connection to nature, leading to the kind of unsustainable policies that pushed new arrivals to move to Boise in the first place. The group, which launched in 2017 and successfully protested the demolition of a downtown apartment building to make way for a CVS, has opposed the library proposal, arguing it uses funds that should be helping working-class Boisians suffering from rising housing costs and should be put to a referendum.

“The spigot is already turned on,” says Dicaire. “Stop promoting the city’s growth.”

In fact, some of the voices pushing back on growth and advocating for Boise to stay just the way it is haven’t been in the city long: After Crow’s return to Boise, he founded a data analytics firm and launched Make Idaho Better, a survey site measures public opinion and offers analysis to local government. His surveys asking Boisians about the city’s housing crunch suggested that those who had recently relocated were more likely to oppose growth.

“They come from LA and see the life they want, and then see it’s on a growth rampage, and then think, ‘I don’t want it to get closer to the place that I left,’” he says.

Boise’s growth challenges city government to evolve

Boise has found itself facing the same challenges as larger cities. Boise State University’s Schneider helped the city run a series of community conversations on growth over the last year to gauge sentiment about the current era of rapid change. The most important issues for residents included housing affordability, transportation and the lack of public transit options, environmental preservation, and a government that was moving too fast to promote development.

According to Mike Journee, the mayor’s director of communications, the city has been working on a series of proposals to tackle the city’s affordable-housing concerns, including creating a housing trust fund and reworking the zoning code to increase density. But Boise, a blue dot in a deep-red state, faces an uphill urban planning battle: With limited powers due to the state constitution’s small-government stance—the city can’t use inclusionary zoning or rent control since those are illegal, or levy a tax to pay for a much-needed expansion of local bus service—it’s hamstrung with a set of legal tools that don’t favor an active city government.

“People who are drawn to Boise now for its small-town charm are likely going to be disappointed if it becomes too much like what they left behind too soon,” says Islam. “But that change is inevitable. Our city is going to continue to evolve, regardless of our preference to keep it the way it is.”

Curbed

February 2019

Chicago’s many nicknames, from the City of Big Shoulders to the City That Works, riff on its reputation as a gritty, hard-working, and down-to-earth alternative to coastal cities.

But the nickname that best characterizes life in Chicago may be the City of Neighborhoods, which reflects its array of diverse, distinct, and close-knit communities.

That sentiment may explain why Lincoln Yards, a new mixed-use mega-development set to reshape a wide swath of the city’s near north side, has angered so many Chicagoans. Estimating total costs to be $6 billion, the proposal, which recently passed an important vote in the Planning Commission after being re-calibrated to reflect community concerns, will ask the city council to approve $900 million in public funding in early March.

Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune architecture critic who shot down earlier versions of the plan, still says the latest version is rife with negative consequences—“snarled streets, bland street facades, and concealed park space”—while three of the city’s largest papers, the Chicago Sun-Timesthe Chicago Tribune, and Crain’s Chicago Business, have all proposed braking or halting the city approval process. “Anyone have a crowbar we can shove into the conveyor belt’s gears?” the Tribune editorial board said of what they called a rushed process.

Lincoln Yards has also led to complaints among the city’s music venues and creative community, since the project would surround the Hideout, a beloved bar and club, and, in an earlier iteration, included new performance venues that were to be run by Live Nation, the concert promoter.

“This isn’t a city within a city; it’s suburb within a city,” says Robert Gomez, owner of the Subterranean, a music club in Wicker Park. “It looks like they took Schaumburg and plopped it in the middle of the Chicago.”

The proposal, and requests for public funding, raise fundamental questions about Chicago’s direction, which could be applied to any U.S. city contemplating large-scale re-development. Can we create working neighborhoods out of whole cloth? Should the public help fund their construction? And, more importantly, can these neighborhoods work for everyone?

“Most people who live and love Chicago celebrate [its] neighborhoods,” says DePaul professor Winifred Curran, who studies sustainable urban development and gentrification. “Lincoln Yards feels homogenizing. It’s not the Chicago people know and love. We’re being asked to put a lot of money into a development that’s not servicing the city as a whole.”

Lincoln Yards is still being promoted as an economic magnet, the kind of mixed-use, walkable, tech-friendly district where business and city tax revenues blossom and the next Amazon could arise.

The economic symbolism of Lincoln Yards

The brainchild of Sterling Bay, a local mega-developer known for transformative projects, including recasting a cold storage warehouse as a Google office, this “city within a city” was master-planned by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), with landscape architecture by James Corner Field Operations, best known for New York’s High Line.

Once spoken of as a possible Amazon HQ2 location, Lincoln Yards is still being promoted as an economic magnet, the kind of mixed-use, walkable, tech-friendly district where business and city tax revenues blossom and the next Amazon could arise. Amid new “character zones,” designed to create more street-level personality among the towers and offices, 23,000 permanent jobs are eventually expected to take root, according to a Sterling Bay spokesperson, and become a “vital economic engine and job creation center.”

Lincoln Yards, set to reshape the former industrial district on the north branch of the Chicago River and bring high-rises to a landscape of warehouses and two- to three-story flats, fits likes a puzzle piece into the city map. Conveniently located near many of the city’s most expensive residential neighborhoods, the 52-acre project would place high-end residential towers, luxury office space, and a network of parks, trails, and 21 acres of riverfront space at a confluence of Lincoln Park, Bucktown, and Old Town. The newest plans include an extension of the city’s 606 bike path and water taxi stops, as well as a relocation and upgrade of the nearby Clybourn Metra station, which would turn the station into a larger, multimodal transit hub.

This development presents a real opportunity to connect and improve the city’s transportation network, says Jim Merrell, advocacy director of the Active Transportation Alliance, not just create a space for cafes and wine bars.

Like New York’s Hudson Yards, a vast repurposing of 20th-century Manhattan rail yards for 21st-century commercial and residential real estate, Lincoln Yards trades on the symbolism of using the infrastructure of the industrial economy to house the tech- and service-based businesses of the future. It’s a common trope, found littered throughout city proposals for Amazon’s new headquarters.

“The reality is, Chicago is shrinking,” says Josh Ellis, vice president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a regional planning group. “Downtown and a few other neighborhoods are growing, but others are shrinking. These large projects, in general, are geared toward stemming the tide of loss, and bringing resources back to the city.”

Despite, or maybe because of, its potential to alter the landscape, Lincoln Yards has been designed to reflect the area’s past. Industrial touches, like truss bridges and repurposed steel from the defunct A. Finkl Steel mill, are meant to show this isn’t being treated as tabula rasa by designers, but as an evolution of an area with important history.

It’s a powerful merger of story and symbolism. But based on the performance of the former industrial district, known as a Planned Manufacturing District, as well as concerns about rising prices, displacement, and density, many housing advocates and community leaders question the rush to break ground.

Does the economy need to double down on technology?

One of the fundamental hopes backers have for Lincoln Yards is that the area will be a new economic hub—and that transforming a riverfront industrial district into a sort of tech village will bring new jobs and development.

But the history of the area not only suggests that many of those changes were already taking place, but that this former industrial site was more successful than many assume.

The proposed boundaries for Lincoln Yards sit atop the city’s first planned manufacturing district (PMD), a zoning designation created in the late ’80s to help save and salvage the city’s manufacturing workforce. By prohibiting residential and most retail use, the idea went, the zoning tweak could keep factories and warehouses in town. DePaul’s Curran says the concept was “wildly successful” and became a national model.

As of a few years ago, the North Branch Corridor was doing just that, according to Michael Holzer, president of the community development group North Branch Works. He told Curbed in 2016 that the area had a 90 percent occupancy rate, with breweries and distilleries clamoring for this type of space. The area’s most famous tenant, A. Finkl & Sons steel mill, didn’t close down; the growing business needed to expand and relocated, on its own timeline, to a bigger facility on the city’s South Side. C.H. Robinson, a large logistics provider, broke ground on a new headquarters in the district last year.

”The PMD has worked, and has helped maintain businesses,” Holzer said in 2016. “There [are] about 10,000 jobs and 400 businesses in the North Branch Corridor, with an average wage of $70,000. We call these ‘head-of-household jobs.’”

It’s true, however, that traditional manufacturing employment has shrunk significantly over time. According to government job numbers provided by Peter Strazzabosco, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Planning and Development, manufacturing land use in this PMD decreased from 73 to 20 percent between 1990 and 2016, while employment in manufacturing declined by more than half between 1988 and 2002, and decreased a further 41 percent between 2002 and 2014.

But the same data shows that from 2002 to 2014, the PMD saw business services jobs increase by 577 percent, and IT & Management sector employment jump 261 percent. Even more encouraging, the area covered by the PMD also saw significant growth in tech jobs before any rezoning or redevelopment, according to city researchUI Labs, a $320 million digital design and manufacturing hub, opened on nearby Goose Island in 2015 to help make Chicago an “epicenter for advanced manufacturing.” And other office space and incubation hubs, such as Lost Arts, have set up shop over the last few years.

That isn’t to say that a redevelopment on the scale of Lincoln Yards wouldn’t kick-start what’s already happening organically, and bring even more entrepreneurs and start-ups to the neighborhood. Years of public meetings and numerous studies have addressed the question of how this area should evolve. But it does call into question the perceived rush to both rezone and provide hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a private development, all in an area that seems to be growing at its own pace.

Who benefits from the new Chicago?

If Lincoln Yards lives up to its potential—both in terms of job creation and facilitating a more walkable, integrated transit network—will it also live up to the promise of working for all Chicagoans? Local politicians and community leaders who oppose the plan point to the affordable housing plans for the project as evidence that it won’t.

According to the most recent proposal, Sterling Bay is asking for the creation of a $900 million TIF, or tax-increment finance district, that would redirect property taxes to pay for infrastructure upgrades to support the mega-development.

The company says it’s a needed investment to transform an underutilized part of the city. In addition, $100 million in industrial corridor bonuses and fees paid by Sterling Bay will support other Chicago PMDs.

“The roads and transit infrastructure in the area are a hinderance to thousands of residents who travel in and around the area daily,” says a Sterling Bay spokesperson. “The TIF will support much-needed and long-overdue infrastructure improvements and untangle the grid as well as provide for new roadways and bridges.”

A number of housing advocates and city aldermen have argued that calling this area “blighted,” as is required for TIF designation, is ridiculous, and that Lincoln Yards doesn’t go nearly far enough in providing on-site affordable housing, which would provide a better link between housing, jobs, and opportunity.

Alderman Ameya Pawar, part of a 10-alderman minority that opposes the Lincoln Yards TIF, says he doesn’t have an issue with density or paying incentives. But he feels the incentive should go toward more affordable housing.

By asking for the TIF, the proposal triggers affordable housing requirements. In this case, according to the most recent proposal, that would mean 1,200 of the 6,000 units would need to be affordable. Sterling Bay has said it will meet the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) and build 300 of those units on-site, and will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund, as well as fines and fees, to support the other 900 units, which fulfills the city’s requirements.

“Segregating affordable housing from these developments encourages segregation,” says Pawar. “They say it’s not paying the city back with the city’s money. Bullshit. I can make a spreadsheet saying what I want to, too.”

Kevin Jackson, executive director of Rehab Chicago, a coalition of affordable housing groups, said that while developments like Lincoln Yards provide jobs and opportunity, the real question is how they help workers in the city’s traditionally underinvested south and west sides.

Setting the precedent for mega-developments to come

Lincoln Yards is far from the only large-scale redevelopment project taking place in Chicago right now, even as political corruption scandals affecting two powerful aldermen, Ed Burke and Danny Solis, rock city politics. Another big riverfront parcel pursued by developers at Related Midwest, called the 78, is moving forward, and many observers expect the Michael Reese Hospital complex in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood to also start taking shape. In many ways, Lincoln Yards will become a precedent.

“I think Lincoln Yards and the 78 should be rebooted,” says Pawar. “These are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to build mixed-income communities, and get lots of affordable housing on-site, and start chipping away on the city’s legacy of segregation.”

Everyone agrees that area encompassed by Lincoln Yards has incredible potential, and that the project could be a catalyst, changing the city and its economy for the better. How the city funds these types of developments going forward, and how Chicago and other cities decide to develop their economies, hits at the intersection of inequality and opportunity that is often so stubbornly entrenched.

“Maybe it wasn’t the prettiest example of what happens in the city, but that industrial area had actual value,” says Curran. “We need to think about things that build capacity for people who live in the city now, and build on the strengths of people who are already here—not attract some elite cosmopolitan class.”

Curbed

March 2019

Along with dog parks and third-wave coffee shops, the high-end, over-amenitized apartment has become a contemporary urban cliche. Luxury apartments aren’t new. But today’s developers have elevated to an art form the practice of including amenities that pander to millennial lifestyle trends.

In Seattle, where the Amazon-fueled boom in luxury high-rises added so much inventory that rents at the top of the market have actually dropped, everything from a bowling alley and arcade to a communal treehouse have been built as bait to attract new tenants. Contemporary New York apartments offer dog yoga and guitar lessons. In Detroit, planned developments feature smart lockers, pre-installed smart home assistants, sky terraces with fire pits, and on-site vehicles for rent. In San Diego, the forthcoming development features an infinity hallway, a vaulted mailroom lined with gold, an outdoor chef’s pavilion, an open-air garden in the round, a maker’s space, and a design scheme that references technological progress, from the industrial revolution to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The artist’s loft at Makers Quarter features a a loom, vintage drafting tables and Toledo chairs, and custom pivoting invisible white boards.
Right off the main lobby, the Infinity Hallway was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Gold Mail Room was inspired by the concept of silver, gold, and oil. A local artist rendered a custom black Venetian plaster with gold leaf.

Are these amenities a bit over the top? Definitely. But they reflect significant shifts in how apartment dwellers—and developers—think high-rise living should evolve. The nation will need to add 4.6 million new units by 2030 just to keep up with the demand for apartment living, according to “Disruption,” a report by the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC). The building boom has forced the industry to be more anticipatory as it tries to design units that are “more personalized, flexible and adaptable to changing lifestyles and needs.”

“The top two ways to separate yourself in a market that’s seen so much activity is adding an infusion of technology, and giving your residence some kind of identity,” says Shauntá Bruner, a senior associate with Delta Associates, a commercial real estate research firm. “Everybody has a rooftop grilling area or a dog park. Successful developers need to create things that tell a story and tie together the community.”

Bruner says that this boils down to better tech and more services. A majority of younger renters agree: 58 percent of millennials surveyed in the NMHC’s 2018 Consumer Housing Insights Survey believe apartments should provide helpful services and amenities for the surrounding community.

Smart apartment technology—especially when it comes to locks, in-building messaging, and energy efficiency—has attracted greater interest from landlords, developers, and tech firms, says Zach Aarons, a co-founder of real estate technology, or proptech, venture capital fund MetaProp. Newer buildings, like the Eugene, just one block from New York’s Hudson Yards megadevelopment and tricked out with tech-enabled concierge service LIVunLtd, exemplify this trend.

“It’s going to be a required thing,” says Aarons. “Developers will feel they need to pre-wire their apartments.”

Technology and services trump gyms and rooftops

Though it may seem like sheer marketing, there are economic motives fueling the amenity wars. Developers feel challenged by restrictive zoning, as well as rising labor, land, and construction costs, which make it harder to turn a profit on a building that’s not decked out for high-income renters.

And high-income renters are a growing demographic. The number of renters making over $100,000 increased by 5 percent nationwide in 2017, according to the most recent rental-market report from Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies, while 19 percent of Americans making six figures rented, an all-time high. The competition for these renters has increased the pressure to add more amenities. In 2016, 86 percent of new apartments offered swimming pool access, and 89 percent had in-unit laundry, according to Harvard figures.

Renters who pay a premium want ease and convenience, and increasingly, that’s translating into a desire for more services, better technology, and new spaces that can accommodate both.

“As technology gets more advanced, so do amenities,” says Caitlin Walter, vice president of research at the National Multifamily Housing Council. “The old fitness center with treadmills and weights isn’t going to cut it. Now, renters want a Peloton.”

Reflecting shifts toward e-commerce and online shopping, one of the most popular new amenities is package delivery services, Walter says, including dedicated lockers. Some are even configured for laundry or refrigerated to hold grocery deliveries. Many of the new upscale urban apartments include smart locks, which not only reflect a more app-centric existence but, by making it possible to remotely control entry and exit, streamline access for the new generation of online service providers.

While adding smart home tech to apartments can be complicated owners find value in creating more efficient buildings and offering more services. Hello Alfred, the concierge service startup, and Baroo, which offers walking and doggie daycare services, have used mobile tech and increasingly wired apartments as a means to reach customers in high-rent areas. Emerging companies like Dwello, a payment system that functions like Venmo for rent, and Amenify, a platform that connects renters with a number of service and “experience” providers, have both moved the landlord-tenant relationship online and made it more robust.

Taken together, there’s a concerted push to create digital platforms for apartment living, and offer easier access for digital providers of cleaning services, dinner delivery, and other deliveries.

Creating community in apartment buildings

What these technological solutions offer in ways to simplify life with the tap of a phone screen, they often lack in human connection. Perhaps thanks to the rise of tech amenities in high-end apartments, the desire for community as an amenity has grown. It’s not just about offering community gardens or rooftops; it’s about planning events and finding ways to link residents.

As Delta Associates’s Bruner puts it, that means “bringing in a yoga instructor, not just creating a yoga studio.”

Bruner finds the best property managers have turned features into events, and find more creative ways to make use of areas like communal kitchens. Two apartment complexes in the Washington, D.C., area, the Pearl in Silver Springs, Maryland, and the Ten at Clarendon, in Arlington, Virginia, feature community gardens, a particularly popular amenity. But the management companies go one step beyond and contract with a local gardening company, Love & Carrots, which provides residents with monthly samples of vegetables and herbs harvested on the premises and demos preparations for these ingredients.

Many properties now hire outside companies to manage resident events. Michael Wittich, co-owner of Axiom Amenities, works in New York City and a handful of other metro areas and helps plan community events for apartment owners and property managers.

“Amenities aren’t what’s selling units anymore,” he says. “Oftentimes, renters live on a floor with 15 other people, and don’t know any of their names. People just don’t want to interact with each other; they’re just not used to doing it. We’re helping that along, and breaking down those barriers.”

Data from recent NMHC surveys suggest community is top-of-mind for renters. The 2018 Consumer Housing Insights Survey found that 83 percent of respondents believed face-to-face socializing with friends and family is an important housing feature, while 58 percent believed apartments should “provide helpful services and amenities for the surrounding community.”

Creating a specific community, and using it as a selling point, informs the business plan of KIN, a family-focused coliving community devised by developer Tishman Speyer and coliving operator Common. According to Brad Hargreaves, Common’s founder, KIN will be a testing ground for a new ground-up app that Common’s tech team designed for residents to communicate, meet each other, and ideally form community.

“The really, really interesting stuff comes from unlocking the idea of density, when you have a lot of people with similar needs in one place,” he says. “I think the basic level of success for KIN is if we’re getting residents to book and share babysitters together through the app. That’s the kind of thing residential operators haven’t done in the past, and it’s a big opportunity.”

Hargreaves, who has promoted Common and coliving as vehicles to build community in our estranged digital age, says that 70 percent of his company’s residents have moved to a city for the first time. Of course, as a coliving space, Common serves a specific clientele. But that statistic just illustrates the potential power landlords, developers, and property managers have to shape spaces made for community and relationships.

“Having connections based on shared interests is table stakes,” says Hargreaves. “As a residential operator, I want to make sure we exercise that power and serve that up to our members.”

Curbed

May 2019

Like many born and raised in Bakersfield, California, Austin Smith has made peace with the city’s reputation. Built on oil and agriculture, the city of half a million in the state’s rural Central Valley, known by outsiders for its unique strain of country music and long-running role as a punchline for Johnny Carson, has traditionally been stereotyped as unsophisticated and backwards.

“It’s like a California version of the New York versus New Jersey thing—but maybe worse,” Smith says. “You’re so close to one of the biggest metro areas in the country, but never quite there.”

Like many of his generation, Smith, 37, moved to bigger cities in search of opportunity. In his case, he sought work in urban planning and commercial development in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. But as he developed a passion for downtown revitalization, he began wondering, why not Bakersfield? He returned to his hometown in 2014 with a hunch that the city was ripe for redevelopment, and soon began work on what would become the 17th Place Townhomes.

Since opening in 2016, the high-end three-story, 44-unit downtown development represents the first market-rate housing built in the city’s core in decades. It’s not every day the city gets new housing, complete with a dog park, fountains, and a fire pit. Now that the development is fully leased—not a small accomplishment for new housing asking the highest rent in town, at between $1,630 and $1,830 for a two-bedroom—its success has convinced Smith and his firm, Sage Equities Real Estate, to break ground later this year on a new 53-unit project downtown.

“What we’re doing is a real niche product,” he says. “But you can really start seeing people get excited about this neighborhood.”

As in just about every other small- or medium-sized U.S. city experiencing a downtown rebirth, opportunity and affordability have drawn many millennials to return to Bakersfield and kickstart new businesses.
Since opening in 2016, the 17th Place Townhomes development represents the first market-rate housing built in the city’s core in decades.

A bet on Bakersfield and rebuilding downtown

Smith’s bet on Bakersfield represents a new era of development, however small, for this Central Valley city. A recent report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) found Bakersfield to have one of the highest rates of millennial movers and homeowners, setting off a series of stories written with a tone of “wait, that Bakersfield?” as if it were a shock that somebody might find the city was both a good value and a good opportunity.

After all, compared to coastal California, where were the high-paying tech jobs and new homes? When California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state’s troubled high-speed rail project would focus on the Bakersfield to Merced section, connecting two Central Valley locations, many rail supporters felt Newsom was saying the train would never connect to LA or San Francisco.

But, as in just about every other small- or medium-sized U.S. city experiencing a downtown rebirth, opportunity and affordability have drawn many millennials, like Smith, to return to their hometowns and kickstart new businesses. Bakersfield may be starting later than most, but it’s following the same narrative, led by a core group of early supporters and entrepreneurs.

The 17th Place Townhomes helped bring more attention to a newly christened neighborhood, Eastchester, that’s beginning to blossom, and includes restaurants, coffee shops, and new businesses. In this formerly industrial stretch of town, business owners are finding new uses for old buildings, including Cafe Smitten, another Smith project, and Dot x Ott, a just-opened seasonal kitchen that sources its produce from a farm 10 miles away.

Though tiny, the downtown turnaround is palpable, says Debbie Lewis, a wealth manager who moved back to Bakersfield a few years ago.

“The downtown that I grew up hearing about and knew as a young adult was a ghost town that people were hesitant to visit and a place that businesses had a hard time sustaining,” she says. “Now, it appears to be growing at a slow but steady pace and an inspiring amount of businesses have are continuing to decide to take that leap, get creative, and get in on the action. People are starting to see the positive impact of investing more care, money, and time in our downtown.”

While the city’s current growth spurt has been out, not up, as nearby farmland has been turned into housing developments, there are a lot of buildings with good bones downtown, according to Gunnar Hand, an urban designer with architecture and planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Hand led a team that devised a new downtown plan for Bakersfield in 2016, in anticipation of the arrival of high-speed rail. They found the beginning stages of placemaking investments had already laid the groundwork for the nexus of new downtown development.

“This is, for lack of a better term, a third-tier city that’s only now coming around to urban revitalization,” says Hand. “Los Angeles is 20 to 30 years into revitalizing its downtown. Kansas City, [Missouri], my hometown, is 10 years in. Bakersfield is in, like, year one.”

Moving back and making a new start

When talking to Bakersfield residents who left town for college or careers and have now returned as older adults, affordability is a constant theme.

It helps in California to have housing that’s actually affordable. With a median home value of $241,000 as of last March, and median starter homes beginning at just $145,300 according to Zillow, it’s no surprise that the median age of a first-time buyer in Bakersfield is just 33. The city’s sprawling growth pattern has played a big role in creating cheap housing; as the city and metro region grew out, Bakersfield’s population ballooned from 70,000 in 1970 to more than 380,000 today.

According to NAR researcher Nadia Evangelou, these newly arrived millennials can afford to buy nearly 15 percent of homes currently listed for sale in Bakersfield, compared to only 4 percent in Los Angeles.

“Millennials still move to big metro areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco,” she says. “But we see that they don’t stay in these areas, because of weak affordability conditions.”

The Eastchester neighborhood in Bakersfield.

But the real draw goes beyond affordability. Cheaper housing enables many of the Bakersfield boomerangs to buy rather than rent, have a better quality of life, and start businesses, all of which might be unaffordable in other California cities.

For Jessie Blackwell, a cofounder of Dot x Ott, the seasonal restaurant and market just a few blocks from the 17th Place Townhomes, now is the perfect time to open a new kind of business in town. The restaurant, which opened last month, is taking advantage of the region’s wealth of farms and fresh produce in a way that just wasn’t really done here just a decade ago.

“There’s a food movement here,” she says. “You can see it in the revitalization of downtown, and the handful of farm-to-table restaurants that have come to town. In the last five years, you’ve just seen this boom in farmers markets and so many more local options.”

Melissa Delgado is a product manager for an agriculture company who returned to town in 2011 after studying in San Diego. She found that the city, with its low cost of living, was perfect for growing her career. With the $2,000 or more she would be spending per month on rent elsewhere, she’s been able to buy a house.

“When I first came back here, I hated it,” she says. “I wanted to go right back to the city. But I’ve been able to grow my career here, and the style of living is just so much better.”

Daniel Cater, an architect and designer who recently returned to town with his wife three years ago, has found great opportunity since moving home (Smith hired him to design the townhome project).

“You’re beginning to see a city of half a million support innovation and change,” he says. “For me, it’s exciting to watch a city that hasn’t really found itself, where the entrepreneurial spirit is alive. It’s fun to be in a place where you can get to know the people making an impact, and make an impact yourself.”

The original SOM plan for Bakersfield would be to connect the city’s historic core, Mill Creek, and forthcoming high-speed rail station. 

Placemaking and the Padre Hotel

Most of the Bakersfield residents interviewed for this story noted that a lot of the new energy downtown comes from people who have returned after moving away, not a flood of new arrivals from other parts of the state or country. There’s still a relatively tight-knit circle of businesses and entrepreneurs in town, often built on local networks. Smith’s dad, for instance, is city Councilmember Bob Smith. And compared to the urban renaissances touted in other cities, Bakersfield’s new developments are not linked to any kind of broad apartment-building boom or big economic expansion yet.

But the catalysts for such change seem to be in place: Two local groups, Kern Economic Development Corporation, a traditional local business group, and Be In Bakersfield, a grassroots nonprofit that promotes new local businesses, have started marketing the city as a place of opportunity.

With some additional investments in transit and placemaking, Bakersfield also has the potential to truly activate its downtown. According to SOM’s Hand, when the firm studied the city in 2016, it found that much of the infrastructure for downtown growth was already finished or in the works. As part of a larger community redevelopment project, Bakersfield developed Mill Creek, a River Walk-style public space and linear park lined with theaters and new businesses. It opened in 2010.

Many of SOM’s suggestions—to create new transit links, connect the city’s already impressive bike lane network, and tie together disparate parts of downtown—have already been done or are in development.

“Our main suggestion was to create infill that brings together Mill Creek with the downtown core,” he says. “That’s already happening now, without the rail station being built.”

In addition to larger urban plans setting the table for more dense development, the successful redevelopment of the Padre Hotel also served as a marker and milestone for downtown. A landmark from the ’20s that reopened in 2010, the ornate hotel at 18th and H streets, a four-star property in the Central Valley, showed many that the city’s stock of old buildings held promise.

“The 17th Place Townhomes and the Padre Hotel are landmark projects for a town this size,” says Hand. “They signal something to the market that didn’t exist before, and it’s starting to snowball. There are local developers taking note.”

A landmark from the ’20s that reopened in 2010, the ornate hotel at 18th and H streets, a four-star property in the Central Valley, showed many that the city’s stock of old buildings held promise. 

Continuing challenges to building a better Bakersfield

Bakersfield has gained momentum, but it still has a ways to go. Like many Central Valley cities, such as Merced, it’s pushing to diversify economically and build new industries, as well as regain the attention of state government after being ignored for many years.

As part of a larger demographic trend statewide, however, these Central Valley cities have seen more attention from new arrivals. Interior metros like Riverside, Fresno, and Sacramento have seen net domestic migration rise from 2012, when this region collectively lost 4,000 people, to 2017, when 38,000 arrived. At the same time, coastal parts of California have grown at a much slower pace, two-thirds less in 2017 than in 2012.

To capitalize on its growing population, Bakersfield’s economy needs to expand beyond health care, agriculture, and oil, and the region needs to invest in creating a more educated workforce. According to the Brookings Institution, among those ages 25 to 34 in the Bakersfield area, 29 percent are in poverty and only 14 percent graduated from college. The city’s persistent problems with air pollution, some of the worst in the state and nation, give potential residents pause.

“We have historically relied on cyclical industries like oil and agriculture, but the truth is, that’s not the future of where the world is moving,” says Anna Smith, a columnist for the Bakersfield Californian, and Austin’s wife. “We need to diversify, and bringing new minds here who have lived in other places is key to the 21st century.”

Anna Smith, like others, has pinned some hope on Newsom’s commitment to the Central Valley, including high-speed rail and other economic plans. Proposals at the local level, like Measure N, an initiative to revive state-funded community development, and a forthcoming update to the city’s general plan, could help finish out some of the placemaking plans SOM and others have proposed to knit together Bakersfield’s downtown.

“Newsom has the opportunity to show us that he can make connections here,” says Smith.

Coming back to feel more connected

The small cadre of new businesses, and Bakersfield residents returning home, suggests a similar story—like those in places like Memphis, Tennessee, or Louisville, Kentucky—is starting to play out. Bakersfield hasn’t had a downtown boom, at least not yet, but the seeds have been planted.

As Debbie Lewis, the wealth manager, suggests, there’s a hunger among young adults to make a mark on their environment.

“They don’t just want to be one of the millions of people swallowed by social media and all the reminders that we’re broke and don’t have any money,” she says. “All that negativity is pushing people to connect with a place and make a difference, and I think that’s possible here in Bakersfield.”

Or, as Anna Smith suggests, affordability isn’t the entire answer, it’s just the beginning. Without the pressure to pay for increasingly high rents, having more time to focus on passion projects and community engagement makes a real difference.

“If you want to say it’s just about affordable housing, that’s not all there is the Bakersfield,” she says. “Young professionals can come here, start a business, and find lower barriers to entry. Most importantly, they can feel connected to the community and make a real impact.”

Curbed

May 2019

When country music megastars George Strait and Alan Jackson performed “Murder on Music Row” live during the 1999 Country Music Association Awards show, the two singers used the song’s blunt lyrics to critique the radio-friendly sheen of contemporary country and its threat to traditional songwriting and artistry.

Anyone familiar with the country music world immediately understood the reference to Nashville’s Music Row. This modest strip of homes and offices clustered southwest of downtown Nashville is considered the heart and soul of country music, and contains a critical mass of songwriters, recording studios, publishing houses, and industry figures unmatched anywhere else in the country. A 2013 analysis by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce’s found the region’s music industry, which is largely contained by this small neighborhood, generates $9.7 billion in economic activity each year, representing 56,000 jobs.

When Strait and Jackson uttered their particularly savage broadside—”Nobody saw him running from 16th Avenue / They never found the fingerprint or the weapon that was used / But someone killed country music, cut out its heart and soul / They got away with murder down on Music Row”—it’s a good bet that more than a few in the audience could picture those famous blocks.

Construction cranes dot the skyline of Nashville in March 2018. 

Today, Music Row isn’t stalked by a metaphorical killer. But the threat to the heritage and musical legacy of this historic neighborhood is real: Nashville’s last decade of booming growth, rising real estate prices, and furious pace of new residential construction has meant this unique center of creativity and artistry is facing pressure from development, which has already led to the demolition and displacement of former studios. The National Trust, one of the nation’s foremost historic preservation group, just placed the area on the 2019 edition of its America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list.

It’s all part of the rapid change rippling across the region. James Fraser, an urban studies professor who used to teach in Nashville, estimates the city is short 30,000 units of affordable housing, and told the Wall Street Journal that the city is at risk of becoming a “chic urban playground for the wealthy.”

The alarm has been raised, successfully in some cases, to preserve parts of Music Row: Indie rocker Ben Folds drew attention to the plight of Studio A, which has since been saved, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation has studied, chronicled, and cataloged the neighborhood’s history since 2015. But without a comprehensive strategy, buildings and studios continue to be bought, demolished, and turned into offices or apartments.

According to records kept by Carolyn Brackett, an expert on Music Row who works for the National Trust, 50 buildings in the neighborhood have been lost to demolition since 2013 to make way for apartments and even a new Virgin Hotel. Between 2000 and 2012, just 13 were demolished.

Nashville’s planning department, as well as preservation advocates and members of the music community, believe they have the beginnings of a solution. The new Music Row Vision Plan, introduced in late April, hopes to preserve the past while allowing the district to grow and prosper in the future.

According to records kept by Carolyn Brackett, an expert on Music Row who works for the National Trust, 50 buildings in the neighborhood have been lost to demolition since 2013.
Pressure from surrounding neighborhoods such as the Gulch and Midtown has led some developers to demolish Music Row buildings to make way for new apartment or condo developments.

More than two years in the making, after extensive input from studio owners and neighborhood groups, the Vision Plan isn’t the whole solution to what ails Music Row; current businesses still have to contend with the larger challenges of an evolving music industry. But the hope is that this combination of zoning changes, new schemes to fund historical preservation, and placemaking and transit improvements will help protect the dynamic cultural district, and perhaps offer a blueprint for other neighborhoods facing similar challenges.

“If we don’t preserve the character of Music Row today, then we lose some of what makes Nashville unique, and a reason that people want to come here,” says Sean Braisted, public information officer for the city’s Metro Planning Department. “There are religious undertones to the history of Music Row. For people to make that pilgrimage, that character needs to be well preserved.”

The original innovation district

Nashville is a much different place now than it was when Music Row started taking shape after World War II. Today, the city is in the midst of a huge expansion in business, real estate, and tourism. The region’s population grew 45 percent between 2000 and 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, hitting 1.9 million. This explosive growth has transformed neighborhoods near or adjacent to Music Row, like the Gulch and Midtown, the latter of which has seen a 176 percent jump in property values since 2010.

Last year, Amazon announced it was bringing an Operations Center of Excellence, and an estimated 5,000 jobs, to town. Also in 2018, the city welcomed a record 15.2 million visitors, leading to the famous strip of honky-tonks on Broadway being invaded by beer bikes and bachelorette parties.

When Music Row started taking its modern form in the ’50s, Nashville was a relatively sleepy Southern city. To accommodate postwar growth, the city’s planning commission decided to permit residential areas near downtown to be zoned commercial. Seeing a future marked by lower overhead, the music industry began setting up shop in homes in and around 16th and 17th avenues south. In 1954, brothers Owen and Harold Bradley became pioneers, establishing Bradley Film and Recording Studios, later called the Quonset Hut Studio, on 16th Avenue, and opening the first of many modern major label studios in the neighborhood.

A view of the offices and studios of Capitol Records in the area known as Music Row in October 1965 in Nashville, Tennessee. 
Country music guitarist Chet Atkins standing in front of RCA recording studio. 

Soon, a flood of studios and related businesses would transform the surrounding streets and alleyways into a musical mecca. By the ’60s, Nashville used Music City as part of its marketing message, and hundreds of businesses, including publishing houses and offices for major labels—as well as cafes, bars, and anything related to music—had opened for business. In 1965, Chet Atkins, a famous guitarist and record producer, built the famed Studio A, which has hosted recording sessions by legends like Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and the Beach Boys, as well as contemporary country stars like Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, and Miranda Lambert.

When the National Trust began researching the history of Music Row—which led to the entire area being declared a National Treasure in 2015—it sought comparative examples in other cities famous for being musical hubs, like Detroit and Chicago.

Not only was there more activity in Nashville’s Music Row than comparable areas in LA or New York, says Brackett, but the trust determined the interconnectedness of the music industry in Nashville was literally one of a kind. A survey conducted earlier this year of the Music Row Business Association found that half of area businesses are music-related.

“Music Row is exactly the kind of cultural district that many other cities have been trying to create,” said Katherine Malone-France, interim chief preservation officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “The sweeping arc of the past and present of the music industry can be felt in Nashville’s modest late-19th century bungalows and small-scale commercial buildings that have inspired and incubated the creation of music for generations.”

The ability to interact with all levels and aspects of the industry in just a few square blocks is an irreplaceable advantage, says Pat McMakin, a member of the neighborhood steering committee that helped shape the new Music Row Vision Plan, as well as a studio owner and long-time employee of Music Row businesses. When he produced records in the ’90s, he remembers taking artists on trips to songwriters, literally shopping for songs with four or five different publishing houses during the course of a day. During a lunch break, he might meet someone with studio space to record those songs, or even make a deal with a record executive.

“It’s so important to have proximity and serendipity,” says McMakin. “It’s like Google’s campus. They’re building a space for people to meet and interact now. We’ve had this for the last 50 years.”

A proposed public space in Music Row, updated with more walkable streets and green space. 

How the Music Row Vision Plan helps

The new Music Row Vision Plan attempts to preserve and protect the neighborhood by recognizing one of the tricky aspects of maintaining a creative, cultural business district. If the only issue was protecting the architectural heritage of the neighborhood, then existing historical district rules would suffice.

But as the industry and specific companies evolve and require more office space, hard and fast restrictions that protect heritage and restrict growth may do harm while trying to do good. By its nature, such an area needs to continue to grow to evolve.

In fact, the city struggled with this issue before, and in 2015, issued a blanket ban on official code changes. Instead of stopping development, the freeze—and a lack of proper guard rails to steer Music Row development in a sustainable direction—led to a rush of specific plan (SP) rezoning projects, limited exceptions to existing rules. According to Brackett, since 2013, 64 percent of the new apartment and condo development projects encroaching on Music Row are SP projects.

“Music Row is unique in that it started as a residential neighborhood, with houses turned into office spaces, and that worked a lot better when it was all a small, fledgling industry,” says Braisted. “This planning process allowed us to think a little more broadly about what we’re trying to preserve. Is it the businesses themselves, or the character of the neighborhood? The plan does both.”

The Vision Plan tries to strike the right balance with zoning shifts, business incentives and support, and placemaking. First, the plan divides Music Row into four character areas, offering suggestions and support for each. Critically, the northern area, near Nashville’s fast-developing residential areas, would be upzoned as sort of a release valve for development.

Bigger music labels that need more office space can concentrate their multistory structures in this area, according to Braisted. There’s even a call to allow businesses to swap their zoning allowances, known as a Transfer of Development Rights ordinance, meaning smaller studios in other Character Areas, where taller buildings wouldn’t be allowed, could sell these rights to other developers and turn a profit.

On the business front, the plan calls for the creation of a private business association to represent the music industry, manage tourism, and push for affordability. The neighborhood would also be designated a Cultural Industry District, and there are suggestions to start a revolving preservation fund, which would create a trust to invest in and preserve properties, with the aim of providing cheap rent to music-business startups.

To encourage easier circulation, historical awareness, and safer and easier transit, and further tie together Music Row, the plan also includes a number of placemaking suggestions, including more pedestrian-focused streetscapes, new and expanded park space, and historic markers.

The city hasn’t run a cost analysis yet, says Braisted, because most of the plan involves rule changes and encouraging private investment, with city only paying to add transit and green space.

These ideas gel with what Jamie Bennet, executive director of ArtPlace America, considers best practice when it comes to protecting and expanding such cultural districts.

”When I’ve seen districts created, cities tend to enter that conversation with a focus on honoring the past or reinventing for the future,” he told Curbed. “In reality, you need to do both. You need to honor what made the area like it is, and build in adaptability for the future.”

The National Trust, however, along with its local partner Historic Nashville, disagrees with certain aspects of the plan; the group wants to ban increased building heights and allow owners of historic buildings to sell their developments rights to other parts of Nashville. Allowing these options would change the fabric of the neighborhood. A letter the Trust submitted to the Metro Planning commission argues that “the plan does not include a strong historic preservation component, which is essential to protecting the overall look, feel, and context of Music Row.”

The continuing threat to preservation and protection

Currently open for public comments through June 3, the plan goes up for a vote by the city’s planning commission on June 13. But an effort like this can’t come soon enough when the goal is to put safeguards in place.

According to Brackett, five Music Row buildings were demolished last year, and six are slated to go down this year. All of the Music Row buildings that have previously been listed on the local preservation group Historic Nashville’s annual “Nashville Nine” watch list have been torn down. And more properties and studios continue to be sold, offering the potential for even more high-end residential development.

The Tracking Room, close to Music Row and the scene of recording sessions by Chet Atkins, U2, and Donna Summer, just hit the market for $4.1 million. It’s reminiscent of the story of Studio A, which, before being saved, was purchased for $4 million by a developer looking to turn it into condos. According to Nate Greene, the agent with Colliers representing the seller, the Tracking Room’s fate could go either way; the significant studio could remain part of the music industry, or be bought, knocked down, and turned into high-end residential units.

“It’s such an active market, cranes are everywhere, and the activity is very much spread out,” Greene says. “The major studios are sticking around, but the smaller, less significant ones, their days are numbered.”

In an age when citiesdevelopers, and colleges are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build innovation districts and startup spaces to foster new business ideas and collaboration, Nashville’s Music Row offers an existing and thriving blueprint for building a creative campus. The question facing city leaders, studio owners, and preservationists is how they can best guarantee music is being made on 16th Avenue for generations to come.

“If you don’t have the plan, you’ll see more haphazard growth, without an eye toward the character of the neighborhood,” says Braisted. “It’s about market forces. This is a way to create incentives for good development, while protecting people’s investment and the heritage of the area.”

Curbed

June 2019

Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the Southeast’s biggest cities, is short 34,000 affordable housing units. A booming job market has attracted 100,000 new households to the city since 2000, and supply hasn’t kept up with demand. In Salt Lake City, Utah, there are more families than available places to live, a shortage of about 54,000 units. It’s the most severe manifestation of pricing pressure in a state where housing costs can run higher than both Las Vegas and Phoenix. This deficit comes after a year when Salt Lake City led the nation in homebuilding. In Columbus, Ohio, the housing market has cooled after ever-higher prices exhausted buyers who simply can’t keep up with rising costs.

“The sweet spots are still a challenge, but there’s no sweet spot in the high end,” Andrew Show, a local realtor, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Three of the nation’s fastestgrowing cities, all far from the craziness of real estate in coastal markets, all building at a relatively speedy clip, and all with popular neighborhoods, boasting year after year of rising prices, have become too expensive for a greater number of potential owners and renters.

When policymakers and pundits talk about the nation’s affordable housing crisis, they usually talk about the forces that deny low-income Americans reliable and accessible housing near better jobs and educational opportunity. And they should; it’s not just a national crisis and widespread policy failure, but a moral crisis for the world’s richest nation.

But new research shows that the shocking realities of the nation’s affordability crisis—8 million renters pay more than half their income on rent, and the country is short 7.2 million affordable housing units, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition—have begun to metastasize and impact the middle class.

A new paper by Jenny Schuetz, a housing policy fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, found that some of the severe affordability issues impacting low-income Americans have crept into the lower-middle class and, without action, will get worse. In “Cost, crowding, or commuting? Housing stress on the middle class,” Schuetz looked at census data to find the impact of a decade when housing costs rose faster than average incomes.

Her nuanced conclusions suggest that, on an aggregate national level, there isn’t a middle-class housing crisis. High-cost metros like Seattle and San Francisco unquestionably have challenges, and, of course, low-income households are stretched like crazy. But it depends on how you look at the data.

If you break down the nation into five income groups, the crises faced by the fifth group—or the lowest-income—are increasingly being seen within the fourth group, the lower-middle class. The fifth of the country with the lowest income spends 60 percent of their money on housing, while the next-lowest fifth spends 40 percent, both significantly higher than the 30 percent recommended by economists.

“The issues facing low-income Americans are now showing up in lower-middle-income Americans, and I think that’s something we should worry about,” says Schuetz. “It’s a national pattern. That group is spending more money on rent everywhere, in Cleveland and not just in California.”

Other studies point to a similar kind of strain. Research from Berkadia, a Berkshire Hathaway company, found that the lower-middle income bracket, which it qualified as earning $35,000 to $49,999 between 2012 and 2017, has been hit hard, with 6 percent growth in rent-stressed families during that time period. Cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Omaha, Nebraska, have become challenging for renters, with 40 percent or more of families identifying as rent-burdened.

It’s easier to focus on the extremes of the housing shortage, both the rising levels of poverty and homelessness and the seven-figure spec mansions of the tech jet set. But the creeping cost of housing is pinching a middle class already struggling with flat wages, rising child care costs, and the skyrocketing price tag of a four-year college degree. This “middle-class squeeze,” as a 2014 report by the Center for American Progress illuminated, was about new constraints, and how “the costs of key elements of middle-class security rose by more than $10,000 in the 12 years from 2000 to 2012, at a time when this family’s income was stagnant.”

Housing unaffordability isn’t the cause of the crisis, per se. But with the cost of everything else rising, it’s not surprising that formerly stable families feel squeezed by even slight increases in housing costs, and that overall growth is hampered by a middle class barely able to pay the bills and put their kids through school.

Aren’t we already in a crisis?

Middle-class Californians, many of whom have recently moved to other, more affordable, areas in the West, like Boise, Idaho, and most new homebuyers looking to buy in the nation’s largest cities, would probably tell you there’s long been an affordability crisis across the income spectrum. And it’s an issue that’s grown over decades: According to a 2017 report done by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, the median price of single-family housing in the U.S. outgrew the rise in median household income by 390 percent between January 1986 and July 2017.

Schuetz’s analysis for Brookings found that lower-middle-income renters and homeowners continue to be forced to make the traditional trade-offs, sacrificing a combination of cost, commute time, and home size for proximity to big-city job markets. It’s all part of the agglomeration crisis, the clustering of jobs and opportunities in specific metros.

What Schuetz has identified as a newer aspect of the problem is the decision by city governments to cut back on housing production via restrictive codes and zoning, which only drives up land prices (the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that the cost of land skyrocketed by 76 percent from 2000 to 2016). Big, productive, and progressive cities have hampered their housing supply with very deliberate policy choices.

“Waving our hands and saying we can’t do anything to fix it gives a pass to local government who have made very bad decisions,” says Schuetz. “As the cost burden of housing keeps inching its way up the income spectrum, if we don’t see that as a problem and change the housing delivery system, it will become a middle-income crisis in more widespread terms.”

If this is what the housing market can produce in a good economy, what will happen to homebuilding if we fall into a recession? A report from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank found that during the last 10 years of economic expansion the annual rate of single-family home starts was 25 percent below ’90s levels. The current rate of construction relative to the number of households is at its lowest levels since the ’50s, the earliest date at which this kind of reliable nationwide data is available.

Schuetz believes cities need to ramp up affordable housing production. Will newly rising metros like Denver, Austin, and Nashville act in time to stem rampant price inflation? Or will they fall into the same trap as other, larger metros?

There are also increased calls for state-level intervention, to overrule failed policies at the local level. The repeated, and so far unrealized, push for SB 50, California’s transit-oriented zoning bill, as well as the successful passage of statewide rent control in Oregon, demonstrate the public’s hunger to have governors and state legislatures step in and use the tools at their disposal to put pressure on local governments.

“Local governments have no incentive to change, and actually have incentive to dig in their heels on these issues, so ultimately, I think that’s going to require probably state intervention, like withholding funds,” says Schuetz.

Without some kind of relief on the horizon, the middle class will be locked out of many areas due to housing strain. And like all Americans suffering from the affordability crisis, they’ll lose out—a loss for the entire country.

“The highest-opportunity neighborhoods have become gated communities, and you can’t move in unless you’re a millionaire,” says Schuetz. “To the extent that high housing costs discourage anybody from moving to a place to find a job, have new ideas, and contribute to a society, we should worry about that. That’s fundamentally damaging to opportunity, and that’s going to hurt the vitality of our most productive regions.”

Curbed

June 2019

If you had asked Paul Smith Jr., mayor of Union Beach, New Jersey, if he thought he’d still be talking about Hurricane Sandy today, more than six and a half years after the storm made landfall, he would have said no.

But years after the storm pummeled New Jersey’s coastline, Sandy is part of the present, not the past, for many of the residents Smith represents. His small beach town on the state’s northern coast, just 6,649 people spread over an area under 2 square miles, spent roughly $6.3 million cleaning debris off the beach. Half of the city’s homeowners were affected by the storm, and so far, more than 350 homes have been rebuilt or raised. But there’s still work to be done.

“The state helped a lot, but some people did decide to walk away from their homes,” says Smith. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out: what’s abandoned [and] where the empty spots are.”

Many New Jerseyans feel the same way. Since Sandy’s initial impact, which damaged 346,000 households up and down the coast, billions of dollars of state and federal money have been spent on repairing, readjusting, and making the state’s buildings more resilient.

But in conversations with a number of storm-impacted homeowners, and homeowners-turned-advocates, it’s clear there are big questions about the efficacy of the government’s strategy for helping communities recover from massive weather events and flooding—and what that means for today’s era of increased storm risk.

Members of the NJOP with Gov. Phil Murphy and Sen. Corey Booker at the signing of the $50 million cross-the-finish-line fundlast October.

Just last October, on the sixth anniversary of the storm, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced a $50 million cross-the-finish-line fund, meant to assist homeowners who qualified for federal help but, for numerous reasons, have struggled to fully rebuild. The fund aims to help them obtain “some much-overdue normalcy in their lives,” according to Murphy, speaking at a press conference last fall in Union Beach.

Advocates from the New Jersey Organizing Project (NJOP), a citizen-led coalition of homeowners who lobbied for the finish-line fund, among other measures, say the delays show that the nation is unprepared to deal with massive floods and weather events. The families impacted by Sandy are the “canaries in the coal mine,” according to Amanda Devecka-Rinear, the NJOP’s founder, as increased flooding on both coasts and in the Midwest will see this recovery drama repeating itself.

“We need a major mentality shift, and need to accept the water is coming,” says Devecka-Rinear.

The story of Sandy recovery illustrates the various steps and stages of storm recovery, and the shortfalls of the current system. Every step of the way—outdated flood maps that don’t properly show the extent of flood risk, federal appropriations that need to be approved after each event, a constellation of different agencies offering different funding sources, and delays that require families to live in limbo—costs more money. This is especially true when it comes to prioritizing resilience and mitigation ahead of the next storm.

And as the current devastating Midwest floods suggest, along with last year’s record-breaking California wildfires, the nation will continue to face pressure from rising waters, extreme weather, and the resulting aftermath: damaged homes and businesses.

“One of the conundrums that we face is that [the challenges we face are] not just limited to storm surge flooding from the ocean,” says Tom Jeffery, senior hazard scientist at CoreLogic, a company that analyzes insurance risk. “People also want to live near rivers, or in the midst of scenic mountains, and that risk impacts the cost of insurance. We’re dealing with this on multiple fronts.”

How disaster funds arrive, and delays begin

For better or worse, the reaction to Hurricane Sandy shed light on the nation’s system of disaster recovery. As the storm hit in October 2012, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was on the ground. But federal appropriations for long-term recovery and rebuilding weren’t passed by Congress and dispersed until March of 2013, at which point the state of New Jersey needed to set up a separate infrastructure and bureaucracy within its Department of Community Affairs to distribute funding.

The Sandy Recovery Division and ReNew New Jersey, which operated the $1 billion Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, Elevation and Mitigation (RREM) fund, has to date assisted nearly 7,300 homeowners rebuild. Of that number, roughly 900 have qualified for help, but, as of this week, have incomplete projects.

In a photo taken Thursday, October 27, 2016, construction workers labor on a beachfront home in Bay Head, New Jersey. Sandy damaged or destroyed virtually every one of the 521 homes in neighboring Mantoloking, New Jersey, including dozens that were swept clean off the map, some coming to rest in a bay or even atop a drawbridge.

Local control and flexibility is the logic behind this arrangement: States and cities understand local needs best, and programs like RREM made the deliberate decision to allow homeowners freedom to choose contractors to help get money disbursed as quickly as possible, while maintaining appropriate safeguards. The “breathtaking” levels of fraud and waste in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina led to a more cautious approach post-Sandy.

But as far as the NJOP and others are concerned, there isn’t enough knowledge transfer between groups helping places recover after different disasters. Since the states need to create and establish their own guidelines for disbursement, “we’re asking people to start from scratch every time,” says Devecka-Rinear.

Then there’s the issue of homeowners juggling different funding streams and rebuilding requirements. FEMA provided immediate support; the National Flood Insurance Program paid out claims to qualifying homeowners; and the Community Development Block Grant program, a big chunk of the money given to the state via the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was one of the primary sources for rebuilding. The Small Business Association also offers funds.

But ever since rebuilding began in earnest in 2013, homeowners have struggled to raise enough funds for rebuilding and meet evolving standards for resilience and flood readiness—all while finding temporary places to live. Numerous roadblocks appeared. Flood zone maps changed, requiring more costly repairs, like lofting homes on stilts. Flood insurance claims often didn’t pay enough for homeowners to rebuild to the new standards; in 2015, U.S. senators forced the NFIP to reopen claims, resulting in $300 million more for homeowners.

The New Jersey RREM program released money in separate cycles, or “tranches,” in 2013, 2014, and 2015, slowing down construction, and capped the award to $150,000 per home. A wave of contractor fraud took advantage of needy homeowners looking to rebuild; even the first consultants hired to run the New Jersey program, HGI, were quickly fired, which cost the state additional millions.

This back and forth sowed confusion for homeowners, who were stuck navigating various funds and programs and trying to figure out how high they needed to build their new homes. For many, the process took years, which meant that the rental housing assistance often dried up, creating a vicious cycle.

Funds initially awarded for recovery had to be used to cover rent and avoid mortgage foreclosures until other funds could be procured to help homeowners cobble together enough to finish their repairs.

For instance, Jody Stewart, another member of NJOP, was awarded $54,000 from flood insurance and $150,000 from RREM, and eventually spent $200,000 to elevate and repair her 1,200-square-foot home in Little Egg Harbor. It took a year for Stewart to receive her RREM grant, and she needed to spend another year in an apartment as her home was upgraded. Today, there are still thousands of New Jersey homeowners who aren’t home.

According to George Kasimos, a realtor who runs an advocacy group called Stop FEMA Now, his home in Toms River, New Jersey, was one of nearly 10,000 in town damaged by Sandy. During the course of his initial rebuild, he discovered that he needed to loft his home based on new FEMA flood-zone mapping. That meant an extra six to nine months of work, and, perhaps, an extra $200,000.

“I felt like I had been hit by two hurricanes,” he said. “The number-one problem is nobody is giving you the information needed to rebuild correctly.”

Kasimos says the miscommunication about flood mapping and insurance rates will be a huge issue going forward. FEMA, which created the maps used for the National Flood Insurance Program, has announced plans to bring maps up to date over the next few years. Homeowners fear increasingly expensive flood insurance premiums, making it more costly to stay in their homes, and potentially deterring future buyers.

Kasimos feels much of the limited federal flooding recovery money is simply going to waste. If, say, a house worth $300,000 requires $150,000 to properly elevate and prepare for the next big storm, is it better to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to update, or to immediately buy them out and reclaim that land as a natural beachhead to help with future storm surges?

“You certainly can’t make everyone in the Jersey Shore leave,” he says, “but you can buy out a lot of people. These should be no-brainers. You can get three to four times more bang for the buck turning that home into green space, and putting money in that family’s pocket so they can start getting back on their feet.”

The current wave of repairs in New Jersey, for instance, backed by CDBG money, covers the bare minimum needed to meet flood insurance requirements. After a few rounds of changes to the flood zone map, Kasimos ended up elevating his home 9 feet, a foot over the FEMA recommendation. But he feels the additional height is more than worth it.

“Don’t elevate for today,” he says. “As much as I fight FEMA, I agree that if you’re going to elevate, you should be doing it 4 or even 5 feet above FEMA standards. Global warming is happening. If you’re getting federal funding, you should be worried about 100-year flooding and, currently, the CDBG money only gets you to a bare minimum.”

What Kasimos fears the most is coastal and waterfront real estate becoming a game of musical chairs. The wealthy and educated will stay away from the high-risk properties, or sell quickly before they drop in value. Eventually, he says, there will be two real estate economies in flood zones, and those without money and means will be caught when the music stops.

“Increases in flood insurance rates don’t affect all people in the same manner,” he says. “When the new flood maps are adopted, it’s like the IRS and the tax code. It’s very difficult to navigate.”

The system is changing, but is it fast enough in an era of increased flooding?

There are signs that some of the criticisms lobbed by advocates are being heard by lawmakers in D.C.: FEMA has rolled out its Risk Mapping 2.0 update to the flood mapping system, which would be implemented in October 2020 and aims to more accurately reflect flood risk in communities across the nation (though the steep, sudden rise in rates may cause financial strain). Federal funding for Harvey was released all at once, instead of in waves like Sandy.

Congress has also been debating a five-year extension to the National Flood Insurance Program, which has recently gone through a system of repeated temporary fixes and updates, and includes money for improved flood mapping and mitigation efforts. They plan to vote on the measure later this month. But these are small steps compared to what is ultimately required.

Devecka-Rinear suggests that, overall, the government needs better state and federal coordination, better mitigation funding, more coordination between programs, and more groups like NJOP that function like unions for storm survivors.

Every dollar spent on mitigation saves $4 to $6 in disaster recovery spending. Currently, much of the mitigation funding repays homeowners instead of providing grants upfront, which means only those with significant funding sources can take advantage.

“We just don’t have enough money set aside for this as a country,” she says. “We just don’t aggressively prepare.”

The story we tell ourselves about flood insurance, that we’re subsidizing homes in areas where people shouldn’t live due to climate risk, is old, Devecka-Rinear says. We need to think about how we responsibly move forward.

“What we learned from Sandy recovery is that working-class families, people of color, those on fixed incomes, the most vulnerable among us, get hardest hit,” she says. “We need to create an equitable program and mobilize our country to face a rising threat. It’s an incredible opportunity to come together, and frightening to think about the consequences if we don’t act.”

Curbed

June 2019

Timothy Paule’s path to revitalizing vacant lots in his hometown of Detroit started with a persistent cough.

In the fall of 2016, the commercial photographer found himself sick and tired from a cold that wouldn’t quit. After a litany of medicines failed him, someone manning a stall at a local farmers market suggested he turn to raw honey. The natural curative worked: It turns out that honey acts as a cough suppressant, among numerous other medical benefits.

Soon, Paule and fellow Detroit native Nicole Lindsey had another idea based on the restorative power of honey: The city’s neighborhoods, which could use more local, organic food options, were also covered in a patchwork of abandoned and vacant lots, typically overgrown with weeds, wildflowers, and fruit trees left behind by former residents. That synergy—an excess of flowering plants and lots of cheap space for pollinators to make honey—helped birth Detroit Hives, a nonprofit that now runs the city’s only urban apiary, one that was recently featured in a National Geographic documentary.

Detroit Hives offers a creative solution for one of the most vexing challenges in urban America today: how to revitalize and reclaim an excess of vacant land. 
A collection of 32 beehives at a handful of sites across the city, Detroit Hives works on multiple levels, hosting science field trips and supplying restaurants like Slow’s BBQ with honey for their barbecue sauce.

“When we started around 2016, there were something like 90,000 vacant lots in the city,” says Paule. “They contributed to crime and injury, and we saw this idea as one of the low-cost, sustainable solutions, like urban gardens, that can reactivate spaces that are left behind.”

A collection of 32 beehives at a handful of sites across the city, Detroit Hives works on multiple levels, hosting students science field trips and supplying restaurants like Slow’s BBQ with honey for their barbecue sauce. But Paule sees it as part of a larger movement to turn blighted vacant lots into beautiful spaces—and, potentially, businesses.

The scope of the nation’s empty space

Detroit Hives offers a creative solution for one of the most vexing issues in urban America today: an excess of vacant land.

The intertwined issues of blight, abandonment, vacant lots, and mostly empty city blocks represent the flip side of the dominant narrative of current U.S. growth: Superstar cities, accelerated by tech money and high-end real estate development, are growing too fast, straining transit and housing infrastructure, and causing cities with the highest concentration of opportunity to become overpriced and unaffordable. And those are just the problems faced by the so-called “winners” in the global economy.

The problem of abandoned property—or what scholar Alan Mallach calls “hyper-vacancy”—is concentrated in areas that are losing jobs, investment, and economic opportunity. This isn’t about the occasional surface parking lot downtown or a few empty lots here and there (in cities like Austin or New York, those spots would be instantly seized by developers).

Concentrated in urban areas, especially formerly industrial regions of the country, there’s an archipelago of abandonment spread across the nation. As Hana Schank wrote on Fast Company, empty land has a different meaning depending on which side of the economic divide you stand: “The winners get reclaimed rail lines. The losers get high grass and weeds.”

Vacant properties create financial strain for cities: decreased tax revenue, greater maintenance costs, increased safety and crime issues (which require more spending), and blight that lowers the value of nearby properties. A press release from the St. Louis mayor’s office simply said, “Nothing good happens in a vacant building.”

Hyper-vacancy has become an “epidemic,” says Mallach. The term, which he defined in a paper for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy as neighborhoods where vacant buildings and lots comprise 20 percent of more of the building stock, “define the character of the surrounding area.” By 2010, one out of every two census tracts in Cleveland, Ohio, could be considered hyper-vacant. In 2015, more than 49 percent of census tracts in Flint, Michigan, 46 percent of tracts in Detroit, and 42 percent of tracts in Gary, Indiana, had become extremely hyper-vacant, meaning a quarter of all units were vacant. “The market effectively ceases to function,” at such levels of vacancy, Mallach wrote, adding that, “the neighborhoods become areas of concentrated poverty, unemployment, and health problems.”

To combat these issues, cities across the nation have invested in policy solutions, blight-busting programs, and creative placemaking like the Detroit Hives method. But as Mallach recently told Curbed, vacant property is more a symptom than a cause, and thus requires systemic solutions.

“They’re causes, in that once vacancy starts to happen, it can make things worse,” he says. “But, ultimately, neighborhoods, towns, and cities are really dependent on what’s happening in the larger market and economy. One of the things that’s so frustrating in the U.S. is that you’re seeing larger and larger disparities between those regions making it in the global economy and those that aren’t.”

The solution on a local level, or at least the beginnings of one, requires strategies that help realize the value of vacancy, and see the land for what it is: potential economic value.

“In the end, it’s about being astute about what you can do, ideas that don’t rely on the larger market to change the game,” says Mallach. “You need to be very strategic about what market opportunities exist that you can really jumpstart.”

Policies and plans for these properties have begun to change along those lines, according to Terry Schwarz, director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, who has studied and launched programs invested in changing vacant lots. As she told Next City, “Now, the new policies that have the most long-term impact are less about fixing nuisances or problems and instead seeing land for what it is: real estate. Cities now want to see what ways they have at their disposal to extract value out of their growing inventories of vacant properties.”

How cities have set out to tackle vacant lots

The Great Recession—which worked as a propellant for pre-existing vacancy issues with its massive rates of foreclosure and widespread economic pain—was the beginning of today’s abandoned property crisis. Since then, cities have engaged the issue in a number of ways.

Some of the simplest, but most important, efforts sought to just get a handle on the issue: Numerous cities engaged in efforts to chronicle and chart rates of vacancy, engaging in local data-collection efforts, as well as creating means to get this land out of city control and back into the hands of citizens and investors. More than 150 cities formed land banks to sell lots at dirt-cheap rates, while others created what’s been called “mow-to-own” programs, which transferred ownership rights to whoever made the effort to oversee and care for abandoned lots.

Much of the research done at the city level only highlighted the need for more—and better—solutions. In Toledo, Ohio, a city research project found that vacant property was a drain on city coffers, costing $3.8 million in upkeep and other city expenditures, and $2.7 million in lost tax dollars. But the vacant lots created a much bigger drag on adjacent property, costing an estimated $98.7 million in lost property value, including $2.68 million in lost property tax value. Other studies found similar results: In Columbus, Ohio, researchers found having a vacant building on the block can reduce the value of nearby properties by 20 percent or more, and a 2010 Philadelphia study estimated that vacant properties result in $3.6 billion in reduced household wealth.

A number of new and ongoing initiatives have tried to turn vacant land into opportunities, or at least use the land to serve a greater community purpose. Mallach and Schwartz both admit that it can be hard to judge the efficacy of these programs in just a few years; many times, local residents invested in revitalization projects leave the area or move on to other things, and popular programs like urban gardening or farming take years to really take root. There’s also the issue of making enough progress to stem the tide of abandonment. A program in Baltimore has spent millions of dollars over the last eight years trying to return vacant land to good use, but has only succeeded in moving the official count of vacant buildings from 16,800 in 2010 to 16,500 in 2018.

“People are really doing something, they’re working hard, but they keep slipping,” professor Seema Iyer, a finance and economics expert, told the Baltimore Sun. “It’s like building a levee that’s not high enough to stop the floodwater.”

Programs that have shown great progress tend to combine long-term vision and continued support. Cities like Cleveland and Detroit have created planning guides for reclaiming and revitalizing vacant lots to help investors in the land bank program improve their results. In Philadelphia, a program called LandCare, run by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, works with community groups as part of an expanded, mow-to-own concept. By working with organizations instead of individuals, the initiative makes sure that reclaimed lots don’t lose support. Right now, the program helps take care of roughly 12,000 of the city’s vacant lots, and adds a few hundred every year.

In New York state, the attorney general’s office has established a grant program, Zombies 2.0, to provide municipalities with money to improve code enforcement strategies and become more efficient at dealing with vacant properties, or “zombie homes,” all using funds collected via mortgage settlements.

Mallach also points to a nascent effort in Erie, Pennsylvania, to create a culinary arts districtamid an area filled with vacant properties. The idea is to turn empty spaces downtown into a collection of incubators, food courts, and restaurants, and the effort may even seek to tap into Opportunity Zone funding to make it happen.

“Is it going to work? Who knows,” says Mallach. “But we’re talking about a strategic, focused project that’ll shock the market, which is what it takes. You need something dramatic to change the game.”

Another way to recognize and realize the value of these properties is to think about resilience. Schwartz points to a pilot program in Cleveland that’s trying to help with overall stormwater management by establishing rules around recovering vacant lots. If the lot was once a stream or waterway, it should be reclaimed as such, or rebuilt with permeable pavement and other features that help improve water management. These kinds of programs can help cities refresh their aquifers and supplies of clean groundwater.

“One of the things about depopulating cities in the Great Lakes region is that we have very interesting and complex hydrology,” says Schwartz. “All of these cities, when they were booming and growing, abused their waterways, and as they grew, cemented over these tributaries and creeks. We can use this vacant land to improve and protect the water quality of the Great Lakes.”

A symptom, not a disease

While the externalities caused by vacant property, and most efforts to fix them, are local by nature, they could definitely use more assistance from the federal level. The Federal Hardest Hit Fund, a foreclosure prevention and neighborhood stabilization effort established in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession, was a great asset for cities in need of funds to knock down vacant homes, but it was a one-time infusion of cash. While the affordable housing crisis coming to a head in cities across the country has finally started to get national attention and policy proscriptions, blighted urban land hasn’t been similarly addressed.

There’s definitely hunger for it: Detroit Hives’s Paule says that after the story of their project went viral this spring, they received advice and guidance requests from around the globe, including from lots of other cities in the Midwest.

“That’s where we want to take it, to help address the issues of vacant lots and help provide jobs and help the environment,” he says. “This can be a triple-bottom-line solution, impacting people, planning, and profit.”

Mallach hopes that more can be done on a federal level. While individual members of Congress have proposed ideas and programs, Mallach says there hasn’t been any leadership on this important issue from the Trump administration, nor has there been any new investment in programming or efforts to help solve this crucial problem. Considering the key role the Rust Belt played in the 2016 election, and the slow pace of recovery in many parts of the region, Mallach hopes that vacant properties and blight will become a larger issue in the upcoming election.