Today the APA announced its annual list of Great Places.  Take a look.

New England has a few entries.  Boston itself has one -- no, not Government Center (shock!), but the South End section of Washington Street.  The piece makes some good points regarding recent investments, including in increasing the area's affordable housing stock, although I'm always skeptical of anything that makes the Silver Line sound like anything more than a regular bus route.  By the way, Washington Street actually extends, uninterrupted, from Government Center all the way to...Pawtucket.  Given the depth of this region's history, I think there's a good documentary idea there somewhere.

The only other selection I can speak to with any authority is Pioneer Courthouse Square in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.  For years the site of a big surface parking lot, the fact that the square exists at all is a testament to the potential of grassroots citizen advocacy (there is a fantastic history of the site and the struggle to convert it into a civic center here).   It's often included on lists like this (i.e. this one), and with good reason.

I asked my Tampa friends if they felt 7th Avenue in Ybor City qualifies as a Great Street.  One of them responded:

Uhh, in the sense that it's one of maybe 3 places in Florida that have a sort of authentic 'character', yes.  In the sense that said 'character' mostly consists of Girls Gone Wild videos and frat dudes dressed like Ricky Martin's cousin, no.

A couple things today.  First, as someone who commutes to school about 7 miles each way by bike, I probably spend more time than most staring at pavement.  Today a friend of mine -- a fellow bike commuter -- asked if, like him, I've noticed a preponderance of squashed squirrels in the streets lately.  As a matter of fact, I think I have.  The poor little guys.  If our observations are correct, though, are Boston's squirrels getting more careless?  Or are they just getting more prevalent?  Well, I also don't recall so many of them up in the trees raining acorn shards on my yard as they prepare for winter, either, so I suspect the answer is the latter.

In a weird coincidence, the Washington Post has a story today about DC's own booming squirrel population, and tucked inside are a couple paragraphs that might be relevant here as well:

The local public's fascination with Sciurus carolinensis is better understood in the context of the urban park movement of the mid-1800s. As cities grew and became more densely populated, the notion emerged that "what was needed from parks was an antidote to the city itself," says Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. "In the late 19th century, there was a growing sense that the public needed urban parks to walk through and enjoy 'rural scenery.' "

Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., father of American landscape architecture, believed people derived a mental benefit from exposure to nature. Animals were sometimes introduced into urban parks to enhance the experience. Herds of sheep trimmed the grass and provided a pleasant spectacle in some parks, most notably New York's Central Park, which had a herd until 1934. Squirrels, though relatively useless as grass mowers, played a similar aesthetic purpose in the District.

We all know of Olmsted's historic influence on the greening of Boston.  The article doesn't draw a direct line between Olmsted and squirrels, though, so I'll hold off for now on blaming him for this year's Boston squirrel massacre.

Second, returning to my previous post regarding the Greenway -- yesterday I came across an interesting perspective while flipping through James Howard Kunstler's The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (published in 2003), which I think is worth quoting here at length:

In the context of contemporary cultural confusion, "green space" or "open space" essentially means build nothing. It is a rhetorical device for putting city land in cold storage in the only currently acceptable form, that is, covered by grass and shrubs, aka nature. This happens because we have lost confidence in our ability to produce buildings worthy of our spirits and aspirations.  So many twentieth-century buildings are failures in one way or another -- looks, relation to the public realm, attitude toward the pedestrian, quality of workmanship -- that we assume any new building is liable to be at least unrewarding and at worst another horror.  The aggregate failures of all the glass boxes, like the Hancock and the Pru and the dreary slabs of Government Center, of all the public place botches like City Hall Plaza, have taken their toll on the public imagination.  Citizens are now thoroughly conditioned to expect the worst.  A large fraction of the public has actually taken this attitude a neurotic step further and decided categorically that urbanism is a menace to the human spirit and therefore that the only acceptable use of vacant city land is for the intallation of the putative antidote to the city: nature.

[...]

This is "nature" in cartoon form.  Unfortuantely this is the current recipe for the twenty-seven acres of valuable land that will be available when the Fitzgerald Expressway is gone: "green space."  The term "green space" should be a tip-off that we're thinking too abstractly.

[...]

It might be appropriate to lay aside a few of the twenty-seven acres for the creation of two small formal parks or squares within the district.  But it is silly to leave it all unbuilt [...] Twenty-seven acres is a lot of land in an urban setting.  It could be composed to contain tremendous civic amenity, activity, and value, without skyscrapers.  Indeed, if the old city is to be truly knitted back together, this land must be built upon.

By the way, I wasn't able to make it to the grand opening yesterday after all.  Did anyone?  I'd particularly like to hear about Calvin.

Or rather, your newly-annointed (er, volunteered) bloggers in chief, Eugenia Gibbons and I, are here.  Howdy!  We hope to generate some momentum here at Practical Visions.  This will require not only our posts, but also your comments.  And I won't speak for Eugenia, but I'm particularly interested in frequent guest posts, so please contact me if there's something you'd like to throw on here -- an upcoming event, a particular interest of yours, a project you're working on, whatever.  The only guideline Dr. J gave us was "don't trash the faculty" (actually I think there was one more, but I can't remember it now; we can't get in trouble for breaking a rule we didn't know existed, right?).  Who knows, over time this page might be worthy of a bookmark in your browser.  That's the general idea, anyway.

So to get the ball rolling on this school year's incarnation of Practical Visions, I'd like to highlight an event coming up this weekend that signals an important milestone of a local public works project that has practically redefined the term "boondoggle."  The event, to which those of us included on the proper UEP mailing lists have already been alerted by both Julia Prange and this week's Off The Wall, is the official inauguration of the Rose Kennedy Greenway.  The boondoggle is, of course, the Big Dig.  For those not familiar with the Big Dig's sordid history, I won't recap it here (this Wiki link will get you started), but suffice it to say it is one rife with what are termed in Foundations as "causal stories."

First off, I'll go way out on a limb here and assume that most people consider the Greenway to be an upgrade from having an elevated freeway slicing through downtown, dismembering the North End and Wharf District:

But lately I've been fascinated by how grand urban plans grow into, and are accepted by, the cities they are planned for (or, often, imposed on).  Considered from this angle, was the Greenway project worth it?  Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, for instance, has been around for nearly 130 years and to me it seems to have been largely successful, though perhaps a bit more disjointed than he intended.  Jane Jacobs, however, warned against plopping down parks merely for the sake of fulfilling some sort of urban green quota -- "people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners and designers wish they would," she said.  (And yes, I just fulfilled my planner name-drop quota).  Until recently, I worked for three years in the cylindrical building on the left edge of the above photos, and after the park blocks near me opened last year it was difficult to tell how they would eventually take.  It'll be years, probably, before we know how the different sections of the Rose Kennedy Greenway and their adjoining districts will really treat each other.  It'll be especially interesting to see how they interact at night.

For now, we are now in the slightly awkward position of celebrating the completion of a project (persistent underground engineering issues and still-future plans notwithstanding) that almost certainly would not have broken ground had its true costs in terms of money, time, and even lives been accurately predicted.  But here we are.  I'll try to check out the festivities on Saturday (I already have plans to do the Bow Tie Ride in Cambridge on Sunday) and see how it feels with people there -- not to mention meet Calvin, the 40' right whale balloon.  I dare you to pass up that opportunity.

This week we learned that Ralph Nader has decided to jump into the presidential race. Not to turn this blog into a political commentary, but I think it's worth discussion among UEP students. As a student of urban and environmental policy and planning, the "visionary" side of my studies definitely shares many of the values of which Nader is a proponent. And I do not believe it would be much of a stretch to say that many of my colleagues in UEP feel the same way. However, the "practical" side of my practical visionary self can't help but think this is a terrible move on the part of both Nader and the Green Party.

Now, I am the first to agree that one of the biggest problems with our political system is that we only have two parties. I have, in fact, worked for the Green Party at the local level trying to push a more progressive movement into the mainstream. I would also never oversimplify the problems of our elections to say that Ralph Nader is to blame for Bush's election. However, with that said, this is a dangerous time to be spending resources on a national campaign that has no chance of electing a Green president. I also have many doubts that his tactics and platform are the right approach to bringing the Green agenda to the mainstream. While I agree with Nader on many levels, I can't help but think that his platform is just...and here's where I might get into trouble with my friends...TOO extreme. Please check out his campaign page: http://www.votenader.org/issues/

I realize this is a controversial topic. (It, in fact, sparked a fairly heated debate over drinks and crappy pasta at Mike's in Davis last night.) But this election matters for us as planners and policy-makers. And the framing of all the issues matter too. And I'm curious to hear what others are thinking. So...this is a blog...go to it. 

The current housing and mortgage crisis in the United States seems to be evidence that the deregulation of the housing market has created a system with the potential to devastate poor, working, and middle class people.  Homeownership has always been the central goal of housing policymakers in this country, and deregulation of the market was intended to further promote this goal. 

Deregulation has taken a number of forms.  For one, the abolition of rent control/stabilization in many urban areas has rendered downtown living unaffordable for everyone but the most economically well- off.  In Boston, for example, the abolition of rent control in 1994 has enabled property owners to maximize profits by catering to the massive student and professional populations while the poor and working class families who traditionally lived here were forced to move away from the center city to find housing that they could afford.  In 2000, HUD announced that 6.2 million households were spending more than fifty percent of their monthly incomes on housing, a fact that is troubling at best, considering that housing is officially “unaffordable” when it amounts to more than thirty percent of a person’s total income.   

Another impact of deregulation has been the growth of mortgage lending companies and the emergence of predatory lending groups.  Predatory lenders are organizations that target people who don’t have the financial security necessary for taking out a home loan and may not have the resources to make monthly mortgage payments.  As is evident with the recent burst of the mortgage bubble in the U.S., predatory lending creates a system where people take out more money than they can afford to pay back, mortgages go into default, and homes are foreclosed upon in record numbers.  A recent Boston Globe article focused on housing foreclosures in Lawrence, MA, speaks to this trend.  In just two years, one lower-middle class neighborhood in North Lawrence has experienced over 600 home foreclosures, with the numbers expected to continue rising in the future (http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/articles/2007/10/07/as_foreclosures_widen_a_neighborhood_erodes/).

A third effect of deregulation has been an overall decrease in the quality and quantity of affordable housing, both in terms of new developments and the maintenance/ upkeep of older units.   Prohibitively expensive upfront costs disproportionately impact low-income dwellers, who often cannot front the money for costly repairs and/or live in homes owned by slumlords who care little for the quality of life of their tenants.  In terms of quantity, contemporary policy measures (such as housing vouchers, expiring lease agreements, and Hope VI rehabilitations) have resulted in significant net losses of affordable units over the.  The conversion of previously subsidized units into market-rate rentals and condominiums is compounding the problem, producing gentrification—or as free market supporters claim, “revitalization”—at the expense of displacing the poor from cities.

Progressive housing critics have long argued that leaving the problem of affordable housing up to the private market will only reinforce and exasperate the problem of poverty and income inequality.  But neo-liberal economics has never claimed to do otherwise. By its very nature, Capitalism requires economic inequality; this inequality runs much deeper partisan political battles  The politics of supply and demand were never designed to benefit the consumer, and within a deregulated, for-profit oriented housing market this same principle holds true. 

For this reason, the for-profit approach to affordable housing will “always tend to produce segregation, ugliness, and deterioration in large parts of the market and an unconscionable gap between housing conditions for the rich and the poor” (Marcuse and Keating, 2006: 156).  In so far that market ‘solutions’ continue to characterize our dominant political and social paradigms, we must constantly self-reflect on our roles as the planners and policymakers of tomorrow.  Are willing to accept a status quo that exasperates social inequalities, or should it be our goal to come together to redefine the dominant social paradigm? 

Courtney Knapp

UEP Class of 2008 

Gavin, Robert.  7 October 2007.  As Foreclosures Widen, A Neighborhood Erodes.  Boston Globe.  Accessed online 12 October 2007.

     http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/articles/2007/10/07/as_foreclosures_widen_a_neighborhood_erodes/

Marcuse, Peter and W. Dennis Keating.  2006.  The Permanent Housing Crisis: The

Failures of Conservatism and the Limitations of Liberalism.  Pp 139-161 in Rachel Bratt (Ed) A Right to Housing.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.