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Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure
Alex Steffen, Worldchanging
Discussion of planetary boundaries is pretty surreal everywhere these days, but in the United States, the disconnect between reality and rhetoric has reached what I think are pretty stunning proportions. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the discussions about how to “fix” the suburbs.
Many still debate that anything about the American model of sprawl development needs fixing, but most understand that something has gone seriously wrong with the outer-ring suburbs that more than a quarter of American call home. It doesn’t take a futurist to look at the conditions on the ground — long commutes, auto dependence, the expected steep rise in oil prices, environmental problems, the bursting of a massive financial bubble (resulting in millions of abandoned homes and ruined families and a wave of bankrupted suburban local governments) — to realize that they suburbs are in deep trouble, and that trouble is just going to get worse.
Many have started to realize that the foreclosure crisis isn’t a crisis in the sense that it will come and go and everything will be fine again someday. For many places, this is the new normal; a permanent foreclosure. Any plan based on the idea we’re going back to some modified form of what we had before is wishful thinking, especially in the sunbelt states where speculative sprawl was at its worst. (In fact, I think that we haven’t seen anything like the bottom on this bust, with millions more foreclosures in the pipeline, and little money or political will to make the massive investments it’d take to keep many newer suburbs afloat.)
As people have realized how severe the problems facing outer-ring suburbs are, designs which attempt to solve those problems by turning sprawl into something else have seen a vogue. (Part of the reason I was prompted to fire off this note was that I got yet another call from a journalist working on a suburban solutions piece, and that got me thinking.)
…The conventional answer to the problems moderate-income outer ring suburbs face would be redevelopment: bring in more housing, retail and commercial, and rescue them by making them more like the prosperous walkable neighborhoods that now command a premium on the market. But inner ring suburbs already possess a huge set of strategic advantages in moving to meet the demand for walkable communities: its not that hard to imagine adding lots of infill development and new transportation infrastructure to make livable, fairly walkable, much more sustainable communities. They have good bones, and they have location.
Imagining that kind of retrofit in the outer ring is a stretch. In the absence of an as-yet-unseen, brilliant solution, the outer ring suburbs, especially those recently built with funny loans at the far edges sunbelt cities, are probably just destined to become semi-rural slums. The idea that some solution has to emerge to their problems rejects both evidence and history, it seems to me; worse, it doesn’t much help us think through how we might offer better outcomes to the people who’ve invested everything they have on the suburban fringe.
It may well be that the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier. I fully expect to see some really interesting experiments cropping up in half-abandoned suburbs in coming decades. But it’s worth remembering the decline of the inner city from the 1940s to the 1990s, and thinking about how long it was before new answers and possibilities took hold there, and how much of urban America is still suffering. If we’re going to avoid that kind of disaster in the outer ring, we need big, bold thinking — thinking that transcends farming and other small-scale solutions to reimagine what the macro-level possibilities might be for places the 21st century has left behind.
(12 March 2010)
Designing Cities for People: Farming in the City
Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0
While attending a conference on the outskirts of Stockholm in the fall of 1974, I walked past a community garden near a high-rise apartment building. It was an idyllic Indian summer afternoon, with many people tending gardens a short walk from their residences. Some 35 years later I can still recall the setting because of the aura of contentment surrounding those working in their gardens. They were absorbed in producing not only vegetables, but in some cases flowers as well. I remember thinking, “This is the mark of a civilized society.”
In 2005, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that urban and peri-urban farms—those within or immediately adjacent to a city—supply food to some 700 million urban residents worldwide. These are mostly small plots—vacant lots, yards, even rooftops. 55
Within and near the city of Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, some 650 hectares of land produce vegetables. This land supplies not only the city’s fresh produce but a livelihood for 4,000 farmers who intensively farm their small plots year-round. On the far side of the continent, an FAO project has urban residents in Dakar, Senegal, producing up to 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of tomatoes per square meter each year with continuous cropping in rooftop gardens. 56
In Hanoi, Viet Nam, 80 percent of the fresh vegetables come from farms in or immediately adjacent to the city. Farms in the city or its shadow also produce 50 percent of the pork and the poultry consumed there. Half of the city’s freshwater fish are produced by enterprising urban fish farmers. Forty percent of the egg supply is produced within the city or nearby. Urban farmers ingeniously recycle human and animal waste to nourish plants and to fertilize fish ponds. 57
Fish farmers near Kolkata in India manage wastewater fish ponds that cover nearly 4,000 hectares and produce 18,000 tons of fish each year. Bacteria in the ponds break down the organic waste in the city’s sewage. This, in turn, supports the rapid growth of algae that feed the local strains of herbivorous fish. This system provides the city with a steady supply of fresh fish that are consistently of better quality than any others entering the Kolkata market. 58
The magazine Urban Agriculture describes how Shanghai has in effect created a nutrient recycling zone around the city. The municipal government manages 300,000 hectares of farmland to recycle the city’s “night soil”—human wastes collected in areas without modern sanitation facilities. Half of Shanghai’s pork and poultry, 60 percent of its vegetables, and 90 percent of its milk and eggs come from the city and the immediately surrounding region. 59
In some countries, such as the United States, there is a huge unrealized potential for urban gardening. A survey indicated that Chicago has 70,000 vacant lots, and Philadelphia, 31,000. Nationwide, vacant lots in cities would total in the hundreds of thousands. The CFSC report summarizes why urban gardening is so desirable. It has “a regenerative effect…when vacant lots are transformed from eyesores—weedy, trash-ridden dangerous gathering places—into bountiful, beautiful, and safe gardens that feed people’s bodies and souls.” 62
…Given the near inevitable rise in long-term oil prices, the economic benefits of expanding both urban agriculture and local farmers’ markets will become more obvious. Aside from supplying more fresh produce, this will help millions discover the social benefits and the psychological well-being that urban gardening and locally produced food can bring.
(2009)
Cleveland’s Comeback
Marc Lefkowitz, Next American City
Sharon Glaspie and her Garden Boyz are at the center of a new movement to repurpose vacant land in Cleveland, a city racing to reinvent itself. Three years ago Glaspie leased a quarter-acre from the Cleveland Land Bank, which manages 3,300 acres of vacant land, or 7 percent of the city’s total acreage. She found six neighborhood teenagers to share what she had recently learned about growing and selling food. Now the Garden Boyz arrive promptly at 7 a.m. every morning to work the soil and to tend and harvest collard greens, carrots, onions and other popular sellers at the weekend farmers markets in Central, a neighborhood where more than half of families live below the poverty line and often pay with food stamps. If they weren’t learning how to garden and run a business, Glaspie says, the Garden Boyz would most likely be indoctrinated in drug gangs.
“They’d tell you, ‘If I wasn’t a Garden Boyz, I don’t know what I would be doing,’” Glaspie says. “Jobs for 13- to 17-year-olds are nonexistent. They earn about $50 a week, which isn’t a lot. But they use it to buy their own clothes and school uniforms. They’ll help their mother out bringing food home and cooking for the family. I had one boy who bought his brother winter boots with his money. They are looked up to by most of their peers.”
Word of the Garden Boyz’s success has spread, and Glaspie plans to bring on four more boys this year with a $15,600 grant from Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) funds that Cleveland received from the federal government. While the vast majority of the city’s $54 million in NSP money will be used to demolish blighted and foreclosed homes, the city is also investing in 58 pilot projects that move vacant land strategies beyond temporary fences and lawns. The city, along with nonprofit community development groups, plans to bring the pilot projects to scale by building on investments from prominent local and national philanthropic organizations, including the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and Living Cities — all funders with a strong interest in land use.
Indeed, vacant land reuse is currently the hottest topic in urban planning. It may be hard for a visitor to find evidence of this, especially if they drive through Cleveland’s east side neighborhoods such as Central, Hough and Fairfax, where whole shopping districts are abandoned and some streets consist of two houses surrounded by a dozen vacant, weed-choked lots. City streets that 50 years ago were teeming with more than a million people are completely wiped out today. Some are reverting back to a natural state, with grass and trees covering over the asphalt.
Certainly, there are Rust Belt cities struggling with more vacant land than Cleveland: Ten percent of Pittsburgh’s total land and 30 percent of Detroit is vacant. But the foreclosure crisis hit Cleveland, which already ranked among the five poorest large cities in the nation in 2008, harder than any city in the Midwest. The city registered 10,000 home foreclosures from 2007 to 2008, meaning that the equivalent of a city neighborhood went bust every month, The Columbus Dispatch calculated. The city has responded by pouring tens of millions of dollars into demolitions — 2,000 of the most blighted homes are slated to come down in 2010. The glut of vacant land is expected to continue before the city can stabilize it.
Still, there are signs that Cleveland is finally prepared to deal effectively with this crisis. When author Alex Kotlowitz visited Cleveland last May, he recounted in a speech what drove him to write in The New York Times Magazine about the foreclosure tsunami in Cleveland. He couldn’t turn away, he said, from the narrative of injustice and unanswered questions about why banks and mortgage companies — and state elected officials who nullified Cleveland’s antipredatory-lending law — were allowed to tear apart the fabric of the city. But for Kotlowitz, who spent years with two young boys in Chicago’s projects in the 1980s to tell their story in the classic book There Are No Children Here, Cleveland’s situation goes beyond telling the story of foreclosure crisis victims. “It was the one place I could find,” he said, “the only place I could find in the country, where people are pushing back.”
The great organizing force is a study called “ReImagine a More Sustainable Cleveland.” Funded by Surdna, ReImagine kicked off in 2008 with discussions among city officials, soil and water technicians, and environmental organizations, convened by nonprofit community developer Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI). The study aimed to identify a strategic approach to intractable issues such as health disparities. “In Cleveland that quickly pointed to vacancy and vacant land,” says Bobbi Reichtell, senior vice president for programs at Neighborhood Progress and steward of the ReImagine study.
…First the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative mappedwhere “food deserts” (areas where residents have no access to fresh fruits and vegetables) and vacant land align with watersheds, green space and parks. They then produced a “Pattern Book,” which shows, for example, where one might restore a culverted stream to support a network of community gardens and provide functional stormwater services; how to use plants to draw toxins from soil; and where low-tech renewable energy systems might extend a growing season. ReImagine, as it’s known, also produced a “decision matrix” that the city now uses to categorize long-term vs. short-term vacant land strategies. So a vacant property with the right size and characteristics, such as proximity to green space, might make the first cut toward preservation. Once it makes that cut, the city might consider a menu of green development approaches, such as a tree nursery, community garden or maybe even an urban wind farm. Proximity to defined “Core Development Areas” will also help determine its development potential as “strong” or “weak.” Either way, the city has a path for that land.
The Pattern Book and the ReImagine study are about to become more than a well-reasoned argument: Last November, the Cleveland Foundation awarded the nonprofits Parkworks, Neighborhood Progress and the Urban Design Collaborative $250,000 for ReImagine 2.0, tasking them with finding specific sites, designing large-scale interventions, and writing a local food business plan. This spring, Neighborhood Progress’ Reichtell expects ReImagine 2.0 to identify the best opportunities for green infrastructure projects, to figure out how much and where land needs to be set aside for farming, and how to scale up the system so the city can handle vacant land in a comprehensive, lasting way. For example, the city land bank currently offers only a one-year lease. Reichtell argues that this policy needs to be updated, since it usually takes a year before an urban farmer can remove debris and repair the land.
An implicit challenge in the work of ReImagine is debunking the notion that development always means “growth.” “We’re talking about pushing people together into dense urban nodes,” Schwarz says. “We’re coming up with a way of managing the landscape enough so it looks like an intentional wildlife corridor. It makes the spot where development occurs obvious.”
…“We’re going to look at where in the city some of those strategies make sense,” Neighborhood Progress’ Reichtell adds, “and what are catalytic projects — urban agriculture districts or green infrastructure or a greenway network.” Reichtell is perhaps most excited by ReImagine 2.0 as a way to bolster the burgeoning urban agriculture community. Greater Cleveland already has 225 community gardens, two dozen farmers markets, and a well-organized, communitysupported agriculture program called CityFresh, where members at the higher end of a sliding scale help subsidize members who might be using WIC or food stamps to buy fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables. “We have identified several recommendations, including tax structures, for urban agriculture, so that it’s taxed differently than residential,” Reichtell says. “There’s also an issue of water access, and streamlining the land bank to get properties out or in.”
Some worry that urban agriculture and greening alone are not enough to combat the foreclosure crisis. “How do you deal with a city that has changed overnight, where now you have blots on whole areas?” says Chris Warren, Cleveland’s regional development chief. “Not just foreclosed, but hard-to-get-title-to and facing a whole second round of exploitations?”
Warren thinks the answer lies partly with ReImagine, and partly with a cadre of his peers who cut their teeth as community activists in the 1960s and who now hold key positions in city and county governments and at the big nonprofit developers, such as NPI. Warren, Cuyahoga County treasurer Jim Rokakis and Neighborhood Progress’ Frank Ford organized and lobbied a General Assembly — one with a staunch majority in favor of private property rights — to pass legislation in December 2008 establishing Ohio’s first countywide land bank, the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, which formally launched in June of last year. “It’s more than an entity to hold land,” Warren says. “It’s a revenue stream of $9 million a year in local money. The important tactic is we didn’t sit back. We didn’t wait for a sugar daddy to come. We found local resources and tools and imaginative approaches to get control out of the hands of exploitative owners.” Warren hopes to use the County Land Bank’s revenue stream to seed green enterprises that will build on or otherwise reuse the vacant land for higher functions such as agriculture…
(Spring 2010 issue)
The secret mall gardens of Cleveland
Lisa Selin Davis, Grist
The shopping mall is not dead. In Cleveland, in fact, it’s growing green: cucumbers, lettuce, herbs and even flowers.
In the former Galleria at Erieview mall, a project called Gardens Under Glass is taking root, part of a grand plan to transform malls into greenhouses. It’s just one of many Cleveland-based projects, suggesting that this rust belt city might have a few sustainabilty tricks to teach urban centers everywhere.
Vicky Poole, who heads up marketing for the Galleria, conceived this project after looking at a photograph of plants growing in a cafe window. Hmmm, she thought, imagining a retooled version of the food court. The mall was already scrambling to find innovative uses for itself in a flagging economy, primarily as a wedding hall, but also as a farmers market. A greenhouse, she discovered, could thrive in the building’s climate controlled environment under the tremendous glassed-in atrium that runs like a spine down its emtpy center.
…Poole’s vision for the mall is both a master marketing tool — this one, like so many of its mid-80s brethren, was in dire straights not long ago, with dozens of vacancies in its 200 stores — and an inventive way to promote sustainability in what has proven to be a largely unsustainable architectural dinosaur. It’s pretty hard to find alternate uses for 100,000-plus square feet of mostly windowless space. “I don’t look at us as a mall anymore,” she says. “We really serve the downtown business community.”
Already, the farmers market is growing in popularity. The grander plan calls for the entire mall to become a retail ecovillage: vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, garden supply outlets, more farmers’ stalls and shops selling recycled goods. There are other ecovillages in Cleveland and a whole slew of green initiatives that we detailed in 2008.
(17 Mar 2010)
10 Land-Use Strategies to Create Socially Just, Multiracial Cities
Carl Anthony, Yes! Magazine
1. Develop a widely shared, long-range vision for social justice, and set targets. Advocates for climate-change policies have proposed CO2 reduction targets by 2050. Social-justice advocates should set targets for poverty reduction for the same year.
2. Find ways to meet the short-term survival needs of marginalized communities while generating longer-term outcomes that benefit society as a whole. For example, invest in projects that meet the urgent transportation needs of low-income residents while building toward a world-class public transportation system for all.
3. As an alternative to sprawl, create public policies to stabilize, reinvest in, and redevelop older inner-ring suburban communities and encourage economic and racial diversity.
4. Manage vacant properties consistently with principles of social justice and CO2 reduction. Transit-accessible vacant buildings can be acquired, held, and managed by nonprofit housing groups in ways that pre-empt speculation and promote community stability. Vacant buildings in newer suburbs can be adapted to community uses such as day-care centers, reducing local transportation needs.
5. Replace aging or underutilized commercial strips with revitalized corridors that link inner cities and older suburbs through public transportation. These sites, with pedestrian-friendly, tree-lined boulevards, are ideal for mixed-income housing, with opportunities for small, locally owned businesses and community organizations.
6. Set aside 20 percent of new residential development for affordable housing and promote transit-oriented development—residential or commercial projects that are high-density, walkable, and close to public transportation. A commitment to affordable housing and community services in these popular developments can dampen the effects of gentrification.
7. Build and strengthen social-justice institutions committed to regional equity, and link them all in powerful statewide and national networks.
8. Reduce the patterns of concentrated wealth and concentrated poverty in neighborhoods. Create opportunities for affordable housing in privileged and job-rich neighborhoods and, with the help of community-based organizations accountable to residents, develop middle- and upper-income housing in poorer neighborhoods.
9. Advocate metropolitan growth strategies that systematically reduce health disparities between vulnerable communities and middle- and upper-class society.
10. Create opportunities for communities of color and other marginalized populations to participate in new business-improvement districts, regional collaborations, and governance structures promoting sustainable metropolitan development.
(4 Mar 2010)
