Jacobs On Old Buildings: New Ideas need Old Buildings

There might be no better set of buildings in Salem than these three to illustrate Jane Jacobs on building age.

Here the brand new, but expensive and empty, Rivers Condos; the abandoned 1911 D.A. White building; and the 1913 Boise Building, now the home of Normandy Guitars, stand side-by-side.*

On this map of the Downtown Historic District (full size here), only the Boise Building is inside the district - located in pink at the "FR" of Front Street. The tax lots for the White Building and the Rivers Condos, at the corner of Court and Front, are all outside the district. We will touch on this later, but Jacobs would likely argue that one of the biggest problems are the voids where surface parking lots have replaced buildings.

Just as Jacobs argued for multiplicity in route selection, so she argues for multiplicity in building selection. The contrast between Keizer Station as new construction of uniform age and Salem's downtown as a jumble of new and old construction of various ages illustrates her points.

In this chapter it is natural to think of our debates about forestry. Jacobs argues for a mix of building ages like the mix of trees in old-growth forests with secondary and tertiary understory. In both the mixture and diversity yields an ecosystem with the greatest resilience and vitality. And both are on-going and sustainable.

Old Buildings Incubate Entrepreneurs and New Enterprises

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, nor old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation...but also a good lot of plan, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings...they need old buildings to incubate new primary diversity.

Only Chains and Established Enterprises can Afford New Construction

If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction....you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized, or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain store, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do....hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighborhoods, and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction....Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

It should not be surprising that a manufacturer of aluminum hollow-body guitars might find an older building attractive!

Conversely, as of this June 2009 map and list of stores at Keizer Station, with the possible exception of the OSU Fan Shop, all of the stores were national chains.

From the Delta to the Sustainable Forest: Old Growth and New Understory

Even the enterprises that can support new construction in cities need old construction in their immediate vicinity. Otherwise they are part of a total attraction and total environment that is economically too limited - and therefore functionally too limited to be lively, interesting, and convenient....when mingled building age is replaced by the economic rigor mortis of one-age construction, [it leads to] inherent inefficiency and consequent needs for forms of 'protectionism.'

Jacobs believes that building and development subsidies are generally overused.

"Flourishing diversity anywhere in a city means the mingling of high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield, and no-yield enterprises."

One potential problem with Salem's new proposed NCMU zoning is what Jacobs calls the problem of "the corner grocery gimmick." This entails some token ground floor retail, typically a lone corner grocery in otherwise homogeneous new construction. It is faux diversity.

Further Thoughts
In many ways this was the most provocative chapter. While many of us are fans generally of historic preservation, Jacobs' emphasis on diversity in the age of buildings means she probably would not support an excessive attachment to retaining unchanged a neighborhood whose buildings were of a uniform age. At some point rigor mortis would set in.

But her move also frees her to advocate for an essentially market-driven argument in favor of preservation - new small entrepreneurs need old buildings. Historic preservation is also an economic development strategy, which does not rely merely on tourism or aesthetics.

If such an area [with older buildings, but otherwise not lively] is examined to see which of the other three conditions for generating diversity are missing, and then those missing conditions are corrected as well as they can be, some of the old buildings must go; extra streets must be added, the concentration of people must be heightened...but a good mingling of the old buildings must remain, and in remaining they will have become something more than mere decay from the past or evidence of previous failure.

The old buildings have a sort of communal sweat equity no amount of planning or subsidy can provide.

The economic value of new buildings is replaceable...but the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.

The strand of free-market conservatism or libertarianism is unexpected and fascinating here! Jacobs is against utopian planning and the market subsidies apparently too often necessary to prop up that planning. She shows cultural and social progressivism with a kind of libertarian conservatism. On the surface this is almost like old-school Oregon progressive Republicanism! Salem's current culture is in many ways the opposite: Social conservatism with urban renewal and market subsidies.

Maybe things like a relaxed noise ordinance; a real mix of downtown housing for a real mix of incomes ("workforce housing"); improved transit, bicycling, and walking access; and the like will encourage new entrepreneurs, encourage night life and a more diverse mixture of street users, thereby accomplishing the business development that Urban Renewal Districts have not yet reliably performed.

*Though it is not really directly relevant, in an indirect way the ownership of the two older buildings also make the point. V. Green notes in a comment that the White building "is owned by Margaret Furlong who also owns the Manning & Boise buildings on State Street." The Manning building is across the street from the Boise building, and houses Furlong's bisque porcelain ornament business. It should not surprise us that the small, essentially quasi-artisanal, manufacturing enterprises behind aluminum guitars and bisque ornaments find homes in old buildings!

Now if we can just find some enterprise for the White building! One of the problems, of course, is busy Front Street and the way it and the railroad together operate as a moat dividing downtown proper from Riverfront park. Front is designed to convey people past these buildings and past the waterfront - not designed to make connections.

OMSI First out with Sanyo Solar eBike Charging Station

Via BikePortland comes news that OMSI has installed a solar charging station for eBikes and eVehicles.

From the release:

Through a collaborative effort from the SANYO North America Corporation (SANYO), InSpec Group (InSpec), and Portland General Electric (PGE), the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) has installed a solar canopy charging station to service electric cars, e-bikes, and most portable personal electronic devices. The solar charging canopy marks the first such installation in North America aiming to provide a solution for the increasing use of alternative transportation. The canopy is now available for public use....

The solar canopy has been installed in OMSI's south parking lot and is large enough to cover 3 standard-sized parking spaces for automobiles. It features weatherproof lockers, each with 120V AC outlets, with two of the lockers serving as charging mounts for the SANYO ‘eneloop bike' Synergetic Hybrid Bicycle, a pedal-assisted hybrid electric bicycle. Additionally, beneath the canopy there is a bicycle rack for bicycle parking.

Sanyo also gave OMSI three bikes. Photos of the installed station can be seen in the BikePortland article.

Willamette University and the City of Salem had had some conversations about a charging station, but multiple considerations suggested it might not yet be practical, among them being variety in transformer/charging packs across different manufacturers.

It will be interesting to follow the use of the station at OMSI and to see whether such a station can be duplicated elsewhere.

Sanyo Solar has a factory in Salem, and some had hoped Salem might be first to roll out a charging station.

Short Blocks Nurture Mixing and Diversity

Jane Jacobs looks at the circulation of people like a biologist or hydrologist might see the flow of water. She uses fluid imagery and sees the messy vitality of the delta rather than the simple order of a man-made ditch as her paradigm. Her point is easy:

Long Blocks Entail Monotony and Simplicity

Long blocks yield

endless stores and a depressing predominance of commercial standardization...there is geographically so little street frontage on which commerce can live, that it must be consolidated, regardless of its type or the scale of support it needs or the scale of convenience (distance from users) that is natural to it. Around about stretch the dismally long strips of monotony and darkness - the Great Blight of Dullness...this is a typical arrangement for areas of city failure.

Long blocks also mean people

are kept too much apart to permit them to form reasonably intricate pools of city cross-use...they sort people into paths that meet too infrequently, so that different uses very near each other geographically are, in practical effect, literally blocked off from one another.

Here she uses an image of fertility and explains why the generative power of city streets requires complexity and not simplicity:

Long blocks, in their nature, thwart the potential advantages that cities offer to incubation, experimentation, and many small or special enterprises...[they] also thwart the principle that if city mixtures of use are to be more than a fiction on maps, they must result in different people, bent on different purposes, appearing at different times, but using the same streets....

[I]t is fluidity of use, and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture, that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city use, whether these neighborhoods are predominantly for work or predominantly for residence.

Jacobs observes that short blocks offer multiple paths to a given point, and that this ostensible inefficiency, the variety in route selection, is actually a profound source of generation, novelty, and creativity for a city district.

Salem's downtown has short, square blocks. This detail is from a 1917 USGS quad.

Street grids are surprisingly efficient at allocating traffic. Because there are multiple paths (see taxicab geometry) between points, each individual can make a set of easy decisions about where to turn and how to get there. They also accomodate different kinds of traffic: car, truck, bus, bike, foot traffic easily. The sum of these individual decisions tends to be an efficient allocation of traffic. The invisible hand lives!

Here's the approximate area of the Sunnyslope zoning map but from the 1917 map. It was open farm and orchard land back then.

But starting mid-century, the quest for planned efficiency led to a ramified (or dendrite) model of arterial, collector, and local streets. In theory, such planning looked good. In reality, this planned network of streets exacerbated congestion, degraded neighborhoods, created sprawl, and instantiated the kinds of planning and market failures we deride in planned economies.

Here's the current zoning map. It shows the suburban-style long blocks with loop and lollipop street networks.

Fortunately, Salem has escaped the worst effects of this kind of development. Still, Salem's suburban-style fringes are not well suited for neighborhood diversity, for economic incubation, and for a post-oil future. It is likely that in 100 years, the old gridded part of Salem will be the most vital and enduring.

At present, however, Salem's downtown doesn't have all the other ingredients, and short blocks alone cannot guarantee vitality. We will see that Salem does better with the mixture of old buildings, but not so good with mixed uses and concentration. In fact, in the longer term, the greatest assets of downtown are its mix of old buildings and its short blocks.

Breakfast on Bikes - this Friday at Union St. RR Bridge

Summer is here, and there's no better time for Fuel-Free Friday Fun - how about Breakfast on Bikes!

Friday, July 30th, we'll be on the Union St. Railroad Bridge from 7am to 9am with coffee, pastries, and fruit for you.

Mechanics from Santiam Bicycle will also be available for quick check derailleur adjustment, lube, and tire inflation!

See you then!

Thanks also to our sponsors - please support them with your business!
Cascade Baking Company
Coffee House Cafe
LifeSource Natural Foods
Salem Bicycle Club
Willamette University Sustainability Council

(You can see how Marion and Center streets have a dotted green line in this bike layer from google. Our mapping project should correct this and highlight effective low-traffic routes!)

City Council, July 26th - First Public Look at Bike Plan Process

Monday Public Works presents a report on the plan for the bicycle and pedestrian updates to the Transportation System Plan! This will be the first substantive public report on the project. A couple of excerpts:

The current Bicycle Plan places a major focus on building new bike lanes. The updated Bicycle Plan will go beyond an emphasis on bike lanes to develop innovating approaches to addressing the following special focus areas:

• Accommodating all types of bicycle users, including entry-level, recreational, and other non-expert users who are not comfortable riding on bike lanes on busy streets;

• Identifying downtown area bicycle routes and facilities that are more direct, convenient, safe, and comfortable;

• Providing safe and convenient bicycle routes to schools; and

• Improving bicycle routes to transit stops, especially to stops on major transit corridors.

About the Safe Routes to School plan, the report notes that

The School District's transportation system currently runs 218 bus routes per day...Last year district transportation reported a total of 2,867,568 student miles traveled with a total transported student rides per day of 20,0006. Of these totals, 23,980 miles traveled and 938 student rides per day were in hazardous walk zone areas. Many parents drive students to school even when they live well within the school walk zone area, adding to traffic congestion and vehicle trips.

It's encouraging to see these tied together and embodied in institutional rhetoric! Bikes are increasingly mainstream!

The Stakeholder Advisory Committee will be an important steering mechanism. The plan envisions a 20-person committee: 9 from public agencies (ODOT, DLCD, Cherriots, 24J, City of Salem, Marion County, Planning Commission), 5 from advocacy groups (Bicycle, Pedestrian, Elderly, Disabled, Schools), 5 from resident and business interests (including neighborhood associations, minorities, business owners), and a little discretionary fudge factor. (The numbers add to 19, not 20)

One area of possible omission comes from business: Go Downtown Salem, the Chamber of Commerce, and freight interests - though it seems likely that one or more members of these groups will be on the committee anyway.

Here is the Portland Business Association's critique of the Portland Bike Plan, and it might be good collaboratively to get out in front of some of these objections. (More on the PBA in a BikePortland article.) Additionally, we saw in Portland recently at the JPACT meeting how some freight interests didn't understand the ways removing cars from the road increases freight capacity and represented a more cost-effective approach than road expansion.

The steering committee may not be the right place to engage these interests, but it seems like conversation with folks having known objections might usefully start earlier rather than later in the process. It's important to have a plan with the political support for funding and implementation.

CH2M Hill and Alta Planning will be the consultants.

Better Biking: One-Quarter of Statesman's 20 Under 40 Want It

Today the Statesman released their Salem 20 under 40.

In interviews earlier, fully 25% of them talked about the importance of bicycling and wish it were easier to bicycle in Salem.

How great would it be if 25% of Salem trips could be made by bike! That's about 15 times what our current "mode share" for bicycle trips is, and that would very cheaply solve Salem's traffic congestion problems! It would also help with community health and climate change.




Clearly bicycling is more important to future community leaders than the current crop of leaders themselves think.

Anyway, a tip of the cap and helmet to:

Angela Yeager
Elizabeth Miller
Evann Remington
Kat Franken
Khela Singer-Adams

Kidical Mass Family Bike Ride Sunday; SJ Recognizes Ride Founder

From Kidical Mass HQ:

The next Kidical Mass ride will be this Sunday, July 25th, 2010. We'll meet at about 4:00 pm at Hallman Elementary School. If you're able, please bring non-perishable food to donate to the Marion-Polk Food Share. During the ride through the quiet Northgate neighborhood we'll pit stop at the new Northgate Peace & Forgiveness Community Garden and have a snack at the Marion-Polk Food Share warehouse and office.

And congratulations to organizer Kat for her recognition at the Statesman 20 under 40 fete Thursday night!

Read more about it in the Sunday paper!