Earlier this month the LA Times had a story on big warehouses that "replace farmland and spew pollution."
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| LA Times, Feb. 2023 |
Yesterday the paper featured a front-pager on a supposed shortage in warehouse and industrial land.
It seemed to be written for multiple markets, for the Statesman Register Journal Guard Today, and its framing didn't correspond well at all to local conditions here in Salem. It was a misleading headline, alarmist, not a very good expression of any "objective" journalism. (It was, in fact, a kind of advocacy.)
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| Misleading headline yesterday |
There had been just a few days earlier a story about another big warehouse and distribution center going up.
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| A new warehouse for a dollar store |
The Mill Creek Corporate Center isn't much of an "industrial" area, not in the sense of manufacturing; rather, it is becoming a warehouse and distribution area, a logistics center, oriented to fossil fuel and transportation. FedEx, Amazon, Home Depot, Dollar General. Others too. Maybe they'll be electrified over the next decade, but at the moment, they're a tribute to gas and diesel.
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| Unwalkable: So sprawled out, distant from housing, with roads as barriers (via a realty site) |
And the site is remote, separated from useful things, utterly car-dependent.
- Previously see "Are the Mill Creek and Salem Renewable Energy Office Parks Already Obsolete?" This was before the warehouse binge started, and if suburban office parks and corporate HQs have indeed gone out of fashion, the switch from "Salem Renewable Energy" park to warehouse wasteland shows that we haven't given up paving over the suburban greenfield.
Meanwhile, the City has scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday the 23rd, an online open house and meeting on "Walkable, Mixed-Use Areas."
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| City promo, via Twitter |
The meeting is for work substantially for compliance with new Climate Friendly Areas called for by new land use rules on climate.
(Obliquely, also, the City admits that our "TSP update" is more of an extension to Our Salem. So far it has been talking about land use much more than streets.)
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| "minor updates" for our giant arterial stroads |
When I read in the summary sheet that Salem now promotes "walkable, mixed-use areas,
particularly along corridors served by frequent transit service," what I
don't see is any real plan, any plausible path, for flipping our giant
stroads like south Commercial and Lancaster Drive from the auto-oriented
big box and strip development to "walkable, mixed-use areas."
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| Is this really going to become "walkable, mixed-use" any time soon? (2015) |
This great change is only theoretical at the moment and more than merely "minor updates" are going to be necessary.
And on the other side of Keubler/Cordon - again, the "beltline" is not functioning as any belt, but is facilitating new development on the other side - we have this large new pocket of sprawly development that is not in any sense of the word walkable. There is no walkability plan for this new development.
It is of limited utility to have these small pockets of boutique walkability - like that charming image, all zoomed in on a micro-scale, on State Street in front of the Pomeroy building - when our big new development is for large warehouses disconnected from anything useful.
Our current approach to "walkability" is unrealistic on our big arterial corridors, and utterly disconnected from our new warehouse district. And so far on big infill projects at Fairview and at the north campus of the State Hospital, we still haven't got fully walkable development there either. Merely to say we have new zoning that allows for walkable, mixed use development does not make it exist in reality.
To the extent that the City builds awareness and support for walkable, mixed-use areas, meetings like the City will hold tomorrow are useful. But as with the Climate Action Plan, the City is exaggerating the scope of actual accomplishment, and hyping talk
rather than walk. If we are really going to meet our climate moment, more and deeper action will be necessary.
Elsewhere:
- A report at Smart Growth America, "Foot Traffic Ahead 2023" and a response at Strong Towns, "Why is it so Difficult to Build Walkable Places?"
- Jeff Speck's book, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, and a conversation with Speck at AARP, "Why Walkable Communities Are the Best Communities for Older Adults."
2 comments:
You raise a number of good points here. In fact, I met with the Mayor last Thursday to discuss climate action and, among other things, the impact of our legacy buildings on where we want to go in terms of walkability, reducing the heat island effect, etc. But again, you overestimate the City's ability to act independently to address these issues. We have changed policies to reduce the likelihood that these past development approaches continue in the future, but the cost to retrofit all of these strip malls and commercial centers is staggering and requires the cooperation of the owners. And, as the Mayor pointed out, in the case of Lancaster, most of it is in Marion County. There is, however, funds to improve the walkability of Commercial Street and pieces of that project should happen this fiscal year. In addition, both the Commercial and Lancaster corridors have been rezoned to mixed use areas with design standards to better support walking and biking. The other point you don't take into consideration is that the state mandates the amount of housing, retail, and commercial/industrial land Salem has to make available, not the City. We may have too many fossil-fuel distribution centers in Salem, but the City doesn't control that. I think what we the City can do is develop master plans for these major corridors that implement the new standards and facilitate redevelopment along the lines of downtown.
The point of asking about retrofitting the arterial corridors is less to insist that they all transform suddenly, but to suggest that we need a larger scale upzoning. From "Our Salem Vision and Draft Plan Relies too Much on Arterial Conversion to Mixed-Use":
"Adjacent to the vast swaths of mixed-use conversion on Commercial and Lancaster there is also this question of penumbral upzoning. (We have seen this also on the State Street Corridor study, where the transition to single detached housing on the alley remains abrupt and we do not nourish the envisioned mixed use development on State with gradual upzoning three and four blocks north and south. This new study should also consider why that plan has not yet jump-started redevelopment on State Street - do we have the right strategies in place? If not, more of the same is not going to work.)"
We likely need more than just legalized middle housing for all this to work.
The project for Commercial you reference is for buffered bike lanes and some enhanced crosswalks. It's very incremental, not fully protected bike lanes, not anything close to a full stroad-to-boulevard conversion, which is what is really needed.
(Maybe there will be more to say in a separate post. We're well aware of Lancaster's multiple jurisdictions. See "Why is Lancaster so Effed up? The Patchwork and Mobility Choice" (2011). The claim here is not that Salem has made too much industrial land available, but that our lingering approach to sort-and-separate zoning has stranded these new developments in utterly unwalkable, car-dependent configurations, without nearby housing and neighborhood commercial hubs. A central claim here also is that "policies to reduce the likelihood that these past development approaches continue in the future" remain staggeringly incommensurate to our climate crisis. It requires more incentive, carrots and sticks, than merely "reduce the likelihood." That is talk, not walk. I may reply to these in more detail later...)
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