dogtown commons

Courtesy of Sunday’s Tribune:

OAKLAND — Subway, one of the few signs of life in the Mandela Gateway retail strip on Seventh Street, was closed indefinitely Friday after being robbed for the third time in a month…

…The armed robberies have scared his workers, causing some to quit, and Tripathi doesn’t blame them. He’s not so worried about losing money, but he is worried that someone will be seriously hurt or killed.

Tripathi was exuberant about the location before he opened for business in August 2006, willing to be the pioneer and feeling confident that other businesses would soon follow him into the two-block stretch of empty ground-floor retail spaces at the Mandela Gateway apartment complex.

He was right about one thing, business is great. But the empty storefronts are still empty. With the exception of the People’s Community Partnership Federal Credit Union, the storefronts are closed and locked, and the street is largely devoid of pedestrian traffic that might detour criminals.

Marcus Johnson, a West Oakland resident and chair of the Prescott neighborhood crime prevention council, said the restaurant’s closure is a blow to the community and highlights the urgent need for community policing and beat patrols.

“He’s been robbed three times. He has cameras and customers, so that tells you that any business is not safe,” Johnson said. “It’s right across the street from BART. It’s busy there. Even with the 99 Cent store and Mandela Foods (both expected to open there next year), how are they going to open there and feel safe?”

All the development in the world can’t help a neighborhood if it remains too crime-plagued for a franchise sandwich shop to stay open for business.

I’m starting to feel like a broken record on this issue, but today is World Carfree Day, and yesterday the LA Times reported on a new report by the Urban Land Institute pointing out the relatively minor impact of incremental improvements in things like fuel efficiency, compared to larger choices about where to live, how much to drive, and so on:

The report, “Growing Cooler: Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change,” analyzed scores of academic studies and concluded that compact development — mixing housing and businesses in denser patterns, with walkable neighborhoods — could do as much to lower emissions as many of the climate policies now promoted by state and national politicians.

Up to now, climate policy has primarily focused on such things as higher fuel economy for cars and trucks, cleaner fuels, greener building standards, lower power plant emissions, and international treaties. But a growing consensus of experts is also homing in on the everyday zoning decisions of local officials and county planners.

Since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has risen three times faster than the population and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations. And it is getting worse: The U.S. Department of Energy projects that between 2005 and 2030, driving will increase 59%, far outpacing an estimated national population growth of 23%.

While dramatic lifestyle changes can do much more than small technological improvements to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon emissions, policymakers and many environmentalists often focus on improving automobile fuel efficiency, encouraging the use of low-energy lightbulbs, and other consumer-oriented choices that the public can adopt with little sacrifice. This results in the jarring disconnect that we get in, for example, An Inconvenient Truth, when Al Gore spends over an hour detailing the major disruptions to human civilization that are likely to occur if global warming proceeds, then ends the movie with a list of mostly small suggestions like turning one’s thermostat up or down by 2 degrees, and keeping one’s car tires properly inflated.

After the maps showing large chunks of densely populated land being submerged by rising oceans, Gore’s suggested actions seem laughable in their smallness, but one can understand his decision to focus on small-scale solutions instead of revolutionary changes to the way most of us live. People are attached to their comfortable, convenient lifestyles, and this passage from the LA Times article shows what environmentalists are up against:

The California Chamber of Commerce and the California Building Industry Assn. declined to comment on the report, but James Burling, litigation director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has battled environmentalists over land-use issues, dismissed “the latest anti-sprawl crusade based on global warming” as “no different from every other anti-sprawl campaign from Roman times to the present.”

“So long as people ardently desire to live and raise children in detached homes with a bit of lawn, there is virtually nothing that government bureaucrats can do that will thwart that,” he said.

Reading quotes like that probably instills terror in the minds of politicians, and their fear of asking people for real sacrifices at the gas pump or the tollbooth is understandable. So it’s easy to see why everyone wants to focus on technological improvements and consumer choice rather than financial sacrifices or lifestyle changes, but that emphasis shouldn’t fool us into forgetting that we already have a pretty good understanding of what can be done to stop human-caused global warming.

We also shouldn’t forget that lifestyle changes may be inevitable, as the costs — both financial and environmental — of energy increase. The real question may be whether we will make the changes voluntarily and with forethought, or involuntarily, as our supply of cheap oil starts to run out and living “in detached homes with a bit of lawn” 40 miles from one’s office stops being economically feasible. Predictions vary about how easily we can adapt to new circumstances, and how severe the disruptions may be, but if the industrialized world does not make some difficult choices now, then soon we may live in a world whether the choice between incandescent and fluorescent lightbulbs is the least of our worries.

A website called Walk Score rates the walkability of any address on a scale from 0 to 100, using google maps and based on how many stores, schools, parks, restaurants, etc. are nearby. It’s a clever little site, and while it obviously doesn’t account for things like crime rates or proximity to mass transit, the scores seem to be pretty reasonable as ballpark figures. My current location gets an okay but unexceptional grade of 72, which seems about right. A few places I used to live, mostly in New York, scored in the high 90’s.

It got me thinking about what other data I’d want included in the algorithm if I were actually using it to choose my neighborhood. Average annual days of sunshine? Average annual temperature? Quality of the local architecture? Average number of trees per block? Average number of barking dogs behind chainlink fences per block?

[Photograph above is “The Long Walk” by Bernard Fallon, taken in Liverpool in 1969. More information here.]

Are we heading toward a time when every piece of every visible surface has been bought by an advertiser? Last night I was compelled to listen to a loud advertisement while riding an elevator for five floors. Then I wake up and read about this.

This evening on the radio there was a short discussion of the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, and how it has revitalized the ecosystem in some indirect ways: aspens are now growing to maturity for the first time since the wolves were first eliminated in the 1920’s, because a reduced elk population no longer kills all the trees in their early years. The renewed health of trees and shrubs has reduced stream erosion and increased beaver dams. Any change to a complex system ramifies in unpredictable ways.

This got me thinking about the city as a kind of ecosystem, in which changes to one part of the system have repurcussions that may be unexpected and seemingly unrelated. The idea of the city as an ecosystem isn’t new. As the late urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote in an introduction to her indispensable book The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

The two sorts of ecosystems–one created by nature, the other by human beings–have fundamental principles in common. For instance, both types of ecosystems–assuming they are not barren–require much diversity to sustain themselves. In both cases, the diversity develops organically over time, and the varied components are interdependent in complex ways.

Recognizing the organic, interdependent nature of cities is a source of both optimism and caution. On the one hand, it means that small positive changes can have beneficial effects that are broader than anticipated. On the other hand, it means that well-meaning policies can have unintended negative consequences, and that public policy is only one little piece of a complex system that no single institution or government can ultimately control.

Viewed in this light, little annoyances like sidewalks being used as parking lots (my own pet peeve) take on more significance. (It’s no accident that the first three chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities all have “sidewalks” in their titles.) The block shown to the right is an extreme example, and the sidewalk parking may be more tolerated there because it is a dead-end street, but I often find myself having to walk out into the street to get around illegally parked cars. Anything that discourages people from walking is damaging to the safety and vitality of a city — having more people out on the streets makes an area more hospitable to local businesses and less hospitable to crime. Reduced crime in turn will make people more likely to walk, further increasing commerce and reducing crime.

There’s no magic bullet that changes a neighborhood from blight to vibrancy, but a myriad of small factors combine to reach a critical mass that can have transformative effects. Encouraging people to get out of their cars and onto their feet would be a good place to start. Not only is walking around a city one of life’s great pleasures, but it’s good for the city, good for the environment, and good for one’s health. What’s not to love?

This is not to say that sidewalk-parking is one of Oakland’s major problems, but that is exactly the point: small, seemingly insignificant things like obstructed sidewalks or lack of crosswalks can have ripple effects in the character of a neighborhood. Much of Oakland’s 154-page Pedestrian Master Plan is devoted to the small details of sidewalk and crosswalk design. But what good is a well-designed sidewalk when it is being used as a garage?

To take another example, The Town notes slow police response times and asks, “I wonder about the psychological effect of letting all of those little things slip through the cracks. How does it feel when you call the police and no one comes?” Aside from the more obvious benefits of an increased police force, the so-called “broken window” theory says that attention to small quality-of-life issues can help a city reach a tipping point in fighting crime. Responding quickly to calls about a stolen bicycle or a car break-in may not seem very important, but residents with no faith in basic public safety are more likely to move out of the city, or drive instead of walking, or shop at a mall in a suburb instead of stores in their own neighborhood. You can’t overestimate the cumulative effects of thousands of people making all those individual decisions.

Seeing a city as an ecosystem also serves as a reminder that power is decentralized. Ron Dellums has gotten a lot of grief for offering feel-good words instead of substantive changes, but one thing I agree with him about is that city hall and police headquarters can only accomplish so much on their own. Dedications of peace poles and block parties may seem silly as the city approaches 100 homicides so far this year, but every person who chats with a neighbor and every family that visits a local park plays a tiny but essential role in making their neighborhood a little less dangerous and a little less desolate. Zoning and policing don’t create communities — they only help create the conditions under which communities can flourish. Ultimately it’s the everyday habits of the residents that make all the difference.

The Washington Post has an article on a recent development in scientific taxonomy — selling naming rights to newly discovered species:

Searching for new ways to raise money for environmental causes, scientists and conservationists are increasingly opting to sell naming rights to the highest bidder. But the trend — which is reshaping the way researchers name everything from monkeys to beetles — has sparked a fierce debate over the future of taxonomy, as well as conservation itself.

The practice isn’t entirely new:

The rules say nothing about selling naming rights. So after Mark Erdmann, a senior adviser for Conservation International’s Indonesia marine program, and consultant Gerald Allen discovered two new species of sharks last year, Erdmann thought, why not auction off the right to name the creatures they had found?

In the 18th and 19th centuries, explorers frequently named the flora and fauna they found after their financial backers. Erdmann reasoned he was simply updating the tradition by bestowing that honor on anyone willing to donate funds to help a species survive.

Will all newborn babies soon have corporate sponsorship too? I can just imagine the birth announcements: “John and Sally Palmer and Microsoft are proud to announce the birth of their daughter, Windows Vista Palmer. She was born September 14th, 2007 in Oakland, CA and weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces.”

This is clearest picture I’ve found of the smoke over California:

With the Lick Fire to the Southeast and the Moonlight Fire to the Northeast, we’re getting it from both ends. Let’s hope the rains come early this year — it’s already been a whopper of a year for wildfires, and it’s only early September…

(Photo is from the Forest Service website here and a Forest Service map showing active fires is here.)

Contrary to predictions of gridlock, mass confusion and worse, Bay Area residents coped just fine with no Bay Bridge over the long weekend. As the SF Chronicle says:

This weekend’s closure tested people’s ability to get around without the major connection between San Francisco and the East Bay. Although there were scattered traffic backups, people appeared to heed the call to stay off the roads and take public transit.

Caltrans officials mounted a nearly $1 million publicity campaign warning motorists as far away as Southern California of the closure and urging Bay Area drivers to take public transit or expect delays along alternate routes. The agency also subsidized overnight BART service and extra ferry runs.

While official ridership figures are not yet available, it’s clear that transit was popular. BART carried huge loads all weekend, and large crowds were reported on ferry systems as well.

“We’ve pretty much shattered every ridership record we have,” said BART spokesman Linton Johnson. “Weekday, weekend, all ridership records we have look like they’ve been broken.”

The past record for daily ridership is 381,200, which was set June 13 when there was a Police concert at the Coliseum in Oakland. The previous Saturday mark was March 3, when 229,583 people rode. The Sunday record was June 24, when 196,000 showed up, many drawn by the gay pride parade in San Francisco.

None of this should come as a surprise.