Habitat Helping To Build Up Housing Stock in North City
Recently I passed through MLK & Grand (map). Near there I spotted Habitat for Humanity crews busy finishing up several new homes:
These homes are being built just North of the old Blumeyer Housing projects. Blumeyer is now gone, being remade under HUD’s HOPE VI program by McCormack Barron Salazar.
This was smart site selection on the part of Habitat. By building their homes adjacent to other new housing it will strengthen both. This corner of the city is getting a good mix of housing types.
Unfortunately the commercial development is all geared toward the car. The above houses are less than a 1/4 mile from a Save-A-Lot grocery store just across Grand but getting there on foot is not an easy task.
Strong urban neighborhoods need strong urban retail to make them fully walkable. This is not about forbidding cars or forcing people to walk rather than drive. It is about making the commercial districts abutting our residential areas such that someone, on a nice day especially, would want to walk rather than drive. For those that prioritize their income such that they use public transportation rather than being a slave to their car, walkable commercial districts will help reinforce that decision.
Addendum 11/7/08 @ 8am:
I need to indicate how I think this more urban/walkable district would have been developed. First it would have been to target an area more than the size of any single project. Both sides of Grand as well as a few blocks of MLK & Page in each direction. Create an urban zoning overlay for this area that would require new buildings to be built up to the property/sidewalk line. Identify where parking could be located and then build several public lots so that those building retail in this district don’t need large quantities of land for their own private parking lots. Build new sidewalks with street trees, benches, bike racks and such. This leaves only the new buildings to be built or the renovation of the few that remain. Place on-street parking in as many areas as possible. Include “bulbs” at the ends of the on-street parking to help reduce the distance to cross Grand, MLK & Page. Streetscape & parking are handled by the city as their contribution to the district. The smaller parcels that exist don’t need to be assembled by the city or private developers because they don’t need massive parking lots – the zoning overlay would remove all mandates for parking. Over time this would develop into an interesting walkable commercial district adjacent to the new walkable housing being built East of Grand.
I’m not quite sure of the point – are you disappointed that Habitat is building homes that don’t meet your vision or that the city approved a Sav-a-Lot, or both? Duh, they’re actually building new homes! I’m just glad to see reinvestment happening in an economically-fragile part of the city. Could it be “better”? Yes, but that holds true on every project – there’s always something to be criticized. But in this city and this economy, our first priority needs to be keeping the people and the jobs here, then we can push for incremental improvements in urbanity. We simply need to save the city from further decline first!
.
“The above houses are less than a 1/4 mile from a Save-A-Lot grocery store just across Grand but getting there on foot is not an easy task”. In my world, a 1/4 mile walk is acceptable. I’m sure crossing Grand is a challenge, but a city won’t function without arterial steets like Grand – the only alternative is forcing traffic onto narrower one-way couplets (in residential neighborhoods) or building more freeways (through neighborhoods). The other half of the equation is no parking lot = no Save-a-Lot. Stores like Save-a-Lot cater to their customers’ needs and desires, they’re not stupid, they want to make money! Yes, single people can walk to a grocery twice a week to buy a bag of groceries to carry home, but most people, including many who could, would rather drive over once a week or every couple of weeks, load their car up with 6, 8, 10 bags and then drive home – it’s simply a much more efficient use of their/our time!
.
The nearest thing we have to the corner grocery these days is Walgreens (and “we” apparently don’t like those, either). Grocery customers vote with their checkbooks, and guess what, bigger wins. Trader Joe’s, Aldi’s, Dierberg’s, Shnuck’s, Shop-n-Save, Save-a-Lot all have minimum store sizes and all need to be severely abused and/or subsidized to even consider opening a store without convenient customer parking. They willingly pay, a lot, for prime commercial land where more than half of it will dedicated to surface parking. It’s their business model. They don’t do it to piss off urbanists, they do it because it’s how they succeed in business! The city understands this. You might be able to build a grocery downtown without parking (although having a whole parking garage above kinda voids that argument), but you’ll never build one outside of downtown – the land is simply too cheap and the risk too great to think “outside the box”.
Steve,
I know one of the foremen for Habitat for Humanity; I could easily speak to him about urbanist issues. He lives in the city and would be sympathetic to building to our input.
Chris
HFH is not about urban context, or any other context for that matter, they are simply a mission-based organization that helps put deserving families on a more manageable path to home ownership. I, too, wish that somewhat competing constituencies (yes, needy families are also part of the environment of more academic urban development issue discourse, in addition to frying bigger fish) would not unfortunately (and perhaps ironically) cancel out certain tenets of ideal urban development form. I realize there are efforts out there to be as sensitive and contextual as possible (the scattered sites project in JVL, on St. Louis Avenue right off of N. Grand, for instance), but this usually only comes into play when large enough expanses of contiguous or semi-contiguous plots are attainable. Most often, the HFH project is a singular installation, or perhaps consisting of two or at most three units, and the cost-prohibitiveness of donated construction materials, finishes, appliances and volunteer labor and they can’t afford to weigh ‘outside’ considerations when the mission is to provide homes to those who would otherwise not have a realistic opportunity to own them. Our city just lacks a very public discussion about urban planning and proper development form, and while I adore the blogs that keep the issues alive and current, the absence of discussion on the physical state of our city in the broader press and political platform is indicative of a community unaware of it’s own surroundings. Starting new publications is obviously NOT the answer to that shortfall, but instead infiltrating existing publications WOULD be the answer. How do we make urban planning and land development, and its reporting, as sexy and interesting as electing the first black president?