Bike Parking Comes to Loughborough Commons, Sorta

The sign reads “For Everyone’s Safety, No Skateboarding, No Roller Blading, No Bicycling. Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” And below the no bicycling sign is, a new bike rack. The sign they should have up at the two entrances would warn pedestrians, “We have no provisions in place for those of you on foot so for your own safety just stay out (unless you work here).” But, back to the new bike rack.

This rack is known as a “dish rack” type of rack and frankly it is one of the worst racks on the market. This type has several problems but the main thing is that it is designed to have a wheel (typically front) slide into one of the narrow slots. This makes the bike very unstable in windy conditions but more critically when attempting to secure the bike to the rack you really can’t use a modern U-lock, you must have a long enough chain to be able to lock the bike’s frame to the rack. Otherwise, someone can easily release the front wheel and take the rest.

This is also a two-sided rack, designed to be accessed from one side or the other but here they’ve pushed it up against the wall so only one side is usable. This is probably OK because I doubt they’d have a mad rush of cyclists all at the same time. What is unfortunate is for the same money (or maybe less) they could have purchased a far superior bike rack capable of holding 2-4 bikes with good support, rather than potentially twisting an expensive rim on a windy day.

But the real problem comes in the placement of the rack. It is increasingly obvious they (developer & engineer) had no thought about bike parking beforehand, only trying to fix the situation later after so much attention. But the sidewalk you see here will someday connect to walks eventually getting you out to Loughborough. This is the only pedestrian route planned in and out of the entire project and if the bike rack is used, bikes will be blocking the sole sidewalk.Pedestrian access & bike parking should have been ready on the day the store opened, something that would have been possible had they given it some thought ahead of time. It would have been the friendly thing to do.

Turning back north toward Loughborough we see they’ve begun to dig out the dirt where a planned sidewalk is going to go. My personal guess is they wanted to wait on this sidewalk until the strip mall building that will be on the left gets built. As with bike parking, the recent attention to these issues has likely rearranged their construction schedule a bit.Note the pedestrian walking along the narrow auto drive as they leave the store. I’ve never once had to hang around to get a picture of a pedestrian, someone is almost always walking to or from the store.

Tearing Down Public Housing

All over St. Louis we are seeing the demolition of 1940-60s public housing projects.  The picture here, however, is the demotition of similar public housing in Toronto.

While I was in Toronto back in July I made it a point to seek out such areas.  All in all they don’t look much different although the population is more racially diverse.  Physically, Toronoto seems to have followed that of many other cities by creating mid & high-rise public housing that had little to do with the street, having a greater relationship to the parking lots.

Like St. Louis and so many other cities, Toronto is razing these structures and replacing them with more urban low-rise housing.  It is funny though, back when the middle class were seeking out single family detached houses we built public housing (which was originally targeted for the middle class, btw) as high rises.  Now that high rises are increasing in cities such as St. Louis and Toronto for the upper classes we are building low-rise public housing.

No matter the form, the public housing areas seldom get complete neighborhoods — walkable with a retail center.  The planners of these developments still assume a very suburban separation of uses philosophy.  Where is the new urbanism town center to create real viable neighborhoods with our public dollars?

Should St. Louis Become a ‘Suburb’ in the Region?

You may have heard about the city’s infamous “Team Four” plan from the mid 1970’s. If not, read Antonio French’s report here. This comprehensive plan was in response to a series of research reports from the Rand Corporation on behalf of the National Science Foundation. I am in the process of reviewing these for a school project but I wanted to share part of it with you now.

From Rand Report #R-1353 St. Louis: A City and its Suburbs published August 1973:

The analysis suggests that, among the alternatives open to the city, promoting a new role for St. Louis as one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life holds more promise than reviving the traditional central city functions.

This is not necessarily suggesting the city taken on a highly suburban form (streets & buildings) but the role of a supporting player in the region but not the core. The center, presumably, would fall to Clayton and the central corridor. In reality, our region and today’s society functions without a single core. Today many people have suburb to suburb commutes.

So what do you think of this idea of giving up on focusing on St. Louis as the core of the region and instead make it simply one of many economic and residential areas? What is the difference?

The first difference, in my mind, is transit. All the planning being done around future transit is focused on trying to reclaim St. Louis as the core from which everything else radiates. For example, the new North & South mass transit studies for the region are trying to connect via the city’s CBD to the county. It would seem to me that getting folks from the county into mass transit can be accomplished much easier by connecting to the end of the new line at Shrewsbury for south county and off the original line for those in north county. There are also several options for connecting the employment hub of Westport into the system.

People are often critical of my belief that neighborhood scale transit in the form of streetcars or guided trams (similar to a modern streetcar but with rubber tires and a single track to guide it) can help increase development and create dense and thus walkable neighborhoods. Perhaps they are right. But my belief in this idea is nothing compared to the utopian notion that by bringing light rail to a former major core we can somehow undo 50 years of change and sprawling development patterns in our region. I’m not convinced.

Would it be so bad for the city to concede that our downtown will never once again be the hub for commerce that it once was? That doesn’t mean it can’t be a great place. In fact, I’d argue that without the pressure to regain its role as the region’s major employment center and commerce hub that downtown and the city might actually be free to focus on creating great places where people want to live and work. This means enjoying out quick light rail connection to the east side, Clayton and the airport but focusing the balance of our transit attention on the neighborhood scale — not how to get more suburbanites into downtown for their day jobs. If anything is a ‘build it and they will come’ scenario it is the thinking light rail to downtown will return jobs downtown.

When the Rand reports were written in 1973 they looked at the population drops in the city, down to 600,000 in the most recent census. Today we are just under 350,000. All of our attention is focused on reclaiming the former glory of the region’s center but how has that worked for us over the last few decades? Sure, we’ve got more residents and investment in downtown but is that really shifting things? The U.S. population is trending back toward cities which may account for much of downtown’s rejuvenation of late. But what is the likelihood of reshaping our sprawling region back to a core with radial suburbs? Very slim in my eyes. I’d like to see us shift to making downtown not the core of the region but one of a number of business centers in the region — the most dynamic of them all. The city should focus on increasing population not by a thousand here and 500 there, but by tens of thousands.

With office parks spread out all over the region, a convention center in St. Charles and performance venues everywhere I just don’t know that we can successfully reverse the damage that has been done. Other regions, such as Chicago, never lost their place as the core. However, many industrial cities, like Detroit, did lose their place in the core. Does anyone know of an example where a former core city regained its place as the center of commerce in a region?

So what do you think? Should we “stay the course” with attempting to maintain St. Louis as the core or accept that in the auto-centric times a region may no longer have a true core and simply work to make St. Louis a pedestrian-friendly urban “suburb” within the region?

Downtown Still Going Strong; Neighborhoods and Inner Suburbs Need Leadership

I got a call from developer Kevin McGowan on Saturday, you may recall the last time he called me was to defend himself over the pets issue in his own building (see post). So McGowan calls me all excited and thought I’d be interested in his news — super fast loft sales. I’m not in the business of acting as a free PR service to profitable downtown developers but as we talked I saw enough in this that it is more than a press release for his firm.

OK, here is the story. McGowan | Walsh has been unsure about what the composition should be for their three buildings at Cupples Station located to the due west of the ballpark (#s 7, 8 & 9). They’ve hung banners on all three for “Ballpark Lofts” but they’ve been looking at office use instead of residential or in addition to. They began to market lofts in the center building — #8 to test the market. They’d been taking deposits to get on a list. Saturday they asked potential buyers to firm up and pick their units — wanting to really see if the buyers would stick around or seek their deposit back. Well, McGowan reports they sold 57 out of 68 units — in just over an hour. Needless to say, he was ecstatic. This represents, he said, over $12 million in loft sales.

So I began to ask more questions. The selling prices were roughly $146K to $400K for square footage ranging from 750sf to roughly 1,500sf. Just a few years ago lofts were easily ranging from 1,200sf to over 2,000sf but we are seeing a shift to smaller units. McGowan confirmed the smaller and more affordable units are where the market it going. Still compared to other lofts downtown these prices seem on the low side but there is a good reason for that. Parking.

You see, McGowan | Walsh did what is called “unbundled” parking — a parking management technique discussed in Todd Litman’s book Parking Management Best Practices whereby a parking space is not included with the unit. Some rental units downtown have unbundled parking that costs extra each month but I don’t know of any other for sale loft downtown where this is the case, save for perhaps the Marquette building by The Lawrence Group. Anyway, buyers at McGowan’s Ballpark Lofts were given the option of purchasing a parking space for the tidy sum of $18,000. Parking is expensive to provide and it is good for people to see the real cost by not hiding it in the purchase price.

McGowan said that roughly 20-25% of the buyers decided against a parking space which, to me, is a very big deal. McGowan credits the MetroLink stop a block away for the buyers willingness to forgo parking and presumably a car. They do have a free scooter with each loft so perhaps these buyers are comfortable with transit and the occasional scoot.

While they are still undecided about the other two buildings this latest round of fast sales may push them toward residential and away from commercial office space. McGowan fully acknowledges the impact of the new Busch Stadium on the marketability of his lofts. He also gives credit to two unbuilt projects — the ballpark village and Chouteau’s Lake Greenway.

The area needs something because the most activity is the on and off ramps that intrude into the area. I’d like to see these simplified a bit so some of the land can be recovered for in-fill construction. Hopefully residents of these lofts will be open to walking, biking or scooting up to City Grocers, which will be moving to a bigger space in the Syndicate Building late next year (see Biz Journal story).

But we have a housing bubble right? Well, yes and no. The “Creative Class” have been seeking urban living options for a while now and downtown St. Louis is the only choice for such a lifestyle in the region. As such, downtown continues to see demand whereas tract homes in the hinterlands are stacking up unsold. The fact is nationally families are becoming a smaller and smaller segment. Singles and empty nesters are the norm, especially as the baby boomer generation ages. For many boomers there kids are long out of the house, they are divorced or have lost their spouse. They 4-bedroom ranch in St. Charles County just doesn’t appeal to them. But this doesn’t mean downtown developers can write their own checks. They are learning buyers have a ceiling they are willing to spend, unlike in the ‘burbs where many buyers will become house poor to own as big of place as they can get. No, urban dwellers want to enjoy life and need money for travel and other things often given up to afford the big house in the suburbs and the two (or three) cars in the garage. This is resulting in smaller living spaces — with residents getting out on the streets more often rather than go from the den to the living room to the family room to the sitting room to the media room when they feel restless.

Transit is a big factor, in my view, toward the choice to buy a loft without a parking space. This is also a factor for the conservative bankers to finance a project without a space per unit — McGowan said MetroLink was a key part of showing their bankers they did not need a space for every unit.. Sadly, we have very few places downtown where that remains a reasonable option. The development future of downtown is in the west area between 18th and Jefferson and into Midtown toward Grand. The near north side has great potential with the vacant Pruitt-Igoe and the largely vacant area between Washington Avenue and the emerging Old North St. Louis neighborhood. Getting a permanent transit option to these locations will enable developers to use vacant land not as parking lots for adjacent buildings but for new in-fill construction. We are at the key point in the development around the CBD and without good localized transit (aka streetcar or guided tram).

And of course the bulk of the city is not downtown yet it only gets passing attention. The inner-ring of suburbs in St. Louis County are as urban as much of St. Louis and deserve renewed focus as well to offset losses in population many of them are experiencing. Natural market forces are coming together downtown with the trick being keeping the “leaders” and their outdated zoning and thinking out of the way. The same simply doesn’t work outside the immediate downtown area — the neighborhoods of the city and adjacent inner-ring suburbs need strong leadership to bring good zoning to them. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions it is just not happening. Downtown will continue to strengthen while the rest of the region is going to suffer from our 1960s urban edge growth mentality. Meanwhile, other regions in the U.S. will continue to outpace our region in terms of population and job growth.

Streets and Accessibility in St. Louis

A couple of things:

First, MayorSlay.com has announced the retirement of Director of Streets Jim Suelmann effective the end of this month after 28 years. So, I must now direct my emails on valet parking issues to the Acting Director, Todd Waelterman.

The Mayor and the St. Louis Board of Public Service are hosting a seminar on “New Accessibility Guidelines for Public Rights-Of-Way;”

Compliance is no longer a guessing game. There is a right way, a wrong way and a best way. Architects, engineers, other designers, developers, builders, contractors, and city inspectors and officials now have a chance to make our community a model. This seminar will provide an opportunity to learn about the new guidelines — from experts in the accessibility field who helped develop the guidelines, and by experiencing what happens when accessibility is not addressed.

Co-Sponsors are The Pyramid Companies and The Starkloff Disability Institute. The seminar will be held December 14-15, 2006 from 8:30am to 5pm at the Hilton at the Ballpark. The registration fee is $100. The registration deadline is December 6, 2006. For more information call 314-588-7090.

Expert panelists include Janet Barlow of Accessible Design for the Blind, Asheville, NC; Bill Hecker, AIA, of Hecker Design, Birmingham, AL and St. Louis Architect Gina Hilberry, AIA of Cohen Hilberry Architects. Hilberry is also an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Architecture.

At right is an intersection that would have had the involvement of St. Louis’ Board of Public Service — note how those at the intersection of the crosswalks are in the line of fire of right turning autos. Similar situations are being created all over the city, including the new intersection outside Loughborough Commons. Hopefully BPS can learn a thing or two from their own event.