Downtown Business Not So Good for Good Works

The giant ribbon-cutting scissors are barely back in their box and Good Works is pulling the rug on their second location, located on Washington at 9th (Banker’s Lofts). I attended the ribbon cutting on December 13th and I must say it was an exciting time, the ribbon cutting for Flamingo Bowl was later that same day.

Above: Deputy Mayor Barb Geisman, Ald Phyllis Young, the store manager and Jim Cloar from the Downtown Partnership cut the ribbon on December 13th, 2007.

In the Post-Dispatch on the 24th of this month the news of their closing:

In the latest blow to downtown St. Louis, Good Works Inc. will close its home-furnishings store next month due to a lack of new customers.Many of the shoppers who visited the store at 901 Washington Avenue were the same ones who frequented the Good Works store at 6323 Delmar Boulevard in University City, said Chris Dougher, one of the owners. Co-owners Dougher and Rita Navarro plan to expand the store in the Delmar Loop.

“We just aren’t generating new business,” Dougher said of the store on Washington Avenue. “It’s a huge disappointment, but we can’t foresee it changing in the near future.”

The 8,000-square-foot store, which opened in November, was one of the larger retailers to locate downtown in recent years.

The store on Delmar, which sells contemporary furniture and accessories, has been successful since opening at that location about 11 years ago.

The owners decided to open a second store on Washington Avenue because they wanted to be part of the downtown renaissance and thought it would become the next Loop.

However, a soft economy has slowed downtown loft purchases, store openings and retail spending.

On opening day I wrote:

“I wish Good Works the best of luck and hope they do get all the support they need from the city — and some on-street parking out front.”

Just imagine the loop as four traffic lanes and no on-street parking, it would totally kill the vibe that it has. That is what exists in front of the Good Works store on Washington — it is a poor pedestrian & retail environment. To do well they needed lots of customers and the area to the immediate East is a dead zone — so dead the taxi cabs get to use the sidewalk as a taxi stand. The loft crowd just doesn’t walk by this location on the way to get groceries, dinner or drinks. Too few people do walk by. OK, back to parking.

As I’ve written before I think so much of St. Louis is auto centric with too many drive-thrus and surface parking lots measured by the acre. Even downtown it is hard to take pictures without getting a damn parking garage in the image. So how can I be arguing for on-street parking? On-street parking does a number of very beneficial things for an area. First it reduces four traffic lanes down to two — much friendlier. This also helps to slow down the traffic on the street. People parking and getting in/out of their cars & feeding the meter creates activity on the street. And finally having parking in front of the store decreases the perception that downtown has a parking shortage. When someone arrives they may have to park in the next block or two but the fact that someone got to park out front helps give the impression that parking is fairly easy. This is not to say that a few on-street spaces out front would have provided a steady stream of customers but it would have changed the feel of the area for the better. Certainly more Loop-like.
Of course they recognize they were basically stealing customers from their Loop location. Not much you can say about that except it takes a lot of marketing to increase a customer base. The Loop didn’t happen overnight and neither will retail downtown. For many places the rents far exceed the number of customers.

This is why we need to take immediate steps to make downtown more pedestrian/retail friendly. On-street parking needs to be added where it doesn’t exist, add street vendors selling hot dogs, toasted ravioli, t-shirts, whatever. Street performers would also be a nice touch. The sidewalks need life to have a good stream of retail customers. If we are not quick to act I can see much of downtown being just a restaurant zone with very little retail.

Old Urbanism, Suburbia & New Urbanism

Here in the St. Louis region we have a little bit of everything — we have old urbanism in the inner core (the city of St Louis) as well as in the many older suburbs that ring the city on both sides of the river. Like every region in America, we have too much suburbia — that auto centric muck that has been growing since WWII.Your know what suburbia is — residential streets with big lawn, no street trees and an increasing number of garage doors. The big box centers with enough parking for the day after Thanksgiving. The indoor mall surrounded by acres of parking. The office park with similar looking buildings casually placed on lush green lawns all set between yet more parking. Being a suburb of the core city is fine — Webster Groves is an old suburb that is walkable in ways St Peters will never be. So my issue is not with suburbs but with suburbia — that very soulless form of building that has predominated America fot the last five or six decades.

So much of our good old urbanism has been destroyed remaking core cities with touches of suburbia.

Old urbanism was built for people on foot. Streets were narrow by today’s standards. Each neighborhood had a commercial area within a short walk. The streetcar was not far away which could get you to the bigger stores downtown. No zoning regulated this. It just was. And it worked well until we reached a tipping point with the car — fewer pedestrians and more cars through it all out of balance. While old urbanism was great for people it did a poor job accommodating the car.

The solution of the day was not to tweak our existing environments but to rip them out entirely. The new suburbia was proudly proclaimed as “progress.” Once narrow streets were widened and those neighborhood shops moved to the new strip centers or the open air mall.

In the early 1980s a few people began questioning the status quo and looks to the past for ways to make walkable communities while still making room for the car. The first result was Seaside, Florida — as seen in the movie The Truman Show. Widely dismissed due to its resort nature, many said the principals couldn’t be applied elsewhere — that we were basically stuck with suburbia as the model for future development both in core areas and on the edges.

But a diverse group of Architects and Planners refused to accept suburbia as the only way, founding the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in 1993. Today people are still foolishly dismissive of New Urbanism — saying it is just nostalgia in the corn field. This view is so narrow it looks at a few projects but doesn’t take into account the depth of the guiding principals found in the Charter of the CNU.

About a decade ago there started being talk of a big New Urbanist project in our region. The resulting project was Paul McKee’s Winghaven (yes, that Paul McKee). In August 2001 Peter Downs authored a story on Winghaven for the RFT; The Gospel According to Paul.

Though the experiment is barely half-done, some people are already proclaiming it a stunning success. “WingHaven will be cited for the next 25 years as a great example of a new form of urban development,” says Richard Fleming, president and chief executive officer of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association.

By this point we had seen enough to know that Winghaven was not New Urbanism, despite what Fleming had to say. At the time I was part of a casual group of architects and planners known as New Urban St Louis. After this article appeared architect John Hoag, planner Todd Antoine and I drafted a letter to the editor on behalf of our group. We wrote, in part:

While we applaud Paul McKee’s efforts to break the current mold of suburban development in the St. Louis region, several points are worth mentioning.

New Urbanists identify with one of two camps: developments in suburban “greenfields” or revitalizing existing neighborhoods in the urban core and inner suburbs. New Urbanists believe strengthening the urban core is vital to sustaining long- term regional growth while acknowledging that greenfield development will continue. New development, whether in the urban core or in greenfields, benefits by incorporating New Urbanist principles. New Urbanism does not imply a strict return to nostalgic remembrances of the past. Instead, it is based on design and planning principles nurtured and refined over centuries of town- building that have been largely forgotten over the last 50 years. Problems such as affordable housing, lack of connectiveness and inadequate public transportation plague many suburban areas. Solutions include pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use and transit-oriented development which offers real alternatives to auto-oriented sprawl.

The St. Louis region is blessed with fine older examples of traditional neighborhoods exhibiting many aspects of New Urbanist designs. However, the region is lacking the breakthrough projects seen in Memphis, Dallas and Minneapolis. We encourage developers, bankers and local government officials to explore the rich variety of New Urbanist developments in the U.S. already completed or in the planning process.

Since this time we’ve seen real New Urbanism come to our region via New Town at St Charles. New Town is a project of Whittaker Builders. I’ve had the good fortune to have spent some good one on one time with Greg Whittaker talking about the project and what led him in this direction. Whittaker, like most large home builders in our region, was responsible for a number of the typical subdivisions that define suburbia. Greg Whittaker spent vacation time at Seaside Florida and he began to wonder if they could do something different than they had. The answer was yes.

Building new (or old) urbanism is not a simple task. First of all, based on current zoning, it is illegal —- even in the City of St Louis. Zoning in much of the country mandates suburbia — be it in the old urban core or on corn fields at the edge of each region. The site where New Town is located was zoned for industrial park development. If someone wanted to recreate the intersection of Euclid & Maryland (old urbanism) on the long vacant Pruitt-Igoe site they could not do so based on our current zoning code which dates to 1947.

Our zoning code is like most in the U.S. — it is what is known as use based zoning. That is the code tells you where certain uses are allowed (so much for mixed use areas) and finally how much parking each use much have. Always back to parking — this is why instead of contiguous commercial districts as in the old urbanism newer areas have each building surrounded by parking. With all this parking between buildings you lose that connected feel of a truly walkable environment.

New Urbanist developments like New Town use their own codes — with the city or county adopting that code as an overlay for that site. These codes are not use based — they don’t care if you want to put a hardware store or an insurance company in a storefront space — they are more concerned with the design of the storefront. This is not to say that you can open a slaughterhouse on a street of single family homes. But having commercial spaces with residential units above just around the corner from single family homes is to be expected — something you don’t see in residential subdivisions today.

Codes in new urbanist projects are “form-based” codes — these control how the buildings relate to each other and to the public street. Cities such as Denver are also using form-based codes to regulate how urban infill will be built in various parts of town.

While New Urbanism is not perfect it is a starting point for building communities that respect people while also accommodating the car. New Urbanists such as Peter Calthorpe tend to have a much more modern aesthetic as opposed to DPZ (planners behind New Town) that rely on a more familiar vernacular aesthetic. Aesthetics aside they all seek to mix uses, provide a walkable environment and reduce dependence on the car. Rather than dismiss New Urbanism we should embrace it as a means for ending the mandated suburbia we have now.

Keep in mind I personally would not want to live in a New Urbanist place on the outer edges of a region. However as a model for sites such as the former Pruitt_Igoe it is ideal. I could live there as I’d be close to the old urbanism that remains in the city. Nobody should have to live in zoning mandated suburbia.

U.S. Auto Industry Caught with wrong product mix again

In the 1970s The U.S. auto industry was blindsided by the 1973 Oil Embargo. Efficient imports autos like Datsun, Honda and Toyota swept in to fill consumer demand for more economical transportation. Homegrown solutions were way off the mark — Ford already had the heavy Pinto. I owned a 1974 Ford Mustang II — what a POS that was. Did they learn anything? Nope!

Today Ford, GM and Chrysler are caught with too many trucks and SUV’s in showrooms as sales of these segments decline in the double digits. Toyota has passed Ford for the #2 sales position in the U.S. Honda is set to pass Chrysler for #3.

Why does it matter? Well the auto industry is an important part of our national economy. Many thousands of workers build the cars and many others work for suppliers to the industry. Until we can shift these people to other jobs a large part of the economy depends upon all of us doing our part and buying a new vehicle. But with the new reality of $4/gallon +/- gas consumers are finally rejecting trucks and SUVs. Frankly the U.S. economy is to reliant upon sales of autos and of new mostly suburban homes.

For years the big 3 (GM, Ford, & Chrysler) have bought and rebadged efficient vehicles to meet demand. They’ve also revised their own models that were designed and sold in Europe and other countries where fuel efficiency has long been important. For much of the 1970s and 1980s Chrysler had a deal with Mitsubishi — my 1984 Dodge Colt was a rebadged Mitsubishi Mirage — it was also a great car. Ford brought us their German built Fiesta and later rebadged Kia’s. GM looked through products offered elsewhere and brought us Vauxhall Chevettes and today they sell the Aveo built by GM Daewoo in South Korea. The Pontiac Vibe is a rebadged version of the U.S.-built Toyota Matrix. Saturn’s Astra is a European Opal. For some reason these auto makers can’t manage to design and build a small & efficient car on our shores.

This year Daimler AG, maker of Mercedes vehicles, began importing the tiny French-built smart fortwo. It only holds two people while showing we don’t all need massive vehicles to get around.
According to fueleconomy.gov the Toyota Prius remains the most fuel efficient mass production car available to U.S. buyers. Meanwhile U.S. automakers were busy trying to prop up sales of trucks and SUVs with hybrid and flex fuel technology — so now thee vehicles just get poor mileage rather than abysmal.

U.S. auto buyers have fewer efficient choices than the rest of the world. We’ve been buying land yachts for so long now the auto makers don’t waste their time with more efficient and useful vehicles. Buyers in other markets, for example, can get a Honda Accord station wagon or a 4-door Civic with a hatchback Sedans we’ve got but a handy hatchback is a rare find.

For used car shoppers the prospects are even fewer. For those on limited budgets the big gas hogs often become the most affordable vehicles to purchase. Thus, those who can least afford the price of gas have the worst mileage.

Ideally we’d have such a great mass transit system we wouldn’t need private autos but the reality is our region is so spread out that we’ll never have such a system. As gas prices rise people will still have cars. I just hope our choices of cars improves.

Time to Think About Running for Office

In less than a year the City of St Louis will have elections for half the Board of Aldermen — the 14 odd numbered seats. If you’d like to see some change in how the city is managed now is the perfect time to begin planning your campaign. I ran for the 25th back in 2005 and it was a very rewarding experience.

At this point you must already live in the ward in which you’d run in. Not sure what ward you live in? Then you probably shouldn’t run for office.

Those seats up for grabs next year are (existing Alderman):

• 1st Ward (gas allowance Troupe)
• 3rd Ward (raze the whole ward Bosley)
• 5th Ward (use zoning as leverage Ford-Griffin)
• 7th Ward (suburbanize the city Young)
• 9th Ward (Patterson just stirs the pot Ortmann)
• 11th Ward (Isn’t Loughborough Commons just great Villa)
• 13th Ward (Thank God Patterson is no longer my constituent Wessels)
• 15th Ward (Thank God Patterson didn’t move to the 15th ward Florida)
• 17th Ward (lease Forest Park Roddy)
• 19th Ward (I’m on the Preservation Board but I’ll vote to raze it Kennedy Davis)
• 21st Ward (a bit of suburbia named for me Jones King)
• 23rd Ward (the mayor is moving out of the ward Hanrahan)
• 25th Ward (Thank God Patterson moved Kirner)
• 27th Ward (Carter)

Alderman Wants Gasoline Allowance

Jake Wagman of the Post-Dispatch has reported on a new bill introduced at the Board of Aldermen today:

Even at City Hall, high gas prices have drivers concerned.

That’s why Alderman Charles Q. Troupe has a relief plan — for aldermen, at least.

Troupe plans on introducing a bill at tomorrow’s meeting that would give alderman an “expense account” for their fuel costs.

While “riding the ward” is a staple of aldermanic duty — right up there with returning phone calls and sending birthday wishes — it seems unlikely that Troupe’s colleagues would endorse his plan to charge taxpayers for their gas.

In looking at Board Bill 83 we see how much Troupe is seeking:

Each alderman shall receive a monthly sum equal to four hundred (400) miles multiplied by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) standard mileage rate for business miles driven.

The 2008 IRS rate is 50.5 cents per mile. So that is an extra $202 per alderman per month. That comes to just under $68K per year at the current IRS rate.

Aldermen are not well compensated until you consider the job is part time — $32,000/year plus a $4,200 expense allowance. Many aldermen have full time jobs that give them enough freedom to make day meetings. Do we really think each of the 28 aldermen are driving 400 miles for aldermanic business each and every month? I don’t think so.

Like everyone else the aldermen will need to find more efficient ways of getting around. At least one alderman, Phyllis Young, drives a Toyota Prius Hybrid.  Should she get the same allowance as someone that drives a less efficient vehicle?  What if an alderman only drives 175 for business in a given month?  What if they just buy their own damn gas like everyone else does?  If they don’t like it they can seek out alternatives.