'This Waterfront Needs A Highway': The Huge Mistakes Cities Keep Making

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that I think waterfront regeneration is a bit overrated. Before our modern era (let's say post 1970), very few major cities were psychologically connected to their waterfronts beyond using them for industrial purposes. A few off the top of my head: Rio, Nice, Miami [Beach] etc. Those cities relied on their waterfront for their identity and were never in a position of "losing" it. Some places that had this and "lost it", like Atlantic City, basically shat the bed completely. If the Boardwalk is worse for wear in 2018 than it was in 1918, then the rest of the city is really worse off now than it was then.

Then there are a few cities where the urban fabric reached right down to the waterfront in a few places, but not all: Fells Point, Baltimore; English Bay, Vancouver; Venice, CA. I'm sure there are others. These places had a very easy time reclaiming or extending their waterfront and cementing it into their citizen's consciousness because they had some precedent.

But most other cities didn't have this connection, so they played a game where they tried to convince people that the waterfront should matter, rather than having the area spontaneously regenerate on its own - which, in almost all cases, it probably wouldn't have. The result is that most waterfronts feel like programmed, themed spaces. In Toronto, the waterfront is vibrant because a lot of governments threw a lot of cash at it over the past 20 years, and because it was so close to the financial district that it made sense to redevelop the vacant industrial lots into condos and offices. Even so, despite the proximity, condos are a relative bargain there compared to what they would be in even hard to get to parts of the traditional inner city. The idea that psychological distance trumps physical distance is nowhere more apparent than it is on regenerated waterfronts.

i think the problem in many instances is scale. and this goes for underused property away from water also. too many cities are still trapped in the giant plaza mindset. lets build a giant open air plaza and the people will flock to it in droves. orrr, the pigeons and hobos will take it over...which is usually the case. portland has had some success scaling things back a bit and building smaller scale infill parks. these seem to work better than giant waterfront people parking lots most cities seem to like. our waterfront is just that and its a mess. its a giant gooseshit and hobo filled lawn. terrible.

[The North One]

Poor Chicago and Toronto, the worst offenders.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

You do know suburban office parks are a thing right? In fact the highest income city in the whole US (San Jose) is filled with them. Many of the most successful companies in the US are headquartered in suburban office parks.

They've fallen out of favor. In any city with a decent center, companies will pay a premium (often a large one) to be in the core. The commercial real estate industry (my field) has been harping on this for many years.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by Minato Ku

Oberhausen's Marktstraße

Wow, Minato, how do you know how to produce these German characters?
I always forget.
Learned Castilian and Latin at school, apart of course from English.

Let me join you again to that one, cause it's actually funny...
Ha yeah, it's so easy on my comfy Debian desktop computer.

ß

Mwaha, this is it, guys.
alt gr + b
That 1st obvious thing I tried made it.
Oh well, that's cool.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by mhays

They've fallen out of favor. In any city with a decent center, companies will pay a premium (often a large one) to be in the core. The commercial real estate industry (my field) has been harping on this for many years.

While I think your general premise is true (sprawly office has lost ground relative to centers), suburban office parks are still quite ubiquitous and desirable, depending on location.

The highest rents in the Bay Area are in bland exurban office parks 40 miles from SF, which certainly has a "decent center".

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by The North One

Poor Chicago and Toronto, the worst offenders.

Chicago has an excellent waterfront, but Toronto's waterfront is not very impressive, at all. The public infrastructure is pretty laughable.

[Doady]

That fact is, suburban office parks are a lot cheaper than CBDs, and they are a lot cheaper for a reason.

Suburban offices are akin to industrial: in terms of location, their priority is to save money, reduce costs, and therefore they are located on the cheapest and most undesirable land. The idea that low land values and low desirabilty in a place indicates that people prefer to be in that place is just funny.

Browntown is the same guy who got outraged at the news that 9% of Markham residents speak non-English at work and argued that they should be arrested, and now he's arguing for more freedom for people and companies, freedom to locate whereever they want by ignoring the bid-rent curve or something. Let urban growth and land use be more market-driven but let's completely ignore market-based concepts of urban growth and land use at the same time. Wow.

[Minato Ku]

About waterfront, when freeways were planned along them in the 50's to 70's, those were industrial areas, not leisure place.

Every cities do urban error, what's matter is how you resolve them.

Until recently the City of Paris was in almost in a frozen mode about the neighborhoods dating back to the 60s and 70s.
It was afraid to correct the urban errors from the 60-70s because correcting those would mean building. As the result the urban errors were left as they were with very few change.

If you're afraid to build there is no way to correct them.
In example, to be profitable a full redevelopment of Montparnasse tower area would need to build more commercial and office space.
Just demolishing the tower would cost billion and nobody except the taxpayer would pay for it. Less office space would mean less jobs and less jobs would mean less revenue for the City, a lose-lose plan.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by mhays

They've fallen out of favor. In any city with a decent center, companies will pay a premium (often a large one) to be in the core. The commercial real estate industry (my field) has been harping on this for many years.

Some companies will pay a premium, others won't. I'd say it has a lot to do with reputation and the sort of people you're trying to attract. The big tech companies don't seem to have a problem attracting talent to their sprawling suburban campuses. But yeah, other companies like big banks seem to want a big tower downtown in order to show off their wealth and power.

Just look at the largest companies in the US:

Apple:


Microsoft:


Google:


Facebook:


Exxon Mobile:


WallMart:
Literally so bland you'd can't find a decent pic, lol.

And several of those are new. Obviously JP Morgan and Amazon are urban, but clearly a company doesn't need to be in the city center to attract talent and be successful.

[Yuri]

São Paulo did this with both Tietê and Pinheiros rivers:





They used to be S shaped (like Cuyahoga river in Cleveland), wider and there were sport activities there in the past. Today they are completely polluted and separated from the urban tissue.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

Burying existing highways is just plain too expensive and intrusive to make any sense.

Unrelated: If we could just develop a machine that could dig tunnels cheaply that would totally change city design.

I don't think either of us is that familiar with the economics of this, but I'm not sure tunneling is the biggest part of the cost of putting highways underground (assuming you don't just do it by "cut and cover" which many do). Once you've got a raw hole, you've got to line it, put in ventillation and waterproofing and reinforcement and all sorts of things which I suspect is the real cost.

I say this just from observation. San Francisco is putting in a new subway line. The raw hole/tunnel was done rather quickly using standard tunnel boring equipment--it was finished 1 ½ years ago. But the subway won't open for another year or more.

Standard tunnel boring machine:


http://74f85f59f39b887b696f-ab656259...march_2012.jpg

[M II A II R II K]

Then trench it and put a park over it.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

I don't think either of us is that familiar with the economics of this, but I'm not sure tunneling is the biggest part of the cost of putting highways underground (assuming you don't just do it by "cut and cover" which many do). Once you've got a raw hole, you've got to line it, put in ventillation and waterproofing and reinforcement and all sorts of things which I suspect is the real cost.

I say this just from observation. San Francisco is putting in a new subway line. The raw hole/tunnel was done rather quickly using standard tunnel boring equipment--it was finished 1 ½ years ago. But the subway won't open for another year or more.

Well yeah, I meant the entire process of building the tunnel, not just the hole itself.

But it's important to point out that a highway is vastly different than a subway line. You can only put 2 lanes in a standard TBM bore so to fit a big highway underground means 4 bores (like say I-95 in Baltimore) or 2 big bores (like in Seattle SR-99 if they hadn't shrunk it down to two lanes each way). Also the cars put off a lot of toxic fumes that need to be ventilated which means more vertical shafts are needed if you have a long tunnel.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by mhays

Do people want suburbs? Sure, a lot do. But surveys and actions tend to look very different in cities with successful cores. People pay big premiums to live in those, on even on the edges of cities that have those. Often they live as close-in as they can. And when visitors come they don't go to the mall, but to the center.

I don't think you can at all generalize. The San Francisco Bay region offers clear examples of the tendencies. Companies often want to keep their headquarters in "trophy" buildings downtown but the same companies will put everyone else in the suburbs and quite often the workers are happy not to have downtown commutes. When it comes to tech companies, I think there's a sharp distinction between hardware, whose employees tend to be older and have families, and software which is where you find the younger recently graduated code warriors.

Here, "Silicon Valley" came into existence and has flourished as a suburban phenomenon. A company like Salesforce.com, that is pure software/tech as a service, let its employees vote on where they wanted to be and they wanted to be downtown. Also, some of the Valley's oldest software/tech as service companies are having to put branches downtown because employyes want to be there but you really don't see the hardware designers doing that.

Seattle's Amazon is interesting because it is really 2 different companies: The online retailer and Amazon Web Services. Many people don't realize that there has been speculation of splitting these barely-related businesses up and it is speculated that if that were done the retailer would be worth less ($400 billion) than the web service company ($600 billion). Both parts have a software component but it would be interesting to know which dominates the downtown buildings. Certainly both Amazon's distribution centers--the majority of their employees--and its server farms can and probably should be in suburbs or smaller towns.

[Minato Ku]

There is a trend toward downtown and that can't be denied.
On the opposite way, it's silly to think that suburban life will be abandoned.
For one big reason, you couldn't not put everything and everybody downtown.

While it's great to see a rebirth of the downtown, suburbs needs to become more urban. Development need to be everywhere.
Old suburban areas need to able to be redeveloped and rebuilt.

What I notice in the USA, it's that when a suburban or low density area becomes old or outdated, it's just abandonned for another places.
So as downtowns and its close surroundings becomes more attractive the inner suburbs and the outer lying inner city areas are decling.

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

T1. That's assuming that you're talking about a city with top-tier urban infrastructure. I doubt cities like that are the ones really struggling.

Top tier is relative. The infrastructure in downtown Cleveland is not comparable to that of someplace like Manhattan, but it will still be much more dense, complicated and much more capable than the infrastructure of Parma, Ohio.

2. Why would the amount of tax revenue per acre be in any way a meaningful metric? Maybe in an island country like Japan where land is limited, but certainly not in a country like the US where half the country is virtually uninhabited.

Because, to borrow Cleveland again, Cleveland is concerned with keeping Cleveland and environs healthy, functioning, and solvent. Cleveland may deign to give a shit about the vast open spaces of New Mexico as a courtesy when it has a free moment, but it is under no obligation to do so. Likewise, it would be unwise for Cleveland to just let the drain continue to places like Parma et al. Cleveland spent millions building its infrastructure, so it has every right to try to get people back in to use it, and it's better not just for the core city but for the entire metropolitan region for the central city to be healthy and generating revenue.

[The North One]

Wow, Exxon literally built a small isolated city in exurban Houston. All of that could have been infill in downtown.

[mhays]

Microsoft's headquarters is generally denser than than those original buildings, and heading more so albeit still suburban. They were also at only 60% drive-alone last I checked (bad for urban, not bad for a suburban node), with rail still five years away. Also their secondary HQ area is Downtown Bellevue with a few sizable towers.

Amazon HQ1 is nearly all urban. They have a little space in Downtown Bellevue.

In my region, tech is much more centralized than in the San Francisco area. Other than Microsoft, it's generally in central Seattle or at least the cores of Bellevue or Kirkland.

[The Chemist]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

i had no idea that there was an expressway under the bund.

Yup, if you don't know it's there you'd never even realize it.

This is what it used to look like:



And this is what it looks like now:


Note that before there were NO pedestrian crossings of the road, and the traffic was extremely heavy, whereas now there are pedestrian crossings at pretty much every cross street and the road is much narrower, with much less traffic (basically local only, all the through traffic is underground).

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by The North One

Wow, Exxon literally built a small isolated city in exurban Houston. All of that could have been infill in downtown.

It's not that easy. How would all those people get downtown given Houston's very limited transit options?