and yes I said yes I will Yes

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St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble

Like Yogi Berra, Holly Whyte is often remembered for his tautological aphorisms: “People tend to sit where there are places to sit,” “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people,” and “If you want to seed a place with activity, put out food.” I have one of my own to add “You can generate activity in a public space by allowing activity in a public space.”

I’ve noticed over the years that the first reaction from people who control public spaces to requests to use the space is generally an emphatic “No.” There appear to be two motivations for this automatic reaction. The first is a fear of risk and the liability that might arise from it. The second is a desire not to lose control over the space. People seem to be empowered by control over space and enjoy asserting that power. Resist the urge! In retrospect, one of the most important unplanned reasons for the success of Bryant Park is that in the early years I said “Yes” to just about everyone who wanted to do something in the park. Activity in the park created a virtuous cycle. The more stuff we had going on in the space, the more people came to use it and the more other people wanted to use it and be there or be associated with it. I believe my colleague, Bob Gregory, at Campus Martius in Detroit has had the same experience. Continue reading →

There is No Free Lunch (or Breakfast)

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Bryant Park Grill Exterior

We’ve come a long way in our view of the impact of restaurants in public space. When I began working in Bryant Park in 1991, most park and community advocates viewed restaurants as anathema. They were seen as commercial activity and therefore as forbidden from public space. We’ve now learned that some kinds of commercial activity are actually invaluable in animating public spaces – including restaurants, food kiosks, food trucks, craft markets and most recently, night markets. In fact, in many public space (and downtown) revitalization projects, food service is seen as something of a silver bullet.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Restaurants are difficult and expensive to develop. Most restaurants are unsuccessful. In my experience, even the most successful restaurants in formerly under-invested places take years to be cashflow positive. Food kiosks are even more difficult to make work. Continue reading →

In Defense of BIDs

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Bryant Park from the air on movie night. The flagship success of BIDs.

The September 19th issue of Crain’s New York Business carries a broadside attack on business improvement districts on its front page, featuring a photo of Dan Biederman the founder of Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (“BPRC”), Grand Central Partnership (“GCP”) and 34th Street Partnership (http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160918/REAL_ESTATE/160919896/shaping-a-neighborhoods-destiny-from-the-shadows). The article rehashes a range of charges that were the subject of dozens of newspaper articles published in the 1990s, as well as a half-dozen government inquiries, including those by the New York City Council, the City’s Comptroller’s office, the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a forensic audit commissioned by City Hall. Given New York’s tabloid culture, many casual (and even some well-informed) observers assumed that where there was journalist smoke, there must be fire, but in fact, the BIDs under Biederman’s direction were shown to be models of good not-for-profit governance and transparency, and none of the negative policy arguments have been shown to be of any merit. BIDs work, and Biederman’s BIDs work better than most. They provide essential services without compromise of any important democratic principles. (BIDs Really Work, City Journal, Spring 1996 http://www.city-journal.org/html/bids-really-work-11853.html).

In fact, I would argue that the downtown renaissance, which began in the early 1990s, was catalyzed by the work of Biederman’s BIDs (of which I was a staff member), and particularly by the success of BPRC. The reopening of Bryant Park in 1992, following philosophies articulated by William H Whyte and George Kelling, demonstrated that social control could be reasserted in the urban core. GCP created “clean and safe” programs for the blocks around Grand Central Terminal in a successful effort to reverse what was feared to be the hollowing out of the city center and its occupation by the violent and homeless. Bryant Park and GCP proved that through high quality maintenance (“fixing broken windows”) and active programming, public spaces previously perceived as being dangerous could be made inviting and attractive. Cities all over the country, from Detroit to Houston, and around the world copied and continue to copy the model. Continue reading →

The View from Vancouver

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The view from harborside in Vancouver. Stanley Park is on the left.

The Placemaking Leadership Forum of Project for Public Spaces held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia brought together hundreds of people who are involved in one aspect or another of placemaking. Having never been to Vancouver before, I found it a beautiful setting with a well managed downtown. The attendees were not only attentive and social, but in my interactions with dozens of people with whom I was not previously acquainted, they proved to be dedicated, intelligent, caring and humble about their work. It was a thoroughly pleasant experience – and a tribute to the folks at PPS who conceived of and organized it.

What was most interesting to me about the substance of the programs was the evidence of a number of diverse streams of thought among those present. Most obvious was the contrast between the outcome-oriented, utilitarian placemakers (which included a number of us who have been around for a while) and process-oriented practitioners, to whom community-building and giving voice to citizens about the future of urban places is paramount. Many of the latter group appeared to me to be newer to placemaking – although by no means was this exclusively the case. Attendees also expressed deep concern about issues of inclusion and social/economic equity. Continue reading →

Say It With Flowers

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A view of the planting beds — on the south, shady side.

Nothing gives you more bang for your public space improvement dollars than plants. When people ask me what the one thing they should do to improve public space, my response is always to institute a horticulture program. Improving the perception of public space is about providing visual cues to users that the space is under social control. Colorful, well-maintained plants send that message in a number of ways. The physical material isn’t very expensive and the skills to maintain horticultural materials are widespread and easy to find. Putting plantings in places where people don’t expect them sends a powerful message.

I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when I went to work for Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991. My father grew some terrific tomatoes in the yard when I was growing up (it was New Jersey, after all) and for some reason there was always mint growing outside the backdoor of the house that we put into iced tea. And that was the sum total of my agricultural experience when I arrived in the Park. From that day to this, I haven’t had a personal garden or even a yard. Continue reading →

MAKE NO GRAND PLANS

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The $600,000 Mistake

The $600,000 Mistake

Daniel Burnham was wrong. I learned this from making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake. Placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process. You need to learn as you go. It is essential to effectively improving public space to take risks – but those risks ought to be small, manageable ones; ones you can back out of with minimal damage. When ideas don’t work out, for example when they aren’t effective in drawing people into the space, then you need to bite the proverbial bullet and reverse course. That is an important part of listening to the community – admitting that what you’ve done isn’t working when they are voting with their feet (in the wrong direction).

At Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships in the 90’s we created a sidewalk horticulture program. Our President, Dan Biederman, came back from a vacation France where he saw sidewalk planters and hanging baskets and decided that replicating that experience in Midtown Manhattan would improve the streetscape and the pedestrian experience. Our horticultural team, led by Lyndon B. Miller had already scored a great success with the perennial gardens in Bryant Park. So we went to work trying to figure out how to extend that success to the streets around Grand Central and Penn Station. We were furrowing new ground here because, while some smaller American towns had hanging baskets (like Cooperstown, N.Y.), we weren’t aware of any large city where baskets and planters had been implemented on a large-scale. It was several years before Mayor Daley (who sent his staff to spend time with us in Bryant Park to take notes) implemented the spectacular Chicago State Street streetscape redesign, with its beautiful horticulture program – which eventually expanded all over the Loop. Continue reading →

TAKING SUBURBIA SERIOUSLY

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The house in the suburbs in which I grew up.

 

Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, poses some serious challenges to those of us who focus on urban revitalization, downtown development and the improvement of public spaces. In essence, he asks the question: “What about the suburbs” and using persuasive data argues that it is where most people want to live – and not just here in the United States, but in most developed and developing places around the world. Kotkin’s point is that most people want an affordable place to live, where they can bring up their children, have a yard, a sense of community and good schools – and that means places outside the urban core.

Kotkin distinguishes his analysis from that of Richard Florida, New urbanists and such-like, by saying that while it may be true that over the last couple of decades people are moving back Downtown, and that this may be a good thing, the data shows that it is rather a limited phenomenon and most people still want to live in the ‘burbs. But he goes much further than that. He argues that because of limitations put on housing unit expansion in desirable cities, and the resulting increased density, they are becoming too expensive for any families but the most wealthy. As a result, fertility rates in urbanizing countries are beneath replacement level. Kotkin says that in many/most major cities around the world, since having kids is so expensive, people have stopped having them. His ultimate argument is that in order for countries to grow and remain economically healthy, they need to create policies to encourage affordable housing creation on the peripheries of cities; and those homes should be detached, with yards and a sense of neighborhoods and have good schools. In his final chapter he demonstrates that there are plenty of resources and space to accomplish this. Continue reading →

Gentrification and its Discontents

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The claim that successful urban revitalization results in “gentrification” and is therefore a bad thing is one of those hypothetical objections to placemaking strategies that isn’t based on hard data, a phenomenon about which I wrote as an obstacle to the implementation of placemaking strategies. For the most part, the objection to gentrification by “advocates” for lower-income people is an objection to hypothetical “displacement” of existing residents by new, higher income folks. To put it as plainly as I can, while those advocates (and journalists) often point to anecdotal evidence of low-income people being forced from their homes by avaricious landlords, I have seen no reliable aggregate data in support of that theory.

I’m a student of the strategies for social change that are about bringing people together – not driving them apart. To Dr. King, integration was not only about bringing economic benefit and political power to dispossessed people, but also creating a society where everyone, regardless of background, is treated with equal concern and respect. Social integration is a good in and of itself, creating communities that honor difference. In addition, it seems likely to me, based on observation and experience, that housing and educating low-income people in the same communities as higher income people may well provide those lower-income people with the tools for economic advancement. Segregating and concentrating low-income people seems to lead to higher levels of social dysfunction.

The Furman Center’s most recent “State of New York Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015” (http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/NYUFurmanCenter_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf) demonstrates that in New York City displacement through gentrification is not a significant effect, but also tells us some interesting things about the dynamics of improving neighborhoods. I find the Furman Center to be an indispensable, and non-ideological, source of measurable information about real estate trends. They are also quite careful about drawing conclusions from the data – and not confusing causes and effects.

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Snowed by Buffalo

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View from the City Hall Observatory

View from the City Hall Observatory

Surprise! It’s a great place!

Back in March, at the invitation of my wonderful colleague, Dave Stebbins, the Vice President of the Buffalo Urban Development Corporation, I spent a couple of days poking around in Buffalo. It was my first trip there. Dave not only graciously showed me the city, but also invited me to sit in on a board meeting of BUDC. I was tremendously impressed by the BUDC, what it has accomplished, what the public and private sectors are doing apart and together and by the incredible urban legacy that the city embodies

The reason for the title is that for years we down-staters have been told that the upstate New York region – and particularly Buffalo – was a devastated economic disaster area. Senators and Governors (including Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton) have in their public remarks emphasized the problems upstate and worked to direct funding and programs there – including Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion.” Whatever has been the past in Buffalo, the future looks incredibly promising. I don’t mean by this to suggest that Buffalo and the rest of upstate New York are no longer in need of Federal and State support – but rather, that the efforts of public and private partners appears to be paying off.

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