Streetsblog New York City

They lord over empty parking lots in Hazard, Kentucky; Twinsburg, Ohio; and Lewiston, Washington like the ruins of a lost civilization. Vacant Walmart stores are slowly decomposing in more and more American towns these days. More than 100 of them have been memorialized as part of the group Flickr pool known smugly as “They Sold for Less.”

These empty husks — yet to be filled by any other retail tenant — are part of the detritus left behind by a paradigm shift in the real estate industry. Signs of the changing times, they tell us what kind of society we were before the bubble burst.

Now, as the commercial real estate industry regroups, evidence is mounting that Walmart and other mega-retailers will take a much different form than they have in the past. The new American shopping experience, according to many industry observers, will be less “suburban big-box” and more “urban destination.”

The demise of several mega-retail chains during the recession, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, helped produce a vast oversupply of retail space, particularly that of the giant, boxy, just-off-the-interstate variety. Last summer, the research arm of giant commercial real estate firm Colliers International reported that there was nearly 300 million square feet of vacant big box retail space on the market — 34 percent of total retail vacancy left behind by a recession that walloped commercial real estate almost as hard as housing.

Since 2008 alone, 120 million square feet of big box retail space has become available. To put such numbers in perspective, that is the equivalent of the total shopping center space in Cincinnati, Kansas City and Baltimore combined, Colliers reported.

This period of retrenchment has humbled even the once-mightiest of retail forces. CNN reported last month that Walmart stores suffered their ninth-straight quarterly drop in sales. Another sign of the times: Walmart is no longer enough of a bargain for U.S. consumers, it appears. The mega-retailer has been losing market share to dollar stores.

The situation has apparently reached the point where the retail monolith is rethinking its whole carbon-gulping model. Walmart is joining other retailers in thinking smaller and more urban, says Ed McMahon, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

“What the recession has made completely clear is that we have way too much retail,” McMahon said. “We are going from the era of the big box to the era of the small box.”

Enter the “Walmart Express.”

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According to AARP, 88 percent of seniors want to stay in their own homes as long as they can. But where are those homes? In auto-dependent suburbs. That’s where most Baby Boomers grew up, in the postwar era, and that’s where most of them have stayed – even as the largest (and longest-living) generation ever enters its golden years.

However, more than 20 percent of seniors (age 65 and up) do not drive at all. In the spread-out, transit-poor communities where many of them live, seniors who don’t drive miss out on countless opportunities. According to a report released today by Transportation for America called “Aging in Place: Stuck Without Options”:

Absent access to affordable travel options, seniors face isolation, a reduced quality of life and possible economic hardship. A 2004 study found that seniors age 65 and older who no longer drive make 15 percent fewer trips to the doctor, 59 percent fewer trips to shop or eat out, and 65 percent fewer trips to visit friends and family, than drivers of the same age.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology conducted the analysis for the T4A report, finding that a large proportion of seniors lack transit access currently, and that in 2015, just a few short years away, 15.5 million seniors will find themselves without transportation options

“My generation grew up and reared our children in communities that, for the first time in human history, were built on the assumption that everyone would be able to drive an automobile,” said John Robert Smith, former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi and co-chair of Transportation for America.

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People choose suburban neighborhoods over urban ones for myriad reasons: because they can afford it, because the schools are good, because it’s a quiet street, or crimes rates are low, or everyone walks around with baby strollers and golden retrievers, or their family is nearby. But countless other consequences stream from their decision of where to live.

If people can’t or don’t walk or bike where they need to go, they’ve also bought themselves carbon emissions from excessive driving. Hours lost in traffic congestion. Growing waistlines from spending time behind a wheel instead of on two wheels, or two feet. Stress and relationship problems. And even worse: The suburb they chose “because it’s safe” ends up being far more dangerous than the city they fled.

William Lucy, a professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Charlottesville Planning Commission, says that people’s decision making about where to live has such sweeping ramifications that he’s concentrated his professional work on it. And it’s why he focuses on danger and death: specifically, the danger of leaving home.

At a daylong forum yesterday on intelligent cities at the National Building Museum, Lucy could barely wait to lay into cul-de-sacs, which he says were designed for safety but end up being more dangerous than through-streets.

“They turn what should be a 100-yard walk into a two-mile drive, and they put more people in cars for more reasons than they should,” Lucy said. And because they get lulled into a sense of security, he said, parents don’t teach their kids about street safety and the “difference between street and sidewalk and driveway and yard.”

But the greatest danger to a young child, he said, is being backed over by a motor vehicle – usually driven by their own parents in their own driveway. Indeed, “backovers” account for 34 percent of “non-traffic” vehicular fatalities among children under 15 years old. (“Frontovers” account for another 30 percent, meaning that 64 percent of “non-traffic” vehicular fatalities still involve children being run over, according to KidsAndCars.org.)

Because these incidents occur on private property, they’re not considered “traffic” accidents and data is not collected by national traffic safety organizations. Meanwhile, Lucy said, squeamishness over openly reporting on the tragedy of a parent killing his or her own child with a car leads newspapers to bury news of backovers – missing a “teachable moment.”

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Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.”

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

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Homeowners in car-dependent areas are at greater risk of foreclosure, according to a report released yesterday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that calls for mortgage underwriting standards to begin taking so-called "location-efficiency" into account.

The NRDC examined data for 40,000 mortgages in Chicago, Jacksonville, and San Francisco, seeking to test the contention -- emphasized most often by the nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology -- that affordable housing should include transportation costs as well as mortgage bills.

And what did the report's authors find?

In all three cities ... statistically sound results [indicated] that the probability of mortgage foreclosure increases as neighborhood vehicle ownership levels rise, after controlling for income. These results suggest that mortgage lenders should include measures of location efficiency in their underwriting to more accurately predict the risk of default.

In addition to including transit access and walkability in mortgage underwriters' measurement of borrowing terms, the NRDC recommended that location-efficiency be formally adopted as a goal for community planners. Particularly in Sun Belt and West Coast areas where waves of foreclosures have prompted new fears of suburban blight, the report suggests that rebuilding neighborhoods with location-efficiency in mind could stave off negative effects from any future downturn in home prices.

NRDC's conclusions are already being heeded by federal officials. Several House Democrats banded together this summer to add language to their chamber's climate bill asking the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure 50,000 location-efficient mortgages.

That climate legislation is stalled for the time being, but the Obama adminstration's deputy housing and urban development secretary said last week that the White House would spend $10 million on research aimed at boosting the issuance of location-efficient home loans.

The demand for walkable neighborhoods is up, but in order to fill that demand, we're going to have to transform our suburbs. How that might be accomplished was one of the most vexing issues discussed at last week's Walk21 Conference.

Suburban layouts aren't about connectivity; they're about space, with lots of separated roads and cul-de-sacs, and few direct routes from one place to another. But the folks at Kittelson & Associates, a transportation planning firm, have one suggestion: bypass roads entirely. That's what they're doing in Tigard, Oregon.

Tigard is a pretty typical Oregon suburb: It's about 10 miles from downtown Portland, it's 11.5 square miles, and about 47,000 people live there. That low density gave Kittelson and officials from the Oregon DOT the chance to connect areas of town by building trails that bypass roundabout suburban street design, allowing residents to easily walk or bike around their city, and get direct access to their neighbors, local businesses, and city parks. The idea came organically: For years, residents had carved out their own informal "desire paths" to get around. The Tigard Neighborhood Trails Project is meant to make existing trails safer, and to build new ones to form a better overall network.

On top of gathering community input at formal town meetings, Kittelson and ODOT also put together a website where residents could draw and comment on new trails on a Google Map, as well as point out existing informal ones. Jamie Parks, a planner on the project, said that the web interactivity made it so that far more members of the community had input into the project and, hopefully, will use the trails when they are completed.

The plan is done, and Tigard has begun implementing each trail, so it'll take some time to see how well this idea works out. Still, this could be a great way make disconnected suburban street networks much more walkable. It's a relatively cheap way too -- a network of 42 trails is set to cost approximately $1 million.

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

That's according to Chris Leinberger, a land use strategist at the Brookings Institution, who spoke today at the Walk21 Conference. There's a simple supply-and-demand argument, Leinberger says, for creating more walkable urban space: About the the same number of people want to live in a pedestrian-friendly environment as those who want to live in a drivable suburban one, but the supply of housing in walkable urban areas makes up only 5 to 10 percent of housing nationwide. As millions of New Yorkers know, that leads to exceedingly high prices. 

But that's not always a bad thing. Sarah Gaventa, Director of CABE Space in the U.K., said that her organization managed to prove that walkability adds value to nearby property and attracts investment. CABE developed a scale to rate pedestrian-friendliness called the Pedestrian Environment Rating System (PERS). For every point on the PERS scale, neighborhoods saw a 5.2 percent increase in residential prices and a 4.9 percent increase in retail rent. Attracting more retail and consumers also means more jobs, though there should be incentives to maintain local businesses and affordable housing, Gaventa said. Having proof that making a space more pedestrian friendly will add value to it is a great way to convince those in power that change -- and a more comprehensive strategy -- is needed.

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As livable streets advocates work to make headway in breaking the cycle of American auto dependence, the folks at Planetizen have put together a video narrative that explains how we got here. "The Story of Sprawl," a double DVD set produced by Managing Editor Tim Halbur, is a compilation of historical films dating from 1939 to 1965, documenting the confluence of factors that fostered the quintessential land use motif of the 20th century: far-flung, low-density, driving-intensive residential and commercial development. The discs include commentary from planning notables including Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, John Norquist, Neal Peirce, James Howard Kunstler and Robert Cervero, featured in the clip above.

"The Story of Sprawl" is available now. Check the Planetizen promo page for more clips and ordering info.

Last week the Federal Transit Administration finally approved the Silver Line, a long-awaited addition to the capital region's transit system that will extend to suburbs in northern Virginia. There are still a few hoops to jump through to secure the necessary funding, but it looks like some relief is in sight for the area's crushing congestion.

Four of the line's stations are planned for Tysons Corner, a collection of malls and offices so unwalkable that traffic clogs streets when employees break for lunch. Only 17,000 people live there, but it provides 167,000 parking spaces for the hordes of commuters and shoppers who drive in on a daily basis. In this excellent NPR segment (listening to the audio is well worth the time), Robert Siegel looks at how Fairfax County officials are attempting to transform Tysons Corner into a more urban setting:

...a central part of the plan is to build residential housing, and plan for 100,000 people. But that means more than build apartment houses -- Tysons is also utterly inhospitable to pedestrians.

Clark Tyler, who chairs the Tysons Corner Land Use Task Force, says there are nine lanes of traffic near Tysons Corner Center, but the street lights give pedestrians only 40 seconds to cross them. Sidewalks mysteriously end.

So, what will the new Tysons be like? 

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Last week Freakonomics picked up a story from the Riverfront Times that connects an uptick in shoplifting, fighting and other crimes in the St. Louis suburbs to a two-year-old expansion of the city's MetroLink rail system.

Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis Galleria about shoplifting, and you'll invariably get two responses: One, it's out of control; and two, it's gotten exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center.

In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights police made 345 arrests at the mall. That's nearly double the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line.

More alarming are the numbers of juveniles (kids under the age of seventeen) arrested at the mall. This year police are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005.

"I know it's not politically correct, but how else do you explain it?" comments a frustrated Galleria store manager.

Not everyone is as reactionary. A police officer who regularly patrols the mall, asked to explain the "surge," replied: "Who knows? Perhaps it's the downturn in the economy. Or maybe it's the need for teens to feel like they have to wear the latest fashions."

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