Development
"Best Cities" rankings push "picket fence" ideal
Releasing lists of rankings has become a sure-fire way for magazines to drive readership. After all, who can resist seeing how their city, college, company, or favorite celebrity rates? City rankings have particularly proliferated, with many magazines and nonprofits creating rankings purporting to choose the "Best Places to Live" or "Greenest Cities." These rankings also bring into stark relief the anti-urban biases in our culture, even among environmental activists.
Photo by kworth30.
More worrisome is NRDC's "Smarter Cities" report, which ranks large cities on their eco-friendliness. Seattle, Portland, and the three cities of the SF Bay Area top the list. It's a good idea to call attention to cities' green practices, but their methodology, too, reveals some deep biases about the "ideal" city. The "standard of living" score boosts cities with higher homeownership rates, which often correlates with single-family detached suburban houses.
The "green space" score asks people taking a survey to estimate the percentage of green space in their city. The more suburban a city, the more "green space" people are likely to estimate, even if most of that green space constitutes grassy berms in between parking lots. And finally, any transportation score which ranks Seattle, with no rail transit system whatsoever, above New York and the highest mode split in the nation, is a bad metric. In this case, the score simply asked respondents how many different types of transportation they had access to, without determining how convenient they were or how many people used them.
DC deserves low marks for our terrible energy generation, which burns more coal and emits more pollution than other areas. But too many in the environmental movement seem to see LEED certified houses with some trees in between as an ideal green form of living. Given that a third of our emissions come from cars, NRDC is doing the nation a disservice with their sloppy and misleading rankings.
24 comments —  Share | — tags: environment, Smart Growth, sprawl |
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Smart Growth
Add jobs, retail, and housing for all income levels in walkable places like
Wisconsin Avenue, Brookland, and Minnesota-
Transit
Provide more alternatives to driving by expanding Metro capacity, building streetcar lines, and speeding up buses. Grow ridership through better maps and schedules from signs to mobile devices. Read posts »
Public Space
Our roadways are our most valuable public places. Design them to accommodate safe walking and bicycling. Locate plazas and public parks to create numerous focal points for human activity. Read posts »
Traffic
Design neighborhoods around grids instead of cul-de-sacs. Avoid building new freeways or widening existing ones which only induces further sprawl. Read posts »
Parking
Drivers create substantial traffic by circling endlessly for scarce parking. Use pricing to manage curb space and dedicate the revenue to providing alternatives to driving. Read posts »
Architecture
Preserve our row house neighborhoods and beautiful architecture that engages pedestrians visually and functionally. Eschew bad modernism that turns its back on the street and the starchitects that peddle it to "make a statement." Read posts »
Education & Safety
Make our urban areas desirable places for people and families of all ages with the highest quality education and safe neighborhoods for all. Read posts »
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by RJ on Jul 14, 2009 10:16 am
Um, I would've gone back and looked at my methodology after that one came in.
by Daniel on Jul 14, 2009 10:17 am
Another bizarre quirk in their methodology beyond the ones you mention is the way they look at energy production and conservation. It says they measure the modes of energy production and availability of energy conservation programs, which are all well and good. But it doesn't appear that they look at electricity use per person, which should be even more important.
A key driver behind low carbon footprints in California cities, even sprawly Los Angeles, is a temperate climate in which people use much less energy to heat and cool their homes. Just as low carbon use for transportation is a good reason to encourage TOD, low carbon use for HVAC is a good reason to encourage development in coastal California. (Ed Glaeser has written about this: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Help-the-environment-stay-in-the-city-39422222.html)
by Josh B on Jul 14, 2009 10:26 am
I'd also add, importantly, that Seattle will have light rail transit within the week, more by the end of the year, and even more than that in three years. It's been a long, rather tiresome and exorbitant process, but this is just to say.
by Daniel M. Laenker on Jul 14, 2009 10:36 am
by Anderkoo on Jul 14, 2009 11:12 am
You made some excellent comments and you reveal and expose the stupidity and hypocracy of these so-called "green" types who really want to have it all and not give up their SUV lifestyle all the while galavanting around proclaiming their "going green"
[ I get green in the face everytime I hear that damn phrase]
...and this "LEED" nonsense which is just a way for developers to be able to build stand alone structures far away from transit, towns, or cities and still be able to call themselves "cutting edge".
In my opinion, any building in a compact , dense city is aoutomatically "green" or greener than any damn suburban stand alone house that you have to drive to as there is no sidewalk or bikeway or subway or even busroute nearby.
This phony "green" crappola needs to shown for what it all really is- claptrap and sales pitching to the vulnerable & the gullible out there.
As for Seattle being such a healthy and green place, I beg to differ. I get severe allergy attacks from all of the slime and mold that grows all over everything in that dismal climate they have which seems to be the trendiest place in the USA to live.
I wouldn't live there if Bill Gates gave me a free house.
BTW
...look up Bill Gate's walk score for his mansion and see how progressive he REALLY is.
by w on Jul 14, 2009 12:46 pm
Also, the new light rail is unlikely to create any highly-praised, but highly generic "transit oriented developments", because of its alignment through working class suburbs and downtown. But Seattle has succeeded at creating many walkable neighborhoods with tons of character, none of which has relied on building a plastic P.F. Chang's-anchored routine near a train station, and then calling out for media attention. Rather, neighborhood citizens have ensured that Queen Anne, Fremont, Ballard, Capitol Hill, and West Seattle retain their local flavor. They remind me slightly of larger versions of Glover Park, which is a great pedestrian area with no rail. Moreover, with so many distinct neighborhoods throughout the city, people are encouraged to walk to local coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. If you're in the Pac NW, compare these neighborhoods to the chain-infested TOD in Gresham, near Portland. That thing looks like someone tried to re-create a mini Tyson's.
by David on Jul 14, 2009 12:52 pm
"chain (store) infested TOD"?
Sure, shopping at small stores can be more enjoyable. But that doesn't exactly make chain stores a pox to be eradicated. I don't see anything morally superior about proprietor-owned stores. If you prefer small stores as a quality of life issue, that's fine. But your rhetoric makes it sound like chain stores are the devils play thing.
Also, funny you should mention Glover Park. Just had a friend from Seattle move there. They foolishly thought they could rely on the same quality bus service that Seattle neighborhoods have. Didn't last a month before she bought a car.
by Daniel on Jul 14, 2009 1:23 pm
Also, your comparison of King County Metro to Metrobus is not apples-to-apples. KC Metro does about 400k average weekday boardings, and Metrobus about 460k. But Metrobus does not account for substantially all bus ridership in the DC area. In the district, Circulator bus routes are operated by DDOT and not counted in Metrobus's rider counts. Outside the District, Metrobus operates alongside other bus authorities with separate ridership counts. Ride On, in Montgomery County, carries about an additional 96k passengers each weekday. There are also separate bus authorities for Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince George's.
Plus, of course, the DC area has heavy rail with nearly 800,000 average weekday boardings, and some commuter rail service. Overall, in 2000, Washington DC was the #4 metro area by percentage of workers commuting by transit, at 9.4%. Seattle was #7 at 6.8%.
by Josh B on Jul 14, 2009 1:40 pm
which was ahead of Portland, which has been hyped in the media as a transit paradise
re: chain stores, a few here and there are convenient, but when they dominate the tenant roster, as they do in most TODs, just feels like a mall without a roof
by David on Jul 14, 2009 1:58 pm
Attacking TODs or new urbanism for being full of chains is short-sighted and counter-productive. They won't be that way forever, and despite what you say one your blog (which BTW crashes every time I try to load it - FYI), they are NOT "worse than strip malls".
by BeyondDC on Jul 14, 2009 2:21 pm
by BeyondDC on Jul 14, 2009 2:22 pm
Our leaders do not understand the importance of buses nor do they ride. Unfortunately many in the media do not understand or ride, either. Unless more pressure can be brought to bear, it's more of the same.
by Jazzy on Jul 14, 2009 2:43 pm
by цarьchitect on Jul 14, 2009 3:20 pm
If the objective is to encourage walking, there is a clear pattern that shows you must do dual-use, not mixed-use, and finance with as much local capital as possible. As Adams- Morgan, Glover Park, and the pedestrian areas of Seattle have shown, whether you run a rail line through the thing is irrelevant.
by David on Jul 14, 2009 3:27 pm
The presence of rail is hardly irrelevant. I guess Glover Park is sort of pleasant. I rarely go there, even though I live a mile away in Woodley Park; it's inconvenient because there's no rail there. The people I know who live in Adams Morgan ride the 42, but they are also frequent Metrorail users, walking to Columbia Heights or Woodley Park to catch trains.
by Josh B on Jul 14, 2009 3:42 pm
by Daniel M. Laenker on Jul 14, 2009 4:04 pm
Ditto the above comments about Seattle--the comparison with Metrobus is problematic given all the non-Metro services in the area, many of which serve DC, plus Metro and the other heavy rail. Seattle does a good job of providing access to exurban areas for commuters and has a free bus service xone in the downtown area which would be good for other cities to emulate. Seattle has a great many walkable neighborhoods and truly livable downtown neighborhoods like Belltown, and places like Capitol Hill that are residential but also have funky stores and a chain super market. It's possible to walk from a number of largely residential neighborhoods to downtown, yet, Seattle doesn't impress one as being all that densely populated.
by Rich on Jul 14, 2009 4:23 pm
Thank you for your comments on NRDC's Smarter Cities site. We welcome the criticism and would like to keep the discussion going as we seek to improve our methodology for this year's research. We are continually searching for data sources, particularly measurements of per capita use.
Speaking of transportation specifically, the ridership figures from the APTA did not cover a large number of cities within our survey population. We decided last year to include those ridership figures in our scoring, but not weight them so heavily that the majority of cities lacking them would be unfairly penalized. As we revisit our scoring method, we are rethinking the use of data sets that only cover a portion of our population ranges so that we may weight ridership (and other per capita statistics) much more heavily--as we agree they should be. We don't want to the criteria to come to be entirely different measures depending on the size of the city, but we do want to use the best measurements possible where we can find them.
The focus of our effort has been to highlight leaders in the many areas that make up what we call sustainability. In that effort, we invite your participation and would like to hear your thoughts, criticisms and suggestions at smartercities@nrdc.org.
by Paul McRandle on Jul 14, 2009 6:06 pm
by Matt O'Toole on Jul 14, 2009 6:17 pm
by Omari on Jul 14, 2009 8:21 pm
So I'd say its not necessarily green space that's the problem, its the green space in copious amounts of private yard space that creates the sprawl.
by nordy on Jul 14, 2009 8:47 pm
A sidenote that I have not heard mentioned is the LEED initiative that DC is currently implementing by 2012. All buildings over 50,000 SF will need to be LEED certified. You will be hard pressed now to find a building under construction not already classified as such.
by WLS on Jul 15, 2009 11:40 am
by Paul McRandle on Aug 5, 2009 5:53 pm