Posts about Books

The conventional wisdom in community development is to preserve current buildings and fight redevelopment of existing low-cost rental units. But that's exactly what we've been doing for the last decade. Instead, the number of affordable units in DC has been cut in half since 2000. The low-cost housing that remains is often poor quality and far from public transit.

While much of the public debate about DC development policies today centers on the height limit, that's far from the only restriction on growth. Locals governments also impose mandated lot sizes, building setbacks, floor area ratios, and parking minimums that restrict the amount of housing and drive up the cost of building new development.

So what's the solution? Yglesias takes the economist's perspective, targeting supply and demand:

[W]e need to acknowledge that there are only two sustainable ways to reduce the price of housing. One is to lower demand by making a given place a worse place to live. Detroit features high crime, low-quality public services, and a bleak job market. The rent in Detroit is not high. [...] The other way is to increase housing supply.

Opponents of smart growth policies contend the suburbs have grown because of America's desire for a white picket fence and a two-car garage. Yglesias says that through policies that discourage additional housing units from being built in urban cores, we've given families little other choice but to turn their backs on urban cores in search of cheap housing. By easing restrictions on urban housing supply, some of those families could move closer to the core, cutting their commute times and reducing their carbon footprints.

Yglesias resists policy prescriptions, instead closing with a call for those on both ends of the political spectrum to let go of failed policies and take a fresh look at possible solutions. "Many on the Left—starting with my inspiration, Jimmy McMillan—are confused about the relationship between housing affordability, regulation, gentrification, and quality of life over the long term," writes Yglesias. "On the Right, the problem is one of myopia and identity-driven resentment." He also wants our public debate "to better distinguish between the price of land (a speculative investment commodity, like stocks or bonds) and the price of houses (a consumption good, like a car or a refrigerator)."

Yglesias has faced some pushback in urban development circles. In a reflection of how fast the online news cycle moves, we already have articles asking if the pro-density movement has gone too far, even though at last check DC's height limit remains alive and well.

At a time of political polarization, is it asking too much for liberals predisposed to distrust corporate developers and conservatives prone to distrust government solutions to come out of their corners? What processes in our systems of government and public debate could be better utilized to facilitate the discussion? Can a happy medium be found between opponents of DC's current development restrictions and the skyscrapers feared by their supporters?

Post your questions in the comments, and we'll try to ask as many as we can during the chat. And join us on Wednesday at noon for what should be a very informative discussion.

He encouraged cities to move away from the historic North American penchant for putting a bus stop at nearly every corner (something not done in the rest of the world), and expect riders to walk a little more so that service is faster for everyone. Shortening trip times reduces the cost of providing service, which usually means that more service can be provided. It also encourages more people to ride, because it increases the area of the isochrone.

Transit routes that deviate off a direct path to serve poorly-located shopping centers, housing cul-de-sacs, and insular complexes, inconvenience through-riders and make transit less attractive, he said. Anything not built "on the way" is essentially saying, "I only want as much transit service as I alone can support," because those destinations can't be pooled with any other destinations. Once urban areas have taken this built form, it becomes expensive to provide service to them.

He ripped into WMATA's Metrobus map, pointing out that almost every route is shown in red, regardless of how often it runs. That's not helpful, he says, because it's like a roadmap "which doesn't differentiate between a highway and a gravel road."

Maps like this, which Walker laments are all too common amongst US transit systems, put the onus on the rider to first figure out what routes get them to where they want to go, then consult a complicated schedule to find out how often it runs.

Instead, he said, the map's design should make it as easy as possible on the rider by displaying routes based on frequency. Routes with the most frequent and round-the-clock service "should scream out at you," he insisted. For example, putting routes in a different color would let riders know at a glance if they could easily jump on board and not bother with a timetable.

Poor map design and inscrutable signpost information cost more than just riders. In some cities, it's become so frustrating that officials have thrown up their hands and turned to another form of transit altogether. Walker finds that unconscionable: cities shouldn't build streetcars or new bus systems simply because the existing system is incomprehensible. He pointed to the DC Circulator as a prime example of unnecessary duplication that squanders public resources that would be better spent making the most-used Metrobus routes more frequent and user-friendly.

His point about circulators is instructive for Tysons Corner, where five are planned. Walker says when good bus service is already there, adding circulators can be redundant and wasteful. In Canberra, Australia, planners faced with a similar situation saved lots of money by choosing simply to rebrand a section where many existing bus lines converged as one cohesive service (the "Green Line") with clock-face regularity.

He acknowledged that streetcars do tend to drive economic development because of their perceived permanence and attractiveness compared to buses. But he urged planners to remember that 50 years from now, any economic development potential today will be distant history, but the travel time riders gain from a bus which can navigate around obstacles will endure. He further cautioned against thinking of laying rails as signifying permanence, since most of DC's original streetcar tracks have been paved over.

Above all, Walker emphasized, transit agencies and the governments that fund them should see their job as enhancing freedom by making as much of the region as possible accessible by frequent, reliable service. The other things transit does, such as spurring economic development, providing jobs, protecting the environment and enhancing social equity, are all secondary to this primary purpose of transit.

If you missed Jarrett last week, you can watch his presentation to the Montgomery County Planning Department, below:

Our evening event will be at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) offices at 1666 K Street NW, Suite 1100, starting at 6:30. Young Professionals in Transportation, Women's Transportation Seminar, the American Planning Association, and APTA are also cosponsoring the event.

Our event does require an RSVP. Additionally, there are a limited number of books available at a discounted rate. You can reserve one when you RSVP.

On Tuesday, February 7, the Montgomery County Planning Commission is hosting Jarrett as a part of their speaker series. The talk will start at 7:30 pm in the Planning Board auditorium at 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.

On the 9th, Jarrett will speak at the National Building Museum from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. The National Building Museum is located downtown at 401 F Street NW. It may fill up so RSVP to reserve your space.

For those of you who live or work in the Baltimore area, Jarrett has also announced a lunchtime talk at Penn Station. It will run from noon until 1 pm on Tuesday the 7th.

All of the events are free.

Jarrett's book, like his blog, is full of insightful commentary. I was particularly interested in his discussion of the relationship between connections and frequency in enabling transit to be a more feasible mode. It was especially poignant for me, since the Metrobus and Prince George's County bus routes in Greenbelt were restructured around these principles just last year.

Prior to the change, we basically had a "direct service everywhere" design, which meant either long waits for the right bus or long rides on the wrong bus. Jarrett talks about how good design (both frequency and connections between routes) can mean that transferring might get you there more quickly and more reliably at the same cost to the agency. My experience on the ground backs that up, and the book explains why transit works that way.

Anyone who has ridden transit on a regular basis will appreciate the points Jarrett makes. Especially his matrix showing the seven demands of useful transit service. Transit designers must take these demands into consideration if they hope to compete for riders.

I won't get too in depth, here. But I will strongly encourage you to buy Jarrett's book. And hopefully I'll see you at one of his events in the area.

A foreword by historian James Goode notes, "With so few past landmarks preserved, it is easy to lose sight of the rich heritage of the city's architectural landscape, and thus it becomes ever more important to retell the stories of these lost places for new audiences."

Lost uses personal sketches, lithographs, period photos, and postcards to cover the city's earliest days as a sparsely populated "largely rolling farmland and rugged wilderness" to a city now with more than 600,000 residents.

Deftly moving from Capitol Hill to Upper Northeast in eight separate sections, DeFerrari draws from known and lesser-known sources. Excerpts from newspapers—that first draft of history—provide many quotes and period insights. Lost brings many of the city's departed newspapers back to life as well.

During those simpler times, before the development of the modern entertainment industry (including motion pictures), families could enjoy entertainment at B.F. Keith's High-Class Vaudeville Theater at 15th & G Streets NW. Among the guests opening night in 1912 was President Taft. Across downtown to the east, 513 9th Street NW featured a livelier form of entertainment, burlesque, at the Gayety Theatre.

While focused on the past physical identity of the city, Lost also introduces us to a cast of personalities whose entrepreneurial élan helped build a growing city, the seat of a power of an expanding nation. These characters helped forge the city's emotional and social identity.

Pennsylvania Avenue NW was where the action was all hours of the day. The powerful and influential local and national papers located on "Newspaper Row." reporters and editors rubbed elbows with drunkards and thieves in the same space once known as "Rum Row." Being cutthroat was not the battle cry, it was the battle.

One who played for keeps was Frank Munsey, a "robber baron" of the publishing business at the beginning of the twentieth century. Munsey is credited with perfecting a printing process that used extremely low-quality "pulp" paper to produce magazines that "were both dirt-cheap and filled with enough racy fare to be widely popular." Munsey brought about the era of pulp fiction.

Sacrificing quality to achieve high quantity, Munsey owned numerous papers nationally and eventually established a local bank. He hired a prestigious New York architectural firm to design a grand twelve-story Italian Renaissance Revival that could house the headquarters of his banking and publishing concerns in Washington. The building stood until 1979 when, despite community and legal opposition, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation (PADC) bought the then-vacant building and demolished it.

Not all has vanished. Lost describes how the Art Deco Greyhound Bus Terminal at 1100 New York Avenue NW, built in 1940, was saved from the wrecking ball. Following the 1968 riots and with construction of Metro, downtown in the 1970's was gritty and grimy, as was the bus station, which closed in 1976. The building was then enclosed with ugly "concrete asbestos panels and a squat-looking metal mansard roof."

After the property was sold in 1985, a coalition of preservationists was able to persuade developers to use the terminal as a gateway to the planned office building. In 1991, the building opened with a "handsomely restored bus station" and a permanent exhibit on the history of the terminal "complete with life-sized plaster casts of historic buses standing where their bays would have been."

DeFerrari launched the blog Streets of Washington in 2009, using his extensive postcard collection as the foundation for featured posts. He also has cross-posted many of the entries here on Greater Greater Washington. This gave DeFerrari an abundance of substantive research ready to be tapped for the book. However, many of the entries in Lost were never published or posted before.

The only gap readers might notice is a lack of coverage of lost landmarks east of the Anacostia River. However, DeFerrari says he would like to write a second volume that would give him a chance to cover sites and neighborhoods left out of Lost.

As the contemporary city changes day-to-day the Marion Barry era is inescapable. Tonight's discussion will discuss the city's recent past, which is critical to understanding the city's future trajectory.

The discussion is in the downstairs meeting room at the Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood Library. It starts at 7 pm, and please plan to arrive a few minutes early. There will be a Q&A following the discussion.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Dream City probes the pathos of DC that by the late 1950s had become majority black, albeit with two distinct factions. A strong-middle class of largely government workers coexisted with a dependent class less than a generation removed from living in the alleys or deep South. Both divergent groups of the city's black populace were equally subjugated by Democratic Southern segregationists that controlled all aspects of municipal government.

Due to the city's status as a step-child of the Federal government, an indigenous political machine, unable to control patronage, was never able to emerge. When the city was awarded home rule in 1973, it was politically wide open as local elections had not been held in nearly a century.

Into this void, up stepped Marion Barry, the perpetual "situationalist," and the rest is history. The book explores Barry's record of drug use, womanizing, wooing the press corps, doling out minority contracts to the determinant of basic city services, raising campaign funds from white developers in exchange for selling off city land, crippling the police force, and growing the city payroll to 57,000 full-time employees according to the 1990 census (more than Los Angeles, a city greater than four times the size of DC).

After the book's release, Barry embraced the veneer of Afrocentrism complete with dashiki and kofia and was elected to a fourth mayoral term. Today, he is a two-time incumbent Ward 8 council member slowly readying for the April 2012 Democratic primary.

Since its publication by Simon & Schuster, the book has grown in stature and become a must read (or re-read) for lay citizens, members of the press corps, and local politicians, many whom cite the book as their favorite book on the city. Previous works have exposed the underbelly of city life during different epochs such as Carp's Washington focusing on the 1880s, Neglected Neighbors revealing stories of life in the alleys, tenements and shanties of the national capital, or Washington Goes to War showing a city turned on its head as it mobilized for World War II.

We hope you can make it on the 17th.

More than a strict architectural history, Capital Losses provides insight into the intimate history of each building and landmark, and how its presence contributed to the livability of the city.

The construction of new commercial buildings and residential properties throughout downtown and mid-city over the past decade has altered the cityscape, but has not fundamentally obscured the city's historic Victorian heritage.

Enacted in 1978, the District of Columbia's Historic Landmark and Historic District Preservation Act is regarded as one of the strongest preservation laws in the country. Goode notes that this legislation, along with the maturation of the non-profit DC Preservation League and the city's Historic Preservation Review Board, provides the DC with a well-entrenched preservation community.

"Capital Losses has certainly helped get a number of historic districts established in the city," says Goode. To date, the Office of Planning recognizes 46 distinct historic neighborhoods and districts.

Last updated in 2003, Capital Losses focuses on both residential and non-residential property that has since been lost to only archival records.

From the old Washington Jail (built in 1839 and razed in 1874) at 4th and G Street NW, and the Center Market (designed by Adolf Cluss in 1871 and razed in 1931) at 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where the National Archives currently stands, to horse troughs that were at major intersections throughout the city until the mid 1950s, Capital Losses chronicles historic Washington with more than 250 entries.

Goode cites "government expansion, private real estate development, urban renewal, freeways, commercial growth, and the enlargement of institutions such as universities, hospitals, and churches" as factors that contributed to Washington losing a "large number of architecturally significant buildings, ranging from Federal structures of the 1790s to art moderne landmarks from the 1930s" since the end of World War II.

Goode, who is also the author of Washington Sculpture: A Cultural History of Outdoor Sculpture in the Nation's Capital and Best Addresses is working on a new book, expected out in 3 years, about DC's historic houses.

"Dedicated to those Washingtonians who continue to fight to save the architectural heritage of the nation's capital," Capital Losses, more than three decades after its initial publication, remains necessary reading for anyone who cares or wants to learn about preservation in 21st century Washington.

A version of this article was first published by Capital Community News.