Just another WordPress.com site
This has been a great project for me over the last couple years, but I have found the blogger platform to be more friendly and integrated with other software that I use. Therefore the Stronger Kamloops blog will be moving to a new home at:
http://strongerkamloops.blogspot.ca/
Please follow me there, and always feel free to email at mitchforgie@hotmail.com!
Stronger Kamloops is now a book! Read it, download it, print it, distribute it! Available for free at issuu.com and link is provided above and below.
It has been a very long time since I have wrote on this blog, as I have been very busy trying to work on Laneway Homes, been writing a book and generally working very hard.
In the spirit of Charles Mahron of StrongTowns.org I have been doing some case studies in Kamloops in regards to the financial affairs of our city, the liabilities that we do not see reflected in the cities capital plans and the return on investment the public sector sees in different areas of the city.
I do not want to say too much, only to provide the figures as I have found them, and let the figures speak for themselves. Currently I have asked an accountant to audit these figures for accuracy, and the figures gathered are based on a number of sources outside of my control.
Notes on References:
I have received all tax information from the BC Assessment Website between January of 2013 and June of 2013. The tax rates and budget figures are based on the 2013 Kamloops City Budget as obtained from the cities website. The figures shown here for taxes collected assume that there are no home-owner subsidies made. Cost of Infrastructure improvements was gathered by a BC Ministry of Transportation Document titled “Construction and Rehabilitation Cost Guide” 2013. Size of properties is gathered from the cities online property information system and survey. For the first two case studies I choose to use Cul-De-Sacs. In this way it can be argued that the only tax-payers who receive a benefit from this infrastructure would be people living on that street, people accessing people who live on that street, and people who are lost (who arguably are not receiving benefit from that street in their usage). I believe that in all ways I have tried to show the best case scenario from the city administrators point of view.
Case Study One; Canongate Crescent, Aberdeen area
Seen above in Google Street View, and on Google Maps, Canongate Crescent is a typical Aberdeen subdivision, with above average home prices. The average property value is $420,882.35. The cities mill rate tax is 4.37%. This, with no subsidies, bring in revenue of $62,534 per year. The cities financial plan for 2013 shows Infrastructure budget at 6.89% of the total budget. If applied to this street, that allows $9076 of this streets taxes allocated for infrastructure costs. Let us for the moment assume that the residents of this street do not contribute ANY of their infrastructure taxes to any other street in the universe. Based on projections provided by the MOT and compared against city projects in 2012 of a similar size (Grandview Terrace), it is estimated that resurfacing this street would cost $702,000. This would be the minimum treatment allowed by city and provincial codes. This treatment is expected to have a life-cycle of 15 years until needing re-surfacing again. The governments minimum code for road re-surfacing (50mm deep) costs on average $117,000 per lane per km.
If the resurfacing was done this year, the cost would be $702,000. With revenue coming in for the street from the properties adjacent at $9076 per year it would take 77 years to pay for the project. If we take the governments number of 15 years until replacement, that makes the shortfall on the project $565,860. Looked at another way, the shortfall is $37,724 per year; or $1109.53 per household per year.
Looking at it yet another way, with the same current budget proportions, and with the idea that we would want every house to at least be able to maintain the road service in the front of their own house, each persons taxes would need to increase from an average of $1839 per house per year, by $1109.53 to a per year per house tax payment of $2948.53! That is a 55% increase in taxes immediately, just to pay for the road in front of the house.
In recap, the important figures:
Case Study Two; Kyle Drive, Westsyde area
Kyle Drive in Westsyde, bisects Westsyde Road and on the west side creates a little Cul-De-Sac. I have chosen this Cul-De-Sac for the same reasons as the last.
Kyle Drive contains 11 properties, with a total taxable value of $3,223,000. The average home price is just below the Kamloops average, with the average Kyle Drive property worth $293,000. The income from property tax on these properties is $14,084.51 and the infrastructure budget from this number is $957 per year. To change things up, in this example I used Hot-In-Place Recycling as the payment method, which has a useful life of 9-11 years. The government expectation for HIP is $54,000 per km per lane (Lanes being 12′ wide).
Using the same type of figures as the last example, it takes years for these tax payers to pay for the re-surfacing of the road in front of their homes. The loss calculated based on a 10 year life-cycle is $6,630 or $663 per year. The tax increase that would need to happen immediately to break even on the re-surfacing of their road is $60 per year per house.
Important Figures:
It is important to note that within this infrastructure budget the city still needs to pay for water and sewer lines, the far more expensive arterial roads, and all the other paraphernalia involved like water treatment plants, pumping stations, road signals, engineering, on and on….
Consider that every transaction in our whole city falls under similar circumstances. Part of the book I am assembling at the moment includes dozens of these examples. We are concerned about our 2% tax hikes each year, but with these figures we can absolutely know that we have a ticking time bomb of 50% and 100% tax hikes in our future.
There is nothing that can be done to solve this problem, but there are things that we can do to react to the choices we have made more sensibly than others. This blog is a good place to start and my book will involve many value capture techniques for the private and public sectors.
Losing the Thompson Park Mall was certainly no great loss, but the question is, how good is what replaced it?
What kind of value does the new mall capture? What motivations influenced the design of the mall? Who does this mall serve, and how well?
I have to say, the mall serves primarily the urban clientele downtown, and does a fairly good job, with many pedestrian crossings to connect to the existing sidewalk. There is also less allocation towards parking, as compared to say a Sahali or Aberdeen stripmall. This is a step in the right direction. The quality of the design is fairly consistent and aesthetically pleasing as well–The oranges, reds and beige’s well reflect the natural palate of the grass lands. The lighting is appropriate, at night the area is not flooded with Halogens, but is rather sensitively lit with human scaled street lights and wall scones. In addition there is also attempts to mass the structure in such a way as to not impose its gigantic scale upon the pedestrian, mostly by thrusting the block between 5th and 6th partially into the parking lot with London Drugs, to obscure the true length of the building. Circulation for cars within the parking lot is inefficient, but interface with the rest of the city is pretty good–that is if your primary concern is getting cars in and out, particularly in. In this regard it is the one-way orientation of Landsdowne Street that is the least efficient; Now many vehicles find it easier to use the parking lot as a counter flow street to Landsdowne, creating congestion within the parking lot. The thrust of this article surrounds the “Public Space” that was created between 4th and 5th avenue in front of what is currently Dollarama. It is pictured below.
So with that said, the thought was there, and many elements of design, urbanity and human scale we’re addressed.
But as I unfortunately tend to, I am going to focus on some of the design elements that the public hearing process, the design review panel and the architects and planners seem to have forgotten, or not capitalized upon.
This development was obviously planning to create a comfortable pedestrian environment. It shows in the “street” which tucks behind Senor Froggies, Bell and a couple of vacant locations, in front of Dollarama. This area has some interesting streetscaping, and plenty of benches provided, but is unfortunately devoid of pedestrians, and actually in many places shops. This contributes to a somewhat dangerous feeling to the space, and it is common to see persons avoid this area to instead walk through the parking lots to pass this area. Why? Why does no one want to walk here?
The most obvious component would be the pillars holding up the sign for Dollarama. These pillars shade the entire street, destroy any type of continuity or human scale to the area. The pillars look as if they should be holding up the Parthenon, only the Parthenon’s pillars are much skinnier…
The area has no entrances for the shops facing the street. There is large blank walls, back doors and generally nothing of interest to bring a pedestrian into the space, making most of the available real estate not viable for businesses. The same is true of the still existing basement level, which is devoid of people and businesses (and also has large private maintenance fees for “public space”).
Furthermore, the “street” is not a conduit, it does not connect anything to anything else. So this place functions neither as a destination, nor as a place of transit. Therefore there is no idle reason to be there. It does not even connect meaningfully to the existing street network, where persons and cars may be idly passing. It is separated by a 4 deep parking apron and landscaping that further prevents integration with the existing city element.
Could this space have been redeveloped differently and achieved a different result, with higher rents, and breed more successful business? I would argue that it could have done this, and even avoided the investment in the ill-utilized public space “street”, and instead used that square footage for parking or revenue generation.
First thing to do:
Put the parking and services in the back! If this building had been built to the sidewalk, and invested the money they invested in their “public” space instead to: widen the existing sidewalk, add benches and perhaps even invest in the transit exchange as a civic space with buildings, services and amenities surrounding it–they would have avoided “tucking businesses out of sight”. All businesses would have been up the edge of the street. Perhaps this is why the average ground floor Victoria Street rent is much more than the mall here, visibility and access. Furthermore, the businesses would have been engaged with a street that served a purpose for pedestrians already, and the businesses would have become visible to persons not already in the market. In fact if that had of been the case, the 400 block of Landsdowne could have been enclosed, and nearly as vibrant as the 300 block of Victoria Street! Furthermore, it would have cost the developer less money, and had fewer on-going maintenance commitments! Higher rents, longer leases, more viable small businesses, more customers, safer street, less private investment and a smaller maintenance budget… I see now why they developed like a sub-urban strip-mall in this urban location…
Second thing to do:
This development terminates the vista for not one; not two; but actually three streets. 4th, 5th and 6th all terminate in this development, and not one terminating vista serves a civic, legible, land marking presence. Each and every visitor to downtown Kamloops cannot fail to visit the Third Avenue pedestrian bridge. In fact on a Google image search of Kamloops, the Yellow Bridge is the most photographed single structure in Kamloops. This is because it terminates a vista down a street. It is therefore obvious, eye-catching and serves as a landmark. The installation of the transit exchange at 6th Ave could have served this function, could have terminated 6th in a fantastic enclosed space full of people waiting for the bus, busking, and just enjoying this island in the grid. All the way from Columbia a visitor to Kamloops could have looked down Sixth, seen the buildings and the people and understood that this was a place of retail and a good place to visit. In its current layout, a visitor looks down 6th and wonders if this is really the turn to the “City Center”, because they have had no indication of this looking north down the avenues thus far… except for the bridge terminating 3rd. This option was available at each and every intersection, however it was not taken advantage of. Moving forward, the developer could invest in some archways over each entrance to the space which would at least partially terminate the vista with something informing and potentially beautiful.
Third thing to do:
No gigantic pillars, no gigantic signs. This is an urban area, traffic speeds are slow, and its is safe and easy even for a motorist to glance at a reasonably sized sign and understand that yes, there in fact, is London Drugs, as it only takes up half the city block anyways. Especially if these spaces we’re built to the pavement, all sorts of complex interfaces could have made the store fronts visible and inviting and context sensitive–for example, sidewalk chalk, clapboards, planters, patios, etc. Unfortunately the mall is not scaled to pedestrians, and is thus avoided by all but those that have a destination within the mall.
So think of the traffic and word of mouth that the businesses here are missing out on. Think of the public space that was created, that all the businesses have to help pay for, which is completely un-occupied and serves no purpose. Some of the businesses, terminating the vistas, could have even been seen easily from as far away as Columbia, and thus demanded much higher rents from the landlord. The higher property values in the development could have meant much larger influxes into the public coffers, with less maintenance expenditure on the part of the businesses.
That is capturing value, for the customers, the businesses, the public realm and for our taxes. Does this building really serve its stakeholders? Does it serve the citizens, the business owners, the developers shareholders, the public interest, public safety, multi-modal transportation, transit visibility, buskers, sidewalk chalk artists, customer or even drivers in the congested parking lots?
The thought was there, but with a little intellect everyone could have won much larger.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has finished for this year, with extended discussions surrounding capital finance, city coffers and financial sustainability. Faster and faster more of these lectures and interviews are making their way onto the internet. I look forward to providing some more of these over time, but some of my favorite CNU at TED videos should start a good primer:
I have recently helped start a company building Laneway Homes in Kamloops. Laneway Homes are a fantastic way to build density in really small increments in urban areas. They are a way for even the most middle class of us to make a big difference to the livability of our city. The houses we build are near net-zero energy usage and carbon neutral. They do not cost any more than any other house. They infill for density creating greener lifestyles. They create high quality downtown rental possibilities and a lower rung on the property ladder than downtown has been able to provide in the market. Building a Laneway House on your property has the ability to enhance your neighborhood, your property value and your carbon footprint. In the context of this blog though, there is alot more going on here;
Laneway Housing in Kamloops has its common association with Vancouver, but in fact Laneway Housing primarily has its roots in early 16th Century London. As West London was rapidly developing around the River Thames and the palaces along Whitehall, the ‘abode de jour’ for the upper classes we’re 6-7 story Row Houses. Great examples of this aristocratic housing still survive all over West London, from Covent Garden to Westbourne Grove. The Row Housing model was physically mandated at that time to be built on a human scale, even for the richest of the city. They we’re required to build up in order to shorten the distances in order for services and resources to be accessible and convenient. Take this example; at the height of growth in the 18th Century, when the only method of transportation was by foot or by horse, the center of London from the periphery was half a days journey. This was the limit of its growth, as the people in the center of the city would be unable to purchase wood or coal to heat the house, or food to eat, or beer to drink, etc. Even this growth was already achieved at a very dense scale. These limits forced further densification. Originally, most of the poor would live in the outskirts of the city, or seedy industrial areas of East or South London, but it became necessary to get the rich persons servants into the centre of the city.
Alleyways, called Mews, we’re constructed the whole way through the luxury row house development, to accommodate stables, storage and other service entrances. These Mews buildings we’re renovated to provide some accommodation above the stables for the servants of the house. Often only a couple rooms and housing as many as 6 servants, the quarters we’re cramped and smelly above the horses, however it provided both employer and employee with a new degree of convenience with the shorter commutes and safer accommodation. The rich areas of town did not become any less safe, in fact they became more safe with the increase of “eyes on the street”. Many of the poor servants now lived in a place where the females would be comfortable walking the streets in the early morning or late night, and the same for their children.
With the advent of the train system, the London Underground, then OmniBuses and later still the automobile, the Mews Houses we’re incrementally taken over in entirety to become houses in the alleyways. They also often became independent quarters for low-level professionals who purchased the homes from Landlords in the Row Houses whos fortunes we’re failing. The transition started.
As London experienced fantastic growth starting post-WW2, and again in the 1960’s, and to the extreme in the 80’s, the Row Houses facing the streets we’re purchased by property developers to covert each level into “flats”. Few Row Houses remain intact in Londons West End, however the Mews Houses do. The Mews Houses are now some of the most desirable real estate in the city. The transition to the Mews Houses was not purely economic though, and the attractiveness of the address is not purely economically stimulated at all. As the city hit heights of population density in the 60’s to such a discomforting degree, the streets became crowded with fast moving vehicles and hundreds of pedestrians. In contrast the Mews Houses stayed on narrow back lanes, unsuitable for fast moving vehicle traffic. The Mews became an oasis of quiet and calm in the bustling city.
It is clear that Kamloops will require extreme densification to accommodate a growing population and diversifying economy. Kamloops’ climate and natural resources make it an efficient geography in which to live regardless of the effects that may or may not be felt from Climate Change and Peak Oil. Current Capital Scarcity make downtown “skyscrapers” difficult to build, as do rising resource costs. Both in the long and short terms, Kamloops is going to need to accommodate many, on its existing infrastructure. Laneway Homes start that transition.
These Laneway Houses may be an affordable housing solution immediately, provide a fantastic retirement residence for someone who wants to age in place, or even just create safer alleyways in Downtown and North Shore areas, but they are an established way to treat problems of the present, with a solution that can be adaptable centuries into the future, as London has shown us.
Find out more info about Laneways4Kamloops at laneways4kamloops.blogspot.ca or call Mitchell at 778.220.9090
Some London Mews:
A recent blog I discovered through the KunstlerCast that does a great podcast and great advocacy work in the name of New Urbanism and Economics. I lifted this piece from the blog because it is so poignant at the moment, with the WalMart expansion being granted and new subdivisions like Aberdeen Heights given the go-ahead, while large parking lots wait to be filled in downtown. As a developer, I can see the financial sense for a private company to redevelop infill parcels, but until the city gets behind us, we all lose.
Without to much more of my input, this is from Strongtowns,org. Many other great articles are here including “Shared Spaces” and “Tactical Urbanism”.
In the United States we’ve proceeded for sixty years with reconfiguring our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. The built in assumption of this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by the better. What we’ve overlooked in our haste to “modernize” is the lower return on investment we get from this approach, even under ideal conditions. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors — who built in the traditional style — may have known what they were doing after all.
After a nice break, we want to welcome everyone back and wish you all a fantastic 2012. We’re still dedicated to publishing this blog at least three days a week (typically Monday, Wednesday and Friday) as well as releasing a podcast every week or two. We’ve got one other channel here we’ll be starting next week, so stay tuned. If you’d like to stay informed with what’s going on with the Strong Towns movement, sign up for our newsletter. We don’t share your address and we don’t spam. We do bite though, at least rhetorically.
Highway 210 runs east/west through downtown Brainerd. In the hierarchical road system, it is the top of the pyramid and would be classified in most places as a “major arterial”. It is designed as a STROAD (a street/road hybrid), attempting to apply highway design standards to what otherwise would be an urban street. In doing so, it has dramatically transformed the land use pattern of the area.
The picture below highlights two blocks that front the highway corridor. The one on the left, which we’ve labeled “old and blighted“, is a block that has retained its traditional development pattern. To the right we have identified the “shiny and new” area, the block that has recently been transformed to an auto-oriented development style, to the glee of city officials and local economic development advocates. In between is a hybrid of the two; part traditional and part auto-oriented.
The old and blighted area is a collection of run down, marginal establishments. There are two liquor stores, a pawn shop, a barber shop, a bankruptcy attorney, a campaign headquarters, a retail establishment, a cafe and a vacant building. This is not a desirable area. If the adjacent highway didn’t already ensure decline, local “improvements” have degraded what little pedestrian connectivity may have existed to the adjacent areas. None of it that remains is easy, natural or inviting. In the community’s eyes, this is an area that is waiting to redevelop, to transform itself fully into an auto-oriented pattern. That transformation has begun; note that the very westerly building, which is a liquor store, has turned two lots into a parking lot.
By contrast, the shiny and new area contains only one business, that being a new Taco John’s drive through fast food restaurant. The modern facility contains two drive-through lanes, good access to the adjacent streets and all the parking that would ever be needed. They’ve done on-site stormwater retention (the environmentalists applaud) and modern signage. It meets all of the city’s design and zoning codes. The restaurant replaced some buildings that were, themselves, part of an evolution from the original, traditional development to the auto-oriented. With the new Taco John’s, the transformation is complete.
If there was any question regarding the public’s opinion on these two lots, the city of Brainerd’s comprehensive plan specifically calls for the transformation of areas that we’ve labeled “old and blighted” into “shiny and new“. The city has designated this areaGeneral Commercial, expressing a desire to see the development along this corridor become highway-oriented. This they describe on page 93 of their plan.
General Commercial
The purpose of this category is to identify portions of Brainerd that should contain general retail commercial uses adjacent to the arterial highway system. The intent of this designation is to provide areas for highway-oriented businesses. Consequently, having a strong general commercial base in the city helps the downtown as well. Having a strong highway commercial area helps draw consumers to the city and provides for a healthy downtown. Examples of these could include highway-oriented businesses such as fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other auto-oriented businesses as well as a number of large retailers.
In that definition of General Commercial, it is stated that a “strong highway commercial area….provides for a healthy downtown.” The problem is that “strong” and “highway commercial” are — in almost all cases — mutually exclusive terms. The numbers prove the point in this case.
The eleven old and blighted lots — some of the most undesirable commercial property in the city — arranged in the traditional development pattern along the incompatible, major arterial of Highway 210 have a combined tax base of $1,136,500.
To compare, the Taco John’s property — the one that is not only shiny and new but configured precisely as the city of Brainerd desires the old and blighted properties to someday be — has a total valuation of only $803,200.
At its nastiest and most decrepit, fighting the negative auto traffic speeding by and the absence of pedestrian connectivity, lacking all natural advantage from the neighboring land uses that would ideally accompany a traditional neighborhood design, the old and blighted traditional commercial block still outperforms the new, auto-oriented development by 41%.
Imagine how much more valuable this traditonal block would be if the businesses were simply given some relief from the speed of the STROAD-induced traffic and/or provided some connectivity to the adjacent neighborhood, two things that could be done far cheaper than the millions the city has spent to make this area the dominion of cars.
Imagine how much more prosperous we would all be if we started building Strong Towns.
—
There is much more to report on this case study. Check back later this week. In the meantime, here is some related information:
Originally published in Kamloops This Week as a letter in 2010:
In the words of Fred Hansen, ex-deputy director of USEPA and regional planner for Portland, OR, “It’s not about MPG, its WBF”.
WBF= Weeks Between Fill-Ups. What Fred is getting at is that cars represent only 25% of our fossil fuel emissions, and no matter the degree to which we improve fuel efficiency, we will only be going a little way to solving the problem. There are hundreds of other reasons why further pursuing the auto-mobile centric form of urban planning is ridiculous.
We need to drive our cars rarely and take advantage of all the other forms of transport available. Walking is a good one, a living in a place where this is practical is a good investment. This is a huge step towards independence of oscillating fossil fuel prices and green house gas emissions. Creating a community in this ideal benefits us all– not to…
View original post 1,356 more words
This is the second half of the article published as “The First Eyesore – Part 1, The Environment”. Both articles are critical of the built landscape in and around Kamloops. The intention of the articles are not to be harsh or negative, but to introduce citizens to a language that will give citizens the ability to participate in a dialogue about how we have built, how we are building, and provide a foundation on which we as the citizens can be active participants in how we continue to build. Many articles in the rest of the blog will touch on issues such as why we built the way we did, why we are building the way we are and what circumstances may influence how we need to be building and how we will build in the future. The first part of this two-part article dealt with everything surrounding the pictured building at 3rd and Battle. This article will deal with what this building is telling us about itself. It is always important to remember Peter Calthorpe, “Cities are more than a collection of buildings in space, cities gain their life and vibrancy from how those buildings and streets relate to one another and relate to the citizens.”
In the first part of the article we touched briefly on the concept of the “Human Scale”. It is now time to expand further on this. We previously touched on how a pedestrian interacts with his/her environment and how a vehicle does. We understand why a street is more vibrant when there are no cars on it, but it takes more than a stick to make a walking journey a worthwhile one. There needs to be carrots as well.
Density is the first key in creating vibrant public space. It is key for all kinds of diversity and metropolitan uses in a city. For example, SmartGrowth BC has calculated unit densities for cities in BC regarding all kinds of land use patterns. For example a city needs to have at least 5 units of housing per hectare for public schooling to be viable–on the periphery of Edmonton right now the school board has refused to build new schools as the density of students has become so low, and the neighborhoods so mono-demographic that they cannot make the schools viable. The essential rule is this, a neighborhood needs to have enough density to support a school over time – there needs to be enough children, enough seniors, young professionals, etc. so that there is always enough children to walk to the school to remain at a capacity full enough to operate. Many other services are no different. If Kamloops had an average density of 25 units per hectare (currently at 13, much lower in places like Dallas and Rayleigh) public transit would not be a burden to the tax payer, but it would actually pay for itself. Not much beyond that threshold and many households participate in what is referred to as “car-dumping”. The convenience of frequent and cheap 24hr transit is now more convenient than car ownership. Many have also argued that a larger percentage of the population taking transit and reducing the burden on our road system in fact pays for itself much sooner than 25 units per hectare. The other note on public transit is that it needs to be frequent to create a broader willingness to take transit. Buses will not become more frequent unless there is enough people to ride them. This is also a function of density.
Density is not so simple though. For successful density there needs to be a wide mix of uses as well: from nightclubs, to apartments, to offices, to retail, to pubs, to doctors offices, to grocery stores, light industry, schools, churches, etc. A pedestrian’s journey is not convenient unless the things required are in fact close at hand. A good example of this is found in Dallas, Texas. In Dallas there are many 100 story office building’s downtown. There are never any pedestrians on the street at any hour of the day. In the picture provided by Google Street view in the heart of downtown Dallas (877 Main Street, Approx.) there are two persons on this street. One homeless and the other a city employee fixing a traffic light. This mono-use, no matter how dense, creates a flight response in people, as once the task needed to accomplish in that neighborhood is complete, they drive out. Dallas, a city with a metro population of 6.3 million, also has a barely functioning transit system that is left primarily to the vagrants and ner-do-wells. In fact it could be argued that diversity is important beyond sheer convenience in dense places. The diversity of the building types, businesses, people, streetscapes and public interaction contributes to the above mentioned term-“Human Scale”. A place filled with diversity provides inherent entertainment and stimulation in a pedestrian journey. These points of interest, whether it be a shop window display, a bizarre character or inspiring architecture, are only really experience when walking, they are just passed by at 60km/h in a car. These points of interest make it worthwhile and rewarding to be a pedestrian. They make the lifestyle of the city one of engagement and excitement.
Great examples of mixed-use, medium density places exist and they are largely extremely lively and exciting places. Italy is a country with thousands of such villages and cities, and the saying of the Italians goes, “10 Italians in the street take up the same space with their activities as 100 Americans.” This jibe simply translated insinuates that after work the Italian streets are filled with musicians, couples, singles, children, vendors, performers, pub-goers and thousands of other spontaneous activities. It is the social interaction of all these lifestyles in the public realm that create such a vibrant place to live.
An easy argument against density using my language is that large buildings and many people in a small area is not “scaled” to the human. To this I can pose many quotes. For example, “I am a person and I stand upright, vertical. When I walk through the forest the trees around me stand vertical.” It is important again to entertain diversity in the landscape. Skyscrapers can be both inspiring and terrifying. So can “land-scrapers”. The important element is diversity, is there interesting details, created for the human at 2m tall to excite me? Is there “holes-in-the-wall” for me to discover on my urban exploration?
Therefore it is important that the buildings in a city enrich the public realm. There are a number of key terms to describe what and how a building can achieve this. A great document published by the London School of Design, called ‘By Design’ identifies some key features:
Character: A place with its own identity
Continuity and Enclosure: A place where private space and public space is clearly defined
Quality of the Public Realm: A place with attractive and successful outdoor areas
Ease of Movement: A place that’s easy to get to and move through
Legibility: A place that has a clear image and is easy to interact with
Adaptability: A place that can change easily
Diversity: A place with variety and choice.
(This document can be found and further explained at http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Documents/Documents/Publications/CABE/by-design.pdf)
The building in question now, at the SE corner of Battle and 3rd Avenue, how does it measure against these variables?
If this building were a performer, how would you describe its Character? Does this building have an identity of its own? Not particularly, this building could be found anywhere in any city in North America and the typology would be familiar. This is a multi-story building which inherently has more density than a single story, and this part is good. Where it really fails is in what surrounds it. In a city with good diversity of buildings, a few distasteful ones could contribute to the overall excitement of the area (as the NYC Sperone Westwater Gallery shows). That sort of diversity contributes to the character of a neighbourhood. This building does little in that respect, it does not contribute to the identity of the area, nor will the architecture ever be known as a landmark in Kamloops.
Regarding Continuity and Enclosure. It can be said that people with many missing teeth are less attractive than those with good teeth all in their mouths. The same is true of streets. A street with uninterrupted buildings enclosing the street or a square creates a comfortable and safe feeling “outdoor room”. Many do not realize why Victoria Street rents drop off travelling east after 5th avenue. That is where the enclosure completely ends. In fact in the 300 Block of Victoria Street there is a missing tooth beside the Kamloops Inn, and unsurprisingly it quickly attracts many people who do not wish to have all their activities known (people you would not feel comfortable having your young daughter playing with). It is not the quality of the people that I wish to draw attention to, but the context of the surroundings and how that can skew a persons conduct(More on this in future posts). As this building stands alone in space with nothing more than surface parking surrounding it, it fails to create a “place” which needs to be accomplished by enclosure. There needs to be borders for a space to be a place.
This whole post and the previous one has dealt with many issues surrounding the impoverishment of the Public Realm at the Battle and 3rd location. I will mention again in this respect however, there is no reason why a person would ever choose to be in the vicinity of this building unless they were parking their car, in transit or using the services inside that building. The same cannot be said of good public realm, like 200-400 block Victoria Street, like Riverside Park, like the village square at SunPeaks, Leister Square in London or Times Square in New York. These places have character, they are enclosed and have a diversity of uses. It is the character of such places as Times Square that we know them world-wide, without having actually been there, whereas Bryant Park only a couple blocks away is completely unknown to someone who hasn’t visited.
Ease of Movement: Interestingly, 3rd and Battle space suffers little to no problems regarding ease of movement, except for perhaps that one has few reasons to ever move through this space on foot. In addition, how does one enter the building itself? It is not immediately apparent… in fact there appears to be a moat of sorts separating the sidewalk from the building itself, as if a pedestrian being able to touch the building we would deface it. If defacement was a problem perhaps the “defacer” was trying to add some character and interest where there was previously none (similar to concrete retaining walls being graffiti-ed). It is the belief of the author that if a building requires a sign to direct the person to the entrance, the architect has completely failed at its job.
Legibility. Perhaps at this point you, the reader, are starting to see how all these elements of design and architecture are in fact related to each-other. Regarding Ease of Movement, the largest impediment to movement is the fact that you cannot immediately figure out where you need to go. Legibility in the macro-sense however appeals to how a building functions to make a city understandable. If I am a stranger asking for directions, are there landmarks you can use to help direct me? Or as a citizen, does the built environment reflect how I like to live, does it represent things in my past, and does it remind me of my dreams? Will the continuity and familiar landmarks help support me over time as I look for security in the neighbourhoods I once called home, or continue to? It is probably few of us who have not taken tea with an elder and heard the disdain the way the changes in the city have made it “unrecognizable”. It is hard to find security in a neighbourhood of constant demolition and construction, and it is demoralizing on a finer scale as it seems to tell us that we are not capable of building anything that is worth preserving.
This brings us to another connected idea, Adaptability. Are the buildings we are building capable of re-use. Like the Tate Modern in London, or the Battersea Power Plant, can our power plants be made into art galleries and high-end condos? Can our churches become gymnasiums and pools? Can our pools become hospitals or bike manufacturers? Can our houses become effective offices or clinics? Or are they not worth remodeling because the use they were designed for was too specialized that they cannot be used in any another way? Or perhaps because our culture of demoralization through constant demolition disincentives us from actually building something of a high-enough quality to last in the first place. At one time if you wanted to flaunt your ridiculous wealth, you would build a bridge or a large civic building with your name on it that would last for decades, neigh centuries. Today you abandon that for cerebral temporary experience, like a Ferrari.
And finally the thrust of the whole argument. Diversity.
Is this building the worst it comes? No. Is it the best we can do? Certainly No.
Images from Google Street View.
I personally think that the entire stripmall areas surrounding the highways through Kamloops are the largest eyesores, and contribute greatly to many foreigners attitudes that Kamloops is not much more than a blue collar pulp town. However in my eyesore column I do not plan to address them, or any of the sub-urban sprawl up the hills, as I do not believe that there was much opportunity to build those houses in a truly long-term sustainable fashion in the first place.
Calling a building an eyesore, I think, is immediately a negative connotation. I choose to highlight some things that I believe have gone wrong in the planning and construction of some buildings, in order to provide a vocabulary to readers to understand why some things in our built environment feel the way they do, and why people interact with them the way they do.
The building above is the Worksafe BC building on the SE corner of Battle and 3rd Avenue downtown. It is clearly a downtown building, yet the surrounding does not seem to foster the lively atmosphere surrounding Victoria Street at a similar time of day. In this article I will explain the elements of design present that have the most to do with the immediate environment. In a second article I will continue by speaking to the finest grain of the building. This is all to answer the question, “Why are the places we are building so different from the places we like?”
If we walk around the immediate surroundings of the address, you notice one thing straight away. There is not really many other people. This is because the only reason a person would need to be in this area is to store their car, which clearly takes up and renders otherwise useless large areas of land. In this central location, our city planners, developers and even citizens and business owners have decided that the highest and best use for this land is to store our cars. Of course there is little beauty in a car, not much personality: some try to impose our personality on our cars, with political bumper stickers, and flags and reindeer antlers (which I really cannot understand how they we’re ever a good idea), or finally my favorite, testicles on your truck (which always struck me as fairly homo-erotic). If this land was not being used for car storage, what other uses might it have? Park land for childrens activities and frisbee playing? Homes for people, art studios? Perhaps it could even create jobs? A small orchard, or even a brewery, or soap factory, or book printer? If this, and similar spaces throughout our town we’re utilized for more than single uses, there would be many economical means for all of our citizens to traverse the town safely, conveniently and comfortably. It takes mixed-use and density to attain this. Car storage is the ultimate in single use, no density space.
Another significant difference between pedestrian rich Victoria Street and this location exists. The width of the sidewalk. Just as important is the proportion of the sidewalk width and the width and speed of travel on the street. Lets talk about vehicle traffic speed first. In ‘Traffic’ by Thomas Vanderbuilt, the authour acquaints us with the idea of ‘friction’ on cars and the speed that they travel. It is known to all of us that the faster a vehicle is travelling whenever it hits anything (person, child, lamp-post, car, truck, etc.) the higher the likelyhood of death. It is not unsurprising then that places which have faster vehicle speeds would be more dangerous for a person on foot, and would therefore be worth aversion. The element of friction that I refer to then is the environment of that which the vehicle travels in, and what it communicates to the driver, “What is an appropriate speed for me to be travelling here?” There are simple ques that a driver will take into account, such as the width of the road (cars always seem to travel slower on the Red Bridge, especially when there is an on-coming car). Another is cars parked on the sides of the road, things that prevent the driver from seeing far into the future. Probably the largest one though is proximity to on-coming traffic. The simple logic is this, roads with cars only travelling one direction, like 3rd Avenue, Lansdowne and Seymour, all have incredibly high traffic speed largely due to single direction traffic. A driver on these roads perceives very little friction, and there-fore, logically perceives the safety of driving faster to be worth the risk. And so the cars travel faster.
There is one more consideration in this circumstance in the eyes of the driver, “How many pedestrians are there?” The pedestrian inserts all kinds of variables into a driving relationship. “Will those children run in front of me?” “Hey guys/girls, did you just see that good looking member of the opposite sex?”, “Look at the hat that lady is wearing!”,”I think I went to Antarctica with that guy.” The relationship between a driver and a pedestrian is a very human one, full of risk, interest, community and relationships. The difficulty is that two pedestrians are safe in their interest travelling at 2 or 3 kph. A person can usually perceive their surroundings at this speed to accommodate any unforeseen difficulties like broken pavement or speeding children. That is a luxury that a driver does not have, as they cannot hear the sounds properly outside their car, nor perceive the smells. In addition they have large blind spots and are travelling far faster than 2-3 kph. It is easy to see how so many “accidents” happen. The car is intentionally created to instill security, however it takes away many of the human functions that we require and have adapted to secure ourselves. The experience of being on a pedestrian street is so rich that even in a car you choose to drive slower. In fact, rarely in Western Canada, you must sometimes ask yourself, “is it even appropriate to drive my car here at all?” For example the picture from China in the slideshow:
Now lets consider the experience of being on 3rd Avenue as a pedestrian with the speeding cars. There is not much protecting you from them. The sidewalk is narrow, barely enough for two wheel chairs to pass, infact it is much narrower than the building code for service hallways in commercial buildings. The indication is that people are clearly not expected to walk here. Simultaneously there is nothing protecting you from the elements, like trees from the sun or walls from the wind. Trees in fact serve many purposes on a great pedestrian street. During the hot months they filter the sun and provide shade to walkers. During the cold months the leaves disappear and let in the needed suns heat. The organic angles and textures soften the buildings enclosing the space (unlike the UFO like bushes and weeds that appear in parking lot ‘landscaping’). They provide a feeling of safety and separation from the vehicles on the street (parked cars also do this, but much worse). They also become convenient places to lean, and to park bicycles. 3rd Avenue has none of these features, and most people do not walk on this street unless they have no other choice.
We have got this far and not mentioned even the ill health effects of air pollution from cars (greater than a mine on the other side of the hill), or how travelling while sitting right from birth fosters in-activity, lethargy, diabetes and obesity (or the financial burden on the health care system resulting). In fact we have not even mentioned the outrageous tax-payer funded infrastructure costs to build an maintain all the car infrastructure like traffic lights, and traffic police. We have still avoided the paradox that the more parking one builds the farther things are away, which creates the need to drive more, which puts more cars on the road, which means the roads have to be wider, which means there needs to be more car storage, and the cycle continues. Have you noticed that the cities only traffic jams occur at locations engineered to make car travel the most efficient (8th Ave. North Shore, Summit Drive, Sahali Shopping Centres)? In fact we haven’t even gone into the large segment of our population that is refused the right to participate in our soceity because they cannot afford, or no longer have the ability to drive. For that matter what about the 15 year olds, which by all intensive purposes posses the tactility and intellect to hold a job, ride a bike and have a mature conversation which cannot get themselves to their own school effectively? I suppose we shouldn’t even bring up the emissions which could be contributing to climate change, or the consumption of oil which is making everything in our lives more expensive.
In the end, the environment surrounding this eyesore is one which accommodates the car at all cost. Provisions to encourage walking, or comfort, or even basic safety for someone who needs or prefers to travel by other means has been removed or ignored. The cost to our economy, social relationships and environment is largely ignored. Stay tuned for Part 2, The Building
November 30, 2013
mitchforgie
strongerkamloops 