Councilmanic

What does that adjective mean, anyway…”alternative”? Because when I think about it, I just find it insulting.

Bloomington created an Alternative Transportation & Greenways System Plan (the ATGSP, a mouthful of an acronym) a few years ago. It troubles itself only with bicycling routes and pedestrian paths like trails. That word “Alternative,” though, assumes that the automobile is the “standard” mode of transportation,  if not the “preferred” one, for everyone, all the time. 

Let’s see: children under 16…the elderly…people with certain disabilities that prevent them from driving…people who can’t afford a car…who am I missing here? These people do not necessarily have direct access to the would-be standard choice of transport. For them, in short, the car is not “standard.” How about people who live close enough to their needs that they get along fine without a car…people whose bicycles or feet are already their “standard” mode of transportation by choice? The “Alternative” title of such a policy document permanently undercuts their choice.

Residents of District 6, the downtown-most district of Bloomington, are the most likely to not consider the car “standard” transportation. That’s a key reason why I moved, successfully, to rename the ATGSP as an amendment to Resolution 08-02, in January of this year.

The ATGSP was concerned only with bicycle and pedestrian paths and routes. Public transit, for example, or mopeds and scooters, viable “alternatives” in today’s Bloomington, are contemplated in other policy documents. The euphemism “alternative transportation” was coined back when no one took seriously the rights of bicyclists and pedestrians to be on the street co-equally with cars. You could also tell that the phrase was coined under the assumption that cars are the “standard” mode of transportation across the U.S., even though this plan was just for this one city.

So I had the despicable word “Alternative” changed to the phrase “Bicycle & Pedestrian” (the BPTGSP, even less pronounceable, I admit). I said, call this policy document what it is.

Comes now word that Monroe County is getting more serious about funding their ATGSP. Good news there, friends. Both city and county need to more aggressively pursue the equalization of modes of traffic on all roads in the county save highways. Even on highways, that can be done.

But County officials, remember that as long as you ghettoize non-car modes under the debilitating moniker “alternative transportation,” you’re not really making transportation safer and more effective. Consider replacing “alternative” with “bicycle and pedestrian” like the city did.

Last year, Garden Hill’s neighborhood association was born again.

I watched it happen. Garden Hill is the neighborhood south of the Stadium and north of the tracks. At least, it used to be a “neighborhood”; for decades, it has been overrun by student rentals, perhaps 95% or more, due to its proximity to IU. The trend finally reversed itself in 2004, when Smallwood Tower Bloc Plaza opened. Students, many of whom are from faraway, well-to-do suburbs, are generally looking for New. Smallwood and its ilk were New. Housing stock in Garden HIll is definitely not New any more, so students began moving away and some of that housing has become owner-occupied.

Anyway, the GHNA was reborn in a dispute between GH residents and the Friedman family, owners of Omega Properties, who were proposing a mixed-use building on the northeast corner of 16th and Walnut. The neighborhood united in its opposition to the project, and, after many months and multiple meetings of the Board of Zoning Appeals, prevailed. Although they were not of one mind as to the reasons, their most significant objections were the number of variances requested (at least 7), the density of tenants, and parking (both too much and not enough…a thorny issue to be untangled in some other post).

I’m glad Garden Hill has an active association again. A neighborhood needs to speak up for itself, otherwise it’ll continue to be the victim of egregious problems like Red Lot tailgating.

The defeat of the project was too bad, though. If more new apartment buildings are going to be targeted to students, Omega’s proposal was the way they should be built: multi-story, on a commercial street with little setback, mixed-use (first-floor retail), and so on. Omega builds very good urbanist projects, and buildings like this help take the tremendous pressure of IU student demand off of nearby single-family housing stock.

But the most interesting thing that came out of the 16th and Walnut debate was a revelation to me: it’s not density that generates noise in a student housing district…it’s the density of the units within that housing.

Jenny Southern, a member of the BZA, said in one of the hearings that in her experience as president of the Elm Heights NA, another neighborhood adjacent to IU, 5BR units were the worst offenders when it came to noise and partying, 4BRs almost as bad. 3BRs you didn’t hear from so much, and by the time you got to 2BRs and below, you didn’t hear a peep out of them.

But our zoning code encourages 5BR units — the ones that generate the most complaints about noise.

Say you have a proposal on land that allows 3.5 units per acre, a typical figure in the central part of Bloomington. Our code says that for development purposes:

• a 5BR, 4BR or 3BR counts as 1 development unit (D.U.)
• a 2BR of < 950 SF counts as 2/3 D.U.
• a 1BR of < 700 SF counts as 1/2 D.U.

Developers naturally calculate the maximum allowable occupancy on their properties. Some then claim that they could build X bedrooms, so they should be given a variance — sometimes to build whatever else they want — or else they’ll just build “by-right.”

In the case of this project, zoned at 3.5 units, the developer could have built 16 bedrooms: three 5BR units and one 1BR. They asked for 14 bedrooms — two 4BR and two 3BR units — and sought a variance for an extra one-half D.U. The neighborhood, finding the project too dense in general, objected to the variance, some saying they wanted at most 12 bedrooms. But four 3BR units would have required the same variance, and three 4BR units would be more likely to cause a noise problem.

Let’s say the developer wanted to build seven 2BR units. No parties to worry about there…but that would require 4 2/3 D.U.! A greater apparent variance than 14 bedrooms in four units as originally proposed.

This is the measure that must change. Developers tell me that 5BRs and the like are the most in-demand unit size among students. It can’t be because they save money on rent. Prices in Smallwood are no lower per person in 4BR units than in 2BRs.

No, long-time residents of Bloomington are more than happy to have students in town. But we don’t have to encourage housing types that encourage them to disturb the peace. Most students like peace and quiet, too.

Up for First Reading tomorrow: IU wants the city to vacate a block of Walnut Grove. (Remember, First Reading is a formality; the Council actually begins discussing this issue Dec. 10 at Committee of the Whole.)

But I can tell you right now, despite my unreasonably high hopes for IU’s potential as an urban place, I have very low expectations for such proposals. When do we stop enabling the University to sprawl ever outwards? When will IU live within its geographic means?

This issue will test the notion of “the campus vs. the urban.” More comments when I’ve studied this proposal.

Tonight I saw the new movie “Changeling,” starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Clint Eastwood. The movie is set in Los Angeles in the late Twenties and early Thirties. One of the most remarkable features of the movie for me was the predominance of streetcars, particularly how unremarkably they occupy the landscape.

The vision of streetcars and Model Ts gliding slowly through the town is an arresting one. For one thing, it’s Jolie’s character’s sole form of transport to her job as a supervisor of telephone operators. (She patrols the swtchboards on roller skates — another interesting form of transport.)

For another thing, everyone moved slowly. Pedestrians jaywalked across streets — leisurely. The closing credits turn up as Jolie walks across a street and off into the city in a crane shot that lasts several minutes, the average speed for all vehciles appeared to be 20 miles an hour. Eastwood’s vision of retro L.A. is a stately one, almost refined.

Streetcars, in other words, were once perfectly normal. Which begs the question: why don’t we put these things back in again?

Another item I noticed while chillaxing this holiday weekend was one of the items in the Times’ 100 best-books list of the year 2008 is Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I can’t wait to get my hands on this. It serves up ammunition for everything I’ve been saying about cars and roads in Bloomington. I’m looking forward to reading more about traffic in ancient Rome, about how accidents occur more often in “safe” circumstances than “unsafe” ones, and, of course, parking. (Any author that can string words together into the phrase “parking foreplay” has my unstinting attention.)

Tom Vanderbilt’s blog, meanwhile, has become my new must-read site. More to come here from it, I’m sure.

NYTimes.com yesterday ran a story about cities and health-care facilities: Plan for New Orleans Hospitals Draws Outcry.

We’ve had our share of battles with our local hospital. But all the politics aside, one word keeps jumping out at me when I hear talk of hospitals expanding:

NEW ORLEANS — Local and federal officials on Tuesday announced plans for a 70-acre medical campus in the heart of New Orleans 

No. Why? Stop right there. 

The word is campus. Why does a hospital need a “campus,” let alone one 70 acres in size?

Campuses are not just collections of buildings on a contiguous piece of property; they’re de facto municipalities. In the case of universities which regularly house students long-term, campuses are what I call “starter cities,” often having their own municipal functions like police, fire, even utilities.

Organizations build campuses so they can exert more control over what happens therein. As a result, campuses tend to be dysfunctional starter cities, built by politburo like the Soviets used to build cities. Single-use zoning, brutalist architecture and suburban setbacks are rampant on U.S. campuses to this day. Such creatures of artifice have no business in actual cities.

Let’s continue:

to replace two hospitals damaged during Hurricane Katrina, a $2 billion investment that supporters say will create thousands of jobs and begin to rebuild the city’s shattered health care system.

Always in the name of “jobs” and “health care” do hospitals get away with building “campuses.” I’d like to see exactly why they had to spend so much on new buildings when they could have repaired existing ones.

But the plan, brewing for months, has drawn strong criticism from preservationists and neighborhood activists because it will lead to the destruction of dozens of old houses and buildings in the Mid-City National Register Historic District. They had urged the Veterans Affairs Department and the state to consider alternative locations.

They’re not just abandoning the hospital buildings, they’re taking perfectly good lived-in houses with them. This is “slum clearance” all over again.

One of the hospitals, to be built by Louisiana State University, would replace the city’s landmark Charity Hospital, a lifeline for generations of the city’s poor, which has been vacant since the storm damaged its lower floors. The other would replace the vacant Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, also severely damaged by the flooding. The old hospitals and adjacent buildings will be abandoned under the plan, which officials here described as the foundation for a new economy for New Orleans, and the largest investment in the area since Katrina.

What, they couldn’t build in place? They couldn’t use the original buildings? This stinks worse than the old buildings must have après le deluge. Editor B, a friend of mine and one of the most eloquent bloggers out there, has been writing about this from Mid-City, the neighborhood that would not die despite many suspect parties’ best efforts to kill it. You should read his several entries on the Lindy Boggs Medical Center to get an on-the-ground perspective as to why this article has me so exercised.

The bottom line: you’re as likely to find a campus that is in competition with its host town as you are to find one that coexists harmoniously with the town. Hospitals and colleges (note that in the story above, one is building the other) are notoriously bad neighbors when it comes to planning and zoning.

Here, our once-local hospital has seized control of its destiny from the non-profit board that oversaw it for a century, is trying to sell itself to a hospital chain (co-founded, ironically, by our state university), and in anticipation has purchased 85 acres outside of town, where they plan to build…you guessed it, a new “campus.”

This is the price of unchecked corporatism. I just hope that “Bloomington Hospital” has the decency to leave the good name of our city, which bore it and went to the mat for it, off their new facility as their moving trucks leave the city limits.