Ask an old time New Yorker about the many great myths about the city and you’ll hear the standard ones about alligators in the sewers, rats the size of cats, and up until a few years ago even a subway that the city built under 2nd Ave but boarded up. The Second Ave subway was for a very long time vaporware (a computer term for software that is always talked about but never seems to become a reality.) I’ve touched on some of the history of the Second Ave subway in previous posts and much has been written about the subway over time. From my previous post:

The most famous, or infamous, part of the Second System was a 4 to 6 track trunk subway running from the Harlem River to Pine St in downtown. It may seem obvious for the need for a second subway line through the east side of Manhattan today but at the time there were actually 3 lines, the Lexington Ave subway and two elevated trains running up 3rd and 2nd Aves. The reason that the Second Ave subway was put off for so long was because the east side was already well served until the 1940s and 1950s when the elevated lines were torn down.

Because plans for the Second Ave line have been around for so long they have been subject to much change. Originally the line was to be a two track subway from Downtown until Houston St where a second set of tracks joined until 61st St where a planned connection to the 6th Ave line was to come in on another set of tracks, bringing the total tracks through to Harlem to six. Here the line would continue on to the Bronx as 4 tracks. The idea was for a super-express line that would connect to the 6th Ave line. It is interesting to note that in the original plans there were no connections from Queens.

The line was first proposed back in 1929, weeks before the stock market crashed and sent the nation into the Great Depression. Construction started twice on the line over the years, most recently in 2007. That’s a long time of waiting and dashed hopes. Lets put that into some perspective:

A more detailed timeline can be found over at SecondAveSagas.com, a blog set up originally to track progress on the line but now deals with all things MTA (one of the best blogs on the subject IMHO).

The First Second Ave Subway

1939 IND Second System plan showing Second Ave subway.

The need for a subway under 2nd Ave seems obvious today but one of main reasons that subways under 8th and 6th Aves were constructed first was due to the fact that at the time (1920-30s) mass transit in Manhattan was lopsided in favor of the East Side. A number of elevated lines ran up through Manhattan, on 9th Ave, 6th Ave, 3rd Ave and 2nd Ave. The 6th Ave elevated line combined with the 9th Ave at 53rd St meaning that residents of the West Side only had one elevated line while residents on the East Side had two. This is one reason the original subway (in 1904) ran through the Upper West Side, not the Upper East (until the Lexington Ave subway was opened in 1918). Two decades of residential growth along the Upper West Side meant that the city, when planning their Independent (IND) subway, focused on the West Side over the East.

But the point of building a subway wasn’t just to alleviate congestion, it was also primarily to allow for the destruction of the much hated elevated lines that darkened streets, threw dirt and trash on pedestrians below, made living near one a painful and dangerous experience, and kept real estate values down (this being New York that last one was a major factor.) Because two elevated lines ran through the East Side the city soon set its sights on transforming this half of the city like it had done on the West Side. So in 1929 the city announced plans for a major subway expansion that focused on a new trunk line running under 2nd Ave that would alleviate congestion and allow for the elevated lines to come down.

The original proposal called for a subway with four tracks (express and local) from the Harlem River to 125th St, six tracks from 125th St to 61st St (for super-express service), four tracks from 61st St to Chambers St, and finally two tracks from Chambers St to Wall St. Back at 61st St the additional set of tracks for super-express would cut off to the west to 6th Ave where they would connect to the 6th Ave line (a rare section of the Second Ave subway which was eventually constructed and is todays F Line). At the Harlem River the four track subway would head into the South Bronx up to Melrose where the line would split into two, two track lines, one which would run to Throgs Neck and the other which would run to Eastchester (click here to see the full description). It should be noted that at this time there were no plans to connect the line to any Brooklyn or Queens lines.

Due to the Great Depression the line was shelved but ten years later the plans were dusted off and reproposed. In the 1939 plan the line would be simpler, a four track line from Throgs Neck to Melrose, Bronx, then south to 2nd Ave in Manhattan to just south of Hanover Sq in Downtown where it would make a sharp turn east and head into Brooklyn under the East River to connect with the IND Fulton St subway at Hoyt-Schermerhorn (or more acuaratly, at Court St which is today the New York Transit Museum, but was at the time an active subway station). The plans at the time show the IND Fulton St subway (A,C) continuing further into South Jamaica and connecting to the Rockaways so one assumes that these extensions may have connected to the Second Ave subway. An interesting note about the 1939 plan is that the 61st St connection between the 6th Ave and 2nd Ave subways is no longer a direct connection, instead there would be a second East River tunnel at about 72nd St which would connect the 6th Ave subway with the Queens Blvd subway in Long Island City. This connection was eventually constructed, but further south at 63rd St.

The Post War Subway Plans

1951 plans for the Second Ave subway and connection to Brooklyn

With the nation coming out of the Great Depression and World War II winding down, New York City was, arguably, at the zenith of its might and prestige. Over the next decade the city threw itself into transforming itself into a new world capital and city of the future. It says something about American culture that throughout the government spending of the 1930s New Deal and the post War urban renewal/highway building boom that not a mile of new subway was constructed. Many books have been written about how Americans at this time drove out of cities for new government subsidized suburbs. It seems like this was a time when city planners were only focused on the car and the subdivision but this was not entirely the case.

After the war the plans for a subway under 2nd Ave were again dusted off. The need for a subway was even greater now that the 2nd Ave El had been torn down in 1940 and the 3rd Ave El was to be torn down in 1955, both because city officials thought the subway was about to be constructed. The plans ranging from 1944 to 1955 called for a six track subway from 125th St to 57th St with a connection east to the 6th Ave subway and, added later, a spur to Queens. South of 57th St the line ran four tracks to a giant new interchange south of Houston St which would connect the 6th Ave subway with the 2nd Ave subway to the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. Some plans called for an additional two tracks running south to Wall St, though plans for this subway were dropped. More details on this large interchange, which was eventually constructed, are in my last post on the Chrystie Street Connection.

These plans came very close to coming to construction. In 1951 a $500M bond was passed by voters to build the subway, order new cars, and fix the crumbling system. So confident were Transit Authority officials that brand new state of the art subway cars, the R11 dubbed the “million dollar train” due to the cost, were ordered (this train can be viewed at the Transit Museum). However, much like the last two times the subway was slated for construction, an international crisis, the Korean War, drove material costs sky high and in 1957, the year construction was supposed to commence, from SecondAveSagas.com:

Transit Authority Chairman Charles L. Patterson used most of the $500M bond issue for improvements to the current system, leaving only $112M for the Second Ave. subway. The New York Times reported on Jan 17, 1957 (page 1): “It is highly improbable that the Second Ave. subway will ever materialize.”

Second Ave Subways Second Act

Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay break ground for the Second Ave subway in 1972. Source: New York Times

The primary reason that after World War II that the United States built so many highways throughout the nation was that in 1956 President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Highway Act which promised states that the Federal government would pay the states 90 cents on the dollar for the cost of building them, which were normally high and through cities especially high. If they wanted to build a mass transit line the Feds would pay nothing.

Second Ave Subway map showing previously completed sections. Source: New York Times

In 1964 this changed. Throughout the 1950s and 60s many people were coming to realize just how destructive building highways were to cities. Not only were neighborhoods often destroyed but, instead of connecting the cities to their suburbs, these new roads were draining cities of the middle and upper classes, on whom cities relied for taxes to pay for the majority of services. In 1950 many cities had all time highs in population but ten years later almost all major industrial cities had lost large percentages of population and future trends pointed to continued loss. In 1964 progressive Democrats were swept into Congress and Lyndon B. Johnson was elected President. President Johnson proposed a wave a new progressive legislation aimed at fighting poverty and building up education, health, and cultural infrastructure, known as the Great Society. One aspect of the Great Society was the Urban Mass Transit Act which promised states 50 cents on the dollar to build mass transit systems. Many aging systems benefited from this act including San Francisco and Washington D.C. which built entirely new systems (BART, Metro).

New York saw an opportunity to finally find financing for the Second Ave subway and in 1967 voters passed a $2.5B bond measure with $600M allotted for the Second Ave subway. The next year the newly formed Metropolitan Transit Authority released its Program for Action in which the agency outlined a massive overhaul of the aging system by upgrading older lines, eliminated the 3rd Ave elevated line which still ran in the Bronx (fun fact: this line was known as the 8 train), capturing Long Island Railroad right-of-ways for new subway lines, and building a scaled down version of the Second Ave subway. The new version would only be a two track line, with Phase 1 running from 126th St to 34th St, connecting to a new crosstown Queens tunnel at 63rd St, and a Phase 2 running from 34th St to Broad St. Future connections would then be made to the Bronx along a rehabilitated Pelham Bay line (6 train) and a new subway along the Metro North right-of-way to Fordham.

In 1972 ground was broken and construction began on small sections at 99th and 105th, 110th and 120th Sts, and between Chatham Sq and Canal St (this section was supposedly destroyed with the construction of Confucius Plaza.) Three years later yet another financial crisis, this time of the city of New York, stopped progress.

A fantastic video from a PBS program in 1975 covers the debate of the day.

Shut off from the world, the only section eventually opened was that of the 63rd St tunnel to Queens. The other small sections were sealed for decades with a politician now and then proposing uses for them. Due to the population decline of the city during the next 20 years and the fragile financial situation of the city and MTA no serious plans were ever brought forth to construct the Second Ave subway.

“The Second Avenue subway is to all intense and purposes dead.” -Carl H. Abraham, New York City Transportation Admin. 1975

Third Time’s A Charm

Second Ave subway proposed route.

After a generation of decline the city began a rebound in the 1990s. Crime began to drop and the population drain of the previous 30 years began to slow and in some places populations grew with new waves of immigrants. With the future of the city finally looking bright planners once again started looking at ways to improve traffic on the East Side of Manhattan. Some saw a subway as still too expensive, light rail and Bus Rapid Transit were both proposed, but residents demanded that a full subway be constructed. Too much time and money had been wasted and congestion along the Lexington Ave subway was only going to get worse.

In 2001 a plan was put forth to build the subway in phases: Phase 1 would go from 63rd St/Lexington Ave to 96th St/2nd Ave and connect with the Broadway Line (Q train). Phase 2 would continue the subway north to 125th St with future connections available to the Bronx and a cross-Harlem subway under 125th St (though this later proposal was not looked at for immediate planning). Phase 3 would run south from 63rd St, with a connection to Queens, to Houston St. It is presumable that this section of subway would then feed into the Chrystie St Connection to the Manhattan Bridge as the Grand St station (along this section of subway) had, theoretically, been built to allow for easy connection to a future Second Ave subway. Phase 4 would extend the subway south to the Financial District terminating at Hanover Sq. There was a second proposal for Phase 4 which would have connect to the Centre St subway (J,Z) and allow for a simple extension of the subway into Brooklyn, but this was eventually passed on.

Construction began again in 2007, months before yet ANOTHER financial crisis hit the nation. History seemed to want to repeat itself but this time funding for the first phase was already in place (as opposed to pay-as-you-go as with past attempts.) When fully complete the new subway will be called the “T” line, the color a light blue. It will get a letter because it is part of the IND legacy (which has more to do with the size of subway train than it does for nostalgia) which has lettered trains unlike the IRT which uses numbers.

Due to financial reasons (costs have skyrocketed over the years) the current version of the Second Ave subway will only be two track, local service the entire route. For all the foresight subway planners might posses, this seems to me a grave mistake that will come to haunt the city for generations to come. The timeline for the current construction on Phase 1 was supposed to end in 2014 but has now been bumped back to 2016 and will most likely not make that mark. Originally Phase 1 was to include a third track to allow for better switching from the 2nd Ave line to the 63rd St tunnel but this was dropped due to cost.

The Future Second Ave Subway

Given the pace at which the Second Ave subway has progressed it is no wonder that the city and MTA are not planning expanding the system into the Bronx or Brooklyn anytime soon. Up until now this series has been looking back at the expansion plans of the past. From here on out, however, I will be presenting my plan for expanding the system. My next post will look at what a future 2nd Ave subway might look like, where and how it could connect to the other boroughs to create a new backbone for the subway network.

More Information

• Second Ave Subway, Wikipedia
• MTA Second Ave subway Capital Construction
• IND Second System, NYCSubway.org
• Second Ave Subway, NYCSubway.org
• Timeline of Second Ave subway, SecondAveSagas.com
• The Launch Box
• Saga of the Second Ave subway (1975)
• Is That Finally the Sound of a 2nd Ave subway?, NY Times 4/9/07

The futureNYCSubway

1. Introduction
2. IND Second System
3. Post War Expansion
4. The Second Ave Subway: History
5. The Second Ave Subway: To The Bronx and the Nassau Line
6. Brooklyn: Bushwick Trunk Line
7. Manhattan: West Side and Hudson Crossings
8. Queens: Flushing Trunk Line
9. Staten Island: The Last Frontier
10. TriboroRX and Atlantic Ave Super-Express
11. Conclusion

http://futurembta.com

Much of Kassel was destroyed in the war so there are three distinct kinds of buildings in the city: the first are the pre-War buildings which are made with brick and are more earth toned in color. These appear to be from the late 19th century and if you look closely you can see the scars in the stone work from the bombings. The second are the buildings that were rebuilt after the war. Everyone has the same decorative style but they use stucco instead of brick for the body of the building which gives them an almost plasticy feel, like these were mass produced knock offs (which in fact they were). The last kind of buildings are the modern ones. These range from classic Bauhause to poor-man’s Bauhause, from Soviet housing blocks to elegant towers-in-the-park. All these buildings are built literally right next to one another, seemingly everywhere. It makes for quite the juxtaposition.

The neighborhoods out near the big park which I walked around are very nice, Beverly Hills nice, with giant mansions, both old and modern, giant trees and nice cars where ever you look. The area from the ICE station to the city center, West and Wehlheiden, are a lot like the Back Bay with very nice side streets, large townhouses and attractive apartment houses. Here is where parts of the University is and where you find the mix of old, rebuilt, and modern buildings I talked about. The area along the tram line feels very much like Comm. Ave in Boston as it travels above ground near BU and through Brighton.

Leaving this area, which is mostly residential, we enter the city center. The nicest parts of the city are behind us and it’s all downhill from here (metaphorically and geographically speaking). The downtown, or Mitte, was pretty well destroyed during the war and the only buildings that remained were the major churches and the Rathaus, or city hall (well, sorta like a city hall). The rest of this center area is all modern and pretty dreary. There isn’t much character and street after street of mall stores, of which there are many duplicates of each, wear on the soul. There is a central plaza area, Königsplatz, which is where they hold all the festivals and where you can sit and watch people, but the place is pretty soul less (not as much as Government Center, however.)

Just north of the downtown is the dirty area of the city where the Soviet block housing can be found and where I’ve noticed most of the Middle Eastern immigrants live. There isn’t much here and it’s pretty depressing to travel through, but all the trams go this way so you have to see it. This area doesn’t have a name on the map but this is where the city splits to the north, Nord Holland is one way which is where the main University is (the main drag, Hollandische Strasse, feels very much like the BU stretch of Comm. Ave) and there are some cool bars up this way. This area seemed to survive the war ok but it being so close to the major industry and rail lines it isn’t as desirable as the West area. Just to the east is Wesertor and Iringshauser, both middle class areas which are residential but nothing to write about (seriously, I can’t think of the words to describe the mediocrity).

Here are a few more pictures. More to come.

[Show as slideshow]

Just in time for Christmas, the 2009 Urban Exploration New York City calendar is now available. Featuring images from the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, Revere Sugar Factory, High Line, and more!

Printed: 12 months, 13.5″ x 19″, coil binding, white interior paper (100# weight), full-color interior ink, $29.99.

Click the image or click here to purchase.

From The Boston Globe (Link)

With the end of the Olympics in Beijing, all eyes turned for a moment to London, site of the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics. While looking for good photographs of London, I was contacted by London photographer Jason Hawkes, who had some wonderful images of London, seen from above at night (from a helicopter, to be exact) – some of which which he’s agreed to let me share here. From Jason: “Shooting aerial photography during the daytime had its own difficulties, you are strapped tightly into a harness leaning out of the helicopter, shouting directions through the headsets to the pilot. If shooting in the day can be difficult, night and the lack of light causes its own set of problems, but overcoming them is half the fun and the results can be stunning. I shoot at night using the very latest digital cameras, mounted on either one or two gyro stablazied mounts, depending on the format of the camera and length of lens I’m having to use.”

Click on the link or the picture to see the rest of them. They are stunning.

I met up with a London photographer last Friday night who had done some painting with light. I’ve always wanted to try it but when you are alone at night it isn’t smart to just leave your camera while you run across the street to act like a fool for 20 seconds. It turns out this is much harder than it looks because you have to paint in 3D something you can’t even see. Thank god for my hyper sense of spacial relations.

This last one was featured on Gothamist.

More here.

Most of us in the pro-development pool think that community groups have too much power but I think that is a very one sided view. Why is it that these people think they need to get together in the first place? I think that it is because they see the city fighting against them and they feel threatened. If we could have a system where all three parties, the city, the developers, and the citizens, had equal say in development then I think we might be better off; a checks and balances system if you will.

Obviously the role of the government is to speak and fight for the citizens but as we all know this many times isn’t the case.

The BRA used to work along the top-down approach. They were the educated elite and their new plans for the city would fix all its problems. As time has proved over and over this is the wrong way to do things. We need a bottom up approach. But can a massive bureaucracy work bottom-up? I think it can and it has to if we are going to seriously start fixing the problems of the city.

I firmly believe that a city is only as strong as it’s weakest neighborhood. Sure New York has Midtown, the Upper East Side, and Park Slope, but it also has the South Bronx, Bed-Sty, and East New York. I think it is an Utopian dream to think that a city will never have slums or ghettos; I believe that they are inevitable. But what I don’t think is inevitable is that they have to be places where people are beaten down, places that are broken with broken people begetting more generations of broken people. I think that we need to see neighborhoods as not just real estate but as functioning organisms, much like the organs of a body. If you had healthy lungs but a dieing liver, sure you could breath but you would still be dieing. I think low income neighborhoods should be places where the weakest in society can go and survive, and where they can even bring themselves up and eventually move out. This was the vision of Jane Jacobs and I think that it is a noble and attainable one.

What I think the BRA needs to be is the agent that regulates the neighborhoods of Boston to make sure each is working correctly. You might think that most neighborhoods won’t need much help but just look at how much stink the Back Bay or Beacon Hill makes when a new building is proposed. The BRA needs to have representatives in every neighborhood that are on the ground and can talk to community groups, and so that community groups and citizens know who they are (perhaps they are elected?) so that people don’t have to feel so powerless. The fact that there are so many community groups in Boston should be a good thing, it should show that the people there actually care about the future of their communities, that they want them to be better places with good transportation, good schools, and safe streets. If developers had no walls against them then Boston would look like Houston.

Recently I found this article in Governing magazine that reminded me of what I said:

The Metropolitan Era
June 30, 2008 By Peter Harkness
Cities and their surrounding suburbs are the new building blocks of an economy both global and local.

Forget about states, cities and counties.

They are so yesterday. What’s in now is metro. No, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation or furniture design. We’re talking about metropolitan areas: the cities along with their environs — including their suburbs, their exurbs, even some of the surrounding rural areas that are tied to the center by employment or commerce.

For decades, urban affairs columnist and author Neal Peirce has trumpeted the underappreciated importance of “citistates,” which he defines as “one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence.”

Now, as the general election contest gets under way, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has embarked on an ambitious and clearly well-funded bid to change the way we look at the country and its economy, with the hope of influencing the debate during the campaign and then policy making by the new administration and Congress.

The message goes like this: The top 100 metropolitan areas cover only 12 percent of the national land mass but are home to about two-thirds of its population and its jobs — and even larger shares of “innovative activity”: 78 percent of its patents, 75 percent of those with graduate degrees, 79 percent of air cargo, 94 percent of venture capital funding, and so on. In all, they generate three-quarters of the gross domestic product.

Add in more than 200 other smaller metro areas, and we truly are looking at a metropolitan nation. Peirce puts it in context: “As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world’s top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland.” And so, he says, citistates are how “our world is now organizing itself” away from an old way of thinking (federal, state, local) to a new way: global, regional and neighborhood.

The first of two reports from Brookings notes that “we are part of a highly networked global economy in which the world’s major metropolitan areas generate an outsized share of world output. Politics, custom and language continue to separate us into individual nation-states; but trade, migration and investment link Seattle more closely to Shanghai than to Sacramento.”

The problem is that Washington doesn’t get it. Federal officials see only one economy, or occasionally perhaps 50 state economies; the population is divided into 435 congressional districts. The feds “adopt policies that betray no understanding of how our metropolitan dominated economy works,” the Brookings report argues. “And they saddle metropolitan leaders with fragmented, diffuse programs that ignore how thorny public policy programs interrelate and spill across state and local borders.”

Investments Needed

We’re paying a price for this myopia. Productivity is slipping, the supply of scientists and engineers has stalled, research and development funding has declined and patent activity is faltering. K-12 education is underperforming; higher education for the first time on an international scale is slipping. Growth patterns are creating a situation where we’re gobbling up farmland, increasing commuting times well above population growth, and pushing more tons of greenhouse gases into the air.

In short, Brookings concludes, we are ignoring the economic engines that give us the prosperity we now enjoy: our metro areas. To rectify that, it advocates investment in education and training, particularly for new immigrants; in infrastructure to move people, goods and ideas; and in amenities — libraries, museums, public spaces — that draw people into urban centers. And Brookings advocates changing the intergovernmental relationship so that it’s more holistic and flexible. Of course, “investment” is code for “more federal aid,” and so recommendations for a National Innovation Foundation and a Cluster Information Center will be viewed skeptically by Congress.

Washington has neither set a national vision nor any standard for achievement, the report said. It does not lead in areas such as immigration and carbon emissions, where metro governments need guidance. And it doesn’t step aside where it ought to, one reason transportation policy still is biased toward cars and not mass transit.

I’m dubious when any group that doesn’t command money or votes tries to affect the campaign debate, but Brookings may well exert some influence this year. Only 10 days after the think tank convened a large crowd at a Washington hotel to hear its recommendations, Barack Obama spoke in Miami to the nation’s large-city mayors. In language similar to the two reports, he said Washington should “stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”

But the presumed Democratic nominee also made it clear that, save for infrastructure help, mayors shouldn’t expect increased aid out of his administration. The federal debt, he said, is too deep.

Link

While not proposing a measure as clear or dramatic as mine, Harkness points out the same flaws I have in regards to the current set up of governmental hierarchy.

I, like most Americans, look at Washington as a broken system. Our leaders clearly don’t understand the changes that are happening all around us. I can’t blame them entirely since the rest of the public also doesn’t quite know what is going on (I’m not going to pretend I know either but I am at least aware of the changes.)

This brings up an op-ed in today’s New York Times by Sudhir Venkatesh, professor of sociology at Columbia and author of American Project, as well as a number of other books on urban poor and globalization. His piece looks at another governmental problem facing cities, HUD (The Department of Housing and Urban Development).

To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD

By SUDHIR VENKATESH
Published: July 25, 2008

WITH the nation embroiled in a housing crisis, one would expect the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be playing a central role. But HUD is a marginal player. Although its Federal Housing Administration division has agreed to underwrite new mortgages, it is merely following the leadership of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

This is no accident. HUD’s sidelined role is a product of its anachronistic approach to both housing and cities. It might be best to simply close the agency and create a new cabinet-level commitment to urban development.

In 1965, when HUD was created, its mission was to spur growth in and around cities. The agency provided mortgage assistance to veterans and first-time homeowners, it built housing for the urban poor, and the Federal Housing Administration spurred suburban expansion by recruiting developers and home buyers to a relatively new, untested market.

Since its inception, HUD has had a fairly straightforward recipe: develop good relations with mayors and local real estate leaders, then award grants and underwrite loans that affirm local development priorities. The longtime mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, was often credited for creating the “city that works,” but it was the support of HUD and the housing administration that helped him eradicate slums, build public housing and create the vast array of working-class neighborhoods that are now Chicago’s signature.

But in the last four decades the urban landscape has changed from discrete, independent cities to vast, interdependent regions where people and goods move freely. Between Los Angeles and Orange County, Milwaukee and Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, cities have no choice but to collaborate on decisions over land use and economic development. In taxation and zoning, regional agencies like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Southern California Regional Rail Authority are as powerful as big-city mayors. And for the first time in our nation’s history, poverty is rising faster in suburbs than in urban cores. In this new era, HUD’s each-city-is-a-separate-whole approach is not only too inflexible and short-sighted, it also hinders effective regional growth.

To see why, consider HUD’s most prominent urban development program: Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (VI). Introduced with much fanfare in 1993, HOPE helped municipal governments demolish dilapidated public housing projects and revitalize their inner cities. To receive program money, mayors agreed to move families from the projects to low-poverty neighborhoods and build mixed-income housing where the projects once stood.

Clinton administration officials were quick to credit HOPE for reducing inner-city poverty. Big city mayors loved it because it gave them license to raze unsightly projects and gentrify their downtowns. Attractive parks and revamped schools — entirely new communities, in essence — brought thousands of middle-class families back to the central city.

But a closer look reveals a more complicated story.

In large cities like Atlanta, Baltimore and Chicago, the program reshuffled project residents to outlying neighborhoods and struggling inner-ring suburbs whose mayors lack the experience and resources to help the incoming poor and stem rising crime and gang activity. More than 80 percent of the families who left Chicago’s demolished projects moved into equally poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.

Lawsuits have appeared every few years since the inception of the HOPE program, alleging that HUD used these funds to resegregate the poor, a violation of civil rights statutes.

A 1998 report from the Government Accountability Office also concluded that HUD oversight was lacking, and HOPE VI was giving greater weight to the interests of real estate developers. This raised widespread concern since private developers are less likely to build affordable housing or maintain usable public spaces.

And the construction of mixed-income housing on HOPE sites has lagged, leading to concerns that HUD policies have reduced the low-income housing stock.

How could a program aimed at curbing inequality and helping the poor end up creating new pockets of poverty? The answer lies partly in HUD’s myopic focus on gentrifying urban cores. The agency ignored studies showing that former project residents would have difficulty finding rental housing in outlying neighborhoods and did not provide assistance for inner-ring suburbs with high rates of foreclosures. HUD resisted calls to slow down housing demolition and to move the poor to areas of high job growth.

By making no effort to ascertain needs and resources on a regional scale, HUD has ended up eliminating poverty in one place while creating distressed, low-income communities in others. If HUD had developed a broader vision, one that tied together inner city and suburb, it could have created policies to help both areas adjust to the modern urban landscape.

In correcting HUD’s missteps, we must first separate “housing policy” from “urban development.” Today, housing policy is dictated by private markets, so why not give the Commerce and Treasury Departments oversight of a single authority that administers Federal Housing Administration financing — needed to keep homes affordable for the majority of Americans — and all of HUD’s other housing programs?

Then, the development needs of our nation’s regions — wide areas like the Northeast corridor or Southern California — could be considered anew. Block grants could provide incentives for municipal and county governments to collaborate. Regionalism must be embraced, even if it tests local officials who fear losing their traditional sources of government financing.

Promoting coherent regional development will also entail linking urban policy concerns like community development and social services with work like rehabbing roads and building railways. With gas prices driving Americans to public transportation, this is a fitting moment to think holistically.

But adding a few more buses won’t do the trick. Americans live too spread out, and economic activity is no longer limited to downtowns. Community-based initiatives — from vocational programs to rezoning efforts to designing effective transportation corridors and recreational space — are sorely needed but will be effective only if they tie into a broader vision that anticipates growth on a large scale.

Even our most persistent problems of inequality will require new strategies. A federal agency devoted to regional planning could help the Health and Human Services Department reconfigure anti-poverty programs to aid suburban communities that have so far gone unnoticed but are desperately in need. It could motivate the Labor Department to develop training programs and support the transportation needs of workers.

We need an agency that can work outside old boundaries and design a regional approach to revitalizing cities and suburbs. Dismantling HUD would be a great place to start.

Link

Venkatesh’s point is that the agencies that we put in place 40 years ago to deal with cities have not evolved as our cities have evolved. Cities are much less important than regions today and our tools for dealing with the new problems regions face are totally inadequate.

This is where the articles dovetail. The world has changed and we are on the verge of being left behind. Mayors for the last 50 years have faced funding problems when their tax bases left the city for the suburbs. The suburbs welcomed the new growth because growth meant tax money. The cities that were left behind were left to rot and die, though this has not happened completely, even the ones that have bounced back still face daunting infrastructure problems.

What is interesting is that now the suburbs are starting to see trouble on the horizon. Too much growth too fast has overburdened many communities. Zoning, which was put in place to keep the character of a place, has led to massive houses on large lots which require cars to get anywhere and everywhere; cars that require more oil and housing that are becoming harder and harder to heat. The suburbs are locked in an unsustainable downward spiral of consumption.

As the suburbs begin to realize their fate, cities are looking to cash in. Already young professionals are looking to live in more humanized places, places where you can walk and interact with people face to face, not car horn to car horn. These are the children of the suburbs who don’t see them as a place to escape to but a place to escape from. Mayors will welcome this influx of population across the nation as they finally see an end to population decline. But the dark truth that isn’t being addressed is that after 40 years of neglect, the schools and roads (as well as rails) of cities are in no shape to take on the growing populations.

What are needed today are tools to deal with cities and suburbs holistically, not as two competing bodies (or pitting cities against cities against suburbs.) Competing with ourselves will not work in a global economy. We must see our settlement patterns from a regional perspective and we must have the right tools to deal with the problems of cities on a regional scale.

I still think a new Super-County would be the best answer here as it would not only combine multiple agencies and streamline beaurocracy, but since the leaders of the super-county would be elected it would give the people of the entire metropolitan region a voice. As of now only mayors of neighboring cities can come together and talk about growth, but this doesn’t happen because Federal policies pit them against one another. An elected board of a super-county would be representing the citizens of both cities and therefore would work for the best solution for both instead of giving one an advantage over the other.

But carving up new political territory is perhaps too ambitious of a goal just yet. What is needed in the mean time is a completely new Federal policies towards cities, ones that brings us together for the greater good, policies that gives cities the tools to deal with the changes that will come in the new century, and policies that can build holistic, sustainable communities instead of either gated off McMansions or low-income ghettos.

Because of high energy costs, living on large lots in the exurbs will no longer be affordable to the middle class. New policies will go into affect that support infill development in older city centers. As the populations of central cities grows again this will put a strain on already fragile infrastructure. Cities will begin rebuilding mass transit systems they ripped out long ago in favor of the car. People will still have cars but better mass transit along with walkable communities will make driving less mandatory and more affordable.

Gentrification has continued its insatiable march forward. Areas that were once hip are now populated by the middle classes with large new apartment buildings going up where fancy condos once were (and before that vacant lots and burned out buildings). Areas that are today considered the ghetto will be the new hip places where artists and YUPies mingle. The poor that once filled these streets will have been pushed further out into once middle class suburbs.

This will not have come easy. Much like the riots that flamed white flight in the 1960s, new class riots will erupt as the inner city poor feel the pressures of a society that they cannot afford to live in while being pushed out by much wealthier whites. Riots and demonstrations will ensue, and while the city will call calm and understanding, behind closed doors the elites will be helping move the poor out so real estate developers can move in.

This new rebirth of the city will mean that there will finally be political pressure put on restoring streetcars and building new subway lines. Because the poor will have been forced out into the suburbs, where rail service is few and far between, new Bus Rapid Transit lanes will appear on highways. Highways were once crushed with traffic can now afford to lose a lane for the only mass transit available for suburbs.

Suburbs will not die. Though the once urban poor will have moved in, many middle class and wealthy people will still be able to afford living there and will prefer it. Large lots will let people have small farms, usually tended by a local farm company so the residents don’t have to do the work themselves. Most suburbs will have created town centers, much like the old main streets, where residents can walk to. These centers will allow for bus and light rail transit to shuttle residents into the city or to a commuter rail station near by. Because of the class differences, gated communities will be the norm, even more than now.

The children who today are not yet born will become the artists that reclaim the abandoned edge cities of the future. Our massive malls today will be abandoned when energy costs make them unsustainable. Most will be left to decay as the suburbanity around them will be given up. As the inner cities looked to Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, so too will these edge cities look in the near future. But this is exactly the type of place young artists and rebels need to grow and create. Malls will become the new loft spaces. Communities will grow where consumers once walked past retail stores. The massive parking lots, already over grown, will be turned into collective farms. The large roofs will be used for water collection and solar energy. Malls, once symbols of everything wrong with the culture of mass consumption, will be turned into the very ideal of sustainable communities. This lays the ground work for the gentrification of the suburbs in the next 50 years.

High Speed Rail has replaced air travel as the preferred means of getting from cities that are close to one another. Air travel will still be available but will be supported by the government and will only fly long distances or in certain corridors with large amounts of traffic (i.e. Northeast Corridor). Many of the new rail lines will have been built, or are being built, along medians of highways since the land is already owned by the states and the rebuilding of central cities has meant land prices have increased to the point where eminent domain is not as affordable, nor as popular, and option.

I’ve added a few maps of Unbuilt Highways;San Francisco, Washington DC, and Los Angeles, and Subways System Maps for Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco MUNI.

I am also going to figure out a good way to let people embed these maps on their websites. What’s a map good for if you can’t use it, right?

Hipsters and the Homeless: Exploration of the underground.

A relic of the old elevated subway days, Sedgwick Ave station connected the Jerome Ave line (4 train) to the 9th Ave Elevated. This was the connection between the old Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, the origin of the term “subway series”. The elevated were torn down over 50 years ago and very little remain. When the 9th Ave was torn down Sedgwick Ave stayed in operation as a shuttle between Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds but when the Giants packed up for the west coast there was no need (also the city had built a proper subway connecting the two stations in the 1930s).

For more information on Sedgwick Ave: Abandoned Stations : Sedgwick Ave

For the full sets of mine and reveire’s images (as well as full sized ones for your desktops):
Reveire3
Vanshnookenraggen

Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia transit maps! I finally got around to doing something with all these transit maps I was making. Unfortunately Google is weird about what maps they allow and don’t allow you to embed on a web page so for the time being I am just posting links to the maps. They are just first drafts but all the lines are there. When I have more time I plan on going through and adding more information to each map. Someone asked me to include stations which is on my to do list but because Google Maps already has stations with information about them for most cities I am going to hold off on this.

San Francisco Transit
Philadelphia Transit
Boston Transit

I have also redrawn the New York & New Jersey Subways map so each line has a nice image in the information box that leads to the line schedule at MTA.info.

Lastly, here is a new map of the MBTA as it should look today with the Green Line and Blue Line extensions marked as in planning and the Indigo Line (Fairmount Branch CR) distinguished as an actual rapid transit line. I heard a story that at a community meeting a few years ago someone in the audience mentioned that the branch was not on the map, which confused the people from the MBTA because it was. What the man really meant was that the line was marked as commuter rail (which is what it is) and not rapid transit. If you want to get people to think about it as rapid transit you needed to show it as a rapid transit line on the map the same as the Red or Orange Lines. This doesn’t mean it will be converted to heavy rail, which is not a good idea since this is the only other route into the city from the southwest other than the Southwest Corridor, but you can change the way people perceive the line just by changing how wide the line is on the map (which is one reason I like maps so much).

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