Hello, San Francisco!

I have been unforgivably bad about posting on this here blog lately. So much has changed since June I don't even know where to begin, so let's just start with the elephant(s) in the room:

I've moved to San Francisco, CA! No need to worry about this blog having a Seattle bias any longer, as we are now broadcasting from the beautiful City by the Bay. Moving to SF was something I'd talked about several months ago, and I'm happy to report this dream is now a reality!

Matt accepted a job at VolunteerMatch, a non-profit clearinghouse that systematically connects other non-profits with volunteers and interns. Located in San Francisco's Chinatown, they are a Craigslist of the non-profit world, if you will. He started this job in mid-July and has been loving it! Seeing him truly enjoy his work and find his niche is so terrific to see.

I finished up my work with SBM on August 4th, after finishing a major safety compliance audit that was like a capstone to my year of employment there. Though due to various circumstances I may not work in the EHS field ever again, it feels good to have both acquired valuable skills through my work with SBM and to have left the position on such a high note.

We made the move down on August 15th and are now living in a kick-ass apartment on Valencia Street! The location of our place could not have been more perfect. Within walking distance of our place are literally hundreds of restaurants, some of the world's best Mexican food, bike shops, renowned fair-trade coffeehouses, more than a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries (not that I intend on visiting them), a major porno film studio, a chiropractor, churches/temples of Greek Orthodox, Vietnamese Buddhist, Roman Catholic, Jewish and Bahai faiths, and a bar called Zeitgeist which serves San Francisco's best Bloody Mary. For all you real geeks out there, our apartment has a Walkscore of 91 out of 100, above the average San Francisco of 86.

None of this would have happened without the help of our good friend Elyse, who was the previous tenant of our apartment. I happened to stumble upon her Facebook status randomly several weeks ago, where she posted "does anyone want my 2 bedroom apartment on Valencia Street?" I called her immediately and told her to take down that posting right fucking now...and as luck would have it, the place has worked out beautifully! I'm so happy we were 1) able to find a place that met our budget (not an easy feat in the 2nd most expensive rental market in the country); and 2) able to help her move into an even better apartment not two blocks away. Our place has 2 bedrooms, a large kitchen and bathroom, hardwood floors throughout, and my personal favorite feature: the fire escape :) Call me cheesy, call me a stupid boho romantic, but our fire escape kicks ass! I'm still getting used to the noise factor (a.k.a. sleeping with earplugs) and the tight quarters, but what better intro to city living could you ask for than living in a traditional San Francisco apartment in the heart of the city's action?

In the week and a half since moving here, I've made it my personal mission to savor as much of the city as possible before I resume my previous existence as a boring white-collar professional. If there is one San Francisco trait that overwhelms me more than anything else, it is the sensation of being a completely square country-bumpkin surrounded by sophisticated city people. I'm learning more and more that Seattle only thinks of itself as cosmopolitan, and San Francisco is truly its muse. Even the densest Seattle neighborhoods of Capitol or Belltown hardly scratch the surface of San Francisco's great urban environments.

Nearly everyone I've met here thinks I'm a moron for bringing my car into the city. With public transit so good and such high density, wouldn't having a car be too much of a liability? They do have a point, as the meter maids here are ruthless; I managed to get three parking tickets in one week the last time I was here! Granted, I was able to find a parking spot in the Castro for $100/month and my car is paid off, so I'm not complaining too much. The car is at least a 20-minute walk from our apartment, so it adds an extra inconvenience for daily commuting. But regardless, I think there is a certain freedom that having a car nearby offers you. What if I need to travel to a Bay Area suburb not covered by BART? What if I want to make a weekend trip to Muir Woods or Santa Cruz?

Or perhaps the most relevant question considering we just moved in: how the hell are you supposed to get to IKEA without a car? You can't say you've broken your apartment in until your first trip to IKEA! We got a bookshelf, end table, and bathroom cabinet there this past weekend so we're golden on that front. On the other hand, the ability to not need to drive on a daily basis here is quite liberating; the city is compact enough to make nearly everything no more than a twenty-minute walk away. Am I guilty of wanting to have my cake and eat it, too? You be the judge.

In matters more pertinent to this blog, I tested out a key piece of San Francisco bike infrastructure today, also known as the "Wiggle". The "Wiggle" is a highly-trafficked bike corridor leading directly from my apartment on Valencia Street through Duboce Triangle, Lower Haight, Panhandle, and finally Golden Gate Park. The genius of the Wiggle is that it completely avoids the otherwise daunting hills of San Francisco that are a major obstacle in certain neighborhoods. The route is safe and includes a special left-turn lane dedicated to bikes, something I'd never seen before. Streetfilms does a great piece on the Wiggle; what makes the route unique is that it's officially designated with signage throughout, almost like a dedicated path cutting through the heart of the city.



I'm looking forward to volunteering with the bicycle culture here locally, perhaps through the SF Bike Coalition. San Francisco is set to select a vendor for its bike-sharing system sometime this fall, so I'll be sure to keep you updated on that. Despite the temptation of multiple bike shops on Valencia Street, I will NOT be getting a fixie anytime soon. Very happy with my Bianchi, thank you!

On a more practical note, I have an interview with Eventbrite tomorrow for a CSR position. After several weeks of intensive job searching, I can say there is definitely no recession in this city! Wish me luck!

Here's to new beginnings in an incredible new city :)

So...What Do You Do Exactly?

Every so often, I find an article that hits the nail on the head for exactly what I wish I could say, if only so eloquently. When I was in school at UW and told people that I studied urban planning (don't even get me started with Geography!), I was met with blank stares and mild eye-rolling 90% of the time. You wanna do what now? The other 10% probably has some idea of the profession and assumes you are either a) an architecture school reject or b) a lost hippie who wants to create urban farms to feed organic food to the homeless - don't worry, some of us still do!

Really urban planning is much more simple than that. I want to be able to take people's vague ideas of what a "sustainable" future is supposed to look like and put them into practice. Are you happy with your current lifestyle? Do you worry about pollution and its effect on your health? Do you hate your morning commute and wish there was an alternative to sitting in your car wasting fuel while you idle? Do you wonder why you can't walk to your corner store the way your parents could? Ever wonder how your city will restructure itself due to the recession? Where its jobs will come from? Well, that's where urban planners come in. Because I'm terrible at explaining things like this, I'll leave it to a PhD student at UMaryland whose full article is below:

It happened again, as it invariably does every holiday season. In the midst of spiced eggnog and office holiday parties or visiting with family and friends, I get asked a simple question: “What do you do?” I politely say, “I study urban planning.” And then there’s the inevitable silence as I wait for the quizzical follow-up – “What’s that?” – and another brooding year of Christmas heartache. However, this year something changed. After I uttered my usual phrase, “I study urban planning,” my speech was met with a “Wow, that’s really cool,” and “Ah, that’s interesting, I have a friend who is studying that,” or my personal favorite: “I wish I had gone into planning rather than settle for law school.”  Yes, the field of urban planning was met with unbridled enthusiasm as I made the rounds this holiday season. A Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle? I think not.

The plain truth is that urban planning is hot. If we take a look at the numbers, according to the Department of Labor, the urban and regional planning field is expected to grow by nineteen percent, from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Moreover, quite apparent is that a burgeoning global population has created the need for additional infrastructure including transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools while simultaneously existing infrastructure needs repair and restoration. It is no wonder that U.S. News and World Report included urban planning as one of the fifty best careers for 2011. But this is really just the beginning. 

In his notable work, Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester describes planning or designing as “a deeply social process of making sense together.” Planners, to appropriate the sociologist’s C. Wright Mills language, translate personal troubles into public issues.  Moreover, they help individuals and communities communicate and develop visions for the future based upon shared interests, values, and norms. In a time and place where the prospect of the future seems uncertain, unsettling and even frightening at times, the expertise that planners bring is needed more than ever. In this context, a perfect storm of factors is contributing to an auspicious growth for the field. 

Let’s be straight: Urban planning is and traditionally has been a relatively obscure field in a relatively obscure set of disciplines known as the social sciences (we like to talk things out). In her article “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice,” Judith Innes writes, “There are probably 1,500 people today who hold a planning Ph.D. The proportion of educators with a Ph.D. in planning is steadily increasing.” This was in 1995. Today, my educated guess is there are in the range of 2,500-3,000 people with planning Ph.D.’s and they are in more places than walking the corridors of the Ivory Tower both here and abroad. You can find them in think tanks, NGOs, law firms, and public policy organizations. In terms of academia, one only need take a glance at the Job Bank on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) website to see the plethora of faculty jobs available. Indeed, the L. Douglas Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) alone has announced it will be filling ten or more tenure-track or tenured positions in the coming two years. Ten positions! That’s larger than the entirety of many planning departments, and along with a number of new positions, the field is seeing whole programs commence and become newly accredited including those at Boise State University and the University of Louisville, among others. To put this in perspective for those new to the field, the annual planning conference for academics draws between 400-500 individuals yearly. The field is not large; we aren’t talking a department of history, economics, or political science here. We are talking about a field where there are at present fifty-four openings for urban planning faculty (I counted). 

Why all the activity?  A constellation of factors are at play, including:

• The first full generation of trained planners are on the eve of retirement

• The growing relevance and significance of planning, both locally and globally from Dubai to Detroit reflected by the ascent of wealth and the capacity to build mega-project (e.g. as in Dubai), but also the ascent of poverty resultant from failed public policy, markets, and structural economic forces (e.g. Detroit)

• The growing visibility of planning through media (including this magazine) and the blogosphere thereby precipitating more interest from the general public

As both supply and demand factors continue to incentivize the field, the explicit notion that both individuals and communities are looking for answers and find themselves increasingly reflected in the language of planning, whether tacitly or knowingly, begs the question: What does this emergence mean for how we train planners for the future? It is a question that generations of planners have considered, including Paul Davidoff and Judith Innes. 

Davidoff, regarded as the founder of advocacy planning, described in his 1965 article Advocacy and Pluralism in Planningthe need to broaden the scope of a planners’ education. He wished to widen the focus of planning to include all areas of concern within government. He speaks to the primary role the planner has as a coordinator and suggests that two years of graduate study may be insufficient to broadly train planners for this difficult job. Judith Innes, writing in the mid-1990s, notes the importance of allowing students to take over their own learning processes. She references an anecdote in a teaching workshop she attended which imbued her with a Deweyian lesson, “that learning by doing has far more power than simply learning by reading or listening and that social learning – learning as part of a group effort – has important advantages over the solitary investigation of the lonely researcher.” More recently, Leonie Sandercock contends the need for “therapeutic” processes to transform urban spaces from places of fear (racial, socio-economic, etc) to places of cohabitation and coexistence. Such processes could be structured in helping residents organize meetings in moving from fixed positions to shared interests. These three scholars are but three voices over planning’s lifespan that add to the discourse on planning pedagogy. The ascent of issues such as all things sustainability-related, social justice, and international development planning only contribute to the dialogue on what a planner should be learning.   

Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that among his students,

“

There’s an interest in international work right now, which probably has to do with the economy . . . Geographically, China is very important, as is India, and we assume that soon the urbanization of Africa will start becoming of interest. [Topic-wise], the environment is becoming stronger and stronger, especially the forces of nature and how they’re acting on cities, such as the rising of water tables.”

What so many of us love about planning is that it is dynamic. And urgently so. From the growing wealth gaps in the United States and globally, to environmental issues, individuals come to planning because they wish to effect change. We can only hope that as the institution of planning moves into the next decade, planners will be more cogent of their past, their context, and their responsibilities to their craft in embracing this dynamism. No Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle required. 

Via: Planetizen

"Ugly Tourism" Takes Off - Welcome to Cleveland, Bitch :)

As if by some stroke of God, one day I'm writing about the schadenfreude of looking at Detroit's "feral neighborhoods" and how the city could be cashing in on a micro-niche of "ugly tourism." Today we are serendipitously greeted with this perspective on Detroit's slightly less corroded neighbor to the east, Cleveland.

Like Detroit, Cleveland has been shedding jobs and residents for decades, and there is little hope for its long-term economic future. But why be such a debbie downer about it? The upsides of economic decline are cheap (cheap!) housing, affordable bars and restaurants, and an unpretentious, no-frills attitude towards life. Why stress out about which college you'll go to when there are no jobs for college grads in your city anyway? Poverty is simple and low-maintenance, argues Mike Polk in the video below:



"Come and look at both of our buildings"
"Watch poor people all wait for buses"
"Here's the place where there used to be industry"

Can you make a rap like this about your city?

Come on, Tacoma, you know you want to :)

Via: GOOD magazine

The Feral Houses of Detroit - Part Deux

Last week we covered one of the more spectacular and haunting side effects of the dramatic decline of Detroit - the rise of "feral houses" and even "feral neighborhoods" that are so thoroughly abandoned they revert to a natural state.

Part of the City of Detroit's economic rescue plan involves essentially withdrawing from nearly one-quarter of the city's land area and letting it become wild. Cut off your nose to spite your face. For those living in Detroit, this must be a stunning reality that not only has the city been in sharp decline since the 1960s, it is completely evacuating large sections of once elegant neighborhoods just to remain financially solvent. Once among the richest of American cities, it now seems more like an internationally famous ghost town. Our version of Somalia, if you will.

A note for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce: "ugly tourism" is all the rage right now in Europe. Like "slum tours" through the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or "grief tourism" to the killing fields of Cambodia and Auschwitz, Detroit needs to take advantage of its clear monopoly on decay and the powerful story of its riches-to-rags downfall. Might I suggest a marketing slogan to tempt the more thrill-seeking among us? "Zombieland Detroit: And You Thought it Was Just a Movie"

This series from the Guardian has excellent photos of the interiors of some of Detroit's most tragically derelict buildings. The incredible thing about many of these shots is that so many of the buildings appear to have been abandoned so suddenly and without planning, with knicknacks and personal belonging still left untouched decades later. In many ways it's eerily reminiscent of post-Katrina, except this disaster was entirely man-made. All photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

East Methodist Church

Detroit’s Vanity Ballroom with its unsalvaged art deco chandeliers. Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey once played here.

The biology classroom at George W Ferris School in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park

Dentist's station, Broderick Tower

Light court - Farwell Building

Michigan Central Station

Michigan Theater - now a parking lot?

Former police station, Highland Park

The ballroom of the 15-floor art-deco Lee Plaza Hotel, an apartment building with hotel services built in 1929 and derelict since the early 1990s

The ruined Spanish-Gothic interior of the United Artists Theater in Detroit. The cinema was built in 1928 by C Howard Crane, and finally closed in 1974

Waiting Hall, Michigan Central Station

Livingstone House, designed in French Renaissance style in 1893, demolished after this picture was taken.

Via: Planetizen

The Feral Houses of Detroit

When you think of the word "feral", is it a rabid dog or cat that first comes to mind? Or, perhaps a feral Gypsy child running through the slums of Calcutta, surviving on only heroin and garbage snacks.

But a feral house? This is an entirely different category of bizarre. In the city of Detroit, long a poster child of American urban decay, things have gotten so bad in many of its wards that thousands of houses - entire neighborhoods, even - can now be described as "feral".

Due to decades of industrial decline, economic disinvestment, political corruption, and failing city services, Detroit's population has declined from over 2 million in 1950 to just 900,000 today.

According to a recent article in City Journal, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, plans to "shrink" the city even further to 700,000 to allow it to thrive. As it stands today, nearly 70,000 houses stand abandoned - many to such an extent that they are completely engulfed by vegetation in the summer months. Nonetheless, the city msut still provide services to the few remaining residents of these feral districts at great cost.

Under Bing's plan, nearly one quarter of the city's land area would be returned to forest and woodland, fully depopulated of its residents, who would be relocated to other areas. With the exception of certain areas like the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans, this is almost unprecedented for any American city.

These feral areas of Detroit may be the closest thing America has to a truly 3rd World standard of living, outside of Indian reservations. Places where only arrests are made on only 37% of murders (compared to 65% nationally), and police coverage is so irregular that many residents no longer call 911 to report crimes because the police simply don't bother to show up.

Detroit's Dave Bing, a former NBA star, has often been compared to Newark's Mayor, Cory Booker, a reformist who has taken charge against the staggering odds in a "crime capital" of America. If his redevelopment plan of Detroit works, hopefully these "feral neighborhoods" will become a thing of the past, a marker of the worst of deindustrialization in the Rust Belt. In the meantime, these houses are as increidble as they are sad.

Click here for a full map of the Detroit feral houses.

Via: Sweet Juniper

I Thought Ford Was Dead...Now they're in the Algae Business, Too?

Ford may not have willingly accepted federal bailouts to save itself from its catastrophic management policies, its bloated unions, and its shoddy models that doomed it to dinosaur status by 2009. A quick visit to Detroit will confirm just how desperate times are for the American auto industry.

But increasingly, Ford is looking more and more relevant by the day. I think they were about the last major player you would expect to get involved in something as innovative as cellulosic ethanol.

According to Inhabitat, Ford has hired a team of scientists to investigate algae-based biodiesel as a major source of new energy for future models.

One of the scientists described the basis for this research program:

“Algae have some very desirable characteristics as a potential biofuel feedstock and Ford wants to show its support for any efforts that could lead to a viable, commercial-scale application of this technology. At this point, algae researchers are still challenged to find economical and sustainable ways for commercial-scale controlled production and culturing of high oil-producing algae.”

I never thought I would live to see the day that: 1) Ford has sustainability-focused scientific research rather than just churning out the latest SUV; 2) they could possibly be ahead of the curve in one day releasing a mass market vehicle that runs on algae biofuel.

Though I'm half cringing when I say this, you go Ford!

Seattle HOPE VI Housing Developments and the Economic Effects of the Spatial Deconcentration of Poverty

The paper I submitted for my Geography Research Methods course. A survey-based exploration of the federal HOPE VI public housing program in South Seattle.

Seattle HOPE VI Housing Developments and the Economic Effects of the Spatial Deconcentration of Poverty

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