Streetbeat, Vol. XXXIV
Density in the suburbs, outdoor dining's next move, and golf cart mobility.
Salom*
And welcome to this newsletter.
It's where I (John Surico) share thoughts & writing each month on cities & their contents: streets, people, energy, cultures, food, form, etc. Thanks for being here, and hope you enjoy your time!
We’re all aboard the end-of-the-year rollercoaster ride, and this newsletter is living proof. It’s coming out late, it’s a bit shorter than typical Streetbeats, and the output itself is reduced. (November was also just one helluva month—even though I say that every month now.) In the race to push out everything one possibly can before the holidays, I wanted to be sure to include this here missive.
So without further adieu, the news:
WYA, TOD?
My dad and I were recently talking about Fairfield Metro, a new apartment building that just opened steps from the Long Island Rail Road station in my hometown of Floral Park, which, as I like say, is half-NYC, half-suburbia. (The town literally sidles the city’s limits.) It might not seem like a big deal, but development of this kind—or what’s known as transit-oriented development (TOD)—is almost non-existent on Long Island and in so many similar suburban settings: a multi-unit, multi-family building, minutes from public transit.
This, of course, was by design. Suburbs were built through single-family zoning, where we separated the residential (houses with driveways) from the commercial (then Main Streets, now usually big box stores with big box parking lots). Towns that may have been originally centered around the railroad were able to sprawl with the advent of the automobile. So often, you’ll see a cluster of shops near commuter rail stations, and then the little boxes on roads stretching away from that. (And that’s even if there’s public transit to speak of.)
This type of development also was—and now, systematically, still is—a calcified form of housing segregation, where wealthier white families could detach themselves from poorer families of color. (Redlining ring a bell?) Now, any sort of development that aims to bring more density to suburbs, especially around transit hubs, is fraught. (Not always for reasons of race, but it can be hard to see the difference when owning a property is so white-dominant.) In many instances, apartments are straight-up illegal to build.
Now, there’s a national effort to change that. States, like Massachusetts and California, are yanking local control away from towns and municipalities to make way for more development around transit lines, in an effort to stem the overlapping crises of climate and housing. (Turns out that if you live closer to different forms of mobility, you drive less.) And as a bunch of new transit investments come online in New York, we could be next.
For my first piece in Hell Gate, a publication I’m just thrilled to see, I did a deep dive into the bubbling fight over housing near trains in the suburbs of New York, like my hometown. Take a look.
Outdoors Forever
As pandemic-era outdoor dining structures gear up for their third winter, it’s high time to consider their future. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone reading this that I’m a big fan of this new streetscape fixture—I not only dedicated a section of Streetbeat to some pretty neat ones for some time, but also, I’ve been playing an active role with the Al Fresco NYC Coalition, joining roundtables and design juries as New York City tries to figure out what a permanent program—now the law of the land—actually looks like. And listen: it’s not easy.
Here’s just a glimpse at some of the conundrums:
Should they be year-round? If so, how do we contend with snow removal? What about keeping them warm? Aren’t natural gas heaters bad for the planet? And after all this work, will people even eat in them?
If they’re not year-round, what goes in their place when they’re gone? Just another parked car? Or can we think of innovative alternative uses of that same space during the off season?
But wait, if they’re not year-round, are restaurants expected to repeatedly build and then tear down? Isn’t that costly? If it’s modular (or more temporary), what does that look like? How does that work?
How much should restaurants be paying for this space? Should they be paying at all? What about the materials to build? What about businesses in areas that have less money at their disposal? Is this all fair?
The list goes on and on. I mention this all to say that there are, in fact, very real issues that need to be solved. But after a year’s worth of discussion—amongst experts, business owners, designers, architects, advocates, and somehow me—we have some guideposts in the form of a new report: The Future of Outdoor Dining in NYC. And with it some answers to questions facing cities everywhere, as they think about how to make these popular programs last. They include:
Phase the transition. Integrate into street design. Create a ‘kit of parts’. Tier the review process. Build a one-stop shop. Implement ‘community parklets’. Scale fees. Educate, don’t penalize. Engage more. Amplify the sidewalks. Steward them. And goddamnit, make them accessible.
Student Showcase
It’s about to be December, which means that any educator you come across — teacher; tutor; professor; or aide — is likely going mad. Final projects and assignments collide with holiday events and year’s end disassociation. That, for me, means grading ~30 papers in just a handful of days. (And I thought I had it bad as a student.) But that does make the holidays that much sweeter.
So to join in that cheer, I wanted to plug two projects where the student journalists I’m working with at NYU are rockin’ it:
The great undergrad bunch I’m teaching this year just published their first features, which cover everything from the Ukrainian refugee crisis in New York to whether Spotify is ripping off musicians. You can read ‘em all here.
Nostalgic for my student newspaper days, I’m honored to serve as editorial advisor to Pavement Pieces, a publication of the Reporting the Nation + New York graduate program that I serve as coordinator for until the end of this year. That said, the dispatches from their reporting trip to Wisconsin—one of the closest midterm landscapes in the country—are something to see.
I’ll have more to share once the semester is behind me!
OSA: Lock Up the Kid Vote
The 31OS squad is busy with holiday planning—we have a packed schedule of markets, our first-ever community potluck (!), and a holiday party for everyone involved—so I’ll be keeping this segment brief this month.
I’ve been thinking about an exchange that occurred as we were about to start filming our on-street interview with Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, the Open Street abuzz in the background. A mother and her inquisitive toddler came up to see what was going on, and we struck up a conversation. The mother told us she was there practically every weekend, and that the street had become like a front yard to her son. “It’s just like the old days, with kids riding bikes and playing outside,” she told us. She lived just around the corner. (At this point, the toddler was telling us all about his dreams of becoming an explorer.)
But what was crazy was that I had never seen the woman before. (And, readers, as you can imagine, I’m on the street a lot.) Or, maybe, I hadn’t noticed her. Because after that, I saw her and her son everywhere—at trivia, on Halloween, at the monthly vendor fair, etc. They were part of this totally silent audience I hadn’t encountered, regularly embracing the space but not making a big fuss about it. Which, if you think about it, is how most of us experience public parks and plazas: we go, we enjoy, and then we leave.
This last year, we’ve seen a growing swell of kids and their parents, showing up the minute the barricades emerge for whatever we have going on that day. Most of the time, they just ride their bikes, draw with chalk, or play corn hole but if it’s a special event, like the circus or reading time, then it seems like every kid in the 718 area code has found out about us. And it’s something—this spontaneous form of ‘play,’ as my colleague Ryan Swanson at The Urban Conga has called it—that we want to continue to build upon.
An Open Street organizer nearby once told me that when they hear of any angry protests or disruptive residents, they purposely invite kids to come play. Because it’s hard to get mad at a kid. Parents are yearning for safe spaces for their kids to be themselves—and for parents to also let loose—and public space does that. (It’s why playgrounds are such hotspots.) But if you’re looking to build support, they also can be your biggest boosters.
You just have to find them.
Bright Side: Climate on the Ballot
It was a complete fuzz of an Election Day (Week? Month?) in the U.S., with midterms that shocked and awed all of us. For me, it was yet another reaffirmation that we’ve entered an era of unpredictability, and we’ll likely float there for some time. But outside of politicians, there were dozens of specific ballot items that stood out, especially when it came to the Earth.
Here are two examples from the coasts: New York and San Francisco.
In New York, the big talk amongst parks and environmental advocates in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8th was The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act. It boiled down to an okay for the state to borrow $4.2 billion to pay for projects like flood mitigation, emissions reduction, and other initiatives to detoxify the state, with at least 35% of funds going to communities underserved and overburdened. (Gotham Gazette had a good breakdown of the bill here.) Voters passed it overwhelmingly: 68 percent in support.
But San Francisco had an even more striking example of what happens when you ask people to directly vote on climate action. In what was the first time I can remember, the city asked voters if they wanted to reopen John F. Kennedy Drive to car traffic. The stretch in Golden Gate Park was closed to vehicles as a pandemic-era measure. The city made it permanent through legislation, but then it was put on the ballot to confirm the ordinance. (Yikes.) So voters had to vote on: a) whether to reopen it to car traffic; and b) whether to confirm the ordinance that made it car-free. (Double yikes.) But that confusing language didn’t prevent a landslide: SF voters overwhelmingly chose no, and yes. In other words: to keep JFK Drive free of cars for years to come.
City in Spotlight: The Villages, Florida
For my junior and senior year in college, my friends and I spent our spring breaks on Bald Head Island, in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It’s one of the few places in America that’s nearly car-free. To get there, you have to leave your car behind on the mainland, and ferry over to your destination. But the island isn’t necessarily vehicle-free: instead of cars, everyone drives around in golf carts.
I’ve been thinking of my colleague David Zipper’s writing on golf carts for some time. (If you haven’t read it, check it out.) The pitch is that the golf cart could expand beyond island/course transportation to become this very attractive form of mobility that’s still car-like but not a car by any means: they’re smaller; they’re electric; and they’re open to the elements. But it is personalized mobility, however you cut it. And if invested in properly, maybe golf carts are America’s gateway drug to EVs—including e-bikes and e-scooters, too.
That brings me to The Villages. For those that aren’t familiar, The Villages is this massive development just north of Orlando. It’s like its own world. (There’s even a documentary about it.) It’s pegged as an ‘America’s premier active adult retirement community,’ but it’s so much more than that: a LGBTQ+ haven; a politically divided enclave (this is Florida); a recreational hub; and a nonstop growth area, as Orlando balloons beyond Disney World. It has a traditional suburban overlay, cut through with ‘town squares’—attractive commercial centers that are friendly to walking, cycling and…. golf carts.
Practically everyone in The Villages has a golf cart. And that’s because there’s infrastructure for it. When we visited Angela’s family there earlier this month (hello Pat and Maddie!), we took the cart on lanes dedicated to them (a little wider than bike lanes), stopped at squares that had charging for them, and maneuvered them through busy areas with tunnels and cut-arounds that are specifically cart-sized. In the morning, you see less cars and more carts. And as a result, lots of neighbors have replaced a car in their driveway with them.
Outside of cities—where the focus right now is to reallocate limited space—golf carts could be this go-between for the suburban abundance of space, which isn’t just an American phenomenon anymore, of course. It’s a way to downsize (or right-size) a setting that’s all about scale. Not to mention: they’re a ton of fun.
Public Space of the Month, November 2022 Edition
Name: Broadway, from 59th to 14th St
Where: Manhattan, NY
Features: One of the most iconic city streets in the world is undergoing a transformation, in bits and bobs. A shared street here; a plaza there. A business district that wants to add more seating and planters on one stretch; another that’s absent on another. So what you have right now is this linear-park-in-the-making, sliced up in segments that show us just how fragmented our planning can be. (The city has a ‘Broadway Vision,’ but not outside of Midtown.) Still, the fact that you can now cycle from Columbus Circle down to Union Square in a mostly protected bike lane and your biggest obstacle is tourists and people sitting down, but not cars, is a sign that change is in the air, for sure.
Have a public space you love? Send me your faves!
Streetbeat Gig Board
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Kita Monthly