Design‚ Development‚ and Housing – Page 3

California’s Housing Problem

Cynthia Kroll and Krute Singa

California’s Department of Finance predicts that by 2030 the state’s population will reach fifty million people—twelve million more than today. This will result in an estimated 2.7 million new households in the state. How should the state allocate resources to house the new population, and how will choices made today affect the state’s economic, social, and environmental performance in the future? In many urban centers, low-and-moderate income households live with home prices and rents that far outstrip basic affordability standards. California has faced two housing-related issues for decades: cost and location. In many urban centers, low-and-moderate income households live with home prices and rents that far outstrip basic affordability standards. Even upper income households pay more for housing relative to their income in California than in most other parts of the US. And what new affordable housing there is has largely been added in nonurban places and at urban peripheries, resulting in steadily increasing traffic congestion and commute times in the state’s urban areas.

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2017-05-30T22:01:27+00:00Categories: ACCESS 32, Spring 2008|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Jobs‚ Economy‚ and Transportation|

The Intersection of Trees and Safety

Elizabeth Macdonald

For at least 250 years, the finest of streets the world over have been lined with trees. On the best tree-lined streets the trees are planted all the way to the corners. Indeed, in Paris, a city noted for its street trees, if the regular spacing of trees along the street runs short at an intersection, there is likely to be an extra tree placed at the corner. Yet in America, elm- or oak-shaded residential streets and commercial main streets are all too often only memories of good American urban design. In the automobile age, a real concern with safety has resulted in street tree standards that dictate long setbacks from intersections, ostensibly to achieve unobstructed sight lines for drivers. But are street trees the safety problem they are purported to be?

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2017-05-30T22:02:24+00:00Categories: ACCESS 31, Fall 2007|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Transportation Safety|

Building a Boulevard

Elizabeth Macdonald

Many communities in the United Sates are taking a second look at the freeways built through and around their down- towns during the 1950s and 1960s. They see them now as barriers to neighborhoods and waterfronts. Several cities have removed stretches of urban freeways or have buried them. The city of San Francisco has taken down two elevated freeways and replaced them with surface streets. One of these new streets, Octavia Boulevard, opened in September 2005 as a multiway boulevard.

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2017-05-30T22:19:04+00:00Categories: ACCESS 28, Spring 2006|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing|

Which Comes First: The Neighborhood or the Walking?

Susan Handy and Patricia Mokhtarian

These days it's hard to miss the story that Americans spend more time stuck in traffic than ever, that they’re fatter than ever, and that the suburbs are to blame—or at least so goes the talk in the public media and in city planning and public health circles. The logic is simple: suburbs were designed for driving rather than walking, leading people to drive more and walk less, thereby contributing to increased traffic congestion and vehicle emissions, declining physical activity, and increasing waistlines. Recent studies show significant connections between suburban sprawl and traffic congestion, air pollution, and obesity. The solution as proposed is simple: redesign suburbs for walking rather than driving, so that people will walk more and drive less, traffic levels will decrease, and physical activity will increase. Problem solved.

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2022-09-28T23:11:03+00:00Categories: ACCESS 26, Spring 2005|Tags: Bike & Pedestrian Planning, Design‚ Development‚ and Housing|

Reconsidering the Cul-de-sac

Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph

For over five decades developers, homebuyers, and traffic engineers have favored the cul-de-sac, a basic building block of the American suburb. Despite its popular success, the “loops and lollipops” street pattern has been repeatedly criticized by many leading architects and planners, particularly New Urbanists, who strongly advocate the inter- connected gridiron pattern. The cul-de-sac has come to symbolize all the problems of suburbia— an isolated, insular enclave, set in a formless sprawl of similar enclaves, separated socially and physically from the larger world, and dependent upon the automobile for its survival. Nevertheless, much can be said in favor of the cul-de-sac street as a pattern for neighborhood space.

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2017-05-30T22:49:39+00:00Categories: ACCESS 24, Spring 2004|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing|

Putting Pleasure Back in the Drive: Reclaiming Urban Parkways for the 21st Century

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Robert Gottlieb

These two assessments of Arroyo Seco Parkway (now known as the Pasadena Freeway) are separated by half a century in time and a sea of difference in perception. They encapsulate the rise and fall of urban parkways. Predecessor of the modern freeway and celebrated transportation model of the early 20th century, the urban parkway has fallen on hard times. Designed for uninterrupted, pleasurable driving in park-like settings with views of surrounding communities, parkways were once hailed as marvels of transportation innovation and design—and as safe and efficient alternatives to arterials and boulevards.

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2017-05-30T22:47:27+00:00Categories: ACCESS 22, Spring 2003|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Planning History|

Brooklyn’s Boulevards

Elizabeth Macdonald</a

Brooklyn is not known for its great streets. And yet, like Paris, it enjoys a remarkable legacy of several mid-19th century boulevards. At the same time that Baron Haussmann was building boulevards in Paris, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, landscape architects for the Brooklyn Park Commission, designed and supervised construction of two major landscaped thoroughfares in Brooklyn.

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2017-05-31T21:26:34+00:00Categories: ACCESS 17, Fall 2000|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing|

On Bus-Stop Crime

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Robin Liggett

It's early morning at the bus stop on Central and 7th in downtown Los Angeles. A middle-aged Latino woman is waiting for the bus, nervously clutching a big plastic bag close to her body. There are no pedestrians on the street, just a few parked cars behind a barbed-wire fence. The nearby corner is occupied by a cheap, run-down motel called the Square Deal with a liquor store on the ground floor. A man in ragged clothes appears to be sleeping (or is he dead?), curled up on the sidewalk outside the store, not far from the woman. Broken glass, empty cans, and other trash litter the bus stop where the woman is standing. She nervously surveys the street for the bus. From time to time she throws a fleeting look at the sleeping man. At last the bus arrives, and the woman disappears behind its protective doors.

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2017-05-31T21:28:20+00:00Categories: ACCESS 16, Spring 2000|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Transportation Policy & Planning, Transportation Safety|

Middle Age Sprawl: BART and Urban Development

John Landis and Robert Cervero

BART was the first American rail rapid transit system to be built in modern times, and its arrival was greeted with worldwide attention. BART is famous. Its fame is attached to its favorable image as the answer to the problems of the modern American metropolis. And the extent to which it has succeeded, or failed, to live up to expectations is an important lesson for other cities wanting to emulate it.

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2017-05-31T21:36:01+00:00Categories: ACCESS 14, Spring 1999|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Transit, Transportation & Land Use|

Parking And Affordable Housing

Wenyu Jia and Martin Wachs

Housing affordability and parking availability are two of the most vexing problems in the nation’s largest cities. In San Francisco, internationally known for its ambience, most working people find it almost impossible to find a house, condo, or apartment at an affordable price. Finding a parking space is nearly as difficult. Many houses are situated on very narrow lots, and frequent curb cuts for driveways reduce on-street parking.

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2017-05-31T21:37:44+00:00Categories: ACCESS 13, Fall 1998|Tags: Design‚ Development‚ and Housing, Parking|