local

The best of 2012 - Local Urban & Transportation Style! You voted. We wrote it all up.

The first couple 'best of' have already been posted:

• Best Mid-Late 20th Century Enclosed Shopping Mall
• Best Late 20th/Early 21st Century New Urbanist Simulacrum of Main Street
• Best Surviving 19th/Early 20th Century "Main Street" in a Former Railroad/Interurban Town
• Best Pedestrian Shopping Street

It's not every day you get such a specific 'best of' opportunity. I wrote on New Urbanism's Excelsior and Grand and it's victory as the best simulacrum of Main Street.

That isn’t to say Excelsior and Grand isn’t without criticism, but it’s the best we’ve got. In fact, it’s hard to take other Twin Cities New Urbanist projects seriously. Arbor Lakes? No real residential. West End? Same problem, but with too much parking and it’s half-empty. Burnsville’s Heart of the City? I’m really happy they are trying. Woodbury Lakes? You can’t be serious?

I had this college summer internship that paid me too much money to basically drive aimlessly around the metro. Coming from a small town and moving directly to an walkable, urban-university setting, this internship was the first chance I had to experience suburbia. I’d drive from suburban office complex to strip mall to industrial park, and repeat. One day pre-ubiquitous GPS systems, I remember coming off Highway 100 while coming down from one of Blaine’s excruciatingly depressing industrial parks. I made a wrong turn and somehow bumped into Exclesior & Grand.

I remember thinking it was a mirage, an oasis in the suburban desert. This place couldn’t be real?

There are a few elements that put Excelsior and Grand ahead of the competition. The location is aided by its proximity to Minneapolis. That, and it’s surrounded by a partial traditional street grid. The strip malls nearby are old by strip mall standards, but they look quaint relics of the bygone years when compared to the expansive Power Center Strip Malls of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In a way, Excelsior and Grand is still surrounded by suburbia, but a humble suburbia in its first generation. The type of suburbia that still had some traditional patterns and acknowledged that Minneapolis, the big city, actually existed.

Excelsior and Grand is not an island (a criticism I have with all the other NU projects on the list). It’s connected to the neighborhood to the south and the few apartment / condo buildings to the north. As long as those walking are willing to brave Excelsior Blvd. The pedestrian connections aren’t that bad and walking within is a pretty pleasant experience. The project doesn’t feel too out of place either – it’s as if it is less than 10 years old, but already part of the neighborhood.

The retail currently occupying Excelsior and Grand is doing well. My only complaint is that the businesses are boring (CVS, Panera Bread, Starbucks, etc.). This isn’t a bad thing for most people. Eventually, as rents and markets change, businesses will come and go. That’s part of how a these things operate and I’m confident the Panera Breads of the world won’t stay forever. I’m just glad that we’ve got a place with good bones – even if the shops are bland.

If you're looking to see the rest of the "best of" series - you can find it here on Streets.MN.

I’ll concede that shipping container housing can be cool. I write this because I took a bit of flack on my previous piece about shipping containers. I wanted to take some time to offer some rebuttals (and a correction - that correction being that I wrongfully labeled the Detroit project as affordable housing. It isn’t. It is market rate. It was a mistake).

I used Tornado Towers as my storyline. I wish I was a better writer and maybe then I could have given a more passionate argument against shipping container housing by bringing it all together. Needless to say, I can’t fault people for commenting on that aspect of the piece.

For the record – I was not arguing against providing affordable housing, I was advocating that it should be quality housing and that we should not “experiment on the poor” like we’ve done so many times in the arena of public housing (e.g.: no more towers in the park). People in need of affordable housing aren’t looking for high-design.

For the most part, shipping container housing has been a luxury for the wealthy. There are more examples of second-homes on the beach/ in the woods than that of a primary residence. It appears to be a burgeoning architectural trend under the label of sustainability.

Before I go any further, I want to concede that there are definitely situations where shipping containers may be useful – such as temporary housing in areas affected by disasters. I have also been informed that they work well in desert climates as military housing on bases. These are fine uses for shipping containers. My main complaint is that, for affordable housing or otherwise, they will ultimately fail and become eyesores.

Here’s the brief rundown on why we should be skeptical of shipping container housing …

• They are ugly and will ultimately not be loved. The design will not stand the test of time and we are only a decade away from these places being either abandoned or destroyed.
• They aren’t much cheaper than typical housing. You can build a normal, standard, average, normal brick apartment building (that will last for a century) for about 5 percent more.
• Environmentally, there isn’t much benefit. Retrofitting shipping containers to make them fit for human habitat takes a lot of energy. Containers are laced with countless hazardous chemicals and getting rid of those is a nasty process.
• Vast majority proposals I’ve seen are nothing more than a "Tower in the Park" idea reincarnate. Only this time it might be worse – stacked shipping containers in the park.
  

Shipping container housing, minus the re-use element, as a means of urban development is a “same stuff, different day” scenario (e.g.: Tornado Towers). It failed in the past and will surely fail again in the future.

I bumped into an article on how Detroit will join some European nations and build America’s first shipping container building. It got me thinking: shipping container housing is a terrible idea. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Why? Because it’s the “same shit, different day” and “experiment on the poor” urban planning faux-avant garde-ism that has failed so miserably in the past. Let me explain.

It’s a trailer park in the sky, a testament to bad taste. - The Free Lance-Star (out of Fredericksburg, Virginia), April 22, 1994

The AP wire picked up on the story and newspapers around the country ran with it: the City of Mankato was going to buy one of America’s ugliest buildings – four stories of stacked trailers – and tear it down.

It was 1995 and the Valley View Apartments or as I knew them, Tornado Towers,  were in the process of being demolished.

The day was memorable. I remember driving up in my Mom’s minivan as the bulldozers razed the site. My father drove up shortly thereafter, snapped some photos from inside his new Buick LeSabre and drove away with a $160,000 check from the City of Mankato (to this day, my dad still has the photos and a newspaper article framed in his office).

The name Tornado Towers, from my understanding, is an ironic testament to what can best be described as good luck. Before the building’s original owners went into default sometime in the mid-1980s, a tornado came through town and leveled nearby buildings and farm fields. One building remained: the stacked trailers (who’da thunk it, right? – as if the stacked trailer homes held together loosely by concrete pillars wouldn’t have been the first to go?).

I spent a good part of my childhood at Tornado Towers helping out as only a child could. In other words, my parents didn’t want to pay for a babysitter, so my brothers and I would pick up small pieces of trash while trying not to get in the way, break something, get hurt or all the above.

I don’t have many memories of the place. My dad recruited a few college basketball players to live there and I remember thinking as a child that one of them was the tallest man alive. There was the Hmong family that tied a goat to their trailer on the ground floor. That got a few complaints. Going up and down the staircase was scary and the elevator never worked (the empty shaft eventually turned into storage space). That’s about it.

The heating bills were astronomical, but it was tolerable since rent went for around $250 per month. In 9th grade science class, years after the tear down, our eccentric teacher handed students a book on heat loss in buildings. The thermal imaging of the building was one big red block. The Tornado Towers was used as a worst-case example.

Tornado Towers was originally an “experiment on the poor” system of public housing units. The idea of the late 1970s, when it was built, was to have cheap, mass-produced subsidized housing that could be moved at the owner’s will. For example, you’d get a trailer, eventually buy it from whomever, own it and move it to another location if you earned enough money to do so. That never worked out, and eventually the place found itself in mortgage default. Next, my father bought them … under my mother’s name (as he tells the story, the bank was offering anything short of giving it away and my mom must have had a better credit score at the time).

Tornado Towers turned around – not visually, but financially – the units were rented to college students and immigrants. It was close to the college and offered affordable housing. The place ceased being government-subsidized housing and turned into good old fashioned affordable housing – mostly by virtue of its ugliness and poor insulation [it was eventually replaced by something almost equally as ugly].

The place was hardly utopia, but was rich with culture and social diversity. The place was dumpy and borderline unsanitary – but never unsafe (it always passed health, safety and any other inspection strategically thrown its way in the City’s apparent attempt to get it condemned). The buildings looked terrible, but operated well.

___

Image from WellHome.com

Shipping containers are the new stacked trailer homes. We should avoid building them at all costs. It is, as many like to say, same shit, different day.

It’s not that we shouldn’t build affordable housing – it’s that we shouldn’t build experimental affordable housing to fit the needs of a few green, trendy, idealistic populations who won’t be living there. The desire to recycle these unwanted containers is noble, but doesn’t lend itself to being as green as a building that can be built and stand its ground for hundreds of years.

It’s not always cost-effective either. Containers need to be converted to habitable places, apparently there are a lot of really bad chemicals involved, and moving shipping containers between locations doesn’t isn’t cheap either.

While I have fond, nostalgic memories of Tornado Towers, it was an unsightly and unfortunate place that could only attract poor students and poorer immigrants. It was built in the late 1970s and less than 15 years later, the townspeople were begging to have it torn down. There was so much pressure to get rid of it that the City Council approved buying the property for a third more than its market value just to tear it down.

The shipping container model is really no different: it’s the push for cheap, mass-produced housing that pawns itself off as an affordable, yet stylish and cool, housing option. They are still sold to the public as mobile units. The problem with this model breaks down quickly as the only people willing to live in these quarters are poor themselves, and those who dwell in them view them as merely a stepping stone to a better place. In some ways, shipping container housing is actually worse than stacking trailers – at least trailers are originally designed with humans in mind, not shipping mass-produced items across thousands of miles of ocean.

Shipping container housing may make some sense in impoverished areas, like the favelas of Rio de Jeneirio, or as shelters after disasters in Haiti. They should not, however, be assembled to meet the needs of the first-world poor. We should view these are nothing more than a passing novelty – especially in areas like the Midwest. Real estate in Detroit is already affordable, and it’s confusing that small, cramped shipping container units would be viewed as a better alternative than just building brick buildings (according to one source, shipping containers save only 5 to 10 percent on construction costs).

Growing up, I was embarrassed about my direct relationship to Tornado Towers (and how they were apparently ranked as one of America’s 10 ugliest buildings - relatives in Arizona sent us newspaper clippings from their local paper). Now, I embrace Tornado Towers for three reasons:

1. I’m glad I got to experience a localized version of urban planning history first-hand, the good and the bad;
2. the City paid my father enough to clear any debts, launch his own business and do well enough to help support our family, and;
3. I can hopefully pass this message along enough times to stop, halt or delay any ridiculous shipping container project that may come up

Who would want to live by a football stadium? It’s virtually empty or seriously under-utilized 355 days a year and chaotic for the other 10 days a year. That sounds miserable.

A recent Star Tribune commentary asked the question, “Vikings stadium: Good neighbor or not?”.

Historically, the answer has been not; and based on all the renderings I’ve seen, the answer will continue to be not. Actually, I take that back – the stadium won’t be either a good neighbor or a bad neighbor. Why? Because it won’t really have any neighbors.

While not the final design, the most recent building renderings resemble nothing more than Metrodome version 2.0 – (it looks like someone sliced the dome’s roof to let in some air and then added a glass facade). North of the stadium, there are three city block sized open surface parking lots. To the west of the site, there are what appear to be two blocks of undefined plaza space. There is some green space and a few small building on the east side of the site, but since this space is currently an interstate highway, it’s not really clear what will happen there.

The only neighbors it would inconvenience are those who are already currently inconvenienced by the stadium. It’s likely the new stadium won’t spark new neighbors either. Do Stadiums Bring Development? Usually not.

I’ve written about this and shared these images a lot over the past year, and I continue to do so because I believe they are powerful in visually showing how little stadiums actually help.

If we build it, they will come? This argument doesn’t hold up under even the most modest of scrutinies. The Twin Cities own experiences should serve lesson that large sport and convention center venues do not create a catalyst for development.

[Minneapolis, Minnesota - 1991, 2002, 2009]

Notice the development around the Metrodome? Neither did anyone else. North of the Metrodome, near the Guthrie Theater, residential development has occurred, but little of which can be attributed to proximity to the Metrodome. The Mississippi River, cultural amenities and other forces play a larger role in redevelopment.

St. Paul has had similar results with the Xcel Energy Center.

[St. Paul, Minnesota - 1991, 2002, 2009]

The taxpayer-subsidized arena was supposed to act as a catalyst for development in St. Paul. Ten years later, there isn’t much to show for it besides renovated pubs along West 7th Street. All of which are fantastic (McGoverns, The Liffey, Eagle Street, Tom Reid’s), but the success of these local watering holes is hardly worthy of hundreds of millions dollars in taxpayer subsidizes.

Stadiums prompting development in the immediate surrounding area of new stadium construction certainly sounds like a plausible argument as large infrastructure projects do typically yield private development. However, sport stadiums appear to be the exception to the rule.

[Indianapolis, Indiana - 1992, 2007, 2010]

The new Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis is pictured above. Notice the RCA Dome in the 1992 and 2007 images. It’s a now a convention center – a non-private sector development.

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 1992, 2002, 2011]

Philadelphia’s sports district has seen little improvement in two decades. Sports stadiums seemed to beget only more sports stadiums … and open surface parking lots. A similar story exists in Phoenix, Arizona, where not even the seemingly omnipresent speculative housing subdivisions of Phoenix desired proximity.

[Phoenix, Arizona - 1992, 2003, 2011]

Even urban success stories of the 2000s (such as Denver and Pittsburgh) with large influxes of people clamoring for downtown and inner-city real estate struggled to fill in the empty surfaces surrounding their sport stadiums.

[Pepsi Arena, Denver, Colorado - 1992, 2002, 2011]

[Coors Field, Denver, Colorado - 1993, 2003, 2011]

[Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - 1993, 2004, 2010]

Is Minneapolis the exception to the rule? Will we somehow beat this stadium vacuum? It’s unlikely. When a large building fails at creating a lively mix of retail, residential, commercial and civic space – it creates an isolating space not worthy of the public affection. Developers, unless enticed with subsidizes, will likely avoid these places.

It doesn’t help that these stadiums aren’t cheap – taxpayers usually end up taking on the initial bill, and all the risk. Stadiums and their surrounding districts are the new “Bilbao anomaly”, are the new urban mall, are the new downtown casino, are the new urban renewal.

Following up with my Dead Malls article, I felt it was only fair to visit some of them.  I trekked over to both the Knollwood Mall and Bandana Square  (okay, admittedly it wasn’t a trek, I work near Knollwood and live in St. Paul).

Knollwood Mall [St. Louis Park, Minnesota]

It’s unfair to label Knollwood a “dead mall” – it is very much alive. While not thriving, there is activity over the lunch hour and some suburban retail staples exist (e.g.: Applebees, DWS, AT&T Store, TJ Maxx and the Home Goods store). To survive, Knollwood has done what a handful of other struggling malls have done, they’ve turned themselves inside-out.

The exterior, which isn’t connected to the mall, has a healthy existence. The Cub Foods draws a crowd and small shops include typical strip mall additions, such as Subway, Leeann Chin and Caribou Coffee. The inside has a few tenants, but is eerily empty as you walk further away from the main entrance.

There is some action by the Kohl’s clothing store, but the emptiness clashes with the glossy wide-open interior corridors. The space isn’t in disrepair. The mall is in good shape, minus the empty spaces. I’m not sure if Knollwood will ever be the mall it used to be in the traditional sense, but with a location like St. Louis Park, I’m positive there will some redevelopment.

Bandana Sqaure [St. Paul, Minnesota]

This is a more peculiar case. I’ll let an author on DeadMalls.com explain it:

This would be one of the coolest malls in Minnesota – if only it was still a mall. Bandana Square was an early twentieth century railroad station converted into an enclosed shopping center with a historic feel. Somehow it didn’t go over very well – perhaps because it is far from the freeway in St. Paul’s industrial Energy Park. [Link] [See also]

 

The buildings are phenomenal. The arched windows, the historic brick facade and even the tree layout make Bandana Square a beautiful place (minus the countless empty parking spaces surrounding it). The DeadMalls.com poster is 100% correct: for a mall’s sake – the location sucks. It’s not just that it is away from the highway system, but it’s surrounded by similar style suburban redevelopment industrial parks and 1980s large-scale apartment / condo buildings.

By the way – this might be the most confusing skyway in the Twin Cities. It connects the back parking deck to the main Bandana Square building by bridging a gap over a surface parking lot. It’s hard to imagine that anyone thought this was a good expenditure of money?

At the end of the day, Bandana Square is a magnificent building that has adopted to a life outside of retail. It has a lot of really good tenants, including a hotel, numerous small businesses and a good-sized medical clinic (Aspen - who gave me great help when I couldn’t breathe out of my left nostril – thanks by the way).

There is a larger narrative here, and one that I hope to touch on in the future. That is the story of adaptive re-use. For anyone interested in the topic; here’s a reading recommendation. And here, too.