Advent 2009 Poem 1

So Advent is here again.
Last year I wrote a bushel of poems I didn't despise too much after the moment every day for the month of December. This year I hope to tie up with the larger calendar better and begin on the first day of liturgical Advent, namely, today. This is part of the Adventus OKC project in some sense, but I would do this anyway, and will have to keep working on this past the various due dates of the city-wide art project.

I hope this year's work still lives for me like last year's does (I'm using some of last year's for lyrics in upcoming songs for this year). I hope you all, whoever you are, take these to heart as well, and please, as always, leave some comments or poems, prose of your own.

Quick notes: I will try at some forms, but expect lots of lyric. I will probably also post a lot at late night, like I am currently doing. I capitalize the pronouns I use to refer to God, but this isn't necessarily due to grammatical piety, lest you find it cheesy, this is due to clarity in referring/speaking to him.

Advent 1

spine, heel, red clay, wet sky
who here has also grown tired of his own body?
quashing the blood-land with my surfaces and ends

I'm hand-in-air proud
of my mastering the particular human skill set
of forgetting the earth while being covered in it

all my people have copped skeptic
and the rest are holed up in battlements

who will slobber wet heartbeats all over our
miles of figuring out and declaiming loud?

so loud, one can decry another's excrement
while forgetting they are covered in it

but I have grown tired of my body
and suspect
that whosoever may, will
wrap hands around the light
and recognize it

OKC Finale!

To finish our discussion of OKC's urbanity, which I have neglected so shamefully over the past month (including during a 2 week tour that I had planned on having some organized time within, and that didn't quite pan out), I would like to offer a few bright spots that contrast to the criticisms I leveled earlier.

To restate, and keep venting, I think the desire of many OKC pro-urbanites to see our home be more like successful urban locales is very healthy, but also more fringe and perhaps futile than we feel. I count myself among them, but also want to stay realistic about what we face in our city when we say we want to make it walkable, or develop better public transit, or develop our neighborhood identities, or help depressed areas while not dislocating their current inhabitants.

The heavy political hand of energy interests keeps our politicians mostly (though not all!) under the thumbs of folks whose desire is to sell more petrol, not build rails. Our development occurred in several periods when automobiles were more ubiquitous and thus, spread our city out in ways that older cities are dense. While our housing is hardly as bubbled and bloated as larger cities, our relative income is still quite low, and limits tax finding for public projects, as well as preventing overpriced development from really exploding in central areas (like the Triangle, Block 42, etc.), the demand for them is quite narrow. Likewise, heavy top-down development has grown faster than any ground-up renewing of neighborhoods by creatives or younger professionals. Our white-flight suburban period was very successful (and continues to be) due to our lower cost of living and land, and this has created an extremely unsustainable sprawl and culture of personal transit.

Yet it is not all doom and gloom, and our city has many virtues, and many potentials within.

The way I like to describe our city to folks across the States is that it is surprising. Folks look at Oklahoma City and perhaps just picture the prairie, or teepees, or the Murrah Bombing Memorial, or conservative politicians, or flat land, or dust storms, ad nauseum.

People seem surprised that we both resemble most other large cities in various surface artifacts (towers, grid streets, a river, etc.), and also in various diversity factors. We have a legitimate Asian district, with accessible and authentic markets and food (though we do lack a good street market). We have GLBT areas, though they are quite modest. We have several arts districts, including the faux one around the otherwise excellent Museum Of Art, and a real one along the Paseo. We have a vibrant Hispanic population, with excellent epicenters (including the historic Capitol Hill), thought they sometimes face racist legislation.

We have amazing old neighborhoods, including those for the East and West Egg wealthy (Heritage Hills, Nichols Hills), and everyone in between, with Mesta Park home tours, Belle Isle's wacky cinder block homes, NE 23rd Street's black heritage that's largely intact, and the varied incomes and styles in spots from Jefferson Park's and Paseo's bungalows, Linwood, Edgmere, and the Plaza District's A-frames and variegated sizes of attractive brick homes, Cleveland and Miller's New Jersey character, all contributing to a diversity and beauty that is found with age, and cannot be faked, thought it can be neglected.

We have respected schools and the OU Health Science Center, bringing jobs, tax dollars, and revitalization to our center. We have the various surprising parks and open spaces that get taken for granted, like the airy expanse of Lake Hefner, the nearby jewel Martin Nature Park, great urban parks from Edgemere to the Myriad Gardens, and a world-class zoo!

MAPS, though under fire in its current version, has been a shining example of urban renewal, and though Bricktown has questionable cultural value right now, it is a fun place, very accessible, and has re-energized downtown like nothing else. If we can get the current MAPS proposals to not center on silly vanity projects (like a convention center), but develop metropolitan ideals, like a central park, more investment in the river, and above all, massively increased transit investment, it will go down in urban history as a brave move in an unexpected city.

Chesapeake's slow, but steady investment in OKC has been very fruitful, from the boathouse to the small city centered on 63rd and Western, as is Devon's new skyscraper a great landmark and resource for the company and the city. OU, OBU, and OSU all have small campuses in the city, and invest well in the higher learning here, as well as OKC University.

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Some Specific Hopes

One of the ways I think OKC can develop real urbanity within the difficulties, and not ignoring them, is by working on focusing on various neighborhood centers. What I mean here is looking at focal points across our sprawl, and then developing in radii from them, not simply radiating out from our distant downtown.

Here are a few examples.

Several small satellite towns exist within the larger incorporated city, including Britton and Nichols Hills. These townlets are vastly opposite from one another (Nichols Hills being yuppie central, a new-Old Money enclave, and Britton being right next door, a depressed rail depot, like a Texas-ghost town on the way to golden slumbers in Edmond). Nichols Hills could center up on the Chesapeake area at 63rd and Western, and up along Western to Wilshire, which is a vibrant commercial corridor already. The park along Grand Blvd. in Nichols Hills is a treasure, and remains public and large enough to accommodate plenty of folks from both the wealthier areas and the less wealthy surrounding. Making the spaghetti of streets between Classen, Grand, 63rd, and Western, just southwest of Chesapeake, into a walkable, dense area of offices and shops/restaurants, would not be much of a stretch. The daytime traffic from the offices would help feed the businesses, and the nighttime traffic and weekend use of residents would be plentiful, especially centered on the OSU-OKC farmer's market, and the diverse shops at 63rd and Western.

Likewise, a trolley concentrated along Western Ave, perhaps connecting 23rd and Western (as the Asian District/Mesta Park/Paseo end of the line) to Wilshire and Western (as the north end of the line at Nichols Hills) would be very successful. Along its route, you have some of the best sushi in OKC (Tokyo, Neko), the best music store hands down (Guestroom Records), live music venues (VZD's, Speakeasy, Hi-Lo), nightlife/food (Irma's, Saturn Grill, Snow Pea, VZD's, Speakeasy, Bin 73, Will's Lobby Bar, Flip's, many more), and plentiful shopping. Running a frequent trolley here, with car lots on either end and the middle, and with discounts for using it at each retailer, would help spur on walkability and be a boon for local businesses, not to mention alleviate traffic and add attractiveness to the congested Western Ave.

Britton offers a different, though more centered opportunity. The older storefronts and small warehouses along the train tracks just north of the old graffiti bridge have long been used as various shops, bars, venues. However, the old downtown of Britton, still intact for a few blocks along Britton Rd., has been blighted for awhile. To center along this corridor with investment in community goods, such as a great few restaurants that are walkable from the many homes located right alongside, good local services, and perhaps even a themed concentration of artisans or professionals would help to re-awaken this historic and valuable area. The TV stations and Oklahoman could develop media centers here, and/or the craftspeople and shops of the industrial areas could link to this area and make it a focus for crafts, antiques, or light arts industry, such as screen printing or ceramics.

Britton is set up very well for a local bus system, dense, frequent, and small, and for a large development of bike lanes and sidewalk investment. It is also an ideal location to develop a light-rail stop, being exactly the kind of place that could grow immensely as a stop-over for folks to and from Edmond and downtown OKC.

Another quick location that already has the vast commercial development up and running, but that could stand a re-thinking of its contribution to car culture is May Ave, from NW Expressway to Grand Blvd. (or even up to Memorial Rd.). This stretch could very easily support a trolley of the kind described for Western Ave., helping to pull people from their cars, and out into the dense chunk of shops and food lined along May Ave here. We could even insert a real rail trolley here, making a potential connection to a wider transit network as it grows, but being a local attraction until it becomes a practical one. Swinging the trolley down the median of the Expressway to Penn Square Mall would also be a nice touch, barring the development of a good commuter rail within NW Expressway from Classen Blvd. to the vast tracts of housing out to the Kilpatrick Turnpike.

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Whew.

Well, I want to move on to some other thoughts, and hopefully keep things going at least once a week if I can, but I hope to continue comments and thoughts from anyone interested in this stuff. We have some fun developments coming up in MAPS, and in Core 2 Shore development, and I would love to keep the conversation living.

Thanks to anyone who reads this stuff, and thanks to the commenters, let's keep loving and growing our city!

Landed Gentry, OKC Urbanity Part 4

The last phase in all of this i want to dig through is one of gentrification, and how it has been rather peculiar in OKC.

The Sultry New-Old

I will quickly run down a pedestrian version of how I interpret gentrification in some classic examples, and general degrees, then look at how we have had some subtly odd variations on theme in our hometown.

In most cases, gentrification happens when a generally run-down portion of a city, usually somewhere in the downtown core or just outside it in the earliest suburbs and outlying dense areas, begins to be inhabited by folks not local to the area in terms of income, ethnicity, job, culture, etc. who are drawn in by the affordability and usually central location of these neighborhoods. In the most healthy cases, it is the very people who grew in a neighborhood, and were able to grow their education and income beyond the mean of the area, who help reinvest in local businesses and local development, thus gentrifying less than simply renewing their own locales, yet often bringing in the negative effects with them unintentionally, such as unaffordable rents, and often a swath of chain stores. What this does is begin to turn the attractiveness of the area to the middle class into something "edgy" or "urban" and thus creates some 90 degree turns in terms of culture and income to the area. This then shifts to a full scale overhaul of the area by municipal re-investment, re-zoning, and commercial investment, especially in terms of services and nightlife. Finally, the area becomes mostly unaffordable for the "original" inhabitants, and the "settlers," and it becomes a full-fledged upper-middle class to wealthy area, hopefully with pockets of various incomes throughout.

Due to the way that both race and class issues have happened in the last century of the US, in most cases, the shift is from an area inhabited by some minority mostly, including religious minorities in the larger cities (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was once a home for Orthodox Jews, and still is in some parts, which creates interesting social tension with the very successful hipster culture there, or Ballard, Seattle, that was a Scandinavian fishing town, now home to a mix of young and old folks, in various industries), to generally white upper-middle class, and generally this begins with an influx of younger professionals, single, and in creative industries such as music, design, media, software, etc. There are many exceptions, but generally, this is the flow as we have seen it in its most vivid US portions.

Gentrification begins to shift from the "exciting" stage of early settlement, and cheap rents, to the gentrified stage when it becomes both safe enough and well-serviced to be attractive to young families, and even older professionals who want to live in the city environment, and the rental situation begins to change. While I earlier decried the "suburban" attitude of "what is best for our hood is what will raise property values" as a portion of a consumerist way of grading quality of life, this same thing is applicable to the owners of dense rental property in large cities, and any rental tenant in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia or NYC, or Seattle, San Francisco, or Portland can attest to this. The property value works in different ways, but it has the same alienating effect, and still creates situations where the bottom line is the only ethic.

Overwhelmingly in the US, the culture shifts are those towards twenty-something cultures and the attendant needs of nightlife, caffeine, imaginative consumption (i.e. very dynamic fashion of all prices, lots of music and media), and environmental morals (thrift/resale shops, organic and green-grocers). The younger generation carries a decent amount of trans-racial interplay, but there are still marked differences in the services needed and offered in lower-income african american or hispanic neighborhoods than in generally gentrified hoods.

Open Letter (To A Landlord)

The main controversy comes about in the way neighborhood costs grow to exclude the inhabitants who had historically lived in an area, and who perhaps gave the area a unique culture, in that it was unique to the "outsiders" coming into an area. Both the influx of nightlife and the inflow of money help and harm an area, in that it brings value and safety to an area in terms of increased folks who want to be safe, and who value the appearance and character of an area, in balance with the economic realities of the families who live there. A neighborhood gentrified out of being a safe haven for drug sales or theft obviously benefits immensely from it, and it is unequivocally positive, but one that loses its ethnic character or historic buildings for commercial "progress" suffers from the same fate as if it were a crack-riddled hood. Except this new crack is for wealthy consumers.

A peculiarity of the current twenty-something cultures (that I belong to as well) is a desire to discover and be original, in the sense of always having something on the edge of the trends, and then discarding it when it becomes too established, in most cases. This applies across most cultural artifacts, including one's locale. The minute predictable shops and less-than-stylish people begin to inhabit a neighborhood, it becomes a bit passe.

However, the darker side of the renewal offered by gentrification is in the displacement of the forces that helped to rejuvenate an area, especially those of the creative arts, who are rarely able to compete with other industries in terms of income, unless they are the few higher up in various firms or collectives. Likewise, the developers and landlords who see the growing value in an area are only operating by the rules of healthy capitalism when the raise rents or build new condos at higher prices, and this slowly, or quickly, and surely makes the situation difficult if not unlivable for those on the edge of the culture, since the economics at the edge are hardly kind or consistent.

So, OKC's Take on This?

I will take a few different examples from our current urban geography to illustrate the peculiar ways we have gentrified, or refused to, and what it might tell us about how we are developing.

Bricktown

Bricktown is one of, if not the crowing success of the MAPS tax initiative, and is something we should be vastly proud of in terms of using a "natural feature" of our inner city to shape a neighborhood. The canal is pleasant, the food is mostly quite good, and even original in most cases, and the Brick ballpark is really well done for our modest baseball team. As time goes on in the canal and streets, hopefully the wear of all of the newness will congeal with the aged warehouses, providing a lived-in feel like San Antonio's riverwalk has, but with more space and less scorching heat (hopefully...).

Yet Bricktown faces some difficulties (aside from the growth of clubs with cleverly-misspelled names, which are mostly a waste of space), in the most part from its setup as an entertainment district only, which creates more of a theme-park feel, than an area that people could actually live in. The major dearth of housing keeps it a destination for in-city tourists, but hardly a place to reside, and the few places there are not entirely in harmony with the aesthetic of the area, the glaring example being the bland apartments built along Reno in front of Harkins Theaters. They (along with the Legacy on Walker Ave.) are daft pandering to suburbanites that developers hope to entice (with their stable tax dollars) into the city. Not an altogether bad idea, but building seemingly color-by-number apartments in an evocative brick warehouse zone does no one a favor. Though, I am glad they are infilling and not tearing down warehouses to do so. The various little flats above Brew Ha Ha are a better example, but there are precious few.

Yet there is still hope for Bricktown, and plenty of room to keep working on adding new destinations and housing, hopefully opening the area to not only the younger, single, nightlife-seeking professionals who can afford the steep rents, but also a mix of folks who could even work in the offices extant in the area, and develop even more commercial growth.

The Triangle

The Triangle, and Deep Deuce are two of the most promising areas in downtown OKC, and also two of the most frustrating. While Bricktown suffers from too much single-use, The Triangle is an example of building a new suburbia in the inner city, and/or a stubborn application of trickle down economics, the opposite of the usual gentrification.

The Triangle still has a mixed use feel to it, with the random small industrial parks nestled to the open lots and sprouting brownstones coming in. Its location is absolutely prime, and the new buildings are actually very lovely, and varied, and fit well in an urban setting, at least on the exteriors (many interiors of the models shown for promotional use are very bric-a-brac appearing). The sidewalks being ushered in, with sweeping views of downtown, easy highway access, and pleasant gardens and public areas, this is a master collection of urban drop-down planning.

Yet it is all crazy expensive.

Some of the Maywood Park brownstones (my personal favorites, seriously if I was rich I would move there in a jif) are up to 3000 square feet of space. This obviously carries a pretty nice price tag, and the new construction and location round out an understandably costly venture. I cannot deny the economics involved, but I am also trying to see it in terms of gentrification, in that there was no period when people sough out the cheap rents for growth in value over time, it was simply decided that it would be upper-crust, and the sheer costs involved will keep any attempt at economic diversity far away. It is to the developers loss. Most people who appreciate Block 42 will not be able to afford its high cost, or they already enjoy life with more space in a spot further out from downtown. With the massive floorplans of many of the units, the very point of density and diversity are muffled by the low population. Street life will be difficult to develop, despite the almost unique in OKC aesthetics and potential.

It remains to be seen what kind of effect this will have. Most units are still unoccupied or being built, even if they are (inexplicably) sold. This is a potentially disappointing case of a city built by developers, and not settled and developed in tandem by its inhabitants.

But I still love the potential of the area, and hope it will succeed, even for rich folks.

Core 2 Shore/ South of Crosstown Expwy.

This is the current locus of debate and focus in the next 10 years of OKC growth. The swath of homes, warehouses, storefronts, and yes, the OKC empty downtown lots just south of the death-trap Crosstown Expressway is being looked at as the key to tying the oddly disconnected and feral Oklahoma River to downtown, a very valuable resource (though quite polluted) that can offer some great growth in outdoor activity and aesthetic growth.

The plans currently being peddled by MAPS 3 potentials are indicative of a problem we have in not filling in what we already have, and just replacing it with grand projects that have little daily human scale use. A giant park would be nice, but perhaps enlarging the Myriad Gardens slightly would serve better, since they are hardly crowded as it is, save during the Festival of the Arts. We look at razing so much of the area, when we could tap the street grid for renewed housing and storefront growth, creating business growth incentives, expanding offices from downtown into the area, and helping to fight blight in the residential sections, which face a grim fate right now in the hands of the developers.

We have hardly filled in the myriad vacant spaces in Midtown, The Triangle, Deep Deuce, and have much more room to grow even in downtown proper, but already we turn to wipe out vast plots of urbanity for some developer's vanity projects.

It is the disease inherent in the drive for a streetcar, it does something superficial, and is nice for tourists and even perhaps day workers downtown, but it does little to tie together neighborhoods, foster density, or even move people to walk more downtown and at large in the city.

Yet I also understand the city's drive to connect the river to the downtown core, and it is a healthy one. The next steps take us even to tie Capitol Hill to the north sides of the city, and help it to recover from the difficulties places on it by racist legislators. The expansion of park space is always a good idea, but it should be done on a human scale, and not in the name of a convention-center scale.

But, Looking On The Bright Side...

We have had rare cases of the usual process of gentrification in OKC. Rarely do we have a neighborhood saturated with growth in creative industries, that helps to renew the fabric of the area, and in turn, can price out the middle class native to it. Even the remotely artistic spots of OKC have little density, save the Paseo, which is actually still pretty affordable in many cases, and the Plaza district, which offers OKC a massive hope in terms of neighborhood identity and natural creative growth. 23rd street between the Capitol and Classen should have long ago become a gentrified area, sandwiched between such robust residential hoods, but it has been a stubborn case of spotty gentrification, with a lot of low-key urbanity reserved, and in depressing cases, empty storefronts on a prime strip of land. It still feels like a place you drive along and to, not walk along and to, though it is slowly growing. Heaven help the Tower Theater to regain some glory!

Yet OKC is not NYC, not Seattle, not Chicago, not any other place. Each city has its own needs and weaknesses, and we must look ours square in the eye, and see what we can do to work within the culture to grow our urbanity, if we believe in it as a good, and not an ill for our town.

It is the honest look that I have hoped to engender in these little rants, and I know we will never have some of the things many people love about the aforementioned large cities. We are simply too sprawled, too poor, too young, too culturally different to grow some of the key pieces we need.

Yet we also have some great potential for change that none of us could ever dream of, and wise city leaders and brave politicians can help us, the people of OKC to grow in amazing ways, with our humble roots intact, and with hard work and an under-estimated diversity and innovative bend.

So, for the next posts, we turn to daydreaming some ways to tie our hoods together, and grow urbanity in islands across our sprawl.

Over The Hedge-OKC Urbanity Part Three

Before I continue on with a quick look at gentrification as it has, or seems to be occurring in OKC, and how it has happened in some different ways here than in its most visible and (depending on your position) laudable or despicable locations in some larger and older cities, I want to respond to a comment (and other comments too) and help clarify some assumptions that underlie the discussion, and hopefully are germane to the whole thinking-out that we are doing here.

A comment on Part One is hoping for some reasons as to why "I still live here" in light of the critiques I have been making, and observations on the specific urban character of our city, and also asserts the virtues of suburban community as well, alongside or against the criticism that we need more density here. It is a valid and thoughtful comment, and I will make a detour here for a sec to help discuss the issues raised.

Don't Taze Me, Okies!

The primary clarification I need to make is that I will very soon get to the good things about our city, and although I am accused of "speaking as a typical outsider," I am actually just adopting a tone that hopefully makes the discussion possible in terms somewhere between someone with education in civil planning/urban development/etc. (which I do not have, obviously) and someone who just cares about his or her city deeply enough to also point out flaws, where we could improve things. I really intend this to be a forum, a discussion, and I welcome all comments, positive or negative. I have lived here my whole life, and thought for years about the value of our place as a home, and continue to do so because of our family and friends, who when it comes down to it, value a place more than anything else.

I also have simply not arrived at the point of looking at solutions to some of our problems, which I will in the next post or the one after. I also realize that contrasting OKC with other urban centres is rife with fallacy, since each place has unique situations, cultures, people, and challenges. This is a point I will make again in a few posts.

Yet the main thins I wanted to dive into is the issue with suburbia, because I feel like I skirted it too much in the previous posts, and I hope to make clear a couple of thoughts.

Out Of Bounds

I first hope to distinguish between the suburban portions of our geography and the urban core, and anything prescriptive I seem to be pushing at applies to the core, NOT to the suburban areas, which are of another type of semi-urban environment. So lest you think I am trying to tie walkability into Edmond, that is far from it, and likewise, I cannot criticize Edmond or Moore for the same issues because they aren't built to be urban anyways. In fact, I hint at this in saying that our cultures here need to be taken seriously, and taken honestly, because there are definite virtues to suburban living, against those found in urban living, and one set does not invalidate the other, and different cultures will have need of different community situations.

I describe the urban core of OKC as roughly that which lies inside of I-44, North of I-240, and West of I-35, though there are notable exceptions, including my own hood that rests just a few blocks north of I-44. You could apply some of these thoughts to the very inner parts of Edmond and Norman, which are quite lovely and walkable (note that they are also the oldest parts, built on a human scale), but few other suburbs have such historic centrality.

Virtue and Shoe Stores

The second issue is that of the virtue of suburban versus urban life. I think the term "virtue" is important here, since it is a real question for us: is a healthy urban fabric, with some of the points I described in the first post, a virtue, or just a preference for some people, who wish that every city could be like NYC or London or something like that?

I am of the conviction it is a virtue, and not simply a preference, though, as I said above, it hardly entitles anyone to some sort of moral win, as there are differing needs. Yet I also believe that the urban fabric contains some virtues that are very difficult to develop in suburban settings, ironically, the very ones put in opposition to "density" on the comment.

Community is a very promiscuous word, that is really as much an inkblot as something concrete and defined. The best I can say on it comes from David Dark, that "community is a verdict," opposed to it being something one can simply do by following steps. I think that divorcing community from density, when it applies to neighborhoods, is how suburbs are often devoid of community, not the other way around. Gated neighborhoods, even open ones closed to their own main streets, are the high example of this, yet so is the ubiquity of chain stores owned by remote corporations, and not local businesses, strip malls-who by their very structure are built with cars in mind, and not people, and the general sense of economic conformity (with the requisite ethnic suspicion) all lead to de-communitizing things, and the verdict is hard to pronounce as widely communal. Density creates an interaction among folks on a scale that is based on organism, limited by space, price, and simply an old street grid at times. This is why there are few (none, in most cases) Wal-Marts in inner cities, despite the desire for convenience that affects every American, because their business scale is simply unsustainable in an inner-city grid. It makes even the humble grocery store a product of a neighborhood, and the fates of both are intertwined as to warrant mutual support. Spending my money at Foot Locker is hardly a moral act, and they do not need my dollars, since they are located all over, and owned by out of towners. Yet spending my money at Shoe Gypsy means I hand dollars to someone whose kids' college savings I hope to be contributing to, someone who is a friend. Supporting a local pizza joint means mutual survival, but Pizza Hut can stand without a neighborhood, at least for awhile.

Likewise, living near where one works saves the waste of time, money, fuel, and stress of commuting in one's own car. Suburbs so not support large numbers of offices in small areas, like downtowns do, and this makes commuting necessary over longer distances. The live-work setup creates innovation in a community simply by providing more time, interaction with other people who can help and challenge, and less waste of resources.

Sustain Pedals

Sustainability is likewise linked more to urbanity (or countryside on the other end) than suburbanity, and Shane's comment is one example of just how this is shaping our city life and discussions. Regardless of politics on the issue, energy and fuel usage is changing, and has to change due to climate issues, fossil fuel supply issues, and economic pressures (importing oil and other fuels). The debate rests in how to adapt, not if it is happening or not, as the political arena tends to think.

This is a good image for the following thoughts:


From Treehugger.com


The reason urban core density is so tightly linked to sustainability is that, primarily, it can offer options other than individual cars as transit. Bikes, walking, buses, subways, and trolleys all offer more sustainable ways of getting around than single cars. This is very difficult to maintain in suburbs because economically it is more difficult as it requires more riders than a non-dense grid can offer, in order to be useful for most folks. The simple physical spread of suburbs makes walking, transit, and bikes very difficult to be of everyday use. Note that I make a distinction between being able to ride in one's neighborhood (which is very pleasant in the suburbs-I grew up doing this in Edmond), and using your bike for transit, which is a very different thing, and requires some sacrifice on the part of the rider. Especially for folks like me who sweat easily and live in a warm climate like Oklahoma. Not pleasant most of the year...ha!

Sustainability is related also to environmental preservation, and while the city is absolutely a non-natural environment, within its bounds a concrete jungle, full of non-organic sights and sounds, it also creates a limit on human expansion and destruction of natural habitats and areas. The big joke is that a subdivision is named for the natural feature it bulldozed to be built (like, Rolling Meadows, or Oak Tree, or Willow Branch, et al), and this is somewhat sharp. The physical facts of sprawl actually impinge more on natural habitats because there are few limits to how far out they can go, depending on how long people will drive for a commute, and in a lower-traffic city like OKC, this is pretty long in terms of distance. While urban areas have to be condensed due to walking issues and street grid, this doesn't apply to sub-urbanity. A clearer distinction between city and countryside is possible with core (dense) development.

Sustainability is also offered in terms of interaction and neighborhood identity. While I remember being less well-off than others in my young years in Edmond, and there was little distinction of neighborhood except by class, as in, who lived in the hugest houses. There was no sense of unique cultures and landmarks, no desire to go compare Taco Bells, and little in terms of nightlife, save an amazing freak period when Edmond hosted a vibrant independent music scene, around 1995-1998. Notice that zoning laws and community groups and neighborhood associations work to prevent economic diversity-how many hoods want to build apartments near them in suburbs? Few. Would a Hispanic or Asian-dense area be welcomed in a suburb? What is the primary motivation behind zoning laws and neighborhood groups? Home value. This hardly screams "community" to me, yet seems to land more on the side of individual wealth growth. That is not necessarily a bad thing (I would struggle to find anyone NOT trying to make money in some way), but as a neighborly aspect it probably needs to be kept in suburban contexts and not urban ones, where space and economic diversity take second fiddle to the energy and innovation inherent in close-quarters and shared public spaces.

So, I grant an urban fabric a "virtue" statues because I do think sustainability and community (whatever it is) are linked better to it than to suburban setups, and because some personal desires of life-ordering are found only in urban contexts versus suburban ones, such as using transit, biking more for commuting, walking not only on my street, but to run errands, etc.

All You Need Is...Well, You Know...

Yet, as I have said all of this, I hope to bring it back to the beginning of the posts on OKC. I meant to temper the expectations of those fervent urbanists who think that OKC needs or must be made into a Chicago, New York, or even Seattle or Portland, in terms of trendy urbanity. Part of the reason this won't really happen is because we have a larger culture here that finds the virtues in suburbanity as opposed to urbanity only, and this isn't something we need to rattle against, but accept, and hope to develop a core, but also keep in mind convictions and trends will change and shift, and urban virtue is hardly infallible.

I grew up in Edmond, in a completely suburban existence, and many friends and family still live there, and I would never consider them somehow allayed against sustainability or community, I love them! I likewise recognize the value of growing up there, in good schools, in peaceful neighborhoods with a lot of greenery around. I grew up in Eagle Crest, on the southeast boundary of Edmond, before the Kilpatrick Turnpike, and there was plenty of woods to go explore, just behind our backyard. The city was mostly empty and even dangerous in this period, though not all of it was, and it would make little sense for my parents who worked in Edmond schools to live in OKC. Indeed, it would be worthwhile to look at what portions of suburbs we need to inject into urban cores, things we have learned from them-like how to have better schools and put a premium on green spaces!

The value of suburbs for the folks who so desire them is that very peacefulness, and even personal space, which is hard to deny as attractive. Family life is often easier to order in certain ways, and just as there are sacrifices in urban life, there are in suburban life, and these are not to be taken lightly.

The last thing I would want to do is villify some portion of our city, as if people who love suburbs also hate the Earth and small businesses. That is NOT the case. It is simply that we don't often consider the consequences of our consumption, and while I can call on some folks to do so, it works both ways.

Likewise, the sheer value of land in suburbs is much lower in cost, so one gets more for less, and this is a coming economic shift, as cities renew, downtowns fill up, the land gets astronomically expensive, creating an economic conformity that is just as obvious as in suburbia. This is a scary trend, and relates to the next post I will hopefully get up in the next few days, on gentrification (and the reversal of it in suburbs), as it relates to our city specifically.

Finally, I would like to take umbrage with the assertion that I somehow love our city less, or have nothing to offer but "deconstruction" to our home. While I enjoy the discussion of the above issues, I do also personally take up the cudgel that somehow thoughtfulness on one's city, and the honest assessments of its characteristics somehow equates with sheer disgust. Of course I will rail on about our poor public transit, but it is because I know how much better transit would help us! It is akin to allowing a friend to take a drug for fear of offending that friend with intervention-one of our drugs being our trend of sprawl, of course I hope that we avoid that abuse!

I will, in a few posts, get to the defense of our city, and I hope anyone who has the same love for our place will bear with me until then, and that everyone feels free to keep offering critiques of these thoughts and additions that I overlook! The joy of the blogosphere is found in interaction!

You're My Density, I Mean, My Destiny. OKC Urbanity, Part Two.

So let's to the difficulties I hinted at in the previous post, after outlining the basic assumptions of what I take to be a healthy urban fabric.

In OKC, our largest problems all tend to revolve around one another, and they generally fall under the realm of lack of density, and the cultures that lack entails.

Space Invaders

Our city has a problem that is not unique to us, that is a problem for many cities outside of the oldest developments in the US, in that we are very spread out, even in our basic core. The problem is that we developed late enough in the game of city zoning and construction that only a small portion of our city grew in the age before cars. We indeed have a historic physical geography that hints at the former walkable/transit grown sense of place, but years of neglect and downright hostile political/economic forces have destroyed it. We have shadows of the old trolley lines, but they were bought up by Standard Oil and other auto/oil companies and dismantled. Our downtown includes some storefront based architecture still, but it is chopped up into small chunks with vast parking lots (single level!!) in between.

In the post-war growth of suburbia, the wealthier middle class began to leave the central part of most cities in the US, and the car-based culture grew extremely fast, helped by eager businessmen who began to feed development like Scrooge McDuck. Yeah, that's a DuckTales allusion. Our physical geography changed, and we noticed here in OKC how many downtown streets became ways to get through downtown, rather than ways to get around downtown, and this is evident in the numerous one-way, three-lane avenues that only last year were returned to two way driving. The point was to get in and out quickly, not to actually have anything to do but work in a tall building, then leave for the 30 minute commute back to the house. The suburbs exploded in development, money, school districts, and we never thought twice about it, except that the city was for the poor, minorities, and eccentrics.

What also changed was our culture. We began to see everything in light of convenience, and in light of what was drivable. In a city with as low of a population as ours, everything was "15 minutes away," and of course, this was by car. Our once semi-rural and humble towns of Edmond, Norman, Mustang, Del City, Piedmont, all blossomed into vast stretches of housing, fenced and sometimes gated in, and surrounded by interstates and strip malls, and the great shopping malls of the 1980s. The moral implications of energy use, oil consumption, climate effects, obesity, time wasting, economic segregation, and even lack of landmarks and important civic architecture were all still just-bubbling up to warn us of our own vapidity.

Now our physical geography within the city is so emaciated and thinned-out that we hardly notice neighborhood delineations, we have potential for great landmarks, but far too few as they are. There is little about our city that bumps together, and that fact keeps our density low, while also being a product of it.

So, density suffered, and now, as we begin to seriously consider public transit expansion, from our vastly inflexible and infrequent bus system, we are faced with a vastly frustrating conundrum.

The Cart, Or The Horse?

Some argue that our city does not have enough mass transit riders to support the cost of putting in even the simplest light rail system, say, to and fro downtown to the main few suburbs (Edmond, Norman, Moore, Midwest City, and maybe the Northwest side of OKC). Some argue that we won't have the riders until we allow a system to develop and people to get used to the idea. We are stuck, as MAPS initiatives have been focused on other pursuits, and politically we have little will from our leaders to grow.

To put it bluntly, OKC's mass transit is probably it's biggest reason why it is not, what some call, "a world-class city." It is the biggest hindrance to several ills, but mostly it prevents any real urbanity from developing, where walkable neighborhoods become reality. To walk in one's own few streets is of course, possible here, but beyond that, to even have a chance at connecting walkable areas with something other than single cars, it simply isn't done here.

If there is one thing OKC needs to invest in NOW, it is public transit. Simply doubling our bus frequency tomorrow would not even begin to address the issue, and that itself would be too expensive in the eyes of most. Developers can build all the expensive brownstones they like near downtown but people will still use their cars for most errands, because there is simply no density to support the needed services in an area.

Yet our funds are hard to come by, and the political will has long been absent to develop anything more than cosmetic. I will not go into the long history of this save, for this brave example of stupidity given by Ernest Istook here.

Trolley Folly

Likewise, the current hubbub on the potential for rail trolley service in downtown and Bricktown is an example of just how poorly we perceive our transit needs here. Transit advocates are all aflutter over this, but it honestly is a step in simply making cosmetic improvements to an area of town no one lives in anyways. It puts transit in the category of tourist attraction, when transit should be a basic method of travel to a city, for both locals and tourists.

A trolley in an area that is already walkable is a waste of political capital, and actual dollars. What is needed is commuter light rail, and preferably one that also has connections to major retail, entertainment, and transit points. This means stops at NW Expwy and May, a line that runs often to and from the airport, stops at Quail Springs, The Adventure District, the Capitol, the State Fair Park, and even locales on the southside, such as Capitol Hill.

What would be even better is a rail system that serves to link neighborhoods with local lines, smaller, frequent, and with far more stops, thus building every possible good gift of development along the routes and at the stops, and then supplement it with commuter rail lines that peak and ebb more with commute times, and serve the longer distances with less stops, making the rides quicker for the outlying communities.

Thus density will not come until we make vast improvements to our transit, but our transit won't be financially viable until our density increases. Most folks in OKC and in the suburbs don't want to pay the prices that come with higher population densities. These include more traffic, more expensive services and goods, more crowds in various locations, and smaller homes and private spaces.

Shoebox Living?

Our cultures here are wary of the cost of real estate in actual cities (whose exemplars I deem New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Boston, in different ways). I have heard many times, aghast exclamations at why anyone would "pay so much for a tiny rental!" in the Lower East Side, when one could own a house with a yard in OKC for far less. This is absolutely a valid point, but it shows the difference in cultures apparent in many cities. That people are incredulous that the Triangle developments here are so expensive for some smaller floorplans (though there are some monstrous floorplans as well-I'll get to that asinine point soon enough) shows how little value we put in place.

I once had a friend respond to my comment of how I wanted to live in Brooklyn with a question of why I would want to live in a city of millions and just be another tiny person there, with no identity. That response did not really make sense to me, and I wondered if that person had actually been to NYC, and partaken of anything beyond the tourist traps and superficial largeness of the place. The magic of place, that one in particular is very real. 8 million folks aren't deceived into living there, with the concomitant discomforts, they are drawn in by the real imagination of the place.

We simply have a very low sense of place here, which is sad in a city that draws a lot on rural life and provincial life, who usually have strong senses of place, but perhaps moreso in European contexts. This low sense of place doesn't put value on specific location within the city proper. This also relates to the lack of neighborhood identity, save for spots like the Paseo, Plaza, Asian District, and slowly, the Midtown and Triangle areas. Note that neighborhood associations are not the same as identities. Associations serve to protect insular interests of the hood, but neighborhood identity serves to invite visitors in to experience something that is interesting to them, and different from their own hood.

Our low sense of place puts the priority on value, not on beauty or even location, as the real estate adage goes. What I mean by value is that frugal McDonald's-Protestantism of "what gives me the most land for the least coin?" This is turned on its head in the actual city context, where location should have the most importance, and the value is found in being near the action and collaboration involved in real urban life. There is little thought given to the costs environmentally, socially, and financially to having more floor space and two-car garages. These things are not conscionable in the actual city, however, because space is too valuable, and place and activity matter more than objects and accumulation of things.

Yet with the proliferation of a laissez-faire attitude of suburban life, where the point is to have one's own property and stuff, that is no one else's, and "I paid for it-It's mine" as a prevailing moral, the side of the city life where innovation occurs from the dense interaction of creatives, businesspeople, service vendors, families, singles, minorities and majorities all rubbing shoulders and sharing a tight space-this doesn't appeal to much of our culture here. The reasons are rooted in political and historic tendencies, and these are difficult to change. Political and familial conservatism doesn't lend much to the growth of urban spaces, and "don't tread on me" works poorly in a sidewalk based-neighborhood.

Until Soon...

The point I make above about cultures is very dear to me, and does matter a lot to what I hope for my own family's life, that we could live actually proud of and connected to our place, not ignoring, or in spite of, wherever we find ourselves.

I would also like to say, the cultures I mention as preventing or slowing progress in OKC's urban growth are not incorrect in their assumptions and desires. Just as healthy politics means healthy debate from at least two angles, so do healthy populations. The desire to have a yard, a big house, and a quiet street are not foolish, not incorrect, especially for larger families. I know this contains generational, familial, political factions in it, and in no way do I assert something as intrinsically superior to the other I do think that environmental considerations have pretty obvious moral implications, however, and I do not budge from them). I simply hope to offer an explanation of where I, and folks with similar convictions, come from.

There is more to come on our difficulties, and more to come in the way of possible solutions. Stay tuned, and leave your thoughts!!!

Innerspace, the Urban OKC? Not the Dennis Quaid Movie. Part 1.

There has been a long-growing, and indeed, grown movement in OKC towards redeveloping our central city, which is peculiar in our kind of town: midwestern/southern, newish, very large and sprawling, and still mostly sub-urban, even in our own core. For most older (read: East and some West Coast) cities the center, though often having periods of neglect and crime growth, the center has always been physically and culturally rooted and valuable.

In our city, this has not always been the case, and indeed continues to be so, even as many businesses are starting to reinvest in the downtown/midtown area, many developers are gobbling up long-forgotten properties, and people are beginning to linger south of 13th street after 5pm. Yet it is still the exception, and our town has only a few factors feeding the growth of downtown, while many important citywide issues of development and urbanity continue to be atrophied or AWOL.

Simply count the single level parking lots in our very inner city. This would be unthinkable in most cities, as it is a waste of space. Notice the myriad empty storefronts and empty stand-alone buildings in our major intersections, from downtown up to 23rd street, to Walker and 30th, to Western and Britton, May and NW 16th Street, anything south of the I-40 Crosstown Expressway Death Trap, Capitol Hill, the list goes on... It is remarkable that so many prime locations stand vacant, when entire neighborhoods could rely on them for groceries and goods.

Despite the trend of core development, new urbanism, and the like spreading across the United States and Europe, there are places where it will be difficult, if not mostly impossible to take root. While I strongly enjoy and am evangelical about urban life, about dense city growth, I continue to run into obstacles both theoretically and practically, on the ground when I consider my home city in their light.

Note that this is a personal obsession, as anyone who knows me is probably annoyingly aware. It matters because Becca and I have seen urbanity done well, and we encounter it here, done quite poorly. Yet this is our home, full of our friends and family, and we cannot just jettison hope for some changes out of hand.

I love and admire my city of birth, OKC, but I have to admit it is very unlikely that a more or less comprehensive urban fabric will develop here in my lifetime. I am with many who have such hope for our city's center, and I too have had dreams of wind-powered trolleys, world-class dining from the most posh to the most funky and cheap, Farmer's Markets ripe with our great produce, fashion and art innovation happening at studios and boutiques all about our town, being able to walk or ride a bike to most errands and workplaces, having local grocers and cafes and hardware shops in each neighborhood, enjoying the diversity of Capitol Hill, the Asian District, NE 23rd street, etc. via connective transit, and even rail and bus transit, tying our city together in lovely ways, and freeing us from a long-incubated shackling to our cars. And glory be if we have a frequent, and fast rail connection from Will Rogers Airport to downtown! Yet I think there are some insurmountable obstacles to OKC really doing this in a timely manner.

I will give a quick summary of what I referred to above as "comprehensive urban fabric," then go over a few of the difficulties we face, in the next blog entry.

Comprehensive Urban Fabric

There are a few distinctives to what I believe is a healthy urban fabric.

1. Street Life. This takes several forms, but usually contains a few common elements.

A. Pedestrianism is one, and this takes place best in a city that is built on a walking scale. This means common goods and services are within reach of most homes in a given area, with perhaps more small stores embedded in residential areas, or central strips along main streets in a given area. This is obviously found in older cities that were built before cars were common, or even invented.
B. Play and leisure on streets or stoops. This can take place only if there is ample sidewalk room, eyes on the street from other residents, shopkeepers, parents, and pedestrians to ensure safety.
C. Shops and goods that are built to the sidewalk, and meant to be walked into, run across. This includes neighborhood grocers, home repair, cafes, salons, and retail.
D. Aforementioned shops and goods are not built behind parking lots. Any place in our current age needs car parking, but this should be concentrated in garages behind, or in concentrated points along a condensed street of services.

2. Public Transit. This easily ties into, and both relies on and is relied upon by pedestrianism. A successful transit system is several things:
A. Intermodal: It connects buses that ply spaces between train and highway service to trains, park and ride lots, and bus hubs. Light rail or commuter trains ply longer distances, to suburbs and back, and to airports or ferry points. If the city is dense enough, even in pockets, the rail needs to stop here, if not be supplemented by a localized subway or trolley system.
B. Frequent: In order to be useful and flexible to the shifting needs of riders, the system must have frequency enough to not utterly throw a rider's schedule should he or she miss a time point.
C. Connective: The connections between lines of bus, train, and subway need to offer flexibility to riders to connect in various ways, and with some straightforwardness.
D. Considerate of both commuter and leisure riders. The system that is relied upon to go to work in a regular, daily commute must also support impromptu trips to grocery stores, clothing shops, baseball games, etc. This also means extending hours into nightlife and weekend times of service.

3. Density. This relies upon and creates the above opportunities, and population density is often the key factor in making Public Transit and street front development economically sustainable for both municipal and private investors.

A. Density is more a product of a longer time of development in an older city.
B. Older cities developed in times prior to the explosion of automobile use (or even manufacture), making highway based and parking lot based development impractical.
C. Density also reflects a mutual sense of shared space among a city's population. This can create tension over space, parkland, resources, noise, cleanliness, etc. but there is also a cultural expectation that these are shared with one another and the municipal and private authorities of a given area.
D. Density creates a need for services to be variegated and in closer proximity when compared to sub-urban development or rural development.
E. Density relies on the shipment of non-urban goods into a given city, such as many foodstuffs and larger manufactured items that cannot be produced or grown in a city environment.

4. Cultural Artifacts. These are quite hard to pin down, and change with each city in some ways, and of course change over time and technology.

A. Neighborhood identity develops in accordance with ethnic/immigration qualities, business/craft association, geographic features both environmental and in terms of city spacing (think "midtown"), in home type, and in other ways.
B. The pace of general commuting and daily activity are often accelerated, in order to accomplish usual tasks. This can obviously be an unwanted, but unavoidable characteristic.
C. Ethnic diversity is almost guaranteed, due to various housing options, more economic diversity and opportunities (even if only perceived), and the sense of shared space that can either calm or exacerbate racial/economic tensions.
D. Tourism flourishes, based both on "local" definitions of place, and on tourist-specific developments or areas.
E. A pervading regional/city identity and sense of place grows from the various ecological, city-physical (such as skyscrapers or other built landmarks), historical, commercial, ethnic, and similar strains of the city's past and present. This can often lead to a disdain for non-locals, especially if tourism is flush, but it can also create much civic pride and shared upkeep and crime-stopping of city places.

In the next post, I will get specific with difficulties we face here, and follow them with some solutions, and some admissions of what we will probably not change, no matter how hard some of us want.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sickness Unto Death -Healthcare Reform Considered

On the radio today I listened to a man cry out the following to Arlen Specter, D-Pa during one of the town hall meetings on health care reform:

“I’ll leave,” the protester said, as several police officers stood nearby. “And you can do whatever the hell you please to do. One day God’s going to stand before you, and he’s going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you’ll get your just deserts. I’m leaving.”

I agree with the man that politicians will have much to answer to, and indeed already do in the face of their constituents. However, the above comment finally sent me over the edge in a debate that I really actually enjoyed watching, as a friend put it, like watching NASCAR for the crashes. It really was just fun to watch the crazies for awhile, but then I began to consider the experience I have had with healthcare, and then consider why we are even bothering with it in the current economic toilet bowl we are in. I personally despise my healthcare (which has always been bought by me, being self-employed, and is expensive, inefficient, and hardly sufficient-no dental, vision, preganancy, etc.), but honestly don't expect too much to change, regardless of who is running it.

I would wish to ask that protester what he expects to answer to God, when he is faced with questions on how he cared for those less fortunate than him. Because the debate over health care revolves very tightly around those who have the least, those who are already sick, injured, single-parents, immigrants, or even just lower-middle class folks.

The bottom line is this: the wealthy and mid to upper middle class will never want for health care, though in the lower rungs it will press more than the upper. They will never want for quality care because that is simply how market economies work. If one has the money, one can have anything.

The health care debate really effects those who are lower than most middle-class income brackets, depending on number of dependents, pre-existing conditions, and any sort of disability or injury.

I somehow doubt God is waiting to find out how well we defended laissez-faire capitalism from socialism, rather than how we cared for the poor, though that seems to be the press of most of the protestors at these events, and in any punditry available on either side. Likewise, I doubt God cares much for muddleheaded partisan defenders, of left or right. I also think long-term viability is more vital than anything that simply blankets care on folks but leaves our children's children broke (much like we will become as the boomers collect Social Security-a Leninist program if I ever saw one! Joking...). We are already well on our way to leaving our children a ruined ecosystem, so let's back away from fiscal incoherence, often evidenced by the reformers.

According to the laws of pure capitalism/liberal economics, what makes sense fiscally is to continue the way it is, with perhaps some trimming of inefficiencies. The profit margin is the only ethic, incentivizing and trickling down financial success, and of course there are nuances, but they only apply economically, not with particularity or pathos to the hoi polloi. Thankfully, most folks believe in a nuanced capitalism, if not something more social.

However considered by the lens of the Gospel, which is not chief among other lenses to Christians but is simply, the Gospel-the only lens, it is hard to justify the reform along lines of fear of government options, not because it involves the government (which has plenty of negatives), but because the basic question is "what provides care for the folks who have the least?" That is it, not, "what keeps me safe and comfy?" or "what will make us the most money and cost us the least?" Those are questions of patriotic idolatry and capitalism-idolatry, respectively. So we need to be considering what covers those who cannot afford to cover themselves, and not in terms of getting them jobs (most already do, or have suffered catastrophic denial of claims or have pre-existing issues) to pay for it, but in terms of help. It is about help, not hoarding.

So as I look back at the above spiel, I realize I haven't offered any answers, and I assure you, I am beholden to no party or side. I simply hope to keep in my friends' and my mind, as we talk this stuff over, a place of humility and reason, of patience and generosity, perhaps opposites of the slobber we have been subjected to by either side.

I also, most of all, hope for Christ-thinkers to have something else to say besides the usual (and untrue) criticisms of mandated euthanasia, and blind-cat defenses of capitalism. And may we say it in a true sense of community debate, not loud-mouthed grabbing at who is right. And may we continue to exorcise the (very real) demons that tie us to political interests as if we have any allegiance other than to the Gospel.