Klyde Warren Park and Value Added

Hi there.  This was fun.  I decided to play around a bit with a few studies related to land value premium/increase associated with proximity to new parks.  Of course, some of these studies added qualitative assessments based on great park/good park/bad park, which actually detracted value from nearby properties.

Recently, I did some qualitative analysis of the area around Klyde Warren Park in the past, suggesting that the road network around it was so poor that it couldn't possibly support the kind of street life (via ground floor businesses), of say Bryant Park and surrounding vicinity.  That wasn't a qualitative assessment of KWP, but rather its surroundings.  However, given that it is a deck park over a freeway, you can never quite escape that reality.  In the link above, you can see the disintegrative nature of the highway as soon as the park's boundaries are reached.  Bryant is much more radial in that it is directly connected to its surroundings in all directions.

So I wanted to do a bit of a mashup between these various studies.  One, the value added to nearby property based on proximity to the park, but not measured as the crow flies.  Instead, measured by walking distance associated with the actual streets around it.  Hopefully, that registers in some way.  However, since this is entirely quantitative, it doesn't make value judgment for example, "hey, KWP cut off Harwood which then dropped vehicular traffic 80% potentially hurting business, accessibility, and value."  Or, "OMG the streets of LoMac are so cartoonishly suburban and dangerous, people refuse to walk the .25 miles from the Crescent to AAC."

Using a variety of studies suggesting various values based on distance to a park, in this case I'm going with "great park" achieving maximum possible value premium, I came up with the following distances and premiums:



To create a measureable incremental hierarchy, I broke it down into tiers.  25% to the first 300', 15% for the next 300'.  10% from 600' to 1000' and then 5% for anything between 1000' and 1600' walking distance to the park.

I used that data to then create the following map, blacking out the parcels which are tax exempt.

After doing that, I created a spreadsheet of every property touching the 'green gradient,' assigning a 'value add' increment according to distance from the park.  For the most part, if the parcel was touching an part of the higher increment, I went with the higher.





Then I used the spreadsheet to calculate a few things: most importantly, Net Property Value Increase and Net New Property Taxes generated for the city.

I found there is currently $1.505 billion in assessed value within KWP's "reach."  This number, factoring in for the KWP "green gradient" increases to $1.659 billion, an increase of $154 million in private value due to the park, which, if memory serves, and the park cost about $60 million, works out to an ROI of 2.5:1 (which isn't a particularly great number).  Some economists I've worked with in the past, like to encourage a minimum of 4:1 return on public investment.

However, this doesn't factor new development from this point forward (ie Museum Tower is only assessed at a little over a million right now).

This is where it gets a bit tricky.  Many of the towers that generate the most taxable value in the area were here long before the park became a reality (ie had funding).  So the question is, if a new tower arises on a site in the area (say the drive thru Chase Bank site), how much of that new added value can the park be credited for?  All of it?  Maybe, but I suspect it will really only be responsible for the increment that makes that hypothetical development profitable.  Not all, but likely more like the 15%-25% increment.

In other words, there is some murk in the numbers.  I can only go by what is on record on DCAD.  And by doing so, I found KWP is potentially adding $1,229,032.23 in yearly tax revenue for the city of Dallas (that is, if the assessments reflect the "green gradient").  Considering the park is looking for an additional $750,000 in yearly maintenance funding, perhaps we just found it without having to levy an additional PID fee.  The question is, can you pry it away from the Dallas general fund considering how over-burdened the city is with parks and infrastructure?

Natural Disasters, Resilience, and the Connx Between Social and Physical Integration

Postscript: 
Klinenberg responded to my piece and confirmed my suspicions, that Auburn-Gresham, despite being a higher crime area (at least at present) coped with the heat wave much better than Englewood, which had 11 times the heat-related deaths during the '95 heatwave.  Again, it was easy to assume based on the eroded physical fabric, but this post explored the morphology and dynamics why one area's physical interconnectivity eroded, which then eroded its social bonds, critical in Klinenberg's analysis to an area's resilience.
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I've written this intro several times of my recent few posts, but here it is again:

About two weeks ago, I attended the Resilient Cities forum organized by the Dallas Institute for the Humanities and held at Dallas City Hall's council chambers.  The second of two featured speakers was Eric Klinenburg, a sociology professor at NYU, and expert on city preparation and response to natural disasters. He was an interesting and engaging speaker, a rare combination amongst academics.

His talk focused on the two natural disasters his research/professional career led him to experience first hand, midwest heat wave of 1995 and the deaths in Chicago from it as well as Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey.

What was most interesting, at least to me and my area of study, was his conclusion about the core reason for deaths in Chicago, because it wasn't the heat that was solely responsible for the majority of the 750 deaths in the city.

While most of the deaths did come from largely poor and African American communities, Klinenberg's research found that the majority only occurred in certain neighborhoods fitting this demographic profile, but not others, some of which turned out to have some of the lowest incidence of heat-related deaths.  How can this be?  How can demographically similar neighborhoods be at both ends of the scale?

Instead, it was the cause of social isolation.  Klinenberg's point is that the real first responders are the friends and family around you and those social bonds help make individuals and, in turn, neighborhoods, more resilient.

So my question was then, what might be the connection between physical form and social isolation?  Does the design of our cities and their inherent networks lead to increased or decreased social and economic isolation?  And has Klinenberg found any connection yet?

So I first asked him via twitter whether he was familiar with Don Appleyard's work correlating social connections of San Francisco based on street vehicular traffic.  Now this has inherent limitations, not the least of which being place and time dependent of being in San Francisco in the late '70s.  However, what I take from Appleyard's work is: 1) there exists a disconnect between the way we design streets to maximize vehicular capacity and the purpose of cities, which is to facilitate social and economic exchange efficiently, and 2) there is a relationship between form and function of our streets, or physical connectivity, to social connectivity.  In the case of his work diagrammed below, the amount of through traffic actually decreased physical connectivity because residents could not as easily cross the street, the streets were less safe, and thus repulsive.

 

Klinenberg responded that he didn't know it well, but had seen the Atlantic Cities synopsis of it.  Because he had mentioned that demographically similar neighborhoods experienced drastically different results to the heat wave, I wanted to take a look at the physical form of those places.  So I asked him for a couple that fit this description and he provided two sets: North and South Lawndale (which is sort of West-ish Chicago) and Englewood and Auburn-Gresham, which is in South Chicago.   This post takes a look only at Englewood and Auburn-Gresham.  I haven't yet dug into the Lawndale sets.

I should at first note that I did not ask him for which areas of the two had more or less deaths and I don't want to know.  I want only to examine the physical and morphological aspects of these neighborhoods to see if that played a role in the social connections or lack thereof.




Above you can see (click to embiggen) the location of Englewood and Auburn Gresham in relation to the rest of Chicago.  I've highlighted the area with a red square, because this is the area I've mapped in DepthMap, Space Syntax's software to mathematically measure spatial integration and physical connectivity. I'll get to that at the end because I only wanted to use that to verify my visual findings from google earth.  I thought it interesting to use Space Syntax given their work correlating the London Riots to areas of physical segregation, and in turn, socio-economic isolation, primarily due to the dis-urban design of post-war public housing.  Double that down for the Paris riots of 2005.

Since I came across this article ranking the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country this weekend, I mapped the 3 of the 4 Chicago neighborhoods on the list that are within this southern study area.  You'll notice that the 4th and 16th most dangerous neighborhoods are in Auburn Gresham.  The 25th is across the highway from Englewood at the border of Washington Park and the sliver of Englewood disconnected by the highway.

So if that article is to be believed, Auburn Gresham is more dangerous than Englewood.

Here is a more zoomed in version of the two areas highlighted based on the boundaries found here.

Now let's get some of the other similarities out of the way aside from demographics.  Both are in Chicago's southside, both have a highway running down their east side and rail lines with larger rail yards (almost everywhere) running along their west side (though, Englewood has West Englewood to its immediate west before the rail yards).

It's worth noting that Chicago has one of the lowest highway lane miles per capita count of any city in the country.  In other words, the city is not very burdened by highways physically or economically.  On the other hand, it has many more at-grade and elevated train lines for the local street networks to either be severed or perform some form of engineering gymnastics to traverse.

The rail lines and rail yard locations are important because rail infrastructure can be just as destructive and pernicious to local networks and neighborhood fabric as highways.  And the rail yards can be more difficult to physically traverse with tunnels, bridges, overpasses, etc., though Chicago still does it quite often.  Nevertheless, even when tunnels or overpasses are used to connect road networks across rail lines and rail yards, there is still a negative "edge" created.

Along those lines, I find it most critical to identify neighborhood centers, which are for more identifiable and critical to neighborhood structure than boundaries which tend to be fuzzy (though we planners insist on focusing on boundaries, borders, and gateways in the same manner that we focus entirely too much on the visible ELEMENTS of cities as complex symptoms rather than the more critical components of systems: CONNECTIONS and PURPOSE).

There are macro-geographic issues at play, the entire "peninsula" of land here in relation to the rest of Chicago, socially and economically.  But to distinguish the difference between the two, we have to examine the micro.

Right off the bat, I pinpoint these two areas as the effective centers of gravity of the two neighborhoods, where the most important "high streets" intersect which instills the most demand and in turn the greatest supply of buildings and intensity of uses.

Also, worth noting is that Englewood appears to have better transit access, with green line coming directly into its neighborhood center of gravity.

So let's take a closer look at the centers:



Above is an axonometric bird's eye of W. 79th St. and S. Ashland Ave.  As you can see it is a pretty intact area, with some minor erosion along Ashland due to commercial vacancy and increased surface parking.  I say minor erosion with the full knowledge of what is to come, because for the most part, Auburn-Gresham (AG) still has fairly high quality urban form from both a road network and physical building standpoint, though the commercial corridors are seeing some in-migration of suburban form fast food drive-throughs, gas stations, and convenience stores.

Now for Englewood:

Oh my.  Clearly there have been some pretty drastic changes to this area over the years.  Whatever had been there before had been replaced by Kennedy-King Community College.





















Above is the same area in plan view.  The most obvious things that jump out are the diversion from the orthogonal grid, so omnipresent in Chicago, lots of vacant land, and lots of parking.




















Moving away from the core of the neighborhood we see pretty severe erosion of the residential blocks of Englewood, almost to the degree of Detroit.



















Another section of Englewood above.

However, it is not enough to merely suggest the lack of buildings led to social isolation.  We have to understand the deeper dynamics that led to the erosion and decay of the buildings and neighborhood fabric.  And to do so, we have to go back in time.

Using older aerials I wanted to go back in time and see if I can determine when the shift in geometries occurred.  So let's hop into the way back machine to 1999, much closer to the actual time of the '95 heat wave:





















Yikes!  It's even worse.  Here, let me highlight what somebody thought was a good idea at some point.






















You can still see the historic neighborhood core in place, far different from what is there now as shown above.  However, a 120' bypass/boulevard was built to circumnavigate the town center at suburban geometries for high speed travel.  To make matters worse, there is a shopping mall like ring road within this mini-beltway to service all the surface parking lots.  This is almost the exact diagram of many "town centers" aka malls without roofs built today, only that it happened in reverse order.  Let this be a lesson to what will happen to the majority of these faux town centers over the next 20 years (see: malls).

This engineering geometry effectively disconnected the surrounding residential neighborhood from the very center of gravity that it orbited.  If you buy Bill Hillier's explanation of cities as effectively co-planar with commercial corridors and nodes at one level and the fabric of residential neighborhoods enveloping those points of social and economic exchange as their centers of opportunity and amenity, then you understand that this commercial node was (one of the) raison d'etres for the neighborhood around it.  This raison d'etre was strangulated by traffic engineers trying to move cars and thus disconnecting, fragmenting and isolating the constituent parts of the neighborhood.

To ensure that this wasn't too new to have its wheels already in motion in the 90's I looked at the surrounding areas:



















And yep, by 1999 the erosion was already well under way, suggesting this work had been done a few years before.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough historic aerials/maps to track it to when the engineering of the street network was so badly damaged/redesigned.

To explain this in metaphor, think about a tree with the trunk being the neighborhood center of gravity and the branches and leaves being the surrounding neighborhood streets and houses.  What they did to this neighborhood was the equivalent of taking a pocket knife and cutting a ring around the trunk of the tree, through the bark, and into the cambium, the connective tissue that transmits nutrients to all parts of the tree.



When you cut the cambium all the way around, you have effectively killed the tree, though it displays no ill effects for some time.  Slowly but surely the leaves stop getting the nutrients they need from the roots, they dry, whither, and die and fall away.

As for Auburn Gresham, which we have shown to apparently be more dangerous and have lesser access to transit, its fabric is much more cohesive, intact, and durable over time (despite some creep of car-dependent uses).

As you see above and below, there are minimal differences between the 1999 and 2012 aerials.  I'm willing to bet there isn't much difference to the 1980 and 1960 aerials either.  Could physical resilience be indicative of spatial integration which therefore yields increased social and economic connectivity?

TRAFFIC

Because I brought up Appleyard's work, it is worth looking at the traffic counts.  None of the roads are particularly over-scaled with the exception of the odd Bypass/Boulevard around Englewood's neighborhood center (transit stop: Halsted Green), which has since been mildly rectified, narrowing it from 120' to ~45', removing some of the flying right turns, though it still hasn't been particularly well-stitched back to the surrounding neighborhoods.

The traffic counts suggest that Englewood has much lower numbers of vehicles using the "main and main" streets crossing at the respective neighborhood centers, with 8,000 per day moving east-west and 12,000 per day N-S.  On the other hand, at AG's core, more than 25,000 cars are moving through each day

The disparity between the two sets of traffic data are worth noting because the physical fabric seemingly suggests that this diverges from Appleyard's conclusions, that higher trafficked streets tend to have more social connections.  However, traffic is also an indicator of a certain amount of activity, of vibrancy provided the vehicles, their speed, and the size/scale of the street don't overwhelm the ability to cross the street and the street network to function for its intended purpose, of safe social and economic exchange.  

In other words, there are apples and oranges at work with regards to traffic counts given the context of where the counts are taken, the design of the streets, etc.  In this case, Englewood appears to be a decaying area, so of course there are lower traffic counts.  Traffic (of all forms) relates to desirability, provided it is suitably tamed from overwhelming the feel and function of the place.

SPACE SYNTAX

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to first examine the two areas in question visually before mapping the street and block network in DepthMap, which if you're unfamiliar is a mathematical model measuring degree of interconnectivity of networks, locally and globally.  As I often write, for areas to succeed, for them to be integrated while providing suitable opportunity for residents, they need both local and global connectivity.  However, the infrastructure of global connectivity often disrupts local networks.  What results is many of those top 25 high crime neighborhoods, because they are physically isolated from the rest of the city around them.

Above is the spatial integration model for the two neighborhoods with adjacent West Englewood and Back of the Yards also in there to provide context and comparison.  It is worth noting that like all data samples the more the better.  This would need all of Chicago to paint the full picture, likely suggesting that this entire "peninsula" is more fragmented and physically isolated than most other areas of the city (with the exception of extreme suburbs and exurbs).  However, it is still useful to compare the apples to apples, the two neighborhoods in question against one another.

The map above is local spatial integration.  Red are the most connected or "spatially integrated" to their surroundings; green and blue are poorly interconnected.  The global integration map is pretty similar.  The only difference is that the east-west roads drop a color code from red to orange, indicating the elongated, peninsular N-S shape favoring N-S aligned corridors linking larger and more areas.



Above, I highlighted to areas worth note.  The larger red outline consists of Englewood's core and everything from it east towards the many heavy infrastructure rail and highway lines to the east.  This is the most disconnected area of this part of the city, much of it has to do with the redesign of the streets in and around the Halsted Green area.  Though some seeds of decay were sewn from larger dynamics of the city and its infrastructure, the particular physical decay and related social isolation in comparison to surrounding areas was primarily due to the destruction of the historic urban fabric and the disconnecting of the neighborhood to its center of gravity.

On the other hand, there is a small area just northeast of the AG core where the fabric noticeably breaks down.  So let's take a closer look at that area:

You'll notice a blue line across the top, that's a rail line that is crossed by every second or third north-south street.  The connections are still there, but diminished compared to other parts of the network.  That's part 1, but not why this area jumps out as green/blue.  What I want to point out is what looks to be public housing Loomis and 76th.  The problem isn't that it is public housing, but rather the design of it, that it clips the grid and breaks up the street network similar to the public housing mentioned in discussion of the London Riots.  Now this is much smaller and disconnected to a lesser degree than the more (in-)famous Cabrini Green and similar 'towers in the park' style public housing developments around the country.

If anything, I think this line of study relating physical networks to social networks is critical to understanding cities and their potential resilience, and that the strength of the physical networks are the most critical component for both sudden, short-term disruptions by way of natural phenomena and disasters as well as long-term, incremental social and economic decay apparent only over decades of change.
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To come later this week:  I will take a similar look at the North and South Lawndale areas to determine whether physical form played a role in the social isolation deemed guilty of far too many preventable deaths during the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave.

Resilience, is it what?

I've mentioned this a few times already, that I was able to attend a Resilience forum held at City Hall and put on by the Dallas Institute.  The speakers were great.  The panels not so much.  Because the speakers weren't local and not experts on Dallas (or just being polite), the discussion never veered from abstract to pointed as it relates to Dallas.

Thomas Homer Dixon's discussion of complexity was turned into the simple and tired false dichotomy of trees vs development.  Developers are simply playing the game to win.  They build where the rules of the game say the opportunity is.  And for the most part, that's sprawl.

Eric Klinenberg's expertise is on city responses to natural disasters and the understanding of why certain parts of cities fare better or worse than others during and after.  However, natural disasters are fairly random and at the same time inevitable.  But also rare.

While we should be prepared to deal with natural disasters, we're better off designing a city that can rebound rather than setting up various bureaucracies or top down regulations to control things that may or may not be tangentially related to natural disasters.  Design it directly into the DNA.  Don't control it.

And that's part of the problem.  Natural disasters are immediate.  And rare.  Far more towns and cities have vanished by quasi-internal issues via slow, incremental decay and dying off, whether economic or through resource depletion or whatever. Where the economy didn't diversify suitably from their original homogeneous  established raison d'etre.

Resource/economy are important in complex systems because those are at the root of the system, they are the original purpose.  Afterwards, that purpose must diversify.  Original purpose tends to be highly ephemeral.  How many port cities still have huge ports and stocks of workers working the docks?  How many strip mining towns still exist?

Point being, the PURPOSE of the city as a system has to diversify as does the economy.  It's more about quality of life and consistent ability and opportunity to participate in the city as a platform for social and economic exchange.

I would argue Dallas is pretty diversified in its economy.  Though the counter-argument can be made that far too much is tied up into the development and finance sectors associated and built specifically on the idea of "growth."  It is dependent upon growth.  This is a good thing and a bad thing.

First, the city can't grow forever.  So there has to be some repurposing of these industries (this cap could be approaching in the various and interconnected forms of food, water, and oil supply).  However, this industry, in place as it is, needs to do what it does.  Except it can't go on doing what it does as it does it.  We can't grow further outward.  The branches on the tree can only get so long before the water can no longer reach the leaves, which then whither and die as the branch eventually falls off as it becomes dry and brittle.

Instead, this growth industry has to be redirected inward towards a more sustainable development pattern.  One where the tax base can support itself and its infrastructural apparati.

So what is important is examining the levels of diversity at the other levels of complexity, PURPOSE has been diversified, but what about INTERCONNECTIONS and ELEMENTS?  Considering most people in the metroplex live in unwalkable environments (I estimate about 98.5%).  This matters not for the walkability, but the social connections made possible by form and proximity.  This is where it ties back to Klinenberg's thesis, that the very basics of resilience come from invisible human bonds.  As Donald Appleyard's work shows, it is the form of the city and the transportation networks that dictate degree of social contact.

From a more anecdotal sense, just fly in or out of DFW.  As your taking off or landing, look down.  Get to know the incredible and overwhelming sameness of it all.  The lack of neighborhoods replaced by the presence of generic sameness of houses made of sticks and spit jammed onto cul-de-sacs of social isolation. Drive the highways and arterials.  Pretend you don't know where you are and ask, "where am I?"  You probably could be anywhere.

In that sense, our ELEMENTS are not diverse enough at all.  Fortunately, ELEMENTS are the least important.  Unfortunately, too many focus strictly on ELEMENTS, the things of the city we touch and see, like shimmering new towers, and elegant bridges, and other knick-knacks, disconnected and alien to the underlying ecologies of place.  As if you put a fully garlanded christmas tree in the middle of a community garden.

But what about INTERCONNECTIONS, the physical infrastructure that allows for the invisible social and economic bonds to exist?  That of the top 20 metropolitan areas in the country, only Detroit has a higher percentage of driving commuters.  There is no positive way to spin that.  It's a homogeny of transportation.  If you lack choice, you lack adaptability, a key component to resilience.  Also, it's never good to keep statistical company with Detroit.  Before you object, consider that cities must be thought of in the fourth dimension of time.  The seeds of the future are already sewn.  But they can also be altered.

Point being, Dallas has the basics of long-term resilience, PURPOSE.  However, we have to diversify Interconnections and Elements (which will diversify inevitably in conjunction with Interconnections).  It is Improved Interconnections, so that we're not all so far apart, taking up so much land, so much water, and polluting the air that will allow us improved social connections.  That will preserve more land so that agricultural and food production can happen closer to the people.  So that we can preserve more water and have more natural areas protected that can better filter rain water and runoff before it enters the ground water.  So that we can drive less and pollute the air.

Improved air, water, food, less oil dependence, and improved platform for social connections.  Only then will Dallas actually be resilient, or at least, moreso.  That the Resilient Cities forum never took the step to this level, it took a steep downward drop in importance once the invited speakers ceded way for locals to totally not get it.

The Music Left in the Broken Record

It's time to trot this simple diagram back out for a quick run around.  If you don't remember it, it shows the "inner-loops" of both downtown Dallas and Manhattan, which despite terminologies of the various sub-centers within downtown, is effectively the equivalent of "downtown" in context of the multi-scaled city, in this case, all of NYC.  That's why inner loops matter.  Point stated is that within this point, heavy, long-trip infrastructure WILL NOT disrupt the local networks that make the city functional, efficient, and desirable in its core purpose as a platform for social and economic exchange.

I'm using this again, because recently I've been counting up the highway lane miles per capita (actually, per 100,000) of just the core cities.  All other data I've assembled, uses metropolitan areas because that's how you find it in census data and TTI and various other aggregators, as you can find here and here..  It matters from this perspective, because the core cities often bear the infrastructural burden for larger areas, hence often the need for metropolitan governing bodies to help offset the cost burden of the core city.  However, using the region to help fund the infrastructure at the core, doesn't offset the negative impact that the large scale, long-trip infrastructure still has on the local networks necessary for 1) daily life and 2) real estate value.  The disruption of networks creates edges that deflate land value.

The core is still bearing that burden while the highway infrastructure subsidizes the commute and in turn the real estate to live outside the city.  Meanwhile, the city then has to deal with the congestion, the pollution, the traffic accidents, and the deflated land values at the core.  This goes for trains too.  Rail lines also disrupt local, short trip networks when they are at grade.  This is why subway lines are buried, why heavy rail lines only enter cities like Paris and London to a certain point, and why Milan has moved one of their major rail stations a few blocks further away from the core to create more high density, local network derived real estate.  The high density and the local network part are related, provided "reach" is still high.  Reach is all the destinations that you can get to or can get to you, often meaning there is a high density context around.

Above is Paris. Highways are in red, rail lines in black.  Notice the rail lines only get so far before they either go underground or reach a Gare.

All of this brings me to the actual data I've assembled by actually measuring the length of highways within city boundaries, counting the widths at every mile or so interval (the lane totals tend to be pretty predictable when the shift wider or narrower, usually at other highway/major road interchanges).  Then I compared these to the latest population numbers for the specific cities.

Here is what I've accrued thus far, the city by city data tends to find their way into categories, as you'll see:

City      |       Lane Miles per 100,000

London:  2.37
Vancouver:  3.13
Barcelona:  5.38
Paris: 8.15
Stockholm: 13. 72

Manhattan:   10.83

Portland: 38,84

Detroit: 59.31
Austin: 66.53
St. Louis: 67.54

Houston:  91.40
Dallas: 96.38

That seems pretty bad.  Really bad.  Until...

Kansas City: 147.74

This is interesting because KC and StL are far and away the worst from a metro standpoint.  However, KC's metro actually drops their city number and StL the greater burden is actually exterior to the city proper.  Some of this has to do with StL's boundaries being quite small.

But this is bad, why?  The simple equation is cost burden over tax base, a burden which will become increasingly localized as taxpayers become less interested in bailing out people elsewhere.  This is Thatcher's America and you're on your own.  However, the scariest part is that the majority of these roads (on the extreme end of the list) are still on their first life span, funded primarily by federal government.  What happens when the bill is due to replace them?  While there is some federal money to be had, they won't kick in the 90% which is pretty typical of new highways/interstates.

Making matters worse is that the CBO projects the federal highway account will have a shortfall of $92 billion by 2023.

So what about state money?  TxDOT is already swimming in $14-18 billion in debt depending upon whose numbers you read.  Add to that TxDOT says they need $1 billion in additional funds just for maintenance on top of their current $10 billion yearly budget.  And (!), TxDOT says they need another $3 billion a year to fight the bogeyman of congestion.  The result is more taxes with lower tax base.

And all of these people in charge see the only problem as CONGESTION and the only solution is MORE CAPACITY, which then feeds itself, further disconnecting people from destinations all but ensuring more driving, more costs on both individuals and public coffers, and MORE CONGESTION thus the need for MORE CAPACITY.

How do we stop the cycle of stupid?

Well, for starters we don't listen to certain planners who are stuck in the 1980s despite whatever credentials they possess.  Jane Jacobs wrote about credentialism in her final book.  I suggest you give that a read.  Also,  we shouldn't listen to tiresome fools like Joel Kotkin who want you to live in their particular vision of the world.  Or Robert Bruegman.  Yet these people keep finding themselves on panels.

Which brings me to my final point.  I was at the Resilient City forum put on by Dallas Institute for the Humanities.  The keynote speakers were very good as I was live tweeting the event.  Particularly Eric Klinenberg.  The local panelists with the keynotes were not terribly informative.  Not at all actually.

One of the reasons is that the issue of resilience being dependent upon connections came up, yet only once did the issue of infrastructure get brought up and that was in the Q&A period by someone in the very back who asked, "have any cities ever tried to move traffic away from the core to make more room for people and parks?"  I'm paraphrasing based on a hazy memory, but the key points are there, particularly the part about "any cities," ie he was asking for specifics and lessons.

So naturally the panel turned to the nominal city planner on the panel (because they would know!), who then did not mention any cities(!!) but then said if we did that all of the vitality would move out to 635.  Wha?  That's it.  That was the entirety of the expertise provided.  Little more than antiquated conventional wisdom.  There was no mention different kinds of traffic, regional and local.  There was no differentiating intracity roads from intercity roads.

There was no mention of the cities around the country that HAVE differentiated the bad traffic from good traffic, that have found various ways to improve their cars while nudging down demand for vehicular travel in the core.  There are the congestion charges of London and Stockholm.  There are the highway removals in San Francisco and Seoul and a variety of other places.  None of which have ever regretted the move.  None.  Instead, we got a shovel full of the conventional wisdom that blamed (and apparently continues to blame) beltways on the death of Main Street, which is quite oversimplified.

This is why I, as a planner, and the general public has so little faith left in the profession of planning and city building.  Their hopes are inflated by pretty pictures and 9 month public processes and books that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and then, what?  And then nothing.  Or some bond package proposals that add some superficial decoration masquerading as urban design.  Nothing about actually shifting real estate markets, opportunity areas for investment, how broke public agencies can leverage assets to do so, or how to increase general livability and opportunity for the citizenry.

Instead, nope.  "We have to be worried about pushing traffic and vitality outwards.  That cow is well out of the barn.  The retail has followed the rooftops of pushing it out already.  If we want a resilient city, we need a connected city, like was mentioned.  Or a network city, like was mentioned at the simultaneous panel, which also unfortunately thought network only in the most superficial, digital sort of way.  We can't make connections unless we're closer to each other.  That means we need an infrastructure of resilience, that favors the short trip, that doesn't mandate every person buy and maintain a car, that doesn't bankrupt our treasuries simply to build MORE CAPACITY, that actually looks more like the cities at the top of the list.  It's time for some actual vision and leadership Dallas.

The Depth and Complexity of the Bottom-Up vs. the Facile, Over-(Under-)Planned, Top-Down

One of these gets it:

Or...

found at.

You can't control the uncontrollable.  But that apparently won't stop designers from trying to design every detail of things they can never fully grasp.  Everyone else is the expert of their lives and surroundings.  Cities are about a platform for that and empowering choice.  Or photoshopping heavy agricultural uses on top of a city, nevermind the structures necessary to support the weight of soil, nor the need for depth of soil and crop rotation necessary to sustain fertile soil chemistry, nor the dirty rainwater run-off.  Will just capture it.  And shower with it or something.  Techno!

Mark Gorton Droppin' Knowledge

Some tweets coming out of an Active Transportation conference in Oregon so I don't lose them.  (Yes, this blog is my filing cabinet. Why do you ask?)

Houston: 95% of trips by motor vehicle; 14% of metro GDP spent on transpo. Copenhagen: 54%/4%. Let's save GDP! #OATS13 

Portland's net benefits from bike investments since 1991: 8.3:1 ROI. Would you invest in that return rate? #OATS13

US=wealthy society but if we waste enough getting 20-30 cents on the $ in autocentric transpo, we will bankrupt ourselves. -Mark Gorton

Powerful segments of society love large infrastructure projects. Use that: Call for separated bike/walk infrastructure. -Gorton #OATS13 

"Traffic is a form of pollution. We need to recognize it as such.... Explicitly seek to reduce it." -Mark Gorton/#OATS13

He's summing it up pretty neatly.
Follow along that hashtag or @barbchamberlain

Policy Coerced Car Ownership > Congestion Costs

Yet oddly, we don't bat an eye that the former feeds the latter:

Keep this in mind when highway builders or politicians trot out the fear tactic of the congestion bogeyman.

*Data from Tod Litman of VTPI.  I simply rearranged it to pile up all of the related costs necessitated by our current supply-side road building policies.  I'm even being generous and not included Roadway Construction Costs or Traffic Services in the sum, suggesting they are basic infrastructural costs of doing business for cities as facilitators of social and economic exchange.  Though, I do suspect that they'd be significantly lower per capita with halfway decent policy.

The Fatal Flaw in the Trinity Business Plan

The other day, Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer wrote another piece on the Trinity River Corridor speculating that the Toll Road and everything else to do with the Trinity is a land deal.  He's absolutely right.  All of city building is at some root level an exercise in uplift.  Except when it fails.

And that the real problem with what all of the planners and business owners focused on the Trinity are getting wrong.  That the potential for high-rise exists simply because of the existence of a plan for some kind of waterfront-ish type of park.

Here are the words:

But some people who are experts in those areas think at least some of the Halff concept was right. For example, their renderings showed dense high-rise development along the river. Last week I talked to Larry Beasley of Vancouver, the international city designer who is working on our Trinity River questions in between other things like helping redesignMoscow. In some ways Beasley's vision of a redeveloped Stemmons corridor mirrored what I saw all those years ago on the conference room walls at Halff. 

Beasley said the big thing is being up high enough to be able to see the river over the tops of the levees. Otherwise the river and the greenbelt don't exist as far as adjacent development is concerned. 

"There's one thing that seems absolutely evident to me," he said. "The sites near the Trinity need very high density. We need to get buildings up beyond the levees so that from a market point of view you can really enjoy the added value of being adjacent to the Trinity recreation corridor, particularly as it's further developed."

What Beasley doesn't seem to get is that:

1. you have to have enough demand to get buildings that tall, 
2. the economics have to work to finance buildings to construct them that tall (primarily due to point 1, 
3. the ground plane has to be pleasant enough to help drive demand, 
4. for the ground plane to be active and pleasant enough, (this is the key point) there has to be enough land available to create a critical mass suitable for a full neighborhood unfractured and fragmented by barriers, and 
5. rivers are also barriers, though not as destructive to the nearby fabric as highways and railroads.

This is not Vancouver, which made the conscious decision to never allow highways into the city back in the 60's.  Instead, this is a hollowed out Sun Belt city whose fractured and fragmented core provided the chutes and ladders for people to escape the dessicated urban core.  This is why I'm particularly and increasingly skeptical of "experts" from out of town, unfamiliar with Sun Belt real estate dynamics.  I suspect this contributes to the general supply-side thinking that undermines our efforts towards building a truly vibrant, interconnected city.

"Just build some high-rises like Vancouver (which didn't have freeways, never hollowed out its core, has amazing urban fabric, a variety of transportation options, and ridiculously beautiful topography) and they will come."  This unfortunately, is the same flawed thinking that fueled Victory, entirely unwitting of its own structural flaws.

All rivers are barriers.  This is why we, the royal and historic we, celebrate besting these barriers with bridges and ceremonious architecture.  However, even with those bridges, urban rivers still create border vacuums and the vibrancy, density, and demand tends to be on the perpendiculars (those roads linking cores of neighborhoods), not the linears (running along the border vacuum).

The nicer the amenity, the less negative effect this border vacuum will have plus how will connected development will be to said amenity.  Unfortunately, all we have is hopes and promises for the Trinity, but even worse than it not being an amenity, is that the areas around it are preposterously fragmented.  The single most fragmented area in the city.

Between the existing, proposed, and soon to be underconstruction highways and railroads that carve the city up into little pieces, unable and too small to support life, all of the land on the northeast side of the Trinity is far less valuable than people seem to think it is.  No matter what the competition "to connect to the Trinity" thinks is possible.  These areas have more global connectivity than they could ever need, but what they lack is local connectivity.

Also, there is the pernicious, deleterious effect of not just the edge condition created by overscaled barriers of "long-trip" infrastructure.  It is simply undesirable to be next to highways due to noise, smell, pollution, and unsafety of the physical environment.  Furthermore, because the movement patterns are all necessarily car-based, there is intense pressure on the land to support spatially inefficient cars in the way of parking.  So you get the eroded edges as shown above.

So let's compare these areas to Victory, which despite its myriad of flaws and improper planning, its biggest and most decisive was that it was and is, in effect, an island within a sea of cars.  Again, it has all the global connectivity any place could ever want, but very little local connectivity.  The kind of connectivity that creates the multiplier effect of proximity and clustering.  It is entirely drive-to, even for office workers 1/4 mile away in the Crescent.  All places need the stabilizing supportive tissue of surrounding neighborhood residential, which is far less susceptible to cannibalization, particularly in outward-pressurized dendritic street networks.

Again, Victory delivered high-rises and density, supply.  But, no demand.  Why?  It has all the same amenities as everywhere else that is near downtown with plenty of "long-trip" infrastructure.  What's missing is the critical mass of area without barrier, the multiplier effect of local connectivity, which makes for desirable places to live, and for others to visit.  And thus, stability and demand.

Plopping towers into areas even more fragmented and less connected is flawed from the start.  It is strictly supply-sided and as we should have learned, that does nothing for filling up the buildings.  Hopefully lenders will realize this soon.

Instead, the future value is in areas of greater critical mass, primarily West and East Dallas, and to a lesser extent, the Cedars.  This is why I don't particularly care about the road.  The potential simply doesn't exist for a Vancouver built along side it.  At least not the downtown side.

On the other hand, if we look at the success of uptown, we can see that even though it has a number of barriers (75, the cemetery, Cedar Springs and Turtle Creek) there is still a critical mass where multiple neighborhoods, each with their own center can combine and make something greater than the some of the parts, which in this case, we could deem a district.  Or, "uptown."  McKinney, helpfully calmed by the slow moving but lovable MATA trolley, provides the seam, rather than the barrier, which it easily could be.

Urbanism is fundamentally about connectivity.  It is the multiplier that drives value and amplifies potential synergies.  Two or more buildings can come together and interact with a street or plaza and become a "place."  Something greater than the sum of parts.  Multiple places come together and make neighborhoods.  Or we can put a wall between them and both suffer.  Two or more neighborhoods can seamlessly interface and become something greater than the sum of their parts and be a district.  Districts come together and make a town.  And on goes the hierarchy.

Urbanism at its core IS connectivity.  Not density.  Density is merely the response to high degrees of connectivity, ie which creates opportunity and thus demand.  However, what is missing is local connectivity, we sacrifice it for the long-trip infrastructure and global connectivity, which fractures rather than unites.  It also proves to be unwieldy to maintain to maintain, physically and fiscally, while subtracting from value rather than adding.  We let it undermine local connectivity because the business interests of the area are too stuck in their ways that made a fortune at the edge, which needed regional connectivity.  But that only raised its value from 0 to 2.  To fill high-rises, we need demand levels of 10 out of 10.

Without it, we can never have neighborhoods and in turn, we can't have magical high-rises plopped from the sky or the wild imagination of planners utterly disconnected from realities of the market and actual urbanism (or from bad business deals).

DFW Job Growth and Sprawl-sided Transportation Agencies

Brookings has a new study entitled Job Sprawl.  It's about where job growth (or loss) has occurred between the 2000 and 2010 census.  More specifically, whether the gain/loss happened within 3 miles of Central Business Districts (what we once called downtowns before they became increasingly single-purpose glorified office parks, a city's swan song), whether they happened between 3 and 10 miles, or greater than 10 miles from CBDs.

Here is the interactive feature.

Here is DFW's cut sheet.

And here is the full PDF report.

And here is a quick map I made to show the critical information:

In the full report, you'll see that nationally, DFW is the 5th most sprawling metropolitan area (MSA) in the country.  Trailing Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston.  Do any of those places have anything in common?  Besides stupid people calling this "growth."

Brookings only considered Fort Worth and Dallas (primary) as the only two CBDs.  DFW lost 215,165 jobs within 10 miles of those respective downtowns, illustrated by the little circles I made.  For Dallas, that's basically everything within 635.  Everything else gained 162,731 jobs.  This is a bad sign.  As I have said, echoing what Jeff Speck wrote in his book, Walkable City, urban cores are competing against their suburbs moreso than they compete against each other.  This is what killed Detroit.

Jobs follow housing.  Real Estate markets are the invisible hand following the invisible arm of transportation network design.  Our transportation agencies actively decentralize our cores.  All of them.  Even the smaller ones that Brookings didn't recognize.  Yet the market WANTS increased walkability and to reconcentrate for the very purpose humans created cities, for social and economic exchange.  To improve quality of life.  To experience life and share it with each other.  To create wealth.  Our transportation planning undermines all of that.  ALL. OF. IT.

The result is that everything is further and further apart, requiring people to own cars just to get to work.  That's a tax which sends money out of the local economy, much of it overseas.  Then we have to further tax ourselves to build the excessive infrastructure to keep up with the outward expansion and dispersal.  Eventually the local economies implode.  Again, ask Detroit.

At some point, Dallas and Fort Worth have to stand up to the regional and statewide transportation agencies actively working against them, against main streets, against walkability, and our downtowns.  There is a tension between what the market wants and the transportation planning and design working against the market.  They're fighting against each other.

City form follows the prime directive.

*Addendum: I've sent an email to the author asking to clarify the methodology.  The data shows DFW losing 71,000 jobs, but we've gained 1.2 million over that period.  This doesn't make sense unless jobs in relation to population is factored.  I'm not exactly sure how that math plays out, but theoretically it seems to make some sense.  I'll post what explanation I receive.

Cousins, Chaos, and Roundabouts

Late the other night I happened to catch Louis C.K.'s recent HBO special.  This part in particular about drivers transforming into horrible people had me in tears from laughter and truthbombs.  "You are driving a weapon."



It's an entirely competitive environment, to the point of sociopathology, that dehumanizes every other thing behind those other windshields and boxes of steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber.  Honk honk.

And then there is this:



Order out of chaos.  You have to make eye contact.  With pedestrians, with other drivers.  You have to drive slowly enough to not be dangerous.  To yourself and others.  Because what an insurance bill that would be amirite?  You have to behave like a human.  And people do.

With that said, that brings up a topic that arose last night.  Can a roundabout be bike friendly?  They're generally not particularly pedestrian friendly, but when designed right and for more pedestrian-friendly environments the speeds are slow enough that the conflict points aren't too bad.

The general issue is that cars never stop at roundabouts.  So while safer than many types of intersections (though not safer than four-way stops), I only like using roundabouts at punctuation points where the design character must shift from car-centric to pedestrian-centric or when odd geometries need some orderly device to make the development to public realm interface work better.

But that doesn't answer the question of how to bikes interact with roundabouts in a safe and comfortable manner?  There seems to be two general solutions since the dedicated lane adds more conflict points than subtracts them when entering these types of intersections.  One is to either share with cars or share with pedestrians.  I think I like the share with pedestrians strategy the most as long as it suitably calms the traffic via engineering and calming devices:


However, this isn't even the best possible image.  It's rather suburban and creates a secondary roundabout for bikes linking various trails together, not actual bike lanes.  Though that can be accomplished simply by tightening up the diagram.

In any case, the logical conclusion is that roundabouts just aren't that urban and should be used sparingly.  But progressive traffic engineers love them because they don't stop traffic.  Cars remain the priority.

Crowdsourcing Real Estate and Chickens and Eggs

I kicked around this idea a few years ago with somebody, but neither of us were/are on the frontlines of investment and development while maintaining our day jobs.  I think we were talking about how to get permanent infill retail structures into some of the modernist downtown buildings with barren 60's brutalist groundfloor arcades (or arcade type things).  Like a lot of brainstorming it simply died on the vine because we were merely kicking around ideas quite tangential to our daily efforts.

So today I came across a site called fundrise.com which is like a kickstarter or kiva, but for profit and for assembling real estate investment, which is kind of great for people a little hesitant to jump on the ebbs and flows of the market or more currently, gold.  Rather than sitting on the sidelines with cash on hand, the idea to put it into improving your neighborhood seems to me like a great one, one that I'm quite interested in.  They also have another site, popularise, which crowdsources ideas for what to do with various properties.

All of which brings me to a recent blog entry of theirs which I wanted to explore a bit (and did in their comments) on anchors, specialty grocers, and the inevitable chicken/egg question of residential and rooftops:

The first issue is that chicken/egg is inescapable.  Because these things are in cities, and cities are complex, and like all complex systems, they are built upon interdependencies, it's not really that one must be before the other, but both need each other and then help push the other forward.

From my experience, stores like Whole Foods have begun to look at a mashup of data that I call, "dollar density."  It's not as important for them, what median income is, but how many households there are that each need their daily and weekly groceries.  Only then does it matter what the median incomes are, so they know there is a market immediately available that can afford their prices.

For me, I look at dollar density as an indicator of desirability.  These are people that can afford to live just about anywhere in the city, but choose that particular census tract/neighborhood because they want to be there, in the self-selection and self-organization sense that then gives neighborhoods their expression of character.

When grocers are looking at these numbers for dollar density, they see areas on the rise, where people are moving-in, that fit their demographic, they're clearly a follower.  As well they should.  If they were to move in first, they'd be foundering for a while until the density that they drive arrives.  Instead, if they catch it on the upswing, they benefit from the recent growth, while then help leverage further development and increased density.  Furthermore, by catching that upswing at the right moment, they can get into markets and establish a beachhead before competitors.

YaGoogling

Just played around for a few minutes on google trends to see what people are googling and where.  It turns out, of Austin, Dallas, and Houston, Dallas tends to google terms like "walkable," "bike friendly," and "urbanism," the least of the three.  Does that mean anything?  I'm not sure.  I do think there is still a hierarchy of southern cities that has yet to fully shake out.  They're all young, which will emerge as the "capital of the south?"  I've always felt Dallas had the most advantages, but seems like the least focused on doing so.

What might be more concerning is that nationwide, googling "urbanism" is on a pretty severe downward curve.  Could that simply be that more people now know what it is?

On Infrastructure Banks and Symposiums

I rather enjoyed this NextCity piece on Chicago's new infrastructure bank.  I really like the concept in that it forces the city to be smart in figuring out how the investment pays off, what to invest in, and increased transparency, all of which would be necessary 1) to draw private investment and 2) because the taxpayers deserve it.  Chicago has been doing a lot of great things since Emanuel took over in terms of rewiring the DNA of the city rather than focusing first on bricks and mortar and other "quick wins."  They're in pretty deep financially and they have to repurpose the city for the long-term.

At the end of the day, if we don't invest in infrastructure, we're screwed.  If we continue to invest in the wrong infrastructure, we're screwed.  The key is setting up the mechanisms to deliver the right infrastructure in the right places to serve the city for the long-term.  Oh, and getting the right leaders in the right places.  That matters too.  And they have that at several levels, including transportation.
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This Friday is the David Dillon Symposium, entitled this year "The Networked City," which is heartening in a way that we're at the very least titling things in a direction towards what we really should be talking about.
It also happens to be the core of what I write about.

Like here:
Converging Parallel Geographies of the Digital and Physical Worlds
Intersection Density and Decay
Planes, Trains, and Autos & the Paths Less Travelled
Inaccuracy of Supply-Side Congestion Combat
The Intersection as the Atom of the City
The Value and Efficiency of Small Block Structure
Trams, Trollies, Trains, and Trampolines
Dendritic vs. Reticulated Networks: A study in market forces of networks
What is the Prime Directive?

I'm happy that the dialogue is shifting.  I'm also excited about Mark Lamster, the new architecture critic for the DMN who recently said this:

Lamster: “Yes, I think Dallas has become very attached to what we call ‘the architecture of genius.’ And I think now it’s a question of figuring out how we make the city a more humane, connected place, a city that’s a network rather than a city of discrete objects and roads.”

This tells me that he gets it.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to catch any of it.  Instead, I'll be at the other event which unfortunately was scheduled at the same time, same day:

What Makes a Resilient City?

Though we can talk about it all we want.  We can also plan about it all we want.  But can we get the right leadership in the right places at city, region, and state levels to begin building an infrastructure of the future that will allow the city of the future?

Detroit, Redux

NYT has a good piece on Detroit and Dan Gilbert's efforts to revitalize it.  The best bits get into the reasons for the decay, which are more accurate than the typical, reflexive answer: auto industry.  But alas, it is far more complicated than that.

There are many causes — the decline of the auto industry and white flight among them — but the one that Professor Galster returns to time and again is development in the suburbs. 

“The villains are the rules of the game,” he said. “Developers find it far more profitable to build in farmland in the suburbs than in vacant land in the core. It’s easier to acquire big sites without worrying about hidden basements, or gas stations, or a reputation for violence, or corruption or inefficiency or the potential racism of your customers.” 

It makes financial sense for developers, but it is disemboweling the city, he said. Which is why he believes that without reform to housing and development laws, neither Mr. Gilbert nor the emergency manager, nor any combination of earthly forces, can salvage Detroit.

If Detroit isn't thinking about some highway tear-outs, particularly the rather useless 375 through downtown, they're not trying hard enough.

The Tales of Griffindor or just Griffin Street

I can't believe I never thought of this before.  I suppose it's one of those things that afflicts us all, that infrastructure is static and inevitable.  That there is nothing we can do about it in our learned helplessness.  After all, we're told these are "improvements" and "needed" and "gotta move those cars" and "get this here road up to level of service A."  The implication of course being that LOS A is a good thing.  Because it isn't an F.  Needless to say, just about every great road in any city operates at a D level or "worse" in the parlance of transportation planners, that rare species that cares not for the negative externalities and indirect casualties of their war on the bogeyman of congestion happening outside of their incredibly narrow scope of view.  Those casualties are our cities.

All of this brings me to Griffin Street, the road that was relocated, I'm guessing sometime around the time Woodall Rodgers Freeway was constructed to accommodate the distance needed to cover the elevation change for the exit ramp to traverse down to the city streets from the elevated freeway.  No matter.  The history is relevant.  What matters is not why it's there, but rather the present of what has it done and what is a preferred future for this property?  How can we leverage something better particularly as a few projects have died on this New Griffin site and as Tim Headington is poking around the Field Street surface parking lots.

Macro-effect of disconnectivity displaced people from downtown to the ever increasingly bleeding edge of sprawl.  The micro-effect is also interesting.  Griffin, acting as the access route to/fro the regional highway system displaced Field as a primary arterial, though Field has retained its size.  The new Griffin killed any existing or potential development and vitality by slicing through developable blocks and carving them into uselessness.  And by doing so it also killed Field by sapping it of its lifeblood.

Field no longer has the traffic to fill that capacity however and in turn, everything around it dies so that highest and best use of it too is as surface parking lot.  Looking specifically at the traffic counts Field runs about 9,000 vehicles per day or about 29% of the capacity its built for.  Griffin has quite a bit of noise year to year but it seems to average around 15,000 to 18,000 cars per day or about 35% of its 6-lane capacity.  You can also bet the vast majority of this is not local traffic.

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We're left with a decrepit old fire station, a 7-11 gas station, a fedex store, and a drive-thru bank (that if memory serves might be closed?  I don't know.  I don't have much use for drive-thru banks and frankly loathe any that occupy downtown land.).  All of that on the 14 acres the New Griffin swath cut through, presumably knocking several buildings down and condemning private land.  All in the name of "public good."  Unfortunately, we're not better off for it.  Unless a few drive-thrus seems like a good use of downtown land to you.

Let's take a look at how to kill 2 birds with one stone, ie leveraging both the Griffin area (by adding land) and the Field area (by adding traffic).  Excuse the incredibly quick, sketchy photoshop work:

Meet the "New Griffin."  It was designed like it's a suburban road with suburban radii and curvatures.  Especially good for traffic to drive much to fast for the urban, downtown context.  Unless you want to eradicate pedestrians like the pests that they are.

Here's an old map I made comparing outdoor cafes to overly large road radii.  Cafes are indicator species of pleasant people space + critical pedestrian activity.  Cafes as businesses won't last very long if people aren't walking by.  Business needs traffic, just not the kind that moves fast and kills and pollutes.

Above is curb cuts.  Design streets for cars and you'll instill demand for 1) parking and 2) access to that parking.  Cars have a nasty way of diving in and out of parking facilities without much regard for human life.  Gotta beat that traffic.  The red spots are areas of heavy concentration of curb cuts.  Coincidentally they are also areas of high parking.  The Griffin/Field area is the big red oval on top.  Green is Main Street.  Main Street is a highly popular, pedestrian friendly place.  It actually feels something like a city.  For three blocks.

Here is the parking along the New Griffin.  Yellow is surface, orange is parking garage.  There are actually more garages than shown as some exist under and/or within other buildings.  I'm only highlighting strictly parking facilities.  There are quite a bit.  And (far too many) people think the key to revitalizing downtown is more parking.  We're almost there...if the goal is one big parking lot.

Let's do some restitching.  Abandoning New Griffin yields approx. 4 acres of right-of-way land which can be packaged into a deal to leverage private investment and development of this land.  The exit ramp, rather than winding around to meet grade below probably should be redesigned to meet Akard, which actually rises up to a similar level as the highway dives down below.  This is more contextually and spatially efficient rather than cloverleaves, which should never ever ever ever ever find their way into downtowns.

Hey look!  It's buildings.  But not by magic like most planning.  We're actually repurposing the street network in the direction needed by both the Field and Griffin sites.  Field needs more activity, Griffin needs more developable land.

Also, don't pay much attention to the layout and design.  For rhetorical purposes only.  The only thought that went into it was 1) restitch grid 2) apportion developable, walkable block sizes 3) throw a couple of open spaces in there.  In this case I gave the aquarium and FountainPlace new front door open spaces.

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With Field being retrofitted back to a two-way road, it can and should return to function for the size and traffic of the primary street it was originally intended as.  By abandoning the New Griffin and realigning it as the Old Griffin we accomplish several things:

• The Field properties have increased value and viability as mixed-use commercial and residential developments.  Right now, without the traffic the only value here is as residential.  Tim Headington should like that idea.
• Abandoning New Griffin gives the city leverage (in the way of 4 acres of land to toss into a deal) for packaging a partnership deal with the current private landowners to develop this land to add new residential which would support West End, Victory, and the new Field commercial/mixed-use mentioned previously.
• Griffin can better tie this part of downtown with Victory by bending the existing right-of-way which sits in the surface parking lots north of Woodall Rodgers into Market Street through Victory.
• The Fire Station can be relocated into one of the new mixed-use developments.  I'm sure the Firefighters would tell you they need better facilities.

First, it should also be noted that you should freak out that Field narrows as it gets to the core when it begins handling more traffic.  All roads should narrow as the grid around them tightens and strengthens.  The lost capacity is handled by the increased capacity of the complex grid around it and traffic filters, as it should.

I haven't bothered scaling these blocks and elaborating the study into actual capacity numbers but based on a cursory glance, it looks like abandoning Griffin repositions about 30 acres of development, which could easily yield +2 million square feet of development (which is all low- to mid-rise.  Bump those numbers up significantly if you think high-rise can work here).  If 75% of that square footage is dedicated to residential (just a stab at what the land and market will yield right now), that could be 2,000 to 2,500 new residents.

Hey, this isn't a bad idea for an hour of brainstorming.  Maybe I'll do some real sketching and turn this into an actual capacity study.
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In conclusion, the swath created a bunch of inefficient and nigh-undevelopable parcels at a highway exit ramp virtually ensuring a highest and best use of surface parking.  You know surface parking.  It all becomes an extravagant convenience to live outside of Dallas and commute in.  That old upside down real estate market. Meanwhile, surface lot owners rake in the cash while waiting for the next Museum Tower golden parachute to rain down upon them as a gift from bizarro over-ambitious financial heaven.

The lesson as always is that land value, demand, activity, and building form are all inextricably linked to transportation and movement network layout and design.  You change the invisible hand by moving the invisible arm.  However, it often takes a generation or so for the true value to shake out as property finds its level, usually under- or over-shooting a few times before properly calibrating.  In this case, that means surface parking on both Field and Griffin.