You may call yourself a new urbanist, but are you living the charter? Do you live within walking distance of neighborhood retail and services? Do you ever use transit? Is your neighborhood mixed-income? Perhaps you don’t even think of yourself as a new urbanist, but you are indeed one by virtue of your location and lifestyle. A quiz created by several young CNU members was rolled out at the conference in Austin, designed to challenge assumptions and allow members to assess their choices. Click here to find out if you indeed are living the charter. (I actually got a score…

An international crew of new urbanist bikers (sounds intimidating, doesn’t it?) assembled at 9AM this morning to cycle around Austin. People from around the U.S., Canada and Great Britain were led by knowledgable locals around downtown, the east side, Lady Bird Lake and Barton Springs. It was all quite wonderful and informative in 70 degree sunny skies. The first stop was at Saltillo Plaza on the city’s historic east side, but more on that later. We next biked along Lady Bird Lake, quite a busy place on a gorgeous Saturday. We crossed the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge and stopped to discuss…

Friday night followed day two of the new urbanism conference here in Austin. After a good day of conference sessions and mobile workshops followed by a speech by Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, members were still energized and fired up. I attended two events that showed some insights as to future directions the new urbanism may take. The Charter of the New Urbanism is an elegant piece of literature. It decries disinvetment in central cities, opposes sprawl, and encourages better cities from the region on down to the home itself. It is a compelling movement, and the charter…

LEED-ND was the topic of the morning session. A panel of core committee members including Jennifer Henry, Victor Dover, Doug Farr, Tom Richman and Susan Mudd discussed lessons learned so far with the certification process, and allowed CNU members to vent a bit about criteria and priorities. As one might expect, there was much hand-wringing about the transect and how each zone gets ranked in LEED-ND. The idea behind LEED-ND, of course, is location efficiency of projects, and the thing that gets new urbanists up in arms is their beautiful greenfield projects don’t get certified in LEED-ND because they aren’t…

Here in Austin for the 16th Congress for the New Urbanism conference, I am doing things a little differently. Usually when attending a conference, I choose a hotel preferably within walking distance of the convention center. With my recent good luck with the vacation rentals website (see my recent post on Santa Cruz and San Francisco), instead of a hotel I looked for a studio or one bedroom rental of some kind. Well, I lucked out! I found a little studio, just off 6th Street and about two miles west of downtown. It is actually the finished attic level of…

In 2004 I wrote a story for Urban Land entitled A Far West Side Story about the plan for a major redevelopment of the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s far west side. In addition to a monstrous amount of office and housing, it was to be home of the new Jets stadium, which would also help the city attract the 2012 Olympics. In 2005 of course, London was awarded the Olympics and the far west side plans went in to flux. The plan has been revived of late, led by developer Tishman Speyer. It has generated extensive coverage in the New…

Kids in Cities has become a pet topic for me, as I introduce Ellis to places like Chicago, Boston and San Francisco while considering future school choices here in Minneapolis. Everywhere I go now, I hear about choices facing young parents in cities. Should I stay or should I go? On a visit to St. Louis last fall, I sat at Crepes in the City one Sunday morning, and overheard a young couple adamantly telling their friends that they were going to stay put after the kids were born. We were on Washington Avenue in the middle of yuppie-ville, or…

For a recent family trip to the bay area, I did a little reserach and our family stayed in two vacation rentals, one in Santa Cruz and the other in San Francisco. I loved it. They were prefect for my wife, son, wife’s parents and her brother, and all it took was a little browsing of a vacation rentals website to ensure what was around us and walkable. In Santa Cruz, we stayed in the quaint Seabright neighborhood, a few blocks from the ocean and a mile from downtown. The neighborhood was fabulous – a new urbanists dream with a…

By reading entries on this website, it is obvious that I travel quite a lot. I stay in a lot of hotels, and usually do a little research ahead of time to ensure they are well located, in a walkable part of the city. I have also done some market studies on hotels over the years, allowing me to survey the numbers and read up on industry trends. Between consulting and firsthand experience, I have come to understand a few things, including hotel concepts. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Hilton Garden Inn in The Woodlands, Texas. I…

Following up on a prior entry, our brave legislature indeed did override Governor Pawlenty’s veto of the $6.6 billion transportation bill. The state gas tax will increase, as will sales taxes in the seven-county metro, all to pay for road and transit improvements. This is immensely good news, although it will cause long-term bitterness in the statehouse. Six farsighted and courageous House Republicans broke ranks to override the veto with the DFL, and it has already cost them leadership positions and endorsements. We’ll see if voters are as irrationally unforgiving come the fall elections. At long last, perhaps Minnesota will…