My take on the recent ULI fall meeting in San Francisco was a feeling of cautious optimism. Why? We already know the economy and real estate industry are a mess. Now that we’re used to it, we’re tying to predict the recovery. Will the recession and corresponding recovery be V-shaped, U-shaped, or the dreaded L-shaped? When will vacancy decline? When will rents go up? When will actual property values increase? Which will recover first, industrial, retail, housing, office (hint, it won’t be office), or hotels? The common thread to any recovery statistics was “when jobs are created.” It all comes…

I’m not sure why train conductors wear those distinctive conductor hats with a brim, but I’m glad they do. I boarded the new Northstar commuter rail last Friday morning, during its inagural week of service, and was greeted by a conductor wearing a hat with a friendly “welcome aboard.” Surely, you ask, what kind of idiot wakes up at 5:30AM only to drive 52 miles out of the city just to catch a train back to his house!? Well, for one, because this is a truly historic moment in Twin Cities and Minnesota history – new commuter rail service critical…

An interesting battle among various stakeholders over a proposed Walgreens store in the Highland neighborhood of St. Paul took an unusual twist recently when, after the local business and neighborhood associations and the city planning commission approved the plan, the city council unanimously rejected it. The plan calls for a 9,000-plus square foot Walgreens store to be built fronting Ford Parkway, the primary street in the core of the Highland commerical district, a relatively dense mini downtown that includes a variety of restaurants and shops, a medical clinic, banks, two bookstores, a movie theater and a full-service grocery store. It…

With so much attention given to green development these days, I figure it is worth looking back at a green building five years after opening to see how things are going. Five years ago I wrote a case study for the Urban Land Institute about Colorado Court, a 44-unit affordable housing project in Santa Monica. Colorado Court was cutting edge at the time. Let’s see what we can learn five years on. In 2004, Colorado Court was just two years old. Developed by the Community Corporation of Santa Monica, it includes a number of green features, including carpeting and insulation…

My first brush with transit oriented development – the first time it really dawned on me as to how it worked – was at Kew Gardens station in London. I went looking for a train station, but I found a transit village. I was hooked. Walking from the train platform to the entrance to the Kew Botanical Gardens (more than a quarter mile away-my reason for being there in the first place) is everything urban living should be. There is of course the rail service and train station itself, and outside of that a Tesco Express (small grocery store) and…

Public gathering spaces are fundamental to a city, and Minneapolis needs one. For everyday use, a meeting place, informal strolls, just sitting around and even spontaneous celebrating, every city should have a place that pops in to the collective mind of the populus. London has Trafalgar Square, New York City has Times Square (one could argue New York has several), Chicago has Millennium Park (“meet me at ‘the Bean’”), Cincinnati has Fountain Square, Madison has Library Mall, and the list goes on. My hometown needs one. Just how badly we need a public gathering place became evident last week following…

It’s not everyday you hear someone tell you to visit Columbus, Ohio, but I highly recommend it. Columbus has more examples of progressive urbanism than most cities its size. It deserves a look. True, I was there in January. And yes, I had to deal with an ice storm that sealed my car shut. As I scraped my car with my hotel key card (always ask for two!) on a cold Saturday morning in Columbus, I remarkably was able to roll down the driver’s side window and the ice stayed in place! I knocked it out with my elbow. But…

What will the city of 2050 look like? How will we really get there? A lot of urbanists seem to be buzzing about this, including the Urban Land Institute, which last year released a publication called The City in 2050. Many of the projections and visions, including those of ULI, are thought-provoking, evoking high-tech, connected cities with a reduced carbon footprint. Demographers add their two cents, with projections of an aging and more diverse population, and the corresponding effect on housing demand. One projection urbanists like to hang their hat on is by A.C. Nelson, who indicates that the United…

My latest Urban Land magazine article, entitled Light Rail in Charlotte, was published in the July 2009 issue. Read Light Rail in Charlotte here. You can also refer back to an earlier post on this website about my experience and observations in Charlotte while researching this article, entitled Riding the New Rails in Charlotte.

Well, you know, we all want to change the world. All apologies to the Beatles, but a revolution is indeed fomenting, and is captured very well in Pedaling Revolution, an excellent new book by Jeff Mapes. Mapes, perhaps unsurprisingly, lives in Portland, Oregon, a leading cycling town in America. His book takes us through efforts to increase awareness and safety of bicycling. Along the way, we navigate the cycling capitol of Amsterdam, as well as long-time American cycling cities like Davis, California. We also learn of efforts to increase biking in New York City, Chicago and Madison. Mapes mixes policy…