Bridging the bridge

In Czech Village, historic Sykora Bakery features pedestrian level windows and benches

[NOTE: Most of this essay was written before I saw a short item in today's Gazette reporting Sykora Bakery faces financial distress due to flood insurance premiums that are slated to double over the next three years. Substantial increases in premiums would be a game-changer for the district, and not in a good way. They would also render moot much of what follows.]

Czech Village and New Bohemia are two historic neighborhoods south of downtown Cedar Rapids. Since the 19th century, they were home to working people and their families--many of them recruited from central Europe to work in local factories like Sinclair Packing and Douglas Starch Works. The factories closed, and a lot of those homes were destroyed in the massive 2008 flood. Since then, government and private investment, along with an increased preference for urban living among young professionals and empty-nesters, have renewed the neighborhoods as walkable places with some interesting local businesses. (More on the history of the district here.)

The new condos notwithstanding, Czech Village and New Bohemia are mostly "drive-to urbanism," with businesses catering to people who live outside the district with bars, restaurants and specialty shops. The National Czech and Slovak Museum (current facility opened in 1995, moved to higher ground and reopened 2012) as well as the African-American Museum of Iowa (current facility opened in 2003 and reopened 2009) are nationally known institutions. For day-to-day needs, like groceries, pharmacies, hardware, and schools, residents of these districts must go elsewhere in the city. Auto traffic from elsewhere is accommodated with huge parking areas.

Source: Google Earth

Czech Village and New Bohemia share a common ethnic heritage, a contemporary identity as tourist destinations, and a Main Street organization: the Czech Village/New Bohemia Main Street District was created in 2009 to promote business development and historic preservation. Main Street also hosts events and sponsors building improvement grants. Abby Huff, a historic preservationist with previous Main Street experience, became the director of CVNB Main Street this year, following the long tenure of Jennifer Pruden, whose energetic leadership helped put the districts on a stable footing.

These synergies are limited by the semi-permeable barrier between them that is the Cedar River. The river is scenic, and is becoming less a potential menace as construction of flood protection proceeds. However, it is as wide as a large parking lot, which can create a disincentive to walk from one neighborhood to the other--at least enough to figure in most discussions of the district I've attended. To be exact, the 16th Avenue bridge is 228 steps across. (These are my steps. Your actual steppage may vary.)

Even from the outdoor tables at Kickstand Bike Bar, Czech Village seems a long way away

CityLab reported in 2015 on studies by Reid Ewing at University of Utah of factors affecting the choice to walk in New York City and Salt Lake City. The key factors in Salt Lake City were transparency, the ability of walkers to perceive human activity beyond the sidewalk (including busy buildings and parks, and a high proportion of windows), and imageability, something about the place that is distinctive and memorable (Bliss 2015, Jaffe 2015).

Cedar Rapids is close in size to Salt Lake City--population of the city proper is about 2/3 the size, though the metropolitan area is much smaller--so we'd expect the factors to be similar. New Bohemia (68) and Czech Village (71) have high Walk Scores, and score high on both of Ewing's dimensions.

So do newer stores like Soko Outfitters

On the New Bo side, the CSPS building houses Next Page Books and Frond Shop & Studio

Human activity in the outdoor seating area at Lion Bridge (Source: lionbridgebrewing.com)

Imageability: Clock tower by the bridge; behind it is the National Czech and Slovak Museum

Crowds gather for events at New Bo City Market

The bridge between them, the Bridge of Lions, constructed in 1910, is not uninteresting, either: it has periodic cutouts with benches and overlooks of the river. There's even human activity at times when people fish off the bridge.

Still, the river appears to be a barrier to pedestrian flow between Czech Village and New Bohemia. I expect it's mostly subconscious for most people. As City Lab writer Eric Jaffe points out, people don't choose whether and where to walk by "[s]tanding at a street corner calculating first-floor window ratios [which] would qualify as weird even by the outlier standards of New York City sidewalk behavior." Most people walk when and where they feel like walking--otherwise they walk somewhere else, or drive--and mostly those blocks turn out to be the ones with characteristics like the ones Ewing and his students identified.

The vast majority of people in Cedar Rapids, even those who frequent these trendy areas, get most places by driving cars. So it's easy to walk across 3rd Street from the New Bo City Market to get a beer at Parlor City, but walking over the river to Lion Bridge would never enter the mind as a conscious choice.

There are ways to make the barrier less superable. Attractions that are unique, or which somehow otherwise stand out as particular destinations, could prove impelling.

At 2nd St & 12th Av, Eduskate and 965 are one of a kind

The most obvious aspect of the barrier, though, is that neither side has built to the bridge. Recall that the Bridge of Lions is 228 Humble Blogger Steps (HBS) across. It is a mere 83 HBS from the bridge to Soko Outfitters on the Czech Village side, but 287 HBS on the New Bo side from the bridge to Little House Artifacts. Mad Modern might be marginally closer, but note well that it's farther from the bridge to the first non-bar attraction in New Bo than it is to get across the bridge. [Update: Mad Modern is closer to the bridge (233 HBS) than Little House Artifacts, but the distance to the bridge is still greater than the distance over the bridge.]

This is partly understandable, given the experience with flooding since 2008.

Sandbagging in New Bohemia, 2013

But the New Bohemia side carries buffering to an unnecessary extreme. The first thing you see coming over the bridge into New Bo is a vacant lot where there used to be a bar.

200 block of 16th Av SE: missing teeth? Punched in the mouth!

The next block in is also mostly vacant.

1300 block of 3rd St SE

Kickstand has opened across 16th Avenue since the South Side Tavern was taken down, and Little Bohemia and Tornado's are a little farther down, so maybe we don't need yet another bar on these blocks, but whoever owns this property needs to unclench their grip and let it happen. A small grocery would go far to making this area truly supportive of residences, and in turn the 24-hour life that would make real the vision of live-work neighborhoods on both sides of the river.

An alternative approach is to look at improving mobility across the river. Main Street Director Abby Huff likes to get across the bridge with the e-assist bikes newly available from Veoride.

Checking out the new bikes at the Market

Or, thinking way out of the box, a Sky Glider like they have at the Iowa State Fair!

Sky Glider Lift at the 2014 Fair (Source: flickr.com)

Put one end in Lot 44 and the other at the Kosek Bandstand. Why should Des Moines have all the fun?

Music to accompany this post:

SEE ALSO: Ben Kaplan, "A New Bohemian's Guide to New Bohemia," Corridor Urbanism, 3 August 2018

Where are the suburbs?

1st Avenue west of Stoney Point Road: still Cedar Rapids, but definitely suburban

[NOTE: This post has been extensively revised in July 2020 due to numerous problems with the original data.]

A few years ago, I referred to the area around Stoney Point Road SW as "in the suburbs." The person I was talking to laughed, because, of course, Stoney Point Road is still within the city limits of Cedar Rapids, and anyhow this isn't like Chicago where they have The Suburbs.

However, there seems to be some analytical value in identifying differences in how and where people live, and it should be obvious to anyone who lives anywhere that we can do a lot better than corporate political boundaries. We can probably do a lot better than census tracts, too, but I'm not going to; at any rate they make a more finely-grained first crack.

City Lab recently reported on a working paper from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies that group analysis of the urban-suburban divide into three broad approaches:

1. census-convenient: Urban means the principal city of a metropolitan area, as well as any other towns of more than 100,000 population; suburban means all other political entities in the metro. (By this definition, 70 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (My Illinois readers will note this classifies the entire City of Naperville as "urban." I'll wait here while you finish laughing.)
2. suburbanisms: Urban means places where the proportions of commuting by private car, homeownership, and single-family housing are below the average for the entire metropolitan area, or where any two of the three are below the metro average; suburban means where commuting by private car, homeownership, and single-family housing are more the norm. (By this definition, over 60 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (That this is lower than definition #1 surprises me, because I live in Cedar Rapids, where much of the political city is actually suburban, but I imagine in more complex metropolitan areas like Chicago many areas outside the political boundaries of the city would also be considered urban.)
3. typology: Urban means places where housing units are older and located more densely than the average for the entire metropolitan area; suburban means where housing units are newer and more widely spread. (By this definition, over 80 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (That's a lot.)

A more finely-grained approach is going to allow us to see with more clarity the strength and duration of the apparent move "back to the city" that began about the middle of the last decade. (William H. Frey at the Brookings Institution is one among many skeptics.) It also enables us to imagine what combination of features might be most attractive to new residents, while also being financially and environmentally sustainable. (More on this soon.)

Uptown Marion: not in the principal city, but arguably urban

For now, here is how the three approaches define city and suburbs in the Cedar Rapids context. The data come from the U.S. Census Bureau via this website, which is way easier to navigate than the Bureau's own site.

1. census-convenient: The City of Cedar Rapids is urban, with the rest of Linn County as suburban. The Census Bureau's Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) also includes Benton and Jones counties. That produces an urban population (2018) of 131,369, with 90,761 suburbanites in Linn County (136,955 suburbanites including the other two counties). The Cedar Rapids metropolitan statistical area is 49 percent urban.
2. suburbanisms: In the Cedar Rapids metro area, 83.2 percent of workers commute alone by private car; 69.8 percent of housing consists of a single unit ("single-family detached"), 74 percent of housing units are owner-occupied. By these definitions, the 18 urban census tracts are
1. below average on all three dimensions: 2.07, 7, 13, 18, 19, 27, 29
2. below average on all except car commuting: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10.03, 11.02, 15, 26, 30.02
3. below average on all except single-family housing: 22, 25. Collectively this includes the urban core of Cedar Rapids, excepting areas west of 10th St NW between E and O Avenues, as well as south of 1st Avenue, and Wellington Heights above 15th St SE. Outside of the core it reaches as far north as Blairs Ferry Road NE and includes the older sections of Marion; the areas around Kenwood Park on Cedar Rapids's northeast side and Cherokee Park on the northwest side; north of Washington High School on the southeast side; and from Jones Park on the southwest side as far south as 76th Avenue SW around Kirkwood Community College. That produces an urban population of 71,275; the metro is 26.6 percent urban.
3. typology: The median housing unit in the Cedar Rapids metro area was built in the 1970s. There are 57 housing units per acre, because much of the three counties is farmland. By these definitions, the 20 urban census tracts are 4, 7, 8, 11.01, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29. This includes the urban core of Cedar Rapids, excepting only the area west of 10th St NW between O Avenue and the Cedar River. Outside of the core it includes the Puffer District adjacent to downtown Marion; the areas around Kenwood Park on Cedar Rapids's northeast side and Bever Park on the southeast side; north of Washington High School and the Rompot neighborhood on the southeast side; and the southwest side stopping at Jones Park. This yields an urban population of 72,691; the metro is 27.1 percent urban.

Wellington Heights neighborhood's Stop the Violence Picnic, 2019 (swiped from redmondpark.org)
Census tract 17 qualifies as urban under definition three (housing density 2400, median age 1939)
but not definition two (76.1% owner-occupied, 81% single-family).

The first definition includes a significant chunk of Cedar Rapids that doesn't qualify under the other definitions, while excluding parts of Marion that do. The second and third definitions agree on 11 tracts, but the second includes seven while excluding nine that qualify under the third definition. Since all of the city qualifies under the housing density part of the typologies definition, the disqualifier always is median age of housing. For example, census tract 30.02 includes a degree of rental housing around Kirkwood Community College unusual for the metro, but the median housing unit was built in 2001 (and 87.1 percent of commuters drive alone). 

The disqualifiers for the second list ("suburbanisms") vary for those who qualify under the typologies categories. All nine tracts have higher rates of single-family housing than the metro average; eight have higher rates of car commuting, and five have higher rates of owner-occupied housing. Four tracts miss on all three! These include census tract 4, northeast of downtown Marion, which is bounded by 7th Avenue, 31st Street, 29th Avenue, and 10th Street/Indian Creek Road. The tract has 2089 housing units per square mile, and the median year of construction is 1961. Its car commuting rate is 85 percent, 88.5 percent of residents own their own homes, and 87.5 percent of residents live in single-family housing.

Why does it matter how we draw the urban-suburban line? Public perception of the line certainly affects how specific areas of the metro are perceived, though I'm not sure the analysis-by-census-tract featured above is going to have much impact on public perception.

The very fluidity (and arguability) of these lines teach us that the terms "urban" and "suburban" are not binary, that they each cover a range of neighborhood types and contain a range of people. One thing we can agree on: political boundaries rarely reflect social realities.

"Welcome to Suburbia!"

Small towns, rural areas and state legislatures

2018 votes for Iowa Governor, by county
Source: CNN. Used without permission.

The divide between successful and unsuccessful places--often oversimplified as "urban vs. rural"--has emerged as a major fault line in contemporary American politics, along with the ever-present racial divide. Where the economic outlook of a place is less than positive, voters--at least white voters--have turned to the Republican Party's anti-government and traditional values ethos, recently overlain with restraints on trade and immigration. (Whether the Republicans, led by the ever-improvisational President Donald J. Trump, will overplay their hand, remains to be seen. For now they are speaking to voters in these places as Democrats and internationally-minded urban elites seem unable to.)

This is reflected in Iowa's political ride this decade, from purple to red. It's a predominantly white state, where most voters live in economically stalled-to-struggling areas, and Republicans have dominated recent state elections.

Iowa has 99 counties, reflecting its past where most labor occurred on farms, and small towns across the state served as market centers for those farms. In this decade, and for the last several decades, most of those counties have lost population. (In the absence of easily-obtainable economic performance data, I use population change as an indicator of strength, assuming that successful places need more workers, and workers are attracted to successful places where they can find a better choice of jobs. Economic success often funds cultural vitality, which is also attractive to people, particularly younger workers.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau [with Governor Kim Reynolds's percentage of the two-party vote]:

• 70 of Iowa's 99 counties have lost population between 2010 and 2018 [60.1% of 426,605 votes]
• 11 counties gained marginally, less than 1 percent (Black Hawk, Boone, Cedar, Crawford, Jasper, Jones, Marion, Muscatine, Plymouth, Pottawattamie, Woodbury) [54.3% of 209,142 votes]
• 6 counties gained at least 1 percent, but less than 2.9 percent, half the national growth rate (Bremer, Buchanan, Clarke, Davis, Lyon, Washington) [60.9% of 40,246 votes]
• 5 counties gained at least 2.9 percent, but less than the U.S. growth rate of 5.8 percent (Dickinson, Dubuque, Madison, Scott, Sioux): one near Des Moines, two housing the central cities of Davenport and Dubuque, and two predominantly rural counties in northwest Iowa [54.4% of 140,523 votes]
• only 7 counties gained population faster than the nation as a whole (Dallas, Jefferson, Johnson, Linn, Polk, Story, Warren): four around Des Moines and Ames, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Fairfield... Fairfield?? [40.8% of 482,145 votes]

Republicans had a tough year nationally in 2018, and lost seats in the Iowa House, but actually increased their already-large majority in the Senate. So, this year, we once again have a legislature and a governor whose support came predominantly from less successful places. One might assume, then, the state would be pursuing policies to help those economies.

One would be wrong. Here is what the Iowa legislature achieved in the 2019 session, which ran from January to April (Gottburg 2019, Rodriguez and Opsahl 2019):

• legalizing betting on sports events at casinos
• legalizing growing hemp and loosening restrictions on medical marijuana
• adding the right of individual gun ownership to the Iowa constitutions, and subjecting any restrictions to "strict scrutiny"
• city or county property tax increases above 2 percent will require a 2/3 vote
• prohibiting use of Medicaid funding for sex-reassignment surgery
• barring Planned Parenthood from receiving federal sex education funding
• requiring public college and university campuses to adopt "free speech" policies
• giving the Governor greater influence on judicial selection
• trespassing penalties for undercover investigations of farms
• creation of children's mental health system
• $15 million for flood recovery in western Iowa

Only the last two conceivably could help distressed people in small towns and rural areas, and one of those is a response to a short-term emergency. The rest is nutrition-free candy, mostly for their ideological allies, many of whom admittedly live in small towns and rural areas. I understand a lot of people love guns, and hate transgender people, Planned Parenthood, college faculty and administration, and "liberal" judges, but shouldn't they and their elected representatives also be pursuing constructive solutions to actual problems?

Nationally, a study by FiveThirtyEight found similar outcomes in other states with unified Republican governments (Bacon 2019). Those 22 state legislatures pushed looser gun laws, restrictions on "sanctuary" cities, restrictions on lower governments' abilities to divest from Israel, restrictions on abortion, "right-to-work" laws weakening labor unions, and work requirements for Medicaid recipients. All crowd-pleasing candy, nothing nutritious to help places grow.

No legislature, however well-intentioned, can bring back the 1950s, or whatever form of paradise white Iowans want to think the 1950s were. The future of the American economy is going to be predominantly metropolitan, although we can argue whether the locus of the action will continue the move back to central cities begun in the middle of the last decade (Frey 2019, Florida 2019, Hurley 2018). For example, the State of Arizona, which is growing faster than the U.S. as a whole, is seeing most of that growth near Phoenix and Tucson, and shrinkage elsewhere.

We also know our economic future is going to be primarily service-driven, not centered on farm work or manufacturing or resource extraction. Employment will be less stable, and whatever we do will have to accommodate the realities of diversity and climate change.

Successful places are those that have adapted to the post-industrial economy, but the cost of living, and the cost of doing business, in places like Seattle, San Francisco and Boston--and Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York--are becoming prohibitive, despite their attractions. Smaller places and their environs can position themselves to take advantage of this, and to be significant players in the economic future. BUT! this requires recognizing the realities of the 21st century, and enhancing the assets that are already in place, not playing to anti-elite resentments and culture wars nostalgia.


SOURCES
Perry Bacon, "What Republicans and Democrats are Doing in the States Where They Have Total Power," FiveThirtyEight, 28 May 2019
Woody Gottburg, "Iowa Legislature Wraps Up 2019 Session," KSCJ, 29 April 2019
Barbara Rodriguez and Robin Opsahl, "Iowa Lawmakers Have Adjourned for the Year. Here's What You Need to Know About the 2019 Session," Des Moines Register, 27 April 2019

SEE ALSO:
"Iowa Losing Millennials, Needs Workers," 14 February 2019
"What is the Future of Iowa's Small Towns?" 3 July 2018

First impressions from our summer vacation

Jane and I just got back from a week in the desert southwest, mostly in search of places like this...

The Grand Canyon, from the South Rim Bright Angel Trail

...and this...

Wapitki Pueblo, Arizona

...but also spending time in towns.

Real knowledge of a place, of course, requires spending a lot of time in it. First impressions matter, too, though, at least I hope they do, because I'm going to spend some quality time sharing them with you. Take them for what they're worth--they are first impressions, after all.

We spent the most time, and were most impressed with, Flagstaff (pop 70000 [+11.9% since 2010], metro area 140000). Like most American cities of any size, it contains an older core as well as massive suburban development. The sprawl is what it is, but the core is of the highest quality. We stayed in a guest house near downtown, not far from the Lowell Observatory and Northern Arizona University. We were a short walk away from their high-quality library...

...and historic downtown.

Firecreek Coffee

Downtown and the surrounding neighborhood features a proper street grid and plenty of street trees, which I trust are climate-appropriate.

The day we visited there was a farmers' market, which was open to the public, as well as a Hullaballoo in the centrally-located Wheeler Park... behind a fence, so I'm ambivalent. The downtown is full of brewpubs and coffee shops, as well as the delightful Peace Surplus Store, where Jane scored some binoculars. There is less of a functional nature--for groceries or hardware you have to go to the stroads.

So, not perfect. But the cool dry air typical of summer days felt amazing after Iowa's soggy spring and the searing heat at lower elevations. What's not to like?

We flew into and out of Las Vegas (pop 650000 [+10.3% since 2010], metro 2.25 million), the Entertainment Capital of the World. Leaving aside what you or I might consider entertaining, or what we think of gambling, Las Vegas is an urbanist's nightmare. The Strip, the internationally-famous entertainment district, has wide streets, and buildings that are as exaggerated in style as they are massive.

The Strip gets points for having created a unique sense of place, but there's no walkable urbanism here. I think you're supposed to stay inside and gamble.

The downtown area north of the Strip features gridded streets and older buildings that have been through a variety of re-purposings, but with all the economy focused on the Strip and all the wealth out in the suburby areas, downtown is desolately squalid.

The vaster part of the city's area consists of suburban development, in a manner exaggerated as only Vegas can. Streets are way overbuilt with multiple lanes, with 45 mph speed limits that underestimate how fast people can and do actually drive--and who would not, with all this room?

Sahara Avenue, looking east toward Durango

The network of interstates and other limited access highways are worse: a lot of room, wide variation in speed, and sudden moves as exits appear and lanes disappear make it all thrilling. "Thrilling" is not a positive attribute in my worldview, by the way.

There are some starts toward light rail and bus rapid transit. I took the Sahara Express to the ballpark, but the advantages of BRT were limited by the lack of congestion (see above), as well as the driver taking a break at one of the stops to talk to a friend.

Las Vegas has made the desert bloom... which may not be a good idea, either. Our friends have lived there over 20 years, and commend the mild winters. Quite a lot of other people live here, too, and the city will shortly add the NFL Raiders to their NHL franchise, so they're going major league in more ways than just pop music and casinos. We were not there long enough for me to see the attraction, however, and the exigencies of the 21st century would seem to mitigate against this sort of development elsewhere.

[SEE ALSO: Lauren Wilder, "Why You Should Visit Las Vegas at Least Once in Your Lifetime," Culture Trip, 30 May 2019]

We passed through a number of other, smaller towns. The town that made the strongest impression was Colorado City (pop 4818 [+ 0.8% since 2010]), where we stopped for a timely coffee. There was something strange about the town--large residences, a lot of them vacant, and a mix of paved and unpaved streets, like a suburban subdivision under construction that hit 2008 and never bounced back. But a suburb of what?

Colorado City compound (photo by Jane Nesmith)

The story of Colorado City turns out to be much stranger, and I'll leave you to this Wikipedia article. A longer, autobiographical account can be found in the book Escaped by Carolyn Jessop (Broadway, 2007). Every town comes into existence for a reason, as a port, say, or a service center for small farms... or as a headquarters for a polygamist sect. The more we read, the creepier it felt to be there--definitely a sense of place, but of the wrong kind. The adversity faced by your average rural small town is nothing compared to the difficulty in figuring out how to overcome a past like Colorado City's.

Mama Cecile's Barista and Cafe is a charming coffeehouse, despite its inexplicable name, and for us was an oasis in the desert. I don't know if there's a real Cecile, or what tragedies her life story might contain, but the coffee was good, the refills were free, the WiFi was reliable, and there was a sizable children's playroom on the side away from the counter. I've not seen that in a coffeehouse before, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea; if you've always wanted to run a coffeehouse but your area seems saturated, you might aim for the young mother niche with a play area. That's how towns are built, or rebuilt, right? One opportunity at a time.