Black Friday Parking 2022

Strip mall, Edgewood Rd SW, 9:45 a.m.

On the southwest side of Cedar Rapids, there is a triangle formed by three stroads: Edgewood Road, Wiley Boulevard, and Williams Boulevard. Average daily traffic counts are roughly 19000 for Edgewood, 9000 for Williams, and (from 2017) 14000 for Wiley. Until about ten years ago, they surrounded Westdale Mall; since that was demolished, they serve a large Wal-Mart, a large Target, and numerous shopping plazas and stand-alone stores.

The area made for an irresistible subject for my 2022 #BlackFridayParking survey, part of the annual Strong Towns event. The area is clearly meant to be driven to; it is served by three bus routes (8,10,12) but the system runs only during the day, and today was running a reduced version of that due to the holiday weekend. Walking between stores is extremely difficult, I can attest. There's a lot of traffic, moving quickly, from various directions. I relied on my remaining agility and the kindness of strangers to get places and return safely to you.

It was a lovely day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I got to Target about 10:00 a.m., too late for the doorbuster sales, but still in time to see a sizeable crowd of cars and shoppers.

Even so, much of the parking lot was unused.

Target, 3400 Edgewood Rd SW, lot 2/3 full at 9:45 a.m.

Down the street at Wal-Mart, the situation was even more pronounced: Many, many shoppers and cars...

View from the front door

...but much unused parking.

Wal-Mart Supercenter, 3601 29th Av SW, lot 1/2 full at 10:00 a.m.

Away from the two retail giants, crowds were thinner and parking lots were emptier.

Strip mall across from Wal-Mart

Kohl's had some traffic near the entrance to their lot...

...but away from the entrance ir was empty.

Kohl's, 3030 Wiley Blvd SW, lot 1/3 full at 10:00 a.m.

The parking lots on the grounds of the former Westdale Mall were glaringly empty.

On the other hand, from a distance it looked like the parking lot of Menards (home improvement store) at Wiley and Williams was very full.

As I forded these lots, I also forded a number of access roads--some, as I said, busy with fast-moving traffic, and some seeing no cars at all. This leads from the Kohl's to Wiley Boulevard, but can only be accessed by southbound traffic.

It made me think that, as much of this event is designed to complain about parking craters, big-box stores and strip malls also generate an excess of infrastructure. Maybe next year we could do Black Friday Access Roads?

Meanwhile, the Westdale area is beginning to see a little of the development promised when the city sunk a fortune into its redevelopment. There is a mixed-use development with apartments.

Parkway West, 3998 Westdale Parkway

These apartments are within walking distance of a lot of shops. I wonder if anyone ever does walk? And what might be the attraction of living here, as opposed to a more human-scaled locale? Price? Highway access? 

The apartments are flanked by a hotel (Tru, a Hilton brand) and a construction project that will become a hotel.

Will these projects generate any foot traffic at all? And given the inherent risks of crossing acres of auto infrastructure, would it be a good idea if they did?

And then there's this guy, across from the Westdale bus stop.

Car wash? Oil change? Tire store? It's auto-oriented, in any case, consistent with its surroundings.

The main purpose of Strong Towns' annual #BlackFridayParking event is to highlight to #EndParkingMinimums, provisions of zoning codes that require large stores to have even larger parking lots. Cedar Rapids' zoning code has those provisions, but the parking lots I surveyed seem to be substantially larger than required, albeit I haven't counted spaces.

Even if zoning requirements do not fully account for this appalling design, public policy has a hand in it. Property tax policy allows property owners to pay low rates on large swaths of unproductive land. City officials everywhere have a preference for big "wins," including attracting and accommodating a large franchise operation, over the economic gardening that nurtures local businesses. (See Alter 2022 on the many benefits of small locally-owned businesses over the big-box franchises.)

The result is a car-chocked landscape, full of expensive infrastructure that the widely dispersed businesses ultimately can't support, stressing drivers and practically prohibiting pedestrians. For financial, environmental, and community reasons, we need to do better. We have what we have in unholy triangles like the one I haunted today, but we need to start thinking differently and designing our cities better. As they say at Strong Towns, "Having 'enough' parking is always going to be less important than creating a place people want to be."

SEE ALSO

"Black Friday 2021," 26 November 2021 [Blairs Ferry Road NE from Fleet Farm to Wal-Mart]

"Black Friday 2016," 25 November 2016 [same area that I visited today]

Lauren Fisher, "14 Photos That Prove We Have Too Much Parking--Even on Black Friday," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Daniel Herriges, "The #BlackFridayParking Exception That Proves the Rule," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Addison del Maestro, "Unplanned Vacancies," Deleted Scenes, 12 May 2022 [paywall] [which I haven't crossed so it might not be any good] [but he's brilliant so it probably is]

Jaclyn Peiser, "Black Friday Isn't What It Used to Be. Here's Why," Washington Post, 25 November 2022 [another annual tradition is declaring Black Friday "over"] [and indeed it may have run its course, or nearly so] [in the meantime we have all this parking]

CURL at 25

 

Cuneo Hall (swiped from luc.edu)

Three alumni from the Center for Urban Research and Learning shared recollections and advice via Zoom last week. The Center is located at Loyola University on the north side of Chicago, and recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, having been founded in 1996. From the beginning its focus has been on seeking knowledge that is practical and helpful. The Center funds faculty and student research that is "action-oriented," with "linkage with Chicago communities" is at the core of its activity. Its mission statement states the goal of developing "innovative solutions that promote equity and opportunity in communities throughout the Chicago metropolitan region and beyond." 

Ellen Shephard at CURL in 2016

I first encountered the Center's Friday Morning Seminars in the fall of 2016, when I was searching for some gathering in the Chicago area that would support my study of cities. I saw Ellen Shephard of Community Allies speak memorably on the economic contributions of local businesses; I still refer to the notes I took that day. Subsequently I attended talks by graduate student Bill Byrnes in 2017 on law enforcement and the black middle class, alumna Dr. Sophia Rodriguez of the University of Maryland in 2018 on the role of public libraries in orienting recent immigrants, and Jennifer Axelrod of the Chicago Community Trust in 2019 on philanthropic efforts to address the racial wealth gap. 

Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which kept me away for two years When I returned this year, I saw that things weren't quite back to normal; most people including the presenters were on Zoom, while I shared the seminar room with the two people who were producing the Zoomcast. Oh well. Maybe next year, we will all be in person, and can enjoy one of those marvelous spreads virtually everybody on the panel remembered from past CURL events.

Sophia Rodriguez, who received her Ph.D. from Loyola in 2014, recalled that once she got connected to CURL, "things seemed more real there" than in her graduate department where she felt herself losing touch with the education communities where she had worked and which she was now studying. The "ethical community-based work" of the Center spoke to her, so in addition to her graduate assistantship she worked on a CURL project bringing organizational leaders together around early childhood education policy proposals.

Asma Ali, specialist master at a major consulting firm--supposed to be unnamed but pretty quickly revealed to be Deloitte Touche--noted the variety of projects in which she was involved with CURL, in contrast to the focused specialization of the Ph.D. program. She commended CURL's founding attention to cultural responsiveness. "The stop-and-listen part is getting more attention" from programs today, she noted, but "CURL was doing it 20 years ago." Talking and listening to under-represented communities is not "just a soft skill that anybody can pick up." CURL not only taught her how to do that, but inspired her to push for it in her various jobs since.

Amy Kerr, director of evaluation at the for-profit consulting firm Professional Data Analysts, agreed that "learning to build trust" is essential to the work of CURL. She advised current students to "think about what you want your life to look like" after graduation.  She said she had always admired top university researchers, but knew she could not be "a happy human being" in such a job. She advised students to stay open and keep learning on the job, but also to keep asking whether they were where they wanted to be and whether their life looked like they wanted it to look. "Are you living your values day-to-day?" 

The emphasis on the values that infused the work of the Center and its fellows came up again and again on the panel--quite a contrast to the phrase "value-free" which was all in vogue when I was in graduate school. In this way they are not just "contributing to understanding," the felicitous phrase used by my graduate adviser, but they contribute continuously to the possibility of common life.

The panel was moderated by Teresa Naumann, operations manager and senior researcher at the Center.

Loyola University is located right by Lake Michigan,
as in right by.