Even a pretty MedQuarter isn't right

 

Entering the MedQuarter on 4th Ave at 6th St SE

Public art, gathering spaces, and coffee carts were among features proposed to the general public by staff of the MedQuarter District at a series of open houses last week. A series of story boards offered a wide range of possibilities, and hence of visions, for the roughly 1.5 square mile district on the east edge of downtown.

The district stretches from St. Luke's Hospital (1026 A Avenue NE)...

 ... to the environs of Mercy Hospital (701 10th Street SE), whose campus now stretches across 8th Avenue.

While some features might be more or less attractive to staff, patients, and city residents...

...overall the MedQuarter concept is a suboptimal use of this space.

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (512 6th St SE)

Long ago, the land between 5th and 12th Streets East was full of city residents. An old picture I've seen of Bethel AME Church shows it surrounded by small houses. Today, the church remains, but sits by itself on the otherwise empty block. In thinking about the future of Cedar Rapids, and the need for affordable housing in walkable proximity to work and school and play, we need to restore historic neighborhoods like Oak Hill instead of emptying them out.

Some current MedQuarter restaurants

The vibrancy of downtown depends on connection to surrounding areas. Too much of the core, in spite of a couple thousand apartments coming online this year, remains oriented to attracting shoppers and diners from elsewhere (so, lots of bars and hair salons, no groceries or hardware). The Wellington Heights neighborhood on the southeast side is the densest in Cedar Rapids, but has no commerce of its own. The restaurants and bars and music venues of the core are fairly close by, but the walk there is bleak and barren.

You want parking? We got parking

There are ways of making that walk less unpleasant, with streetscapes and pocket parks and better lighting. A radical revision of the district could even cut back on its surface parking habit and go in for a dense mix of housing and small shops. Any of this would improve on what's there now, but I feel like I'm voting among false choices.

The fundamental purpose of the MedQuarter is to serve folks like Sophia and Jason here (and me) with hospitals and clinics that of necessity rely on outside clientele like them, and so need a great deal of territory where we can put our cars. Nothing that requires as much parking as the MedQuarter does belongs where the MedQuarter is.

Expansion?

SEE ALSO: "Filling in an Empty Quarter (II)," 25 October 2013

10th Anniversary Post: MedQuarter and Westdale

Cedar Rapids Public Library's temporary downtown location,
where ideas for my earliest posts were hatched

In May 2013, I continued the momentum from starting Holy Mountain a month earlier. I posted 12 times, down from 14 the previous month, but not equaled since. I included three photo essays--on downtown construction (while noting the sudden departure of union picketers), my sabbatical spent partly in and around the temporary downtown library in the Armstrong's building, and the installation of the skywalk across 1st Avenue between the Doubletree hotel. I liked being where stuff was happening.

Another type of post I haven't employed as much since is commentary on national politics. I had complaints about scandalmongering, misrepresentations of the Affordable Care Act, and overall dysfunction in Congress. The posts reflected the underlying rationale for concern with place, rather than with place making itself: "The real losers in all this are the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, the "other" and the environment," I wrote on May 15.

I was hardly less grumpy about place making in Cedar Rapids, as the month presented two major development projects that looked nothing like urbanism: the development of a medical quarter anchored by our two hospitals adjacent to downtown, and the redevelopment of the former Westdale Mall site into a massive strip mall.

Plans for Westdale, printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on May 10, 2013, showed a senior center, a hotel, offices, and "mixed use" development, where there had once been a 1970s-era shopping mall.  Mostly, however, 

This is definitely old stuff. What they're essentially going to do is rearrange the many many parking spaces, and reconfigure the stores. Beyond the parking lots, the new Westdale will be no better integrated into the city than the old one was.... The designers' schematics all show happy people walking, but they all got there by car. Technically you could walk or bike to the new Westdale--just as you can now--but you would be foolish to make the attempt.

The city, for its part, was kicking in $10 million to make this happen.

Some of what they planned has come to pass. I was out there last fall to do Black Friday Parking. It's pretty much a sea of parking and big stores, though.

Westdale, Black Friday 2022

I also saw apartments and a hotel under construction, within easy walking distance of the big stores, but hardly walkable.

The MedQuarter event was mainly to solicit public comment. Their big plan full of promises would come later in 2013. Their goal seemed to be to be more attractive to visitors to the medical facilities, regardless of the impact on the broader community. "This would be done with better signage, prettier landscaping, and clearer branding." And plenteous parking. In 2013 I described the area between 5th and 12th Streets SE as "a large swath of large buildings and large parking lots." And that's still what's there, a great blankness instead of connection between the east side neighborhoods and downtown.

Medical parking lots, January 2018

The development of the MedQuarter and Westdale show that Cedar Rapids remains all in on the car as the normal way to get around. This is understandable--the city is built on cheap real estate and easy access to anything by car--if not commendable. Carrying that forward, and meeting the expectations of current residents, are stronger incentives than adapting to an uncertain future. The density and connections that make walkable areas vibrant and sustainable continue to be afterthoughts, but those are what will get us to a sustainable future for all, not bigger cars and easy parking.

MedQuarter businesses and the city share interests in sustaining viable businesses and job creation. But the city's interests extend beyond that set, and I'm not hearing that the businesses consider that theirs do. I hope the SSMID will do more than turn an empty quarter into an empty quarter with a brand and better signage, but is there any reason to anticipate they will?

Not yet.

Ten years ago, it was enough to revel in my new knowledge and criticize the old ways of doing things. In time, though, the euphoria of the new wears off, and one comes to realize the depth of the challenge in making change. Change is difficult, and slow. Yesterday's Gazette featured a letter to the editor wondering why the city doesn't provide (even) more parking in New Bohemia. Like most of the country, we in Cedar Rapids are used to getting around by car, and if gas is up to $3.50 a gallon, and the weather is occasionally wacky, well, we can get used to that, too. The long haul required of urbanists seems to be considerably longer than a mere ten years!

SEE ALSO: Ellen Dunham-Jones TED talk on "Retrofitting Suburbia"

End of May 2013: the river was up again!

Immaculate Conception takes down convent

That was then, looking north (Google Earth screen capture)

This week's demolition of the mid-century convent building at the corner of 4th Avenue and 10th Street SE is a seminal example of the tension between individual rationality and collective irrationality. Save CR Heritage, our local historical preservation warriors, documented the demolition on their Facebook page. Cindy Hadish, Save CR Heritage secretary--and author of the Homegrown Iowan blog--said the organization had sought a 60-day hold on demolition through the city's Historic Preservation Commission, but the commission had not acted on the request before the building was demolished.

This is now, looking east

There is no mention of the demolition on the Immaculate Conception Church website. According to Save CR Heritage, the church had deemed the building a "liability" because it had been unoccupied for some time, and that plans are to use the space for additional parking. The convent was added to the church campus in the 1950s; the present building and adjoining Scotus Hall were built in the early 20th century ("The First 100 Years--1858 to 1958").

It may be that the church can use the parking. Their current parking lot is small; when I've attended Sunday events at the church, people park across 3rd Avenue in the Physicians Clinic of Iowa lot, but that may not be practicable during the week. Others among Cedar Rapids' historic 3rd Avenue churches, including my own, have over time taken down buildings to expand parking. Most of these churches draw members from all over the metropolitan area, and most of those members need somewhere to put their cars while they worship. The city has a stake in the success of all its institutions, and the churches, medical facilities, and businesses along 3rd all need parking for their driving visitors.

On the other hand, Cedar Rapids' core, and in particular the area designated as the MedQuarter in which many historic churches reside, is awash in surface parking. It is particularly noticeable along 4th Avenue:

4th Avenue, looking downtown from 10th Street
(Google Earth screen capture)

And this is not a case where 4th Avenue is "taking one for the team," handling the parking so other streets can be great, like Heivly Street in Decorah or 2nd Street SE here (Kaplan 2016a); the parallel streets through the MedQuarter are also laden with parking lots and unfriendly buildings.

The city has a stake in the vibrancy of its core, too. And the way parking competes with all other uses makes it the enemy of good development. (See Shoup 2005, Kaplan 2016b, or really any published urbanist.) Save CR Heritage argues the convent building could have been used for housing. Surface parking puts destinations farther apart, making walking less desirable, the neighborhood less interesting, and adding to the city's infrastructure maintenance load (paid for by you, whether you're driving or not). The more driving is accommodated, the more cars are brought into the area, the less safe it is for everyone else, and the more the planet suffers. 

The conflict between parking and other community interests is not symmetric. If all the churches, medical facilities, and so forth want more parking, we have seen they will get it, even demolishing buildings or buying adjoining properties to obtain it. But who speaks for the countervailing interests? Organizations like Save CR Heritage (and Corridor Urbanism) can advocate, but have no power to back it up. Only the city government can act for collective interests with long-term, widely diffused benefits. Can they limit, through zoning, the amount of land devoted to parking lots? Block sales of homes to institutions without a plan for using or replacing those structures? Broker parking lot-sharing agreements?

Governments, of course, are far from perfect. They are far from perfect advocates for collective goods. They have their own incentives. Often they respond to the loudest, most powerful voices in the room, which is the main reason Adam Smith didn't like public spending. Governments like flashy things, like a new casino, or a spiffed-up Field of Dreams, which is getting showered with public money in spite of accumulated evidence the return on investment is likely to be disappointing (Ionescu 2022, Welch 2022). They would rather build new roads than fix the ones we've got (Marohn 2022). Meanwhile, Iowa is ending a program of rental and utility assistance; outsiders like the poor don't have the political heft of insiders.

And yet, without someone to balance the scales by standing up for public interests, the community is merely the pursuit of private interests. Private interests are not all bad--Smith also points out that the brewer's and the baker's private interest in living well gets me beer and bread--but if that's all we have to go on, we get short-term thinking and long-term desolation.

SEE ALSO: 

"Filling in an Empty Quarter (III)," 25 July 2014

"Indulging in Urban Fantasy," 6 September 2014

"Why Historic Preservation," 22 July 2013

"The Future of Downtown Cedar Rapids," 24 June 2022

I Wish This Parking Was...

It's the day after Thanksgiving, when Strong Towns members near and far leap out of bed at the crack of dawn to--what else?--document their town's excess parking capacity, which is often glaringly visible even on what is normally the busiest retail day of the year. I've been at this since 2015, when I went to the north edge of town to observe scenes like this...

big box store, Collins Road, 11/27/2015

...and this...

big box store, Blairs Ferry Road, 11/27/2015

In these two cases, there were many customers in both stores, and many cars in the parking lots I depicted. The problem is that the lots are so big that there was much excess space anyhow--even on Black Friday!

Five years later, I had been looking forward to re-visiting the places I'd documented that first year. However, the coronavirus pandemic has forced many plans to change, and Black Friday Parking is no exception. It would be no surprise to find excess parking capacity today, even in the busiest shopping areas. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and no doubt even less interesting.

Happily, the good people at Strong Towns came up with an alternate plan: Show us a place where there’s too much parking, but more importantly, tell us (or even illustrate for us, if you’re artistically inclined!) exactly what we’re missing out on by not taking a more flexible, adaptable approach to that space (Herriges 2020). You can see results from around the world by searching for the hashtag #iwishthisparkingwas on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

So I did not return to Collins and Blairs Ferry Roads this year. It may actually be the oceans of unused surface parking I documented in 2015 are the highest, best use of that land, although it probably doesn't deserve the rich dollop of public infrastructure that helped build the Target and all those strip malls. (One could, alternatively, make the argument that foregoing sprawl would leave more natural areas and/or farmland.) 

This year I went to the core of the city, where sadly we also have oceans of surface parking that goes unused no matter what day it is. I took this picture in Czech Village, surely my favorite sector of the city.

Czech Village has preserved a gorgeous shopping district on 16th Avenue, which was the center of what used to be a vibrant working class neighborhood. Much of that housing disappeared after the flood of 2008, but the district remains, enhanced by some great live-work spaces. Those residences aside, it is essentially "drive-to urbanism," and both 15th and 17th Avenues are lined with surface parking lots to accommodate visitors. Developing 15th Avenue would make a nice connection between the district and the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library, but I chose to pick on 17th Avenue instead, because it could connect to remaining residential neighborhoods across C Street. It was difficult to develop much here with confidence, so near to the river before there was adequate flood protection, but that is now largely in place, so that obstacle has been removed.

I wish this parking were a series of four-plex apartments, the missing middle housing that Cedar Rapids so desperately needs, and probably better long-term investments than the $300,000 condos that have sprouted in the adjoining neighborhoods of Kingston Village and New Bohemia.

As development continues near the river, the land value in Czech Village and the other neighborhoods may increase to the point that surface parking lots become irresistible targets for improvement. This is less likely to be the case in the MedQuarter, where the biggest stakeholders are the health care giants not private landowners. Just east of downtown are some parking craters of staggering size. Here's one, in the 500 block of 7th Street SE.

I don't know that my phone camera can capture its enormity. I tried again, with video.

Even on a weekday, this parking is excessive. I wish this parking were any sort of block that could support a 24-hour downtown. There's room for quite a bit of housing, and maybe a corner store-- groceries and hardware historically abounded in this neighborhood, but that was long ago--and even a pocket park. It is a scandal that this much land in such a valuable part of the city is going unused.

SEE ALSO

"Black Friday Parking 2019," 29 November 2019

"Black Friday Parking," 27 November 2015 [in which I again used the expression "shooting fish in a barrel"]

Hiking the (parking) crater

Many people have asked me, "Given the oversupply of parking near downtown Cedar Rapids, is it possible to walk from Coe College to the New Bo City Market entirely via parking lots?" All right, no one has ever asked me this, but I have always wondered myself. One day during a recent very cold snap, I was stir crazy enough to try it. I've been back over it a couple times to perfect the efficiency of the route. The online maps have the distance as 1.7 miles, but with all the angles we might cut it as short as 1.3.

Our hike begins at the parking lot near Dows Fine Arts Center. By no means is this the largest parking lot at Coe, but it is in the direction we're going, so here we start.

Getting across to Casey's General Store is tricky with 1st Avenue's average daily traffic count of 16,600, so the judges (me) are allowing the theoretical possibility of crossing here while in fact crossing at the corner where there's a walk light.

From Casey's we cross 12th Street to the parking lots behind Via Sofia's and Daisy's Garage...

...which serve as bridges to the Physicians Clinic of Iowa. PCI is in many ways the catalyst for the MedQuarter idea. In 2012 they planned a move out of a smaller facility on 8th Street; threatening to decamp to suburban Hiawatha got the city's attention, and they wound up with this larger space which apparently required closing two blocks of 2nd Avenue. We approach from the northeast.

Across 10th Street is their parking garage. We're going to have to go around it, but can pretend we're walking through it. In on the 10th Street side...

...and out onto 2nd Avenue!

Across 2nd Avenue:

From 3rd Avenue to 4th Avenue we walk through two adjacent parking lots, both serving medical facilities.

We continue across 4th Avenue at a slight angle--the judges hesitate but allow this--to make this connection:

Angling across this lot gets us to 8th Street. This lot gets us to 7th Street, within sight of the Post Office.

Cutting across 6th Avenue, the Post Office parking area and 6th Street gets us to the Post Office's vehicles which lot is fenced off.

So, once again, our hike will require imagining that we can pass through barriers like ghosts. Scoffers may well object to these technicalities.

But if you're still with me, we are ready to cross 7th Avenue.

A couple more parking lots get us to 8th Avenue, another thoroughfare with imposing traffic (ADC=13,700). So we'll look across the street to where we'd like to go...

...and take the way of discretion.

Angling across this block, used mostly by Horizon Family Services, gets us to the corner of 9th Avenue and 5th Street.

Two small adjacent lots get us to 10th Avenue. Stepping over the railroad tracks gets us close to the historic Cherry Building.... almost there! For the last block, though, I'll admit to pushing the envelope and trying the patience of the judges. We have to cross 10th Avenue (or the construction site) at quite an angle to get to the Cherry Building's parking area, which to my mind looks more like an alley than a true parking lot.

Nevertheless, if you're willing to accept that compromise, we made it!

(And, if your young and exuberant self is not tired yet, you can continue across The Depot parking lot to the Geonetric building.)

Now, if you're through checking your FitBit, can we reflect on what all these parking spaces mean?  Between our urban downtown and some traditional walkable neighborhoods is some severely suburban development, exemplified by PCI's shopping mall-like layout. The city street of the future (Davidson 2018) will look nothing like what's there now, nor what the MedQuarter contemplates building. While some of our hike's success relied on technical rulings by me a.k.a. the judges, or by crossing lots that were individually so small that no one could object to them, we've just trekked through a huge parking crater that creates a tangible boundary between downtown and the nearest core neighborhoods. This much empty space makes it difficult either to sustain a 24-hour downtown or to make connections between the neighborhoods and the burgeoning commercial areas in downtown and New Bo. At the same time, most of the crater is in private hands, and anyway is too far from downtown attractions to support for the nearby urban development with parking capacity.

At the same time, our hike shows the limits to how the MedQuarter can develop. If the success of these medical enterprises depends on the choices of people with cars they're going to need a great deal of surface parking, maybe more than this area can supply (Castleman 2018). At the same time, if medical "tourists" from the region matter more than people on foot from the immediate neighborhood, maybe the medical development should be and would be happier somewhere on the edge of town where real estate is cheap and expandable, the car can be king, and acres of surface parking don't put a crater in the urban fabric. Meanwhile, residential and commercial development along the route we just walked could support a larger walkable area than we currently have, room for families in the city center, affordable housing and--dare I say it?--a school or two. Maybe the solution to PCI's parking needs is not to subsidize their tearing down houses but to help them find a better location.

Design meetings last week

Two public meetings Tuesday raised issues of neighborhood design in the center of town, including enhancing walkability.

At the Metro Economic Alliance downtown, we got our first look at the wayfinding and branding signage chosen for downtown, the MedQuarter, New Bohemia and Czech Village (with City Council approval and timetable yet to come). The signage was developed by Corbin Design which is headquartered in Traverse City, Michigan.

Drivers would be served by this type of sign, indicating which section they're in, and orientation to other sections and attractions.

Pedestrians could benefit from more detailed markers, including "you are here" type maps and interesting historical facts.

Some signs would show walking times to various attractions, which might encourage people to walk more rather than returning to their cars and re-parking.

A closer look at the map, which is stylized and does not depict actual Cedar Rapids.

What can Cedar Rapids learn from Rochester?

The MedQuarter is an area in Cedar Rapids to the northeast of downtown, comprising about 40 square blocks including two large hospitals, some large medical practices, and numerous smaller offices. In 2011 a Medical Self-Supported Municipal Improvement District (SSMID) was formed to facilitate development of this area into what its 2014 Master Development Plan calls "a recognized destination for high quality healthcare that addresses the needs of both visitors and Cedar Rapidians" (p. 1). The large amount of underused space in the district makes it ripe for development; I've watched these discussions with great interest and a good deal of commentary, most recently here, with a bit of P.S. here.

Cedar Rapids is not unique in seeking to leverage its health care cluster to promote prosperity for the city. A quick Internet search finds Baltimore, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Camden, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Poughkeepsie pursuing some version of the "eds and meds" strategy. The closest role model for us is Rochester, Minnesota, a town slightly smaller than Cedar Rapids (112k vs. 129k) but world renowned for the Mayo Clinic, a mega-hospital employing about six times the combined work force of St. Luke's and Mercy Hospitals in Cedar Rapids.

(Strange to say, Rochester, too, only considers itself an aspiring healthcare destination: Its 2010 Downtown Master Plan stated one of its goals was to "[s]upport the Destination Medical Community goal to provide an ideal experience for patients and visitors" (p. 29) and a state law passed in 2013 aims at facilitating its becoming a Destination Medical Center. Ummm... with a million patients a year coming from 150 countries it isn't already one?)

Well, there's your problem. You call these banners?

Semantic issues aside, the established fame of the Mayo Clinic and the proximity of Rochester led me to investigate what a medical destination looks like. Specifically, aside from the size and medical mission of the facility itself, how does it impact the area around it? This is by no means a systematic survey but rather a quick impression from walking the immediate vicinity of the main hospital building, eating lunch in the "subway," and walking a few blocks in a randomly-chosen direction which happened to be south.

The Mayo Clinic is thoroughly integrated into the downtown area. Some might say it pretty much is the downtown area.

Rochester Methodist Hospital used to be separate but merged with Mayo some time ago.
Another large Mayo facility, St. Mary's, is a few blocks west.

There are some government buildings, some big hotels, and quite a lot of restaurants and small shops. Parking is mostly in garages, with some short-term on-street parking.

There are stores facing the street, as in the picture above, as well as in a "subway" accessible through the Kahler and Marriot hotels. Some of what's there:

By the way, directional signage, one of the goals of the MedQuarter, could be a lot better in Mayoland. When a confused, tentative out-of-towner wanders across the path of a doctor on a 20-minute lunch break, danger lurks.

The existence of both the subway and a skywalk system did not preclude pretty vigorous activity on the street, at least at mid-day with weather that was mostly good:

The Peace Plaza is a block of 2nd Street SW, east of the main clinic building, that has been closed to traffic:

Besides the Peace Plaza, though, Rochester hasn't pursued the sort of recreational amenities envisioned by the MedQuarter plan. There are trails along the nearby Zumbro River, and an intended Riverfront and Arts District (pp. 79-83), and some substantial city parks nearby, but not in the immediate vicinity of the clinic itself.

What is the impact of the medical complex on its surroundings? One block south of Mayo on 1st Street SW, we are still in the world of small restaurants and shops. This is the old City Hall, by the way; the current facility is across the river.

Another block away, and it's emptying out...

Beyond 4th Avenue, it's really empty, just like the edges of Cedar Rapids's MedQuarter are. Rochester's medical/downtown area is intense and urban, but quite contained. The Downtown Master Plan notes, "the fringe areas between Downtown and [nearby] residential zones often exhibit a pattern of development, including many blocks of surface parking lots, which does not provide either a gentle transition from Downtown or a strong edge" (p. 31).

So what have we learned from our investigative race through Rochester? Maybe nothing. If Cedar Rapids does achieve its goal of becoming a medical destination, it neither means we get what Rochester has, nor that what Rochester now has somehow limits what Cedar Rapids could build.

Most importantly, the contrast of urban and suburban patterns of development surely results from design choices made long ago. Rochester's medical complex is clustered in a high-density way; Cedar Rapids's medical buildings stand alone surrounded by many acres of surface parking.

If the SSMID's plans for the MedQuarter go forward, it will reproduce suburban design albeit will be way more attractive than what's there now. I believe this has less to do with the Mayo Clinic's greater size than with design choices long in place. I do not have a business brain, and can only speculate that it's because of these contrasting legacies that, with 1/6 the medical employment of Rochester, downtown Cedar Rapids has much less than 1/6 the ancillary businesses. In the MedQuarter itself, it might be 1/600.

Another thing critical mass allows is some imaginative thinking about public transportation. Rochester's comprehensive plan, adopted this year, envisions the need for serious investment in buses in order to meet anticipated growth. Mayo anticipates it will continue to grow: "It is expected that this expansion will happen both within and outside downtown, with non-essential functions relocating out of downtown [to] key growth areas to the south and west. In tandem with this change, Mayo is focused on critical transportation solutions for staff and patients" (p. 28). This is one important way in which contributing to the strength of the community as a while contributes to the strength of the medical enterprises.

The MedQuarter plan, too, expresses the intent to "contribute to the growth of Cedar Rapids," in three specific ways (p. 3):

1. Respectfully integrate MedQuarter development with adjacent neighborhoods and districts 
2. Clearly define the role of public and private sector interests and continue to strengthen private-sector control and accountability to carry out enhanced public services
3. Elevate the MedQuarter and the City as a whole by establishing a unique district character and environment attractive in the recruitment and retention of medical business and ancillary uses

The underlying premise is that in contributing to the strength of the medical enterprises the effort will inherently benefit the community as a whole. But in practice, whether MedQuarter development will improve commercial opportunities or transit depends on choices: the inclusiveness of vision of those with "control," and to whom they're willing to have "accountability."