Instructional Billboards

One of the nice things about living in a ghetto neighborhood is that you're constantly being told what to do by billboards. Drive through the poorer parts of Oakland and you'll get great instructions from billboards about what to eat, how to be a father, and how to brush your teeth. Okay, that last one is a joke, but have you seen those ads on the backs of buses warning parents not to let their children fall out of windows? I swear, Oakland would just disintegrate if it weren't for all those helpful signs.

In my opinion, "public service" ads are usually ineffective at best, condescending at worst. From an urban design perspective, all they do is advertise the fact that one is passing through a bad part of town. An organization called Champions for Change has been putting up a lot of these billboards lately. I find them amusing because they encourage people to do things that would be either difficult or crazy given the urban context. For example:

This one is up on a blighted section of West Grand near Market. Not many fruits and vegetables to speak of in that part of town. The Whole Foods downtown, a couple miles away, has a great selection of produce, but something tells me the target demographic of this ad can't afford to pay $2.00 for an avocado.

There's a related billboard nearby:

By the way, that's an ad for footlong sandwiches next to it.

This is a little more realistic, in that it's acknowledging that it may be difficult for people to make all these healthy choices given the place they live. But it's a little unclear what it wants people to do. Get involved in local politics? Organize a farmer's market? I find it hard to believe that anyone would be motivated to do anything based on this billboard.

The topper is this one:
I've spotted this billboard in downtown Oakland, possibly somewhere around Telegraph and 23rd. It was changed before I got a chance to take a picture, so I had to jack this image from the internets. What's hilarious/insulting about it is that it was posted in an area where any responsible mother wouldn't dare send her children to just "go out and play." The options for going out to play are severely lacking in downtown Oakland. Just to give you an idea, this is the caliber of playground we're dealing with:

If I ever send my future child to play on a gated-up old parking lot with a few plastic toys strewn across it, I will have failed as a parent.

Children of very strict and involved parents in the ghetto often spend their days inside, lest they get corrupted by the influence of the streets. As a result, they often end up struggling with obesity (from lack of exercise) and asthma (from indoor air pollution and rats). I remember a friend of mine from my days in New York who fit this bill exactly. A very smart girl from Jamaica, Queens, she had weight problems and severe asthma from being kept indoors all day. It would be easy to criticize her parents for not letting her outside, but they made the most rational choice given their circumstances.

The most disturbing public-service billboard in Oakland, however, has to be this one:
If we've got manic, toupee-sporting babies on the loose, fruits and vegetables are the least of our worries.

Things I Learned Reading "722 Miles"

I went to the third planning meeting for the Estuary on June 18th. It was an "open house" style format, with little presentations set up on boards like in my 6th-grade science fair. I learned some interesting facts--did you know only 1,000 people live in the Estuary area?--but I didn't take notes, so no blog post. Supposedly the next meeting is where the rubber meets the road. Apparently people are going to sit down and try to create their own master plan for the area. It's from 9 am to noon on July 11th at the Beacon Day School, 2101 Livingston Street, so please come if you're interested.

In lieu of yammering on about the Estuary, I thought I would take it back to the old school with a book report. I just finished reading 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, by Clifton Hood. It was pretty good, and gave me some insights into transportation issues. It seems like everything these days is high-speed rail this and bus rapid transit that, so it helps me understand these issues by getting a little historical perspective. Here's what I learned:

--The goal of the subway was to reduce density.

Parts of lower Manhattan were among the densest on Earth before the building of the subway, causing outbreaks of disease and other problems. The progressive citizens of that day wanted to disperse the population as much as possible. (Indeed, it seems that through much of history, overcrowding has been a much bigger problem than sprawl.) The subway was seen as a means to such dispersal. How ironic that today mass transit is seen as a way to create density.

The subways were much more popular, profitable, and successful when their goal was dispersal. For one thing, they had a guaranteed market of teeming masses who looked to the subway as their ticket to freedom, out of overcrowded tenements and into gleaming new homes. For another, they had real estate on their side--the opening up of new land to development allowed real estate speculators to make a killing. Nowadays, the real estate industry often opposes public transit because it raises property taxes. And as we know well by now, cars are an easier way to disperse the population.

--Rate increases aren't the worst thing in the world.
When the first New York subway line opened in 1904, the fare was a nickel. Over time, the public became so attached to the nickel fare that the rates didn't change until 1948. Politicians won elections for decades by promising to preserve the nickel fare. Meanwhile, the subway went from a profitable, self-sustaining operation to a run-down system that had to go begging for subsidies.

AC Transit is increasing its fares on July 1st, from $1.75 to $2.00. I know that that will be a hardship for some people who rely on the bus, including myself and my girlfriend. However, fueling, maintaining, and insuring a car is still many orders of magnitude more expensive than public transportation, so I think a little perspective is needed.

--Public-sector employees are sometimes overpaid.
This is heresy for me to say, considering that I come from a family of underpaid public-school teachers. But once the New York subway became publicly owned, labor costs did shoot up and damage the subway system financially. Hood writes that during WWII, "even though revenues remained high because of the heavy wartime traffic, subway costs were escalating, primarily due to transit workers' wage increases. From 1941 to 1945 wages rose 27 percent, and labor's share of total operating costs went from 54 percent to 63 percent" (p. 247).

This is a tough one for me to swallow. Of course I feel that bus drivers and train operators deserve a decent living, and I'm generally pro-union. But I'm more open to the argument now that public-sector agencies make concessions to labor more readily than a private enterprise would, due to the fact that it's not "their" money to give away. I don't necessarily think BART or AC Transit employees are overpaid, but many government jobs do seem to pay higher and provide far more generous benefits than comparable jobs in the private sector. For a perpetually underfinanced area such as transit, that's a problem.

--There has always been a tension between two competing visions of the transit network: transit as a business enterprise versus transit as a public utility.
Transit gets hammered from both ends on this. When the New York subway was privately run (by IRT), people loved to bash it for only caring about the bottom line. It fought expansion because it was content to keep making money on the busiest routes. Similarly, it preferred obscenely overcrowded trains to manageable ones. And of course, the private IRT worked hard to bust unions, keep wages low, and exploit workers. Basically, the subway was criticized for failing to serve the public good.

As a public utility, transit gets knocked from the other end of the spectrum. Conservatives heap shame upon transit for requiring subsidies through taxes. Farebox recovery rates, a business metric, are the standard by which all transit is judged. And transit employees are criticized (sometimes with reason) for being overpaid. It would be nice if we as a society had some clarity about what the standards are for transit. Do we care most about maximizing ridership, or ensuring operating profits and self-sustainability? Is transit a basic utility, like trash pickup, or a business?

There's also a third paradigm available: transit system as prestige piece. This concept is basically foreign to American transit systems. As the author writes, "unlike the London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo metros, New York's subway had not been conceived as a national showcase and did not receive extra funding for reasons of prestige" (p. 250).

The Moscow subway: the upside of totalitarian dictatorships.

It sounds nice to dream of the day when money is lavished on BART and AC Transit (ha!) as a matter of regional pride. But then I think of the Oakland Airport Connector "blingfrastructure" project and think, ew. Basic needs first.

The High Cost of Cars: On-Site Parking

My last post seemed to be such a hot topic that I thought I would do a sequel, focusing on a different aspect of the high cost of cars in the city: the on-site parking lot.

Just to be clear, I'm not some anti-car nut. I drive a car. However, I think the tremendous amount of infrastructure and space required by cars tends to be taken for granted.

Joel Garreau enumerates the requirements of cars well in Edge City. He writes, "to park an automobile takes four hundred square feet. That's the actual parking spot, per car, plus its share of the required driveways." (p. 118). Meanwhile, people need far less space to move around once they're out of their cars. As a result:

The developer needs one and a half times as much space for the cars as he does for the humans. Given that, the cheapest option a developer has is this. Build a one-story building. Let it cover 40 percent of the ground. That leaves 60 percent of the land to be covered with a simple parking lot. No grass or trees or sidewalks. But the right ratios at the least expense. Which explains why an awful lot of cheap development looks the way it does" (p. 120).

Oakland has its share of cheap development:

I could go on, but you get the idea

This perhaps explains why so many of these on-site lots are at fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and 7/11's. Builders of these establishments want to do what's fastest and easiest.

The need for parking isn't going away anytime soon, but we could do with less on-site parking. A more pedestrian-friendly option is street parking and parking structures for the general public, rather than just the customers of one business. Although ugly, a parking structure minimizes the space devoted to parking and forces people to walk a short distance to their destination. As a result, people will often stop at more than one store during an outing. The owner of one small business in the Uptown district told me business went way down when the city closed all the surface parking lots in his area. People going to and from work no longer parked there and hence never had an excuse to pop into his store. (For the record, I'm glad those lots are gone. I still find the unintended consequences of these things amusing.)

In addition to being ugly, on-site parking lots are highly inefficient. Because they are usually for customers only, they sit half-empty much of the time. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is the McDonald's on Haight Street in San Francisco. Upper Haight is a notoriously difficult neighborhood to park in, yet the McDonald's lot is usually more than half empty. No wonder they have to practically threaten to impale non-customers who are tempted to try parking here.

Oakland has similar problems. Take the Kragen's on Park Blvd., which sits next to the (now-closed) Parkway theater. I wonder if it would have made a difference to the Parkway's survival if customers could have parked in the Kragen's lot.



Then there are the on-site lots that are just totally unnecessary:
In many parts of Oakland, street parking is sufficient to meet demand. The dead space created by this Burger King parking lot breaks up what would otherwise be a nice street to walk down. It's an opportunity for some great infill development.

Of course, there are some types of businesses that require on-site parking. Home Depot customers don't want to lug pieces of lumber down the block to their car. Still, I think they went a little crazy with the size of the lot at the Home Depot in East Oakland:

Maybe they were overly optimistic about business projections or something, but this place is almost always a sea of empty asphalt. (It doesn't help that it's impossible to find this place without getting lost and circling around a few times.)

In contrast, many feared that the parking lot on Lakeshore would be inadequate once the Trader Joe's opened. And it's true, the lot is almost always near capacity. (During the daytime, at least.) Parking there is a tense operation at times, although I can almost always find a space. But because of this economical, consolidated parking arrangement, the rest of Lakeshore doesn't need on-site lots. The street is bustling and pedestrian-friendly. And, perhaps not coincidentally, 7/11 and McDonald's-free.

Running on Empty

A couple of gas stations near my house have closed in the past few months, victims of the economy and low gas prices.


Even the graffiti writers can't resist rubbing it in:
I say good riddance. You could argue that gas stations contribute to global warming twice--once when people fuel up, and again when people choose not to walk because they don't want to go past an ugly gas station. They're like holes in the city's fabric, ruining the visual definition and symmetry of a street. Not surprisingly, people will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid walking past them. It amazes me that with as much zoning and regulatory control the city exerts over land use, gas stations still end up on pedestrian-friendly streets, next to historic buildings, and so on.

I was hoping to do a post on the "trend" of gas stations closing, but it takes three things to make a trend, and I only know of two. Keep hope alive, though! There are plenty of other gas stations that I have my fingers crossed about.

This one on Lakeshore at the intersection of Lake Park is awful. On a street that's great for retail and where space is precious, this blots up the landscape. I actually think a parking lot would be a step up from this. Although I suppose it's good for business on the other side of the street, since everybody crosses over to get where they're going.

This one on Piedmont Avenue is another winner:

I can't capture the whole street in a picture, but this station sits between the Landmark Piedmont movie theater, L'Amyx teahouse, and a beautiful old church. Pedestrian-friendly streets are still scarce enough in Oakland that they deserve some sort of protection from this kind of blight.

My unscientific analysis indicates that there are just too damn many gas stations in Oakland. Many, even most, of them seem to have a pretty low volume of business--probably because people tend to shop around for the cheapest gas, and you're not going to find it on Lakeshore. Everybody in my neighborhood goes to the Arco station on Park Blvd, not the half-dozen other stations nearby.


I don't know what sort of cleanup or other costs are associated with converting gas stations into storefronts--somebody fill me in on this--but here's hoping that change can happen. After all, the market has spoken.

On the Waterfront

I went to the second community meeting for the Estuary plan a couple of weeks ago. I saw some other bloggers there, but I think that nobody's really written about it because it was just kind of meh. The planners, especially Eric Angstadt of CEDA, really seemed to have their shit together. A woman gave a great presentation connecting planning issues such as pollution and walkability to public health issues such as obesity and asthma. And there were many thoughtful comments by people in the audience. But the Truth to Power crowd would not be deterred. You know, the ones who, no matter how asinine their ideas, think that they are the lone voice of reason against the monolith of money and politics. Some of the noble causes put forth by these brave citizens were complaints about the railroad line that has been there longer than virtually all of the area's residents, and the lack of sufficient parking for new residential developments. One nut in particular stole the show with his rants. "I know who you are now," he said to noone in particular. "You're the people who wanted to clearcut the trees around Lake Merritt." He brought that up three or four times, until Eric Angstadt had to walk back there and get all serious with him. If he had decked the guy I would have stood up and cheered. I'm wondering if these community forums aren't really just a setting for really bad theater, a la "Waiting for Guffman." It's times like these that I just thank God I don't live in Berkeley.

Anyways, afterward I realized that I still didn't have a good handle on what the Estuary area was really like, so I biked through and took some pictures last week. And I have to say that I get it now. I get why it appeals to people and why they don't want it to change. I get the aesthetic appeal of the area. The mix of heavy industry and artist lofts makes sense to me now, and I get why people would want to preserve that feel.


The fact that these streets are so geared towards industry gives them a unique look that draws artists. I find it interesting that a lot of basic rules of good planning are broken, with some counterintuitive results. Sidewalks and bike lanes--"complete streets"--are a basic tenet of the new urbanist philosophy, but these streets have neither, and somehow seem even cooler for it.

Try getting a street like this built nowadays.

Because it's an industrial area, there is very little traffic from passenger cars. So even though some of these streets lack any amenities for walking and biking, they feel safer than a place like downtown Oakland. The comment from a resident that I mentioned last time--"there are so many things to do here, despite it looking like a wasteland"--makes much more sense to me now. That guy meant wasteland in the sense of a removed, aging-industrial, low-rent district, not wasteland in the sense of a hellhole.

I was also impressed with the true mixed-use nature of some of these streets. A lot of lip service is given to the concept of mixed use nowadays, but how often do you see an auto body shop next to single-family detached homes? The residential and industrial uses really are cheek by jowl, and it seems to work. (I would put a picture of that here, but I didn't get a good one, so just picture it in your mind.)

It was also a surprise to me how quiet parts of the Estuary seemed, even with the industrial uses and proximity to the freeway. I see why people would groan at the thought of a bunch of condos going up and newcomers flooding in. It's not like all this space is going to waste, it's just that the uses don't result in a dense population.


One insightful comment at the meeting was from somebody who pointed out that the Estuary is really a collection of different neighborhoods, and that's true. There are parts of the Estuary that suck, and those are the parts I had had in mind during the meetings--weed-choked vacant lots, streets used more for dumping than anything else. But other people were picturing old brick buildings and artist enclaves and boats docked on the waterfront. It was like that old story about the three blind men patting different parts of the elephant.

I guess this would be the trunk?

So unless I'm missing some pockets of coolness, the area from 19th Ave to Fruitvale is the good part. Between Fruitvale and 50th it gets noisier and dirtier.


There are also some new(ish) developments within the area that range from fair to poor. This condo complex is ok, if blandly similar to seemingly every new condo complex in the Bay Area. Worse is the office park below.

Walnut Creek, anyone?

I've focused on the aesthetics and visual aspect of the area because I still have a lot to learn about the deeper issues of land use and development. I've been filled in somewhat on the whole Carlos Plazola controversy. (If you're too lazy to click through, the charge is that he bought property and then asked his boss, one Ignacio de la Fuente, to get the land rezoned so he could reap a windfall profit by building condos.) It seems like with all of this stuff there's always far more backstory than I'll ever even realize. But I do think that aesthetics can help guide judgment on these matters. Just looking at the streets can tell us a lot about what's worth preserving and what should be scrapped. I agree with McBain that the estuary could grow well if it had more "incubator space" for microbusinesses, along with more live/work lofts and other nontraditional forms of housing. I don't think this place needs an explosion of housing or retail to be a productive and vital area that serves the rest of Oakland well.

Anyways, in lieu of any kind of grand point, I thought I'd pose a few questions to whoever still reads my slow-posting ass. First of all, why do so many city-planned parts of Oakland come out looking like this:

That is, why does Oakland build so many landscaped places that look pretty but are functionally useless? This stretch of waterfront near High Street belongs in a class with Middle Harbor Shoreline Park and Jack London Square. Clearly a lot of money was spent installing these benches and rocks and grasses, but nobody goes here. It sits there in the noisy, ugly part of the Estuary like lipstick on a pig. Yes, that's a public storage facility across the street.

Anyways, why does this mistake seem to get repeated over and over in Oakland? Everywhere I go, there always seems to be some kind of fancy new public showpiece looking sterile and underused. Is there some kind of long-term logic that I'm missing, or is this just a case of the best intentions going awry? Somebody please fill me in.

The second question is slightly less rhetorical. A friend of mine told me about Numi Tea (located along the Estuary), and how they want to expand into a nearby building, which would provide jobs and grow a cool Oakland business and basically be good for everybody.

However, the landlord of the property doesn't want to rent the site out to them, because he's hoping the land will be rezoned as residential, which would generate more income for him than an industrial tenant would. So, assuming this story is true, what should the city do in a situation like this? I mean, I could go all libertarian and ask why we even bother with zoning. Shouldn't questions of what gets built where just be determined by market demand? If people are willing to pay more for housing than for industry, what's wrong with building housing? Isn't more new housing in Oakland a good thing? Why should we be trying so hard to hold onto these industries, to the point where we're effectively subsidizing them?

On the other hand, what if the larger needs of the community are being eroded because of the shortsighted interests of a few landowners and developers? What if by putting up a bunch of new condo units, developers are destroying the very thing that makes this community unique? And doesn't Oakland needs things like heavy industry and blue-collar jobs in order to be a balanced, healthy city?

So please, leave your thoughts and school me.

Pictures of Dead Railroad Tracks

No book-length post from me this time. I just thought I'd share some pictures of the defunct railroad tracks littered throughout West Oakland.



It doesn't make any sense, the millions of shipping containers passing through the Port, the daily lineup of trucks idling on Maritime Road, and the train tracks slowly rusting away like the ruins of a lost civilization.

I've heard people say that there are problems with rail, that it's too inflexible, that the "first and last miles" are a logistical challenge, that freight only makes sense for bulky industrial products. I just don't buy it. If we really prioritized rail, and stopped subsidizing freeway construction, none of these problems would be insurmountable. I recently came across a fascinating interview with Michael Dukakis, of all people, talking about this subject:

"In Massachusetts, the governor wants to build a four-mile light-rail extension using existing right of way [tracks and property that are already in place], and it's going to take six years to complete. How can that be? Chinese and Irish immigrants were laying four miles of track a day on the transcontinental railroad, and that was in the 1860s."

The transcontinental railroad had its terminus point in Oakland, reshaping the city forever. Both the black and Chinese communities in Oakland grew out of their connections to the railroads. (The mostly black Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters union had a chapter in Oakland, while the Chinese of course built the railroads.) The character and visual layout of Oakland was determined largely by the existence of streetcars and passenger rails. Sad to see the means of all that history turning to weeds.

Estuary Planning Workshop review

Monday night, at the urging of this post, I went to a planning meeting for the Estuary area of East Oakland. Since I'm new to this whole scene, I thought I would write about my impressions, in the hopes that it will be less intimidating to other people to get involved in stuff like this.

I got there a little bit late, so when I came in a guy from the consulting firm was giving a presentation about the whole project. It was boring. (Note to self: come late every time.) There were about 85 people in the audience, skewing heavily to an older, white demographic. I hadn't known what to expect--I thought there would be a larger contingent of hipsters throwing their weight around, but it seemed more like retirees performing their civic duty.

Anyways, the consultant guy then gave us some information about the area currently, with a little bit of history thrown in. That part was actually pretty interesting, and I learned some things, although it was amusing how much he sugared up his description of the estuary area. I just can't think of streets like this as very nice:


On the other hand, I guess it wouldn't be good form for the speaker to shit all over an area that he's working on. Seriously though, I was surprised at how much I didn't know about this relatively small strip of land. I didn't know that it was a food production area, or that there were so many condos, and I had no idea about the white elephant sale. So maybe I'm the idiot here.

After the presentation we were supposed to break up into four groups to discuss our ideas for the area, but people kept asking the speaker general questions. It was obnoxious as hell every time somebody was like, "what about ConAg?" "What about the railroad?" I get the sense that people relish the idea of being the "lone voice speaking truth to power" in a context like this. They think that the dude with the microphone represents "the system," and they're the little people in the audience standing up for the community.

Anyways, we finally divided up into our breakout groups. This was the heart of the meeting. My group was interesting in that it had a pretty thorough mix of interest groups. There were a couple of neighborhood condo residents, an industrial business owner, a landowner/developer, a guy from Urban Strategies, a few pro-environment people, an aspiring chef/bleeding edge hipster, and a couple random others thrown in. They all seemed pretty well-educated, solidly middle class people--not necessarily representative of the whole community, but thoughtful and diverse in their opinions. The developer guy looked like McBain from The Simpsons, which is pretty much how I would imagine a developer looking.

Anyways, the guy leading the exercise asked us first to write down what we value about the waterfront. I definitely learned some things from the responses people gave. For one thing, plenty of people love the estuary just the way it is and don't want it to change. The business owner said that what he liked about the area was that it was isolated from the rest of the community. And here I thought that was a bad thing! After that was the awesome quote from a resident that "there are so many things you can do here, despite it looking like a wasteland." Another person said she liked the low population density, which again, I tend to think of as a bad thing, especially for a place with good potential like the estuary.

The second question asked what we would like to see changed about the estuary area. My response harkened back to this post of mine. I basically said that Alameda is nice, and Fruitvale BART/International has a lot of flavor, so the estuary could be a good connection between the two, instead of a no-man's-land. The business owner wanted less bureacratic red tape, the Urban Strategies guy said he wanted more blue-collar jobs, the environmental people wanted greenways and a beautiful waterfront, and so on. At times it felt like people were just reciting the talking points for whatever thing they were speaking on behalf of. The aspiring chef's answer to every question involved the phrase "artisanal foods," and I had to keep myself from cracking up by the third or fourth time. After a while though, people stopped being caricatures of themselves and some interesting conversation developed.

The developer made what I thought was the most interesting comment of the night when he said that "right now we have warehouses that are empty. But if you have incubator space--lofts, small businesses, small warehouse space--people want those all day long." The issue of zoning conflicts came up, since the zoning map and the general plan are apparently in conflict. The Urban Strategies guy made a good point on this issue when he said that "people can't act as rational economic agents when they don't know what the results will be at city hall."

Everybody seemed pretty surprised at areas of agreement within the group. I've started to become more and more aware of the "strange bedfellows" phenomenon in urban planning. The business owner was in sync with the Urban Strategies guy as far as keeping the area friendly to industry and jobs, and in sync with the environmental people as far as being pro-rail. The developer was in sync with the artisanal foods guy in terms of wanting space for small businesses. The biggest faultline I noticed was between the "develop and build" philosophy and the "leave it as it is" philosophy. Nobody really tried to tease out the conflicts though, so they were sort of just smoothed over instead.

When we had finished, one guy from each group was chosen to present a summary to the larger group. That was pretty much it.

So that's what it's like going to a community planning workshop. It's a clever idea in that it forces people to deal with each other rather than blame the guy at the podium for everything they don't like about a city plan. (And also it's democracy in action or something.) My biggest concern is that gathering input from the community in this way can be a feel-good process that sidesteps the hard questions and potential conflicts that might come up. I'm afraid that the ending resolution will be some mushy-mouthed statement like, "we want a nice, mixed-use place with interesting architecture." (i.e, the kind of statement where no matter what happens, politicians can say, "see, this is what the people wanted!") I hope that as the process goes along it gets a little more into the nitty-gritty of what's realistic and what the conflicting issues might be. I don't want to witness screaming matches, but I'd like something more realistic than a collective Christmas list. And I really don't want Oakland to end up with another underused park or plaza.

The next meeting is in late April, probably at the same location (Fruitvale/San Antonio Senior Center, 3301 E. 12th Street #201), although they might find a new venue. Check the Oakland.net website (or most likely abetteroakland) for updates. If you're not persuaded to come yet, keep in mind also that there are free Oreos at the end.