Much has already been penned about the competing interests of Washington’s urbanist groups. Specifically, about the Committee of 100 with its preservationist bent versus the blogosphere and its smart growth bent, led by Greater Greater Washington.

I’ve thought about the divide as well, and I agree with those who say that it’s the result of a massive divergence in how the older generation and younger generation think about cities.

The Committee of 100 and its preservationist brethren think about cities in terms of the mid-to-late 20th Century, when proposals for massive highway and urban renewal projects threatened to essentially bulldoze most of the city and turn it into a giant suburb. Fighting those proposals was the necessary urbanist agenda of the day, and current residents owe preservationists a great thanks for saving our city from the wrecking ball decades ago.

But the experience of fighting a never-ending rear-guard action against bad ideas left that generation neurotic about new development. The city spent so long building crap that the preservationist contingent simply can’t wrap its mind around the possibility that change might be good. 50 years of mostly horrible, anti-urban development has convinced an entire generation that all new development must be bad.

Then there’s the new order. The younger generation of which I am part. Unlike the older generations that watched livably urban cities empty out, my generation started with empty cities and has watched them fill back in. The crap of the late 20th Century is what we were born in to. It’s our starting point. Since then, almost every change to the city has been for the better. Neighborhoods have revitalized, ghettos have disappeared, transit options have expanded. The city is a far better place now than it was when my generation first started paying attention in the early 1990s, so we’re comfortable with change. We think of it as a positive force. We want more of it.

Thus the great divide. One generation’s experience tells it that change must be negative, and another generation’s experience tells it the opposite.

Only time will tell if we’ll be able to find common ground.

After I heard about the terrorist plot to bomb Metrorail, it wasn’t long before I remembered the movie Total Recall. Specifically the scene where Our Hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger, walks through a security x-ray while entering a subway station.

Image from the movie “Total Recall.”

Is this our future? The technology is already more or less here. Would it be a fair price to pay for safety? Too much? Irrational security theater?

Just to be clear, there is no real-life proposal to do this. But it’s not hard to imagine the rush to add security that would likely follow a successful attack. Can you imagine a future with a set of these at Metro Center? Would you still ride if so?

This is a map of the Washington region by population ethnicity as of the 2000 census. Each dot represents 25 people. Red dots are Caucasians, blue dots are Blacks, yellow/orange dots are Hispanics, and green dots are Asians. The map is part of a series created by flickr user Eric Fischer showing the 40 largest cities.

White it’s important to note that this data is 10 years out of date and undoubtedly seriously obsolete, it is nonetheless interesting. The familiar east-west white-black divide is obvious (although not nearly as stark as the divide in Detroit), but isn’t it interesting to spot the pockets of overall diversity, and to see how clearly Metro stations in Northwest and Montgomery County stand out.

What patterns do you see? What do you think will be different about this map when census 2010 data comes out?

In today’s installment of the Washington Post Local Blogging Network, I discuss why it is wrong-headed and sociologically harmful for Gallery Place management to use a “mosquito device” to try and drive away teenagers from the Chinatown entertainment district.
 

The Post’s big Metro-section story today is about seat hogs on the Metro – people who take up more than one seat in crowded trains. Seat hogs are naturally a frequent target of rider-on-rider scorn, perhaps second only to the dreaded escalefter.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with people spreading out as long as there are several seats available. You’re only a seat hog if people on the train are being forced to stand for lack of enough seats.

But since we’ve all seen plenty of hogs on crowded trains, what should we do about them? Can we do anything?

The Post article discusses SeatHogs.com, at which frustrated riders post pictures of the most blatant offenders in the hopes that the prospect of being publicly shamed will dissuade potential hogs. Funny, but it seems unlikely to work. The odds of any given hog being shamed are too small.

If I see a seat hog and I want to sit, I’m not generally shy about asking them to move. Occasionally I even ask hogs to move when I’d otherwise be happy to stand, just on principle. No one has ever refused. But I wonder if this tactic doesn’t actually contribute negatively rather than positively. After all, if hogs are trained to think it’s acceptable to do their thing unless someone confronts them, then riders who happen to be too introverted to feel comfortable asking someone to move will be increasingly out of luck.

So if neither shaming hogs nor asking them to move are really ideal solutions, is there one out there?

In a post at the Washington Post Local Blogging Network, I discuss why it is foolish to suggest that the District should divert money from infrastructure to social services, because infrastructure is an investment that pays off in terms of economic development, which in turn simultaneously reduces the need for social services while providing the city with the money it needs to pay for them.

Shockingly, Washington, DC does not look like this.

Residents of Washington, DC will continue to be denied Congressional representation because, once again, a bunch of Congresspeople who aren’t from cities want to use voting as an excuse to force the District to drastically weaken its gun laws.

In some places of the country carrying a gun makes sense. If you live an hour from the nearest police station, get the protein for many meals from animals you’ve killed yourself, or have certain jobs, guns are sensible tools to have around. However, urban centers like the District of Columbia are not like that. In Washington the police are always nearby, most people would rather give up their wallet to a mugger than risk dying in a gun fight, and in any event it’s too crowded to use a gun safely without worrying about hitting someone innocent.

Most city residents conclude quite sensibly that the city is better off with fewer guns, for the same reasons that most rural residents conclude quite sensibly that their communities are better off with more guns: Different policies are appropriate in different places.

Wouldn’t it be great if elected officials from both parties accepted that cities and rural areas have different problems with different solutions, rather than trying to force their own local politics onto places that are fundamentally different? Maybe that’s too much to ask.

When Kensington banned children from a public park and tried to extort money from their school earlier this week, it was an acute case of heartless cruelty. It was also an (admittedly extreme) example of the exclusivity ingrained into much of suburban thinking that can seriously degrade community health.

It’s easy to understand how communities built on the notion of escaping from the unruly city can be so xenophobic, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK that they are. A community that values its serenity or pocketbook so much that it forgets the needs of its constituents isn’t much of a community. College students, skateboarders, high school marching bands, and even (the horror) fifth-graders are all legitimate community members, with legitimate needs.

The next time the folks on the Kensington town council see a news story about obesity rates among children, or about the social apathy of a generation raised on video games and TV, they should remember the time they outlawed healthy, constructive, school-supervised outdoor play.

There seems to be some outrage that a supposedly “affordable” housing project in Fairfax County includes in its mix of units housing for families making between $50,000-$100,000 per year. Famously conservative County Supervisor Pat Herrity calls the plan “government run amok.”

With the caveat that I know absolutely nothing about this proposal except for what it says in that article, I have to say that the outrage is probably misguided. The whole concept of building entire neighborhoods for a single narrow income group is outdated. The government built plenty of low-income only “project housing” back in the 20th Century, with awful results. When you take a bunch of poor people and cosntraint them to living in places exclusively for poor people, the result is a ghetto with an often crime-ridden and permanently stratified population. Hardly desirable goals for taxpayer subsidy. Current thinking on the subject suggests that mixing incomes produces all sorts of nice effects, not the least important of which is that neighbors value their neighborhood as something other than a government handout to be used and then destroyed. If you can make your affordable housing seem like normal housing, that’s generally good for the city (or county) and for the people living there.

So while I sympathize with the knee-jerk reaction to oppose government help for families earning close to $100,000 per year, it is probably legitimately good policy to do so. Having those folks mixed in with those earning less than $50,000 a year will make the neighborhood better.

PS: Lest I be accused to equating “rich” with “better”, the concept of mixed income neighborhoods is equally true on the other side of the spectrum. Neighborhoods that are exclusively for the wealthy are also undesirable for the city. The best neighborhoods are those open to everyone, in which the same person can live as they go from student to wage-earner to high-roller, and from single to partnered to having a family.

A facepalm moment if ever there was one

ghetto (noun)
any segregated mode of living or working that results from bias or stereotyping; “the relative security of the gay ghetto”; “no escape from the ghetto of the typing pool”
– Princeton University WordNet dictionary.

Cordoning off dangerous neighborhoods is how you create ghettos. Basic human nature dictates that most people subconsciously imitate those around them to avoid social conflict. Put a person in a mixed neighborhood where crime isn’t tolerated, and that person will more often than not lead a straight life. But put them in a place where crime is a way of life, and that same person learns that crime is the natural way of things, and goes bad. Of course there’s more to it and it’s not true for everyone, but nonetheless there is a clear and unmistakable pattern. This is why most affordable housing programs now focus on spreading low income housing around town rather than focusing all of it into a handful of gigantic housing projects.

Every city planner in the country, and most people with common sense, know that as a rule, ghettos are bad for the city. Especially ghettos of crime. Nobody in their right mind would try and create one.

It boggles the mind, then, that Mayor Fenty and Police Chief Lanier want to do exactly that, and create a ghetto in the heart of Washington.

Never mind that closing off entire sections of the city to people that don’t live there is blatantly unconstitutional, it’s a stupid, stupid idea. Even if it’s just for ten days, you’re sending a message that legitimate citizens, business and money have no place in that part of the city.

Don’t be surprised if legitimate citizens, business and money heed the message.