Design vs. Develop

I won’t be able to blog or do any open-source programming for the next few days as my laptop suddenly stopped working. Dell’s supposed to send someone out with a replacement part this week, so we’ll see if that fixes evertyhing. In the meantime, development on the podcasting suite will be delayed (I’m soooooo close to a stable release). (Special thanks goes to the Arlington County Library for making this post possible.)

I usually wait for it right about here.

So claims the author of this op-ed. From the article:

The truth is that New York, Chicago and most of the older American cities had their greatest growth before there was anything resembling real public planning; the most basic American land planning tool, zoning, did not come into widespread use until the 1920s.
…

Since World War II, moreover, the density of the Los Angeles region has climbed dramatically, while that of older cities in the North and East has plummeted. The result is that today the Los Angeles urbanized area, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, has just over 7,000 people per square mile - by a fair margin the densest in the United States.

That 7,000 figure looked a little dubious, so I did some digging at the Census Bureau website.

The first thing we have to question is the use of the term “Los Angeles urbanized area.” For those of you unaware of Census Bureau CSMAs, metropolitan areas typically include many counties beyond the core urban area. The Los Angeles CSMA includes Ventura County, Orange County, Los Angeles County, Riverside County, and San Bernardino County. Of these, Orange County has the highest density, coming in at 3,605.6 people per square mile.

So if you add up each county’s density, you might come to a number near 7,000. However, this is totally erroneous: you’re adding averages. Likewise, adding these numbers and dividing by 5 will also be incorrect as the counties very greatly in square mileage.

Could the “Los Angeles urbanized area” be a small, but heavily built-up portion of Los Angeles County that would indeed have 7,000 people per square mile? Ahh, yes, the central city itself. Now let’s look at his comparisons, Chicago (12,750.3 per sq/mi) and New York (26,402.9 per sq/mi). Just how is Los Angeles “the densest in the United States”? If you’re going to cite a statistic, at least use one that supports your thesis.

I wouldn’t doubt that the sprawl reputation is a bit overblown (especially when you throw places like Houston into the mix), but to say that modern zoning has caused Los Angeles’ density (and the former lack thereof causing NYC’s “sprawl”) is a bit of a stretch.

This Cleveland neighborhood is unhappy with the number of churches deciding to build there. Why?

“The neighborhood used to be filled with stores and businesses,” [Tracey] Kirksey says. “Now it’s all parking lots.”

“Those churches, those doors are shut [most of the week]. They open on Sunday for a few hours, and on Wednesday for Bible study.”

“Anyone can open a church anywhere … There’s too many churches. You’ve got a church on a street corner, but the area around them is in despair. What is the church there for?”

What indeed. However, further along in the article, one long-standing, respected church considers opening a grocery store and adding housing. I’d be interested in seeing how far this progresses and if the neighboring congregations take a cue.

Chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. says Wal-Mart must act because consumers blame stores, not suppliers, for abuses. Yeah, really taking one for the team there, Wally World. As if you haven’t dictated the business practices of those suppliers for the last decade. Hypocrites.

I’ve added a forum to my Joomla! programming website, as I’ve been getting a steady stream of e-mail related to my podcasting component and people are beginning to ask a lot of repeat questions. We’ll just have to see how this goes.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Bill Scranton has officially begun his campaign for governor of Pennsylvania. From the article, Scranton appears to be the new Tom Ridge: from one of the smaller cities, apparently conservative, and yet pro-choice (although supportive of current abortion regulations). Wants to lower taxes, but doesn’t want to go as far as any of the other candidates have suggested. It’s business as usual with Scranton. This is just the kind of candidate Pennsylvania loves to vote for. Bleh.

Busy weekend over at Get Religion. The general gist of the post is that oversized homes forced into older neighborhoods with exclusively private inhabitants are a bad thing (I wholeheartedly agree).
However, the commenters soon rushed in accusing the authors of either trying to deny large families * adequate housing or forcing their own views of order on poorer, old neighborhoods. This heated debate demonstrates that churches desparately need to play an active role in rebuilding our cities and neighborhoods, if carefully.

* I grew up in a family some people would consider large (5 children), and we made use of a home significantly smaller than one of these McMansions, although still larger than an average home in the area.

Earlier this week, I added a component to Joomla! that powers a new sidebar to the right titled “Recent links I’ve visited.” These are pages I’ve recently read that don’t necessarily warrant a full blog post, but you may still find interesting.

Downtown Indiana, PA (my hometown) is considering a decade-long makeover. They’ve hired a landscaping and design firm to help them improve a lot of details. It sounds like people there are welcoming the change, as their input is being considered throughout the design proposals. A lot of the changes appear to be similar those that can be found in the book City Comforts.
Indiana’s downtown has actually fared pretty well over the past decade and a half. When the mall was originally built on the outskirts of town, the leaders of the day decided they weren’t going to even attempt to attract competing department stores. Instead, they worked on supporting local businesses and now have a nice collection of restaurants and a museum dedicated to Jimmy Stewart. From what I can tell, the vacancy rate is either equal to or lower than the mall’s, so I say they already have a good start. Keeping an eye on it…