Cape towns eye ‘undevelopment’

What can a community do when it's already pretty built up, and its main commercial district is riddled with eyesores? Some towns on Cape Cod "are turning their attention toward rundown buildings and deteriorating shacks, buying and builldozing them to make way for public parks and scenic views," the Boston Globe reports.

"Along Route 28 in Yarmouth, aging motels, neon lights, and asphalt parking lots have swallowed much of the land. Residents such as Jack Mulkeen conceded that his popularly scorned town is "where everyone on the Cape points to and says, `We don't want this to come here,'" the article notes.

Sound at all like Rte. 9 in Framingham?

"For more than a decade, though, Yarmouth has worked to tear down structures that built that reputation. Verdant pocket parks with benches and water views have replaced a languishing motel along Route 28 and Rascal's Nightclub, a once-popular bar that Mulkeen said had fallen on hard times and burned."

Just because a main commercial roadway has been poorly developed once, with no regard for either pedestrians or asthetics, doesn't mean it has to stay that way forever.

What Happens When Streets Are Solely Built For Cars

"When communities organize themselves around the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, they effectively engineer physical activity right out of the equation," notes an article in Endeavors, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill publication. "Children can spend as much time riding to soccer practice as they spend on the field."


Rich Killingsworth, UNC research associate professor in the School of Public Health, heads the Active Living by Design project that will investigate "how people and their communities make decisions that encourage or discourage physical activity."

"When we looked at the data across the United States, we found that as communities became less compact — sprawled out — they showed higher prevalence of hypertension, obesity, and less physical activity," Killingsworth told Endeavors.

Reminder: Encouraging physical activity means more than the presence of sidewalks -- there are sidewalks on Speen Street between Rtes. 9 and 30, but does anyone want to walk there? There has to be an appealing streetscape so people want to walk, and the ability to get to destinations safely and pleasantly.

‘Smart Growth’ in California?

"California's official demographers projected last week that the state's population, now 36 million, could reach nearly 55 million by mid-century," write the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters. That's a staggeringly large number of people in a state that's already being choked by pollution, massive traffic jams and other manifestations of poorly managed growth. Yet the impact of growth is typically ignored until there's a crisis.

"To its credit, however, the still-young administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking the impacts of population growth seriously," Walters says. "Schwarzenegger has created an interagency task force to work on what one of its leaders, Business, Transportation and Housing Secretary Sunne McPeak, terms "a thoughtful initiative to fight what we call dumb growth."

The task force is reportedly looking at offering local communities incentives to cluster housing "near jobs and mass transit to dampen traffic congestion. [Sounds like the Massachusetts Senate plan for smart growth zoning districts (see blog entry).] The state, for instance, might make its grants for transportation, water plants, sewage facilities and even schools contingent on meeting state goals."

Oversized Wal-Mart Stores Threaten Vermont’s Essence

So says the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which placed the entire state of Vermont on its 2004 "endangered places" list.

"During the 1990s Wal-Mart located three of its four Vermont stores in existing buildings and kept them relatively modest in size," the organization notes. "Now, however, the world’s largest company is planning to saturate the state – which has only 600,000 residents – with seven new mammoth mega-stores, each with a minimum of 150,000 square feet."

The point isn't to bar Wal-Mart, but to urge the retailer to make reasonable modifications so as not to destroy the state's essence.

"Some big-box stores have adapted to local standards and worked to fit in gracefully with existing commercial districts. Some have even located in recycled vacant properties in existing downtowns," the National Trust says. "Wal-Mart should change to accommodate Vermont, not the other way around."

(Local aside: Unfortunately, ugly big-box strip-mall retail IS the existing commercial district along a good part of the Rte. 9/Rte. 30 Framingham-Natick "Golden Triangle." However, it doesn't have to be that way forever. Planners MUST start demanding more human-scale, pedestrian-compatible development. Not installing useless sidewalks in hideous asphalt oceans, but creating an area that people want to walk around in once there.)

‘The Lack of Pedestrians’

"Aside from the relative quiet and cleanliness of Framingham, what impressed the two journalists about the town was its lack of pedestrians -- which they believed was the result of everybody working," says a MetroWest Daily News article about two visiting journalists from Macedonia.

"We don't see people hanging out in cafes," Arben Ratkoceri told the News.

Having been to the Balkans five times since the breakup of Yugoslavia -- all five times staying in the homes of local people in Bosnia and Slovenia -- I can say it's more than just everybody's working.