Category Archives: City planning

The Baltimore Peninsula was supposed to be a $5.5 billion walkable city of residences, shops, and offices built on a former industrial site. Promoters convinced the city of Baltimore to put up well over $600 million in subsidies for the project. Now, most of the construction is done and it looks like one of China’s many ghost cities.

The creator of the above video suggests the project was supposed to be like Dubai but ended up being like a suburban community like Columbia, Maryland. But Columbia is a low-rise city of single-family homes, while Baltimore Peninsula is mostly a mid-rise complex of five- to seven-story condos, offices, and shops. In other words, the epitome of New Urbanism. Continue reading →

In 2024, Strong Towns declared Maumee, Ohio to be the nation’s “strongest town,” largely because the city rebuilt its main street to favor pedestrians over cars. It removed two of the four lanes and reduced the amount of parking on the street.

Google Street View of Conant Street before it was rebuilt.

Strong Towns believes that suburbs are not fiscally sustainable. Its goal is to “replace” traditional suburbs with a different kind of development that is supposedly “financially strong and resilient.” This new kind of development includes denser housing, an end to new road construction, and redesigning existing streets to be more walkable and less auto friendly. In other words, New Urbanism. Continue reading →

A downtown Minneapolis office building that sold for $220 million in 2016 was resold last week for $6.25 million, a 97 percent markdown. The Ameripress Financial Center is a 31-story office building that was built in 2000 and occupied by a single tenant, the American Express Financial Advisors (which was spun off by American Express in 2005 and renamed Ameripress). The building had been leased by Ameripress, which has its own building in downtown Minneapolis, and with so many people working remotely, it moved out of the leased one.

Photo by AlexiusHoratius.

The Minneapolis Downtown Council keeps saying that downtown is recovering, but admits that that recovery is more in the nature of evening restaurant patronage than office workers. It recently released a 2035 recovery plan that relies heavily on government urban-renewal projects in sites such as the waterfront and former post office. Continue reading →

A recent study concludes that it is feasible to convert some downtown buildings into residences. However, given the qualifications they put on this statement, I strongly suspect the authors’ definition of “feasible” is quite a bit different from mine.

Can the owner of this office building feasibly convert this space to residences? The answer, according to some, is “yes” so long as taxpayers give the property owner enough subsidies. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.

First, at least some of the building conversions they studied were hotels, not office buildings. Hotels, which are already residential in a sense, have a lot more plumbing that make them easier to convert to residential uses than offices. Continue reading →

The commercial real-estate market is tanking with vacancy rates approaching 20 percent, observes high-tech consultant George Sibble. This is a problem for all of us, he warns, for two reasons.

First, he says, the defaults that are likely to result from this will be much greater than the defaults that caused the 2008 financial crisis. Second, cities depend heavily on commercial real estate for tax revenues. Despite his arguments, I believe this is more of an opportunity than a serious problem. Continue reading →

The owner of San Francisco’s first and fourth largest hotels announced Monday that it is going to walk away from the mortgage it owes for those buildings. The owners of the Hilton Union Square Hotel noted that San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges,” including the fact that fewer groups want to hold conventions in a city now more famous for its homeless population than its cable cars and restaurants.

Once famous as the center of the 1960s counterculture, Haight Street is now the home of a new kind of counterculture. Photo by Franco Folini.

Last month, Nordstrom said that it was closing both its stores in downtown San Francisco. “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years,” said a Nordstrom official, “impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.” Continue reading →

The city of Portland announced yesterday that it received a $2 million federal grant to get it to ban gasoline (and, presumably, Diesel) delivery vehicles in a sixteen-block area of downtown Portland. That means all supplies to offices in that area will have to be transferred from petroleum-powered vehicles to electric vehicles before they enter the zone, thus driving up costs.

Here’s the cheery view greeting coffee drinkers looking for the Starbucks in the downtown Portland area that will be ruled off limits to gasoline-powered delivery vehicles. Source: Google Street View.

The good news is that three of those 16 blocks are city parks and eight are government buildings, so only five blocks of private office buildings will be affected (not that anyone should cheer about a policy that makes government cost even more than it already does). In addition to offices, I count at least four restaurants and coffee shops plus a beauty salon that will be annoyed by the new rules. At least one other restaurant has already “permanently closed,” probably due to recent rioting, and this new rule may be all that is needed to push some of the others out as well. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of parking garages in the area, so none of the bureaucrats who are making these rules will have to have their lives disturbed by them. Continue reading →