What Can Cities Do to Go “Blue”?

 

In a number of projects and proposals, architects and urban planners are working with water instead of against it

In 2003, Jacques Lacour and his brother, Ovide, built a fishing lodge on a sliver-shaped lake called Old River that was once part of the Mississippi, near Batchelor, Louisiana. Leveraging local knowledge and techniques that had been developed over decades, they hit on an architectural concept that is becoming in vogue as climate change drives flooding events around the world. They made their business, called Old River Landing, amphibious.

 Instead of building Old River Landing on a foundation, the Lacour brothers built the whole structure on a base of polystyrene foam—8,100 cubic feet of it. That was enough to float the building in the event of a flood, leaving an extra tolerance for the action of waves from storms or boats. For added stability, sliding sleeves on each corner of the building encircle vertical poles, meaning Old River Landing can go up and down, but it settles back into place, impervious to the water currents and waves that might push it about.
 

Batchelor is an agricultural community, specializing in sugar cane. But Old River hosts anglers, who come up from Baton Rouge or Lafayette and stay in private or public lodges called camps. Starting in the late 1970s, some homeowners started making their camps amphibious. Now, when the lake rises, so do the camps.

 Architecture firms in the Netherlands and elsewhere are offering upscale versions of these amphibious houses, or even homes that float outright. In the famously vulnerable Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation contracted the American firm Morphosis Architects to build an amphibious home called the FLOAT house. And the Buoyant Foundation Project, a nonprofit founded by Elizabeth English, an associate professor at the Waterloo University School of Architecture in Ontario, uses modern engineering techniques to retrofit houses in flood-prone areas.

“We need to acknowledge that the water is eventually going to do what the water wants to do, and shift our approach, as human populations living on the Earth, from one of trying to dominate nature to one that acknowledges the power of nature and works in synchrony with that,” says English. “We’ve already set ourselves down this path of dams and levees and water control systems, and it’s really hard to turn back. But we don’t need to keep replicating that. We don’t need to make the situation worse. It’s time to step back from the approach of control and fortification.”

When Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, displacing a million people and causing more than $100 billion in damages, English was working at the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center on the aerodynamic behavior of windborne debris. The disaster, especially the failure of the levees, made her realize that flooding could do far worse damage than wind ever could. More recent hurricanes, too, have had their effects exacerbated by the design of the cities they have hit. While Hurricane Irma caused less-than-expected flooding in Florida, Hurricane Harvey was catastrophic due to the rainfall it dumped on Houston. City planners have attributed much of the flooding there to the prevalence of blacktop and concrete, which keeps water atop the landscape rather than letting it settle in.

To protect homes from flooding, FEMA encourages static elevation (raised houses) and won’t certify amphibious homes for the National Flood Insurance Program, meaning residents often have to climb stairs and deal with the visual impact of elevated houses. “The response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was, in my opinion, entirely insensitive to the cultural context of New Orleans in particular, and South Louisiana in general,” says English. The permanent, static elevation was disruptive to the aesthetic feel of the historic neighborhoods there. A student told her about Old River Landing, and she began to discover amphibious homes in other parts of the world.

But there are more ways to work with water than mitigating flood impacts. Architects and urban planners are reevaluating all the ways cities interact with water, from transport to recreation to energy to drinking water, and their ideas have the potential to fundamentally alter cities the way the car did in the 20th century.

“Cities that today start to embrace water and take advantage of the skills of water, will be the cities that have a better performance economically and socially and politically in 20 to 30 years,” says Koen Olthuis, founder of Waterstudio, a Dutch firm that has found designing around water to be more than a niche market. “When situations change—and that’s happening now, the environment is changing, the climate is changing—cities have to react. You have to change the skills and the performance of the city to give a reaction to this situation, and the reaction should be not fighting it, it should be living with it.”

Olthuis calls this idea the Blue City, and sees a coming progression, from green cities (low impact) to smart cities (connected and responsive), to blue cities, which use water to be both of the previous. An ideal city, he says, would accomplish this by using water to achieve three types of goals—to reduce energy needs, to generate energy, and to store energy.

Floating-Seawall4.jpg
Waterstudio designed this energy-generating seawall, called Parthenon, for Arabian Oddysea. (Waterstudio)

Waterstudio is working with Oddysea Development to showcase these strategies and more in a multipurpose entertainment resort on a one-square-kilometer man-made island in Bahrain. Called Arabian Oddysea, the project is scheduled to break ground in 2019 and be completed in 2023, according to chairperson Dara Young. The estimated $6 to 7 billion project will include shops, hotels and restaurants, as well as an aquatic sanctuary, a man-made mountain and an Arabian horse track. But along with—and integrated into—the entertainment, Arabian Oddysea will incorporate water in ways designed to improve energy efficiency.

“Integrating ways to sustain our needs by channeling energy allows us to lead by example. Bahrain was first to discover oil, so we’d like Bahrain to be the first in the region to introduce architectural hydropower,” says Young. “Over the next five years, the gulf countries are expected to need to generate 40 percent more electricity than they are now … and it’s important to stay ahead of the curve and come up with alternative solutions.”

To do that, Arabian Oddysea is incorporating several Waterstudio-designed elements that each use water in a different way. One is a sea wall, but it’s not designed like normal sea walls, which tend to be big chunks of concrete that waves smash up against and eventually demolish. Called Parthenon, the seawall is made of columns of turbines hanging underneath like the pillars of its namesake. As waves flow in and out, they drive the turbines, which generate enough energy for about 50 houses, but also reduce the action of the water so that behind the wall, the water remains calm.

Another feature is an array of floating solar panels that lie just beneath the surface of the ocean. In hot climates, exposed directly to sunlight, solar panels quickly exceed the optimal operating temperature. But when water is allowed to flow over them, they absorb sunlight at a balmy 80 degrees. There will be floating solar panels just offshore of the man-made island in Bahrain. (Waterstudio)

All that energy needs to be stored, somehow, and batteries are expensive. Arabian Oddysea plans to use it to pump water into tanks housed high in tall buildings called blue batteries, and then let it flow back down to run turbines once the sun is down. According to Young, 25 percent of off-peak energy needs will be housed in the blue batteries.

Another element of the Oddysea is a system of water-filled tubes running through walls and floors in buildings, squares and city streets. The water pumped through helps cool the city, reducing load on air conditioning.

Even the entertainment will incorporate water, says Young. The horse track will be suspended over water features. The water drained from the blue batteries will tumble down 200-foot “hydrokinetic waterfalls” that house the turbines.

Othuis’ vision doesn’t stop with the Bahrain project. He speaks of floating museums or stadiums that could be shared between cities across bodies of water, or even whole cities that move, or expand and contract, with the seasons, increasing density to maintain warmth and opening like a flower in the summer. A true blue city would incorporate these designs and more to treat water like a tool, rather than a threat.

“There are many things that won’t work, [and that] will maybe always be part of a futuristic scope or vision,” Othuis says. “But you see that some of these ideas in the end will be part of the next generation of cities.”

Oddysea is somewhat unique in its scope, its price tag, and its virgin landscape. But there are many other ongoing projects and proposals that tap specific innovations to address smaller aspects of water management. A permeable concrete from a UK company called Tarmac can absorb 600 liters of water per minute per square meter. A Danish architecture firm has designed a parking garage that sits atop a water reservoir and rises atop floodwaters as they drain into the reservoir. Dikes in The Netherlands now house sensors that can give managers advance notice of overloading, allowing them to evacuate or divert water when one part is getting too much stress. In San Francisco, new developments over 250,000 square feet are required to install and operate grey water recycling systems.

Danish architectural group THIRD NATURE has designed this parking garage that sits on top of a reservoir. In heavy rain, the reservoir fills with storm water and the garage rises.
Danish architectural group THIRD NATURE has designed this parking garage that sits on top of a reservoir. In heavy rain, the reservoir fills with storm water and the garage rises. (THIRD NATURE)

With the Bahrain project, Waterstudio has the benefit of working on a new development, where designs aren’t constrained by what’s there already. Much of our waterways, however, already share coastlines with buildings or other structures that would need to be adapted or discarded. That is what Baca Architects and H+N+S Landscape Architects, are doing on the Waal River in the Netherlands. A 1995 flood led to the development of that nation’s Room for the River program, which seeks to accommodate the changes to the rivers there, and the Waal River is a flagship project for the program.

At a bend in the river, near the German-Holland border, the town of Lent was at risk. A low-lying area just inside a higher peninsula, sort of a short cut for the river flow, was liable to flood. Over the last decade and a half, the city relocated around 50 dwellings and farmsteads, and H+N+S dug out a channel, turning the peninsula into a seasonal island. Now, the river would have space to flow, alleviating flooding not just in Lent, but downstream as well.

“This marks a fundamental shift in thinking, to date, in Holland, Germany, the UK, who have consistently built … with the presumption in terms of policy is we hold water out,” says Richard Coutts, director of Baca Architects.

 The landscaping has been completed, and bridges to the new island of Veur-Lent have been built. Now, Baca Architects are working on designs for the space. It’ll include parks, a campground, and an equestrian center. New homes will be developed based on the flood risk of their location. Those on the water will float, able to rise and fall with the tide each day. Those vulnerable to the expected seasonal variation of up to 12 meters will be amphibious in a similar manner to Old River Landing. Higher still, houses will be built with a flood-resilient lower floor, to minimize damage in the case of larger floods.

If the Veur-Lent project goes well, it could serve as a model for other cities and riverways. But there are still regulatory hurdles to building in a style that’s unfamiliar. FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program denies coverage to floating homes, while extending it to houses that are on the ground and likely to flood. Amphibious buildings, like Old River Landing, are ineligible at any price. Just like many of their neighbors, the Lacours built it anyway.

“It’s a way of life that we’re all accustomed to,” says Lacour. “Growing up on the river, there’s nothing like firsthand experience of seeing what water can do, and if you try to, you may find a solution for those situations. I think we’ve adapted to the changing conditions of our rivers.”

 

 

smithsonian.com

 

 

Opinion Hurricane damage can be costly, but housing market recovery is swift

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While the scale of destruction and suffering caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma is staggering, history suggests the local economy and housing markets in the affected areas will bounce back relatively quickly.

Each natural disaster is tragic in its own way, but some commonalities are apparent. Generally, natural disasters don’t permanently change underlying housing market fundamentals; they just disrupt things for a number of quarters, including causing sudden price hikes in less-affected communities as a result of the influx of displaced people. After an initial dip, the economy gets a near-term boost from reconstruction, before things return to normal.

How might economic activity, specifically housing, be affected by these storms?

The delinquency rates will spike locally due to employment disruption, but will not cause distress in the banking sector due to record levels of high-quality capital and strong and improving performance in the rest of the country. Some bond or portfolio investors will be affected, but the overall impact will be manageable.

With respect to economic activity, past severe weather impacts on job growth were short-lived, with an immediate drop in employment followed by three months of significant bounce-back, according to research by Keith Phillips and Christopher Slijk at the Dallas Federal Reserve. Understandably, numbers for Irma are still being calculated, but Harvey and Irma are projected to reduce third-quarter GDP growth for the United States between one-quarter and one-half of a percentage point and then similarly boost GDP growth in the fourth quarter, then more modestly in early 2018.

While fires and tornadoes make the news, the greatest share of losses from natural disasters is generated by hurricanes. Hurricanes also have the highest average loss per event and are the most frequent large-dollar disaster event, which can be sobering, given that we had an active hurricane season. The impact of climate change is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s worth noting that loss estimates seem to double every 10 years as cities expand and storm intensities increase.

Similarly, impacts on home prices have typically been short in duration. In fact, home price trends do not appear to change fundamentally, suggesting people rebuild and get on with life. Research by Eli Beracha and Robert S. Prati found that “one full year following a hurricane, little evidence emerges suggesting a lingering effect on residential real estate prices.”

Researchers at the Dallas Federal Reserve similarly stated, “The typical hurricane strike raises real house prices for a number of years, with a maximum effect of between 3% to 4% three years after the occurrence. There is also a small negative effect on real incomes.”

Federal Housing Finance Agency researchers who looked at the impact of Hurricane Andrew specifically observed that “price appreciation rates were positively affected by Hurricane Andrew. After about two years, appreciation patterns in all of the regions fell to rates close to pre-hurricane levels.”

While home prices per se seem unlikely to be significantly affected in the long term, the scale of these storms suggests we could see some impact to the housing market. For example, housing starts could be delayed, as builders must wait for the saturated ground to dry out. The lack of flood insurance coverage for many residents affected by Harvey may also have an impact. Fewer than one in six residents of Harris County, home to Houston and the nation’s third-largest county, have flood coverage according to the National Flood Insurance Program. This will partially hinder the boost to the economy from rebuilding and make federal loans more important.

Finally, where we are in the business cycle affects markets and our ability to bounce back. The recovery from Hurricane Ike in 2008 was delayed because of the deep national recession, while Harvey struck when the construction industry was already experiencing shortages of labor and materials. Thus, we can expect to see a rise in the cost of construction materials and possibly even slight slowdowns nationally in new home builds as construction workers are diverted to rebuilding.

 

 

By Ralph DeFranco Bloomberg October 11 2017

 

Sustainability at the heart of hotel design in the future

Green Hotels

Sustainability has been a buzzword within the design community, and hoteliers have been latching onto the idea of the past number of years

Sustainability has long been a buzzword within the design community, and hoteliers in particular have been latching onto the idea of the past number of years. Not only is it a response to an increased awareness of climate change and the impact we as humans, especially those working in one aspect of the construction industry, have on the planet, but it is also a response to client demand, with more and more guests desiring sustainable tourism as a requirement in their holidays. An annual competition run by hotel consultancy firm the John Hardy Group called Radical Innovation Award takes submissions for innovative hotel designs that reimagine the hospitality experience, and this year’s entries and winners point to a significant upswing in sustainable hospitality that could well be the future of the industry.

The award has singled out a number of visionary projects as finalists, but many of the entries proposed radical ideas that threw out the rulebook of hospitality design. A common theme was that of sustainability, both in an environmentally friendly sense, but also in a cultural sense, where local culture and art is celebrated and promoted. This also points to recent trends in hospitality where local experiences are being sought by guests wishing to engage more with the place and people they are visiting.

Green or garden hotels were a big feature of a number of entries. Canadian firm Arno Matis Architecture proposed a project entitled the “Vertical Micro-Climate Hotel”, whose concept is to make the outdoor areas of hotels located in the harsh climates of North America habitable all year round. One of the features of this hotel was the use of heliostat technology, a mirroring system which reflects sun back into certain parts of the building as required so as to make them habitable even in colder weather conditions. EoA’s submission involved suspending hotel facilities from a treetop by using a system of cables to hold rooms in tent-form above a trampoline-like platform, giving the hotel a very small footprint above the forest floor and re-orientating the guest’s field of vision to that from the tree canopy. A Dutch architecture student submitted a project that he had built in his mother’s back garden which connects guests to nature while allowing them to sleep in a sustainably built and naturally ventilated structure.

The culturally sustainable aspect came in the form of the currently-operational Play Design Hotel in Taiwan, which champions local artists and designers by installing their creations into hotel rooms and encouraging guest to interact with them. The idea came about after the developer noticed a lot of his artist friends were having to go abroad to showcase their designs, and he thought that it would be better to not only exhibit the work locally in hotels so that international guests could see them, but also to cultivate an environment of design engagement within the hotels themselves. “I want people to experience the culture of this country and played a lot with the idea of using the hotel as a portal for people who want to learn about Taiwanese design, a space that is furnished with all of these local designers’ work. So, their work is not only shown but so it’s experienced. Design isn’t something you only put in a museum or gallery. It should be used. It’s for your everyday use,” says hotelier Ting-Han Chen.

 

Article by Hospitality.net. 

Battery-operated homes may soon be a thing

 

The batteries resemble outdoor neighborhood junction boxes and can be put inside the house

Developers are getting ready to cut the cord on electricity, and a battery may take its place, according to the Wall Street Journal. Homes are incorporating batteries that resemble modern versions of outdoor neighborhood junction boxes, but these can be put inside the house, according to the Journal.

Up to 4,000 energy-efficient homes planned by real estate developer Mandalay Homes will use 8 kilowatt-hour batteries from German maker Sonnen, according to the Journal. The majority will be in Prescott, Arizona.

In Vermont, a partnership with Tesla Energy and Green Mountain Power is offering 2,000 of its customers a 13.5 kilowatt-hour battery called the Tesla Powerwall for $15 a month. The batteries cost $5,500, according to the Journal, but GMP CEO and President Mary Powell said the utility can afford to put them in homes because it helps the company save on grid infrastructure. GMP also uses batteries from Sonnen, SimpliPhi and Sunverge.

The shift toward renewable energy is a trend among builders and developers as more residential buyers slowly consider environmentally-friendly options, despite the added cost. Popular states looking to revamp their grids include New York, California, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont and Arizona.

Prices for solar panels in Florida have fallen by 64 percent over the past five years, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. South Miami recently became the first Florida city to mandate the installation of solar panelson all new homes. [WSJ] – Amanda Rabines

For more information on Green innovations contact us.

Does eco-tourism have a sustainable future?

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Does eco-tourism have a sustainable future?
by Lois Avery

Leonardo DiCaprio is almost as well known for environmental activism as he is for acting so it comes as no surprise that his luxury resort venture in Belize is creating a new vision for eco-tourism.

He first set eyes on Blackadore Caye, his 104-acre unpopulated island off the coast of Belize, a decade ago and bought it with a partner for a reported US$1.75 million. Once work is complete in 2018, it will house luxury villas and all the frills associated with five-star hospitality in one of the most beautiful corners of the globe.

But there appears to be more to this venture than financial gain. “The main focus is to do something that will change the world,” DiCaprio says in press reports. “I couldn’t have gone to Belize and built on an island and done something like this, if it weren’t for the idea that it could be ground breaking in the environmental movement.”

Plans for Restorative Island, as it will be known, show a large raised platform that stretches in an arc over the water, with artificial reefs underneath. The island will grow indigenous plants to support a manatee conservation area, and mangrove trees will be replanted. This vision is the result of 18-months of work from a team of designers, scientists, engineers and landscape architects but this labour of love extends beyond the last year-and-a-half. Apparently, DiCaprio spent a decade searching for the perfect hotel operator to partner with and he settled on Restorative Islands L.L.C., which is owned by Paul Scialla, founder of Delos, a global company known for its work on ‘well building’ designs.

“Delos, the partner in this development is the founder of the WELL building standard – they are positioning this as a rating tool for wellness in the same way that LEED/BREEAM etc. are to environmental sustainability,” says Matthew Clifford, Head of JLL’s Energy and Sustainability Services, Asia Pacific.

He explains that the WELL accreditation is still very new to the hotels industry but its implementation is a growing trend as developers, operators and consumers alike become more conscious of responsible travel.

An eco-tourism choice for all budgets

While the WELL standard may be new, the concept of an environmentally sustainable hotel is not. “Aside from DiCaprio, Marlon Brando conceived something similar in Tahiti and, whilst relatively well-known, we’ve also had the experience of Soneva and Six Senses in Asia for a number of years with their eco-resorts. Australia, Caribbean, Central America, North America, Scandinavia and the Alps are also markets where eco-resorts have been created; in truth, they can be found on all continents,” says Bob Merrigan, Executive Vice President, Hotels Project Services, JLL Asia Pacific.

From luxury resorts championed by wealthy individuals, to the back to basics eco-lodges that promote community living, eco-travel caters to all budgets. Yet it’s affluent travellers who are driving the larger scale resort developments. According to a 2012 Four Seasons survey of luxury travel trends, “the affluent put much more thought into their purchasing decisions to determine whether a product or service will intrinsically improve their lives.”

And when it comes to developing these resorts at the higher end, a significant investment is involved and funding often comes from private wealth.

Clifford adds: “Any development project will focus closely on how they can generate a buzz and, ideally, pre-sales. Developers are pretty smart at lowering their risk, and these days most major projects won’t go ahead without some level of pre-commitment. The celebrity endorsement is another way to generate a lot of interest, and I would be quite surprised if these didn’t sell out in rapid time.”

It’s clear that eco sells but Merrigan maintains that the market remains relatively niche: “There are the savvy entrepreneurs who see opportunity for which some will remain true to the eco-friendly spirit and others will play lip service interested only in the commercial returns.”

Ultimately, the hotels industry is driven by consumers. “Overall, environmental and sustainability issues continue to grow across all property types – it is not uncommon for guests to check the carbon footprint of their air travel to a destination,” Merrigan says. “Others may favour green policies such as obtaining all consumables within a specific radius of a property.”

A recent TripAdvisor study found that the ‘green’ travel trend is gaining momentum among its members; 71 percent said they plan to make more eco-friendly choices in the next 12 months compared with 65 percent who said the same a year earlier.

“There has been a growing consciousness of the need to protect these beautiful locations, rather than paving them all over, or ruining them with cookie cutter, or environmentally destructive resorts,” adds Clifford.

“Perhaps this is a way to avoid this destructive trend, by developing these beautiful locations, but in a way that keeps it beautiful and special for the long term.”

What makes a hotel ‘eco’?

• A carefully selected site: It must take advantage of positive local features, such as proximity to sustainable transport, rather than requiring people to fly in. Eco-sites mustn’t destroy areas with endangered species, high value agricultural land etc.

• A holistic design and delivery: the process must consider the full life cycle costs, not just up-front costs. For example, it may cost more up front to make the building efficient in terms of water, waste, recycling and energy, but these can pay for themselves over the lifecycle of the asset. Something which takes into consideration other macro-trends like climate change. What happens to your luxury resort if hurricanes, floods, coastal erosion, or sea level rise continue? And the project must be managed well to maintain the design goals. For example, don’t design an eco-hotel and then serve unsustainably fished seafood in the restaurant.

• A positive impact on the community: This might include helping to bring renewable energy investment to a remote area, which may not otherwise happen without the support of a developer. Or to create jobs for locals.

How hotels are capturing a new designer dream

How hotels are capturing a new designer dream
by Lois Avery

 

When the Versace Hotel opened in 2001 on Australia’s Gold Coast, it was billed as ‘the world’s first fully fashion-brand hotel’. Everything from the soap to the swimming pool carried the Versace stamp and it signaled the start of a travel trend: fashion conscious globetrotters paid a premium to immerse themselves in the world and wardrobes of the catwalk’s greatest visionaries.

Bulgari, Armani, Missoni and Louis Vuitton followed suit. Their exclusive properties serve as 24-hour shop windows with everything from the furniture to the fine dining carrying their ubiquitous logos.

“Hotels that bear the name of top-of-the-line fashion houses such as Armani or Bulgari are normally priced at the top end of the luxury hotel segment. ,” said Tasos Kousloglou, Senior Vice President of JLL’s Hotels and Hospitality Group. “The thinking behind it is that this type of lifestyle product can command a premium price and weather financial crisis. However, the ultimate success of such ventures long-term has yet to be proven.”

For fashion designers it’s a profitable partnership. “It’s like when designers branch out into watches or fragrances; it’s expanding their reach and it’s about brand awareness, diversification and an additional income stream hey ultimately benefit,” he adds.

“For developers, a designer collaboration requires substantial investment when every fixture and fitting of the hotel is branded. Their experimental nature often creates design, maintenance and operational challenges” says Kousloglou. And this may result in high capital, labor and fees that hinder profitability.

“Hotel developers and operators are finding it harder to differentiate themselves and such a financial commitment needs a return.”

Designed to be different

The international tourism market is more competitive than ever. The hotel industry has been racing to keep up with the demand, introducing a range of new brands to bolster travelers’ choice.

With such massive supply, differentiation becomes key. 

“It used to be all about the star rating, three, four, five, but that’s not widely used anymore, particularly in China. Now it’s segmented by budget – economy, mid-scale and luxury.”

New trends

The increasing number of upscale and boutique brands competing for market share must balance the cost-efficiency of their collaborations in the face of rising competition.

Rather than a full-branded partnership, American designer Oscar de la Renta, for example, teamed up with The Peninsula Hotel group to create bathroom amenities, including a bespoke fragrance. Diane Von Furstenberg, Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Tam have also put their names to carefully selected corners of the hotel market, ranging from a single suite to artwork.

 

“What we are seeing is the lifestyle brand branch out – from fashion to more design-lead collaborations.”

Even developers are taking lessons from designers at the planning stage. Renowned architect Zaha Hadid has put her name to showpiece properties in Macau and Dubai.

 

maingallery-1D8

 

The changing attitudes of millennials will drive the trend for personalization.

Haute couture may have dictated design ten years ago and fashion followers will continue to seek out designer dreams. But a new trend is transforming the hospitality industry and one thing is certain: it’s personal.

In Search of New Frontiers. Many investors looking to the area around 79th street.

Biscayne Times Article

Written By Erik Bojnansky, Senior Writer; Photos By Silvia Ros
MAY 2015

Little Haiti

 

A mile west of Biscayne Boulevard and the MiMo District, Little River // Miami’s neighbors include rag shops, car mechanics, and a couple of metal recycling ventures. There are also a few cafeterias nearby and churches — the largest being the ornate Cathedral at St. Mary’s, which has existed at 7525 NW 2nd Ave., in one form another, since 1936.

For the past few years, this area has been attracting artists and specialty businesses in growing numbers.

In all Jain, Vander Werff, and their financial backers own or are contracted to buy more than eight acres of land — some contiguous, some not — roughly between NW 71st Street and NW 75th Street, and N. Miami Avenue and NW 2nd Avenue. That’s roughly 20 city blocks.

“We wanted to find a neighborhood where we could own enough land to achieve critical mass, so we quickly and quietly assembled quite a few properties,” says Vander Werff, formerly an executive with the Fifteen Group, a land acquisition firm. “We started out with seven [properties] at the very beginning, and we’re now up in the 50 range. And we’re still going.”
Jain and Vander Werff even have a name for their piece of Miami: Little River // Miami. The twin slashes symbolize the Florida East Coast railroad that transects their future neighborhood. “They’re a part of the history of Miami,” Jain declares. “It’s what connected Miami to the rest of the country.”

But this is just the beginning. Jain and Vander Werff say they intend to pack Little River // Miami with galleries, tech startups, restaurants, bars, art studios, and other unique businesses. Among their confirmed new tenants are Vanity Projects (a video gallery and designer nail salon from New York), Hot Satellite (a pizza establishment from Los Angeles), Bill Brady Gallery (a contemporary gallery founded in New York), FJ Company (a car restoration business specializing in Toyota J40 Land Cruisers), and a mysterious cocktail bar that’ll apparently announce itself at a time of its owners’ choosing.

Little Haiti

Local artist Carlos Betancourt will be building his own 2000-square-foot studio, designed by his partner, architect Alberto Latorre, on a plot of land they purchased from Jain and Vander Werff last November for $60,000. Jain also hopes to bring Car2Go to the area, plant more trees, and push for a linear park along the railroad. Someday soon, Jain says, she hopes to add new apartments and condos to the mix. “This is about the arts, creatives, entrepreneurs, startups, food and beverage, interesting spaces,” Jain says. “We love the adaptive reuse possibilities. That’s part of what makes it interesting. It creates a sort of interesting organic vibe.”

Besides the dozens of warehouses, Jain likes the area’s wide streets and its proximity to I-95. And while it’s somewhat removed from Miami’s hot neighborhoods, Little River // Miami isn’t exactly in the middle of nowhere.

“We’re due west of the same thing that’s going on along Biscayne Boulevard,” she says. That “thing” is the revitalization of the MiMo District, which she helped inspire.

Avra Jain and Matthew Vander Werff: The railroad tracks have become an integral part of their project.
ut Little River // Miami is also part of a larger, gritty swath of Miami that’s north of 51st Street, east of I-95, west of the FEC railroad tracks, and south of the Village of El Portal. Within this sector of Miami are the historic neighborhoods of Lemon City and Little River. Since the 1980s, they’ve also been known by another name: Little Haiti. For decades, this once-forgotten part of Miami served as a kind of Ellis Island for Haitian immigrants. It was also a hub of commerce where numerous Haitian-owned businesses, churches, and other nonprofits opened up.
Now the warehouses, strip malls, and other commercially zoned properties are being snatched up by investors like Jain and Vander Werff, people in search of new frontiers in Miami’s overheated real estate market.

Peter Zalewski, a real estate analyst and founder of CondoVultures.com, says long-term investors are looking approvingly at Little Havana and Little Haiti, thanks to the overflow of development occurring in nearby boom areas. In Little Haiti’s case, he explains, developers are moving north from the anticipated success of the Design District, Midtown Miami, and Wynwood.

Within the overlapping Lemon City and Little River regions, significant real estate transactions have been taking place at a fast pace. For example, Todd Oretsky and Philippe Houdard, founders of Brickell-based Pipeline Workspaces, plan to build a five-story, 80,000-square-foot building that will serve as their company’s fourth and largest “co-working” office space for private contractors, artists, and other businesses.

Rick Dacey, Eddie Diaz, and Brian Best will be opening their (permanent) pizzeria Hot Satellite in the courtyard.
Besides shared meeting room space, refreshments, and state-of-the-art Internet for its tenants, publicized plans for the proposed project envision communal storage space and retail on the bottom floor. The building is slated to go up on a 13,905-square-foot parcel at 6900 NE 2nd Ave. that Oretsky bought for $400,000 this past December.

There’s plenty of buying activity farther south in Little Haiti, too. Among the new major players is California venture capitalist Bob Zangrillo. Since 2013, Zangrillo’s companies have invested $26 million, obtaining at least ten acres of land and several warehouses east of NE 2nd Avenue, according to records examined by the BT from the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser website. Zangrillo’s biggest buy was the $15 million purchase of 6.5 acres of land at 6001 NE 2nd Ave., which includes Magic City Trailer Park and the deteriorating 113-year-old Dupuis Medical Office and Drugstore building.
Tony Cho, president of Metro 1 Properties and Zangrillo’s partner, says they plan to upgrade and lease out the warehouses they now control. As for the former trailer park, “our goal is to re-landscape it, improve it, and make it an amenity for the neighborhood where cultural special events can be held,” Cho says. “That’s for the short-term. We don’t know anything beyond that. We don’t have concrete plans for the assembled lands.”

Up north in Little River, between 83rd and 84th streets on NE 2nd Avenue, Urban Atlantic Group bought four properties in April 2014 for $5.2 million. In a joint venture with Conway Commercial Real Estate, UAG invested another $1 million transforming the old J.J. Dessalines C. Center at 8325 NE 2nd Ave. into its own co-working venture called MADE at the Citadel — the MADE standing for Makers Artists Designers Entrepreneurs.

Across the street from MADE stands an empty, 64-year-old, 65,000-square-foot building that Conway says he intends to renovate and reopen as a traditional office building with retail on the ground floor.
While Vander Werff is focused on developing creating Little River // Miami as a cohesive community, Jain has been buying properties with other investors elsewhere in Little River. One such investment is hard to miss. On March 31, through a California holding company, Jain bought the former seven-story Bank of America building at the corner of NE 2nd Avenue and 79th Street (7924 NE 2nd Ave.) for $6.2 million from Pedro Rodriguez, owner of the Presidente Supermarket chain, who previously tried to transform the 178,810-square-foot building into an affordable-housing project.

Jan Mapou: “They’re buying almost everything they can put their hands on in Little Haiti. They’re offering a lot of money for the old buildings.”

“The prices are going up in Wynwood. A lot of people are moving out,” says Moody, who co-produced the “Little Haiti Country Club” exhibit last August at a nearby retail building co-owned by Jain at 8267 NE 2nd Ave. “Now we’re working to carefully gentrify this neighborhood, to keep people here rather than doing the same thing.”

In Wynwood’s case, artists and galleries played a huge role in reviving an area once wracked with crime and poverty following the departure of much of its manufacturing base in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Twelve years ago, only galleries were interested in renting in Wynwood, says David Lombardi, principal of Lombardi Properties, which owns several Wynwood buildings. Today the neighborhood is visited by an estimated 150,000 people each month and is flooded with restaurants, stores, bars, and offices, while various developers are hatching plans for new retail and residential projects.
“Wynwood,” Lombardi says, “is going through an incredible transition.”

That transition has jacked up rents. In 2011, rents in Wynwood ranged between $15 and $20 a square foot, Lombardi notes. Now they’re anywhere from $20 to $60 a square foot.

Lombardi, who insists he’s still enthusiastic about Wynwood’s future, also owns property in Little River, just north of MADE at the Citadel. There he’s asking for rents at about $12 a square foot. “It’s in its infancy,” Lombardi says of this northern neighborhood. “It’s like the early Wynwood days. It’s got a good energy up there.”

A small number of artists have been operating in warehouses in Little Haiti and Little River for more than a decade, but their numbers are growing fast. Yuval Ofir represents local artists and runs the Yo Miami arts studio out of a converted warehouse his family has owned for decades at 294 NE 62nd St. His family also owns a perfume distribution business in Wynwood’s fashion district.

According to Ofir, many galleries and artists once based in Wynwood are migrating northward because their landlords increased their rents. “Artists were forced out [of Wynwood] a long time ago,” he says. “The biggest migration happened two or three years ago.”
But how much longer can artists or small-business owners afford to rent in Miami’s northern reaches? Ofir of Yo Miami notes that developers are renovating warehouses all over the area, and they’re already asking for higher rents, an observation confirmed by Tony Ulloa, a broker with Keyes Commercial Realty. “Prices have gone up significantly over the past year,” he says. “There’s a demand for space from artists being misplaced from Wynwood and the Design District.”

But the current demand isn’t just from artists, Ulloa adds. Thanks to the PortMiami expansion, which is projected to increase freight traffic, buyers are scrambling to acquire warehouse space near the railroad tracks, which run east-west near 73rd Street.

The Little River area, Ulloa explains, has “the highest concentration of warehouses serving the rail system, north of Wynwood.”

Aside from several subsidized housing projects in Little Haiti, much of the housing available in the area — while far from being in pristine shape — is inexpensive compared to most places east of I-95. This could change in a few years.

Real estate analyst Peter Zalewski predicts that when the next development cycle commences, buyers will look at Little Haiti’s residential areas. “The appeal is cheap nearby real estate relative to what properties are trading for in the more established markets,” Zalewski says. “At this point, Little Havana has the advantage because of the looming up-zoning process. That being said, Little Haiti enjoys the advantage of catching the attention of the big-money developers who are attracted by the area’s lack of modern housing.”

No water element…Crystal Lagoons may be the solution.

Crystal Lagoons

By Ina Cordle, The Real Deal

 

SoLē Mia Miami, the $4 billion planned mixed-use project in North Miami that marks a joint venture between Turnberry Associates and LeFrak, will have South Florida’s first patented “Crystal Lagoon,” The Real Deal has learned. The 10-acre Crystal Lagoon at SoLē Mia represents the first in Miami for Miami-based Crystal Lagoons, a company that touts itself as able to “transform any destination into an idyllic beach paradise.”

Turnberry Associates and LeFrak also have an option to develop a second Crystal Lagoon in the future at the same site — a former landfill — the lagoon company said. SoLē Mia Miami, between Northeast 139th Street and Northeast 151st Streets, is a 183-acre master-planned community located on one of the largest remaining undeveloped parcels in South Florida east of Biscayne Boulevard.

The massive project, zoned for 4,400 residential units, is also expected to feature a dine-in movie theater, high-end bowling and entertainment venue, 37 acres of community parks and recreation, upscale shopping and dining, commercial office space, as well as other amenities. Biscayne Landing languished for many years after an attempt to develop it fell apart early last decade. Developer Michael Swerdlow sold his stake in the mixed-use project to Boca Developers in 2005.

Crystal Lagoons

The company was not able to get the project started before the real estate and financial markets collapsed. Swerdlow helped revive the development in 2012, forming a partnership with LeFrak to build the master-planned project over a 16-year span. LeFrak brought in Turnberry Associates earlier this year. Crystal Lagoons’ technology uses disinfection pulses that allow using up to 100 times less chemicals than swimming pools, and also uses an ultrasonic filtration system that allows using up to 50 times less energy than for conventional filtration systems.

Uri Man, CEO of Crystal Lagoons US Corp. said the technology allows for the construction and maintenance of unlimited-size lagoons. The beachfront and blue water create a venue for swimming, kayaking, paddle boarding, sailing and windsurfing, he said. “We’re revitalizing real estate development. Now, you can create your own location,” Man told TRD. “Our lagoons are really transforming the lifestyle of these communities with access to the beach.” The lagoons at SoLē Mia will be anywhere from six to 12 feet deep, he said.

Crystal Lagoons Miami
Crystal Lagoons Miami Proposed

 

“Our lagoons provide real estate developments with substantial quantifiable benefits such as increases in pricing, sales velocity, higher rents and in many cases the lagoons are being used to transform otherwise non-viable development sites into viable development sites,”

Man said. The first Crystal Lagoon was built 17 years ago in Chile at San Alfonso del Mar. Patented in 160 countries, Crystal Lagoons currently has a portfolio of more than 300 projects in 60 countries worldwide including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Egypt, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Colombia. The SoLē Mia Miami project follows the lagoon company’s recently announced U.S. projects including partnerships with real estate developers such as Tavistock Development Group in Orlando, Metro Development Group in Tampa, and more projects planned for Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Hawaii. The company said it has 35 projects in negotiation in the United States, valued at $20 billion.

Which Comes First, the Park or the People?

 

 

 

Do you live within a half mile (0.8 km) of a park? Can you walk from your home to a park in ten minutes or less?

If you live in Boston, San Francisco, New York City, or Washington, D.C., the answer is almost certainly yes: nearly every resident in those cities has quick and easy access to some kind of public park space.

If you live in a more spread-out place, like Fort Worth, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; or Las Vegas, there is only about a 50/50 chance you can easily walk to your closest park. And things are more challenging in the sprawling giants like Oklahoma City, Memphis, and Indianapolis. In Houston, for example, more than 1.2 million people cannot get to any park, even a tot lot or a small urban square, without walking more than a half mile.

These facts, determined through mapping by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), demonstrate the need for many more parks for the increasingly urbanized U.S. population. Cities are rising to the challenge in creative ways, building deck parks over highways, converting asphalt schoolyards to after-school community parks, installing community gardens at abandoned properties, turning unused rail lines into linear parks, and more.

All these efforts help provide green space within a ten-minute walk for the millions of urban and suburban Americans who are too far from parks to derive the health, environmental, and rejuvenating benefits they offer. While a number of big-city mayors and even a governor have endorsed the goal of providing parks or other open spaces within a ten-minute walk of residents, adding enough parks to serve all 249 million people living in U.S. cities, suburbs, and urbanized areas—83 percent of the population—will be a challenge.

There is another, concurrent approach to providing Americans with a nearby park: bringing more dwellings to the periphery of existing parks to increase density on their edges. This is what TPL researcher Kyle Barnhart calls, “not only ‘parks for people,’ but also ‘people for the parks.’”

Small areas of pavement are transformed into usable urban open space, commonly known as parklets, in San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks Program. Small areas of pavement are transformed into usable urban open space, commonly known as parklets, in San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks Program.

The concept is parallel to the approach taken with transit. It is well established that the expense of building and operating transit lines can and should be earned back through the promotion of transit-oriented development—dense pockets of housing, commercial space, and retail development within 2,000 feet (610 m) of subway stations and major trolley and bus stops. Arlington, Virginia, for example, has won numerous awards—and achieved notable economic success—by closely tying compact residential and commercial redevelopment to six of its Metro stations.

The same logic can hold for park-oriented development. While studies by Smart Growth America and others show that transit is the strongest generator of demand for urban consolidation and density, parks can be high on that list, too. This has been shown in compact redevelopment in such places as Philadelphia (around Hawthorne Park), St. Paul, Minnesota (around Wacouta Commons), and Denver (along Commons and Confluence parks).

Surveys regularly find that people strongly desire greenery nearby, and they like providing a place for their children (and their dogs) to play. Even people who have no kids or animals and rarely go to a park significantly benefit from simply having a green view from a house or an apartment, as has been shown in research by Ming Kuo at the University of Illinois and others.

“The great thing about parks is that you can jump into them from just about anywhere,” says Elizabeth Shreeve, a planner and a principal with SWA, a landscape architecture, planning, and design firm in Sausalito, California. “And it’s particularly true for trails—long, thin parks that can have a few miles of edge and touch so many more communities.”

Americans are not unified on the topic of density and parks, and that lack of consensus may be partly due to the many different mental pictures people have of both parks and cities.

Iconic photos from New York City and Chicago show massive walls of apartments facing Central Park and Lincoln Park, respectively. Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square, and Portland’s new Jamison Square teem with activity nearly around the clock because of the large number of people living nearby. But that is not the rule. An ongoing study by the Rand Corporation is finding that some city parks around the nation are surprisingly lightly used, and part of the reason is that so few people live near them.

One dramatic case is Portland’s 5,032-acre (2,036 ha) Forest Park, one of the largest city parks in the country, which has only 4,344 residents within a half mile (0.8 km) of its long boundary. It receives only about 500,000 visits per year, which sounds like a lot, but that works out to less than two persons per park acre every week.

In contrast, New York City’s Riverside Park, much smaller at 330 acres (134 ha), serves more than 259,000 people within easy walking distance and receives about 3.5 million visits a year. Riverside Park and the adjacent Riverside Drive were specifically planned and designed in the 19th century as an amenity attraction for the development of scores of mansions, and later handsome apartment buildings, along the drive, and it worked.

In a few places, tall buildings could threaten the very parks they celebrate. In Manhattan, a recent spate of ultra-tall luxury condominium towers is casting shadows that reach into Central Park at certain hours during winter months. (These buildings do very little for urban density because their super-wealthy owners generally reside elsewhere most of the time.)

Parks in densely developed midtown areas of major cities might well require special zoning protection to avoid being cast in shade much of the year. San Francisco already has fought back with a stringent sunlight protection law that requires developers to replace every square foot of parkland that is newly shaded even one hour of the year.

One trend affecting densification around city parks involves the conversion of former manufacturing and office buildings to residential use. From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington, business and industrial centers have been turned into or added to residential communities. As new residents move into the once-nearly abandoned historic downtown Los Angeles, how might that change demand for park amenities like playgrounds in Pershing Square or increase use of newly built Grand Park or Spring Street Park?

Finding the Revenue

Park-oriented development plays into two of today’s realities: urbanites want high-quality parks nearby, and mayors need revenue to maintain the quality of those facilities. That revenue can only come from taxpayers, philanthropic donors, or people paying fees.

“In cities, density not only matters, it’s crucial,” says Mahlon “Sandy” Apgar IV, a real estate counselor and author. “Parks are one of the key features that can bring it about.”

Apgar himself is living his aphorism. Beginning as an intern with legendary developer James Rouse, he has lived in London; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore’s suburbs. But after becoming empty nesters, Apgar and his wife, Anne, moved to Baltimore’s Federal Hill neighborhood, which is anchored by the famed Inner Harbor and a historic park. There they cofounded a park revitalization organization called South Harbor Renaissance.

Apgar is focusing his attention on finding a sustainable funding model to pay for better upkeep and management of that historic open space, Federal Hill Park. He thinks solutions could include market-based pricing for revenue-generating activities in the park, a value-based local tax benefit for merchants who contribute in-kind support to the park, and a services-based assessment (such as those charged by private neighborhood associations) to pay for maintenance by the Waterfront Partnership, Baltimore’s celebrated open-space management group.

“As Baltimore grapples with solutions to issues of employment, housing, and education, parks must be part of the mix as well to make it a healthful and beautiful city that unites and uplifts people,” Apgar notes.

“Of course, conversations about density can be a flashpoint for a community,” he adds. “People intuitively perceive the drawbacks more than the benefits. Most people don’t link their neighborhood’s density with the capacity and resources to improve their parks. So, that’s what policy makers and officials themselves need to understand and then communicate to constituents.”

Opposition to greater building height or increased development density surrounding parks is often due to NIMBYism, he says. “And in older cities, it may be symptomatic of other issues confronting residents, such as antiquated infrastructure and inefficient public services despite high taxes.”

In the absence of lengthy conversations and public education, “battle lines are drawn between old-timers and newcomers who bring fresh ideas and energy to enliven community parks,” Apgar says.

Jamison Square, the first park added to the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon, is a model pocket park that, through a variety of inclusive features including a fountain, a boardwalk, and an outdoor gallery, enables a high level of use by the surrounding communities. (PWL Landscape Architecture)
Jamison Square, the first park added to the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon, is a model pocket park that, through a variety of inclusive features including a fountain, a boardwalk, and an outdoor gallery, enables a high level of use by the surrounding communities. (PWL Landscape Architecture)

“Historically, inflexible zoning did not allow much room for experimentation. Now that’s changing,” he says. “The millennials’ drive to the city and enthusiasm for shared space promotes higher-density urban design. Planned new communities have shown the way by integrating open space with denser mixed-use development and introducing flexibility to open-space zoning. And these innovations, thankfully, are moving from backroom deal making to more open neighborhood forums.”

Baltimore has a triad of parks that illustrate the opportunities and challenges of the “people for the parks” concept.

Federal Hill is an eight-acre (3.3 ha) park in a crowded historic neighborhood. A few miles away, 135-acre (55 ha) Patterson Park, supported by a group called Friends of Patterson Park, is becoming steadily safer, more beautiful, and more active, adding significant value and appeal to its neighborhood; it seems likely that the housing market there would support replacement of some of the small surrounding rowhouses with apartment buildings.

But the story is different on the west side, where 700-acre (283 ha) Druid Hill Park was at one time the city’s premier pleasure ground, surrounded by large apartment buildings and a dense fabric of fashionable brownstones. Because of severe neighborhood decline, the periphery today is a sad mixture of old buildings, vacant land, and a few new gated developments.

Zoning and Political Will

There is no one-zoning-fits-all solution to these myriad situations, nor a single best way of developing around parks. In some places, the housing demand simply does not exist; in others, there would be strong resistance from current residents to denser development. Apgar takes that concept further: he believes that large parks should not even be thought of as single entities. “One of Patterson Park’s strengths is that it is large and diverse enough to have a mix of surrounding communities with different types of housing, different uses, and different markets,” he says.

In all cases, local politicians and business leaders would have to understand that park-oriented development is economically beneficial to the city and environmentally beneficial to the surrounding region, just as is the case with transit-oriented development.

Clearly, with a few notable exceptions in places like New York City, many neighborhoods surrounding parks are far from being fully developed. In fact, with many urban communities in a state of almost continuous redevelopment flux, there is often room for gradual densification. A rough calculation shows that if the density around parks in all urban areas were slowly increased so that the half-mile-walk “catchment population” doubled from an average of about 1,850 people to 3,700, the number of new parks needed to provide the ten-minute walk to all city dwellers would be cut in half.

This approach would not be easy. One person particularly aware of the importance of parks, but also of the challenge of density, is Jeremy Sharpe, vice president for community development for the Rancho Sahuarita master-planned community in Tucson, Arizona.

“The closer residents can be to a park, the better,” Sharpe says. “A safe, well-maintained park is an amenity. We regularly survey our residents, and parks and trails continue to be the main reason people live in our community.”

Federal Hill in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor offers eight acres (3 ha) of park space in what otherwise is a crowded historic neighborhood.
Federal Hill in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor offers eight acres (3 ha) of park space in what otherwise is a crowded historic neighborhood.

But density is a challenge, he says. “In principle, in gateway cities the park-oriented development idea makes sense. But in non-gateway cities like Tucson, the market doesn’t demand that level of density,” he says. “Yes, there is an increased interest in urbanity, especially by millennials. But according to two 2015 ULI studies, while 37 percent of millennials want to live in cities rather than suburbs or a small town (America in 2015), only 13 percent actually now live in or near downtowns (Gen Y and Housing). Most millennials want urban amenities in a suburban environment.

“Also, sometimes changes in the development process are difficult,” Sharpe continues. “New ideas are often challenged, not because of the concept necessarily, but because there aren’t existing principles to work under in the local market. Public planners have limits on what they’re able to approve due to politics and zoning constraints. In our master-planned community, we’ve had to demonstrate some amenities and principles that were new and unfamiliar in our region.”

Shreeve turns that thought around. “How about giving developers density bonuses for making improvements to existing parks?” she says. “Traditionally, in many places developers give land or money for new parks. But what if they also had the alternative of making our current parks better and allowing more people to live around them?”

Would this densification strategy cost more, or less, than simply buying more land? No one knows yet, but there is one major difference between the two approaches: buying the land requires public (and occasionally, private) money, whereas changing the urban form can be done largely through private financing. Small changes in zoning rules, incentives, or both can allow private developers to enter the market and assume the risk in return for likely profit.

Cities today are again ascendant, but they can also be difficult places to live without green space and other places providing respite. Creating new parks and working to fit more people around the edges of existing parks is a double-barreled way to get the most benefit to the largest number of people at a cost the nation can afford.

Peter Harnik is director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land; he is author of Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities (Island Press, 2010).