DFW REimagined – The future of real estate

From: Fort Worthology

Thanks to the City of Fort Worth for passing this along – it’s a fully up-to-date map of central city Fort Worth bike infrastructure, as of this moment. Solid blue lines are on-street bike lanes, solid red lines are shared lane routes, solid green lines are off-street trails, and dashed lines are planned installations of their respective types. (Plus the solid black lines downtown, which are the Houston & Throckmorton shared bus/bike lanes.)

This really shows how far Fort Worth has come in a very short time, as the majority of these routes have been added quite recently

Fort Worthology » Newly Updated Fort Worth Bike Lane / Bike Route Map.

From: Christopher Leinberger in NY Times

WALKING isn’t just good for you. It has become an indicator of your socioeconomic status. 

Until the 1990s, exclusive suburban homes that were accessible only by car cost more, per square foot, than other kinds of American housing. Now, however, these suburbs have become overbuilt, and housing values have fallen. Today, the most valuable real estate lies in walkable urban locations. Many of these now pricey places were slums just 30 years ago.

Mariela Alfonzo and I just released a Brookings Institution study that measures values of commercial and residential real estate in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, which includes the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. Our research shows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable, where everyday needs, including working, can be met by walking, transit or biking. There is a five-step “ladder” of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values.

Read more at Now Coveted – A Walkable, Convenient Place – NYTimes.com.

Richard Florida has  a good, short post up arguing against arguing against what we might deem “blind density.”  In other words, in an effort to chase after density, we’re simply building taller.  Not more compact.  And certainly not more efficient.

The diminishing returns comes from a few places.  First, walkability and modal share of alternative transportation begins to jump around 20 units per acre.  People are closer to the things they need and places they need to go.  Other forms of transportation besides the car not only make sense but are more effective forms of transportation within dense places.  Dense places will invariably have congestion.  As Mumford said, “if you’re trying to move 100,000 people around in a square mile area, the motor car is the worst possible solution.”  These gains in other, more efficient forms of transportation start to gradually decline from 40 to 60 units per acre and then plateauThere are no more gains to be made in terms of walkability and transit ridership over a certain density “saturation” point.

Read more at WALKABLE Dallas-Fort Worth: Diminishing Returns of Building Height.

Take a look outside your window. You’ve probably gotten used to that omnipresent, smoky haze that hangs over the Metroplex like a pall of economic viability — upwind power plants a’chugging; cars snaking down tangles of toll roads and highways; shale gas production amid the cities and ‘burbs slowed but steady. Says the state environmental regulator to its citizenry: Try not to breathe as much air, DFW. Today, it will be bad for you.

This afternoon in particular, that big laboratory in the sky will brew a potent, alchemical mixture of nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, sunlight and heat to create something else altogether: Ozone.

Read more at Try Not To Breathe Too Much Today, DFW – Dallas News – Unfair Park.

This summer, Dallas’ Orange Line will be extended five stations northwest of downtown. The light rail service will expand what is already the United States’ longest such network and improve connections between central Dallas, the suburb of Irving, and — in 2014 — Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Yet billions of dollars in new construction have barely increased transit use; just 4.2% of the city’s commuters use public transportation to get to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. If there is one city that proves that simply building transit does not attract people to transit, this is it.

Investments in Dallas’ road infrastructure might provide some explanation for the situation. An astonishing seven grade-separated highways extend radially out from the city center in all directions.* This is a city designed for the automobile.

At least some of the city’s residents apparently have not had enough of those roads. Early this month, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlins announced his support for a new toll road along the Trinity River whose alignment would not only parallel existing highways and the Orange Line, but it would significantly reduce the value of a new park proposed for the area. If public funds can be found to cover at least part of its $1.4 to $1.8 billion cost, the project appears likely to be built over the next decade.

Read more at A Tollway in Dallas and the Absurdity of Building Duplicative Infrastructure « The Transport Politic.

Density is all the rage these days. Urban economists, some of whom could be heard extolling the praises of “sun, skills, and sprawl” just a few years ago, now see increasing density as the key to improving productivity and driving economic growth. In his story for The Atlantic, “How Skyscrapers Can Save the City,” Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser put it this way: “As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs … tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself.” Well-intentioned planners and preservationists drive up prices when they stand in the way of taller and taller buildings, he argues. Overly restrictive height limitations not only impede economic progress, but make cities less, not more, liveable.

There can be no doubt that density has its advantages. In general, denser cities are more productive, more innovative, and more energy efficient. But only up to a point.

Read more at The Limits of Density – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities.