It's a long way to Copenhagen... from Houston.

I recently took a fresh look at Houston since my last visit ten years ago. Or at least, “fresh” is how I felt during the moments between air conditioned buildings and cars. While many of my coastal, post-carbon-apocalyptic prejudices about the city still hold, I also saw something new in its haphazard planning.

Houston is famous for exercising little or no municipal control over zoning and land use, which leads to a cheek-by-jowl scattering of homes, businesses, and freeways. (The Zone d’Erotica shop unabashedly occupies what is clearly a former pancake house next door to an unamused Dillards department store.) The region’s muggy climate and low gas prices make Greater Houston heavily car-oriented. Pedestrians are a low-status exception to the Ford F-250 rule. A honking Escalade at a parking-lot entrance reminded me that you still have to look both ways if you’re on the sidewalk.

From a climate-controlled vehicle, I got a glimpse of Houston life. Locals describe neighborhoods that are seven miles apart (roughly the span of San Francisco) as being “close” to one another. I gawked openly at the Chase Bank's 8-lane drive-through ATM. The California Pizza Kitchen has “curbside” service so you don’t have to get out of the car to collect your takeout order. A waiter simply walks up to your window and swipes your credit card. The multiplex has valet parking.

Central Houston’s traffic jams resemble its summer thunderstorms: clouds converge out of nowhere, and a brief but torrential downpour ensues. Drivers can be ruthless or (if you admit to being a lost and befuddled visitor) downright friendly-- a fellow motorist got out of his car to give directions after traffic inched ahead and he could no longer give them from his window.

Urbanists and demographers alike see urban centers of the future looking more like Lagos or Mexico City than the orderly grid of the 20th century prairie metropolis. I couldn’t help but think that messy, crowded Houston may actually be more representative than most US cities of the urbanism of the future. Like Mexico City and Lagos, Houston is divided between those whose air-conditioned cars bypass traffic on toll roads and those who dab their foreheads and wait for the bus. From the freeway, Houston’s commercial strips are a flipbook of tangled overhead wires, gas stations, and drive-thru Tex-Mex.

Houston is a city of intense wealth and intense poverty. Energy interests saturate Houston’s cityscape and institutions- (Ken Lay’s name is etched eerily on the Fine Arts Museum donor wall). Yet Houston’s informality gives it an intensely flexible urban landscape and a dynamic economy. It has a tremendous capacity to absorb new people- both immigrants seeking work and thousands of Katrina survivors.

Houston’s urban design possesses seemingly little coordination or regard for history and no mediation between commercial interests and land uses. The motto seems to be “if it’s not in style anymore, tear it down and rebuild.” Or perhaps, “if it’s not profitable, tear it down and rebuild.” Houston sprawls and reconstitutes itself with the vigor of a Gulf storm surge. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Houston took advantage of its flexibility to be ahead of the curve in adopting low-carbon lifestyles in the 21st century?

E. Mattiuzzi

Garden Cities, US-style

Belgium doesn't have a monopoly on cute and walkable.

Amazing Slate.com slideshow on Forest Hills, in Queens, NYC. It suggests that an attractive mix of housing types on a curvy but walkable grid can work in a US suburb. And that it did. A hundred years ago.

E. Mattiuzzi

fresh interest in Midtown alleys

Like all good things in the urban environment, the Old Soul coffee company in Midtown Sacramento wasn’t intended to be what it is now. Old Souls is tucked in a warehouse in the middle of an alleyway. The building’s high ceilings and exposed beams hint at a past life as a workshop or an auto garage.

According to the Sacramento Bee, local developers have proposed building small, affordable residential units in the alleyway where Old Soul is located at 18th and Capitol. Another alleyway near Memorial Auditorium would model a row of (expensive) seafood and Italian restaurants in San Francisco.

But the charm of Old Soul is precisely its unplanned nature. The Bee reports that Old Soul originally roasted beans to sell wholesale, and gradually started serving coffee and food, formalizing its operation with permits and a cash register along the way. (A sign at the counter informs regulars that Old Soul has now started collecting sales tax on walk-in orders.) No central corporate office decided on the mismatched chairs and benches, board games and books scattered about the old brick building.



Sacramento has been slowly taking notice of its alleyways. Over the past few years, the city quietly issued individual permits for a handful of new and above-garage housing units in alleyways, adding foot-traffic and life to its urban core.

The city could stand to make it easier for individual developers and businesses to set up shop in Sacramento’s alleyways. (Current code requires the city to grant an exception or variance.) But architectural re-use and creative designs should take priority over cookie-cutter redevelopment.

Neighborhoods and buildings that evolve over time create a more vibrant city than large-scale, purpose-built structures. To urbanist Jane Jacobs, this meant allowing a city block to evolve with new uses and new architectural styles one building at a time, like Old Soul Coffee has.

And one more thing. Developers and Bee reporters need not use “European” as a catchword for pedestrian-friendly streets. Midtown’s walkable blocks and alleys are as American in style as its grid of numbered and lettered streets. Those who remember a time (or live in a place like Midtown) where you don’t need to get in a car to buy a newspaper know that Midtown is full of character and surprises that reflect a rich blend of Sacramento history, not an imitation.

E. Mattiuzzi

Time to look in the mirror: Sacramento tent city attracting national media attention

Sacramento's homeless population is front page news on the New York Times website. Homelessness is not a new issue in Sacramento. Neither is the fact that the city regularly shuffles people who build temporary encampments between several locations along the Sacramento River near highway 160, Discovery Park, and the industral area near Loaves and Fishes and the Salvation Army. The homeless population is visible along Richards Boulevard and 7th Street.

Their tents, either along the river under the 16th street bridge or in the railyards, are regularly raided by police and their belongings confiscated. Ostensibly this is to keep settlements from becoming too permanent, which, in the eyes of city officials, could raise issues about tenure and code enforcement.

One idea that has been floated recently is creating a permanent shelter, basically a warehouse site with basic services like a roof and bathrooms, modeled on shelters in Portland, OR. According to the Times article and Good Morning America, this idea has gained traction with Mayor Johnson. Foreclosure rates in the Sacramento Valley are among the highest in the nation. Increases in homelessness have, apparently, become too embarassing to the city to ignore any longer. To be seen is how a "permanent shelter" would be implemented- whether homeless people with pets would be accomodated (a major barrier for many to seeking formalized shelter) how safety would be provided for, and whether people would even want to live there.

The idea that we would need a "government sanctioned tent-city" speaks to the fact that we treat homeless people as sub-citizens, criminalizing their very existance and ability to meet their own basic human needs. We exclude them from the streets with loitering laws, by removing park benches, and puting spikes on the ground under window ledges where someone might sleep. The very word "homeless" indicates that someone is deficient because they are "without a home" or "without a roof" as some romance languages put it.

As Berkeley Professor Nezzar AlSayyad is fond of saying, Americans have a "right to safe and sanitary shelter, not a right to shelter." This means that although we make sure that a "formal" housing structure meets strict codes, we don't make sure that everyone is housed. In other words, if a homeless person erects a tent or a shanty without proper plumbing and insullation, it will be torn down even if it means that the person is sleeping on the ground in the rain with nothing over their head.

There are bigger problems of inequality, a broken economic system, and government indifference that fuel homelessness and turn the problem and the stigma on the individual, rather than society. We will see if Sacramento decides to address both the immediate housing crisis and its underlying causes.

E. Mattiuzzi

operation inconspicuous: put down the phone.

Cell phones are the new cigarettes. Don't have a newspaper or a book but want to blend in standing on the corner? Text a friend. If Steve McQueen were in a film today, he wouldn't try to look casual on the streets of San Francisco or New York by lighting up. He would flip open a cell phone and pretend to check his email. On the street, a phone in hand turns a loiterer into someone who's just waiting for a text to drop out of the ether and remind them why they exist. "He's looking at his phone, so he's probably not standing on that corner preparing to execute a heist." It's like when someone double parks their car but puts their emergency lights on. "Don't worry, nothing to see here." One of the greatest pleasures in life is sitting on a bench or at a cafe table peoplewatching. Why should it be awkward to have no official occupation other than drinking a coffee by oneself and observing others? In a society that spends so much time in cars and behind gates, we are constantly allowing the right to stand on the street with no particular business to be eroded.

E. Mattiuzzi

Happy Birthday, Oscar Grant

Someone was telling me the other day that I shouldn't ride my bike to the Fruitvale BART station because 1. I might get run over, and 2. a couple of people had been killed there recently.

Immediately surrounding the Fruitvale station is a Latino-American neighborhood and commercial district. Shop signs and billboards are written in Spanish. Women selling roses and day laborers stand on the corner while men sell tacos out of trucks. There is no tofu or mango in the burritos sold on International Boulevard. Adjacent neighborhoods are primarily African-American and Asian-American. Fruitvale is off the map for most Bay Area residents, who only hear about it on the news or know that it's on the way to the Oakland Airport. Traveling by bus from downtown Oakland to the Fruitvale station on International Boulevard, I realized that the name is no joke- the street is lined with the shopfronts of businesses, community organizations, and places of worship with signs written in every imaginable language, changing every few blocks- Vietnamese to Chinese to Korean to Spanish- marking the beginning of a new district or neighborhood.

Near the Fruitvale station, there are pawn shops, travel agencies, money wiring services, restaurants with men wearing cowboy hats and smoking outside, women pushing strollers, and people of every color going to and from the station and the indoor market. At the center of it all is a recently-built transit "village", a mix of apartments, shops, and offices including the La Raza health clinic. The village is everything a transit-oriented development should be. It replaced a parking lot with high-density, mixed-use buildings, affordable housing, local-serving retail, outdoor cafes, and you don't even have to cross the street to get to BART and a bus hub. Potential gentrification aside, the concept makes my planner's heart flutter.

My first trip through the station was just a few weeks after the area, and the city of Oakland, had experienced the trauma of waking up on New Year's Day to hear that a young man named Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART police officer as he lay face-down on the station platform in the early hours of the morning. At the time, a makeshift memorial of candles and flowers had appeared on one side of the station, but was cleared by my next visit.

Today, a group of community members, Black, White, and Latino, were handing out fliers for a rally commemorating Grant's birthday and calling for justice in his case. Passersby took pictures of their table and their banner with Grant's image. Taking pictures is a way for people to reduce their discomfort when they are feeling insecure and disoriented in a space. It's a way to take control and distance yourself from a situation or a subject without feeling emotion, or perhaps just a way to try to digest it when you are at a loss for words- like telling someone whose loved one has died that you're sorry for their loss. The fliers and the banner, like the makeshift memorial, keep the event from becoming divorced from the place or fading from memory. People should feel uncomfortable and unsettled about Oscar Grant's death and what it says about our society.

Oscar Grant, I strongly suspect, did not have the luxury of 'avoiding' the Fruitvale station. Neither do most of the people who travel through this vibrant urban space every day, should they even want to.

Oscar Grant would have been 23 years old today.

E. Mattiuzzi

The Mayor of Castro Street

The development of the Gay Rights Movement in San Francisco is a wonderful example of the often central role of geography in urban social movements. As I sat in the Castro Theater watching Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch deliver excellent roles in Milk, I was struck by the strong connection between their activism and the urban environment.

Before he ever defines himself as a politician or an activist or even begins to imagine a movement, Milk maps out in his mind an imaginary line, “a six block area,” that will be safe and welcoming for gays in a city and a society that was overwhelmingly hostile toward them. Milk tells his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) that there should be at least one street in the world, at least one neighborhood, that is a haven for gay people. At the time, the Castro was a working class Irish-Catholic neighborhood. In the film, Milk builds this haven by identifying businesses that were friendly to gays and targeting those that were not for boycott, spreading outward from his own camera shop.

Some of the most rousing scenes in the film involved Emile Hirsch’s character, Cleve Jones, rallying thousands of people to the street to protest events such as passage of a ballot initiative restricting the civil rights of gays. The methods by which he gathered a crowd included not only working a mad phone tree, but running into the shops and bars along Castro Street and shouting that there was action going on in the street. Only through intense concentration of gays in the Castro could this be possible. In a sense, it was a ghetto- an area where a particular population concentrates, indirectly or by force, to seek refuge or become separated from the rest of society and its scorn.

The production of the Castro as a ghetto from both the inside and the outside increased violence but facilitated organizing. Milk and his followers exercised agency and self-determination by imagining a utopian node from which acceptance of gays could spread. However, building the district was hardly a “choice,” but rather a matter of survival because gays were not welcome outside the Castro as a group or as individuals. Concentrating gay homes, businesses and bars provided an easier target for police brutality. Ultimately, though, the ghettoization of gays through the formation of the Castro district provided solidarity and brought visibility to police violence. Just as Jane Jacobs tells us that eyes on the street make it safer, concentration of violent acts against gays in a specific geographic location helped ensure that the beatings and killings would not go unnoticed. Milk and Jones and others could act ask eyes on the street, channeling anger and outrage into organized disorder on the street.

Market Street was the nexus of this anger and organization, serving as a symbolic and a physical conduit of truth to power. When demonstrations threatened to boil over into rioting, Milk and his followers would march down Market Street to Civic Center Plaza right up to the doors of City Hall. The intensity of this imagery on film, the dense, noisy mass of people in motion taking action to make themselves heard, reminded me strongly of The Battle of Algiers. Like the native Algerian population storming down from the Casbah, the gay population forced San Francisco, and the nation, to listen to their cry for equal rights. Just as powerful, if not more so, was the image of thousands of people processing down Market Street from the Castro bearing candles after Milk’s assassination.

E. Mattiuzzi