There’s Always Something to Do in Brownsville

“There’s nothing to do in Brownsville.” It was a constant refrain when Eva Garcia was growing up in the midsize Texas city, situated just across the border from Mexico. After college, most of her friends moved away to Austin or other cities perceived as more dynamic and interesting. But Garcia stayed, got a job in city government, and is now part of an initiative to transform her community and neighboring cities. “I want to make Brownsville a place where people want to stay,” she says.
As an employee of the city’s department of planning and development, Garcia is taking an active role in doing just that, helping to organize programs and funding for a network of 17 miles of new multiuse trails in and around Brownsville. She’s also been lobbying to attract new businesses to open alongside these new biking, hiking and paddling trails. She recently attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit to connect with other people working to build thriving small business communities and get new ideas for how to improve her own.
The goals of Brownsville’s recent outdoorsy development are nothing less than ambitious: Boost the local economy, improve health outcomes, rescue precious natural resources and encourage the growth of a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. Those are big problems to solve, and Brownsville is trying to tackle them all at once. But the city is aiming to prove that all at once is the best way to take on big issues.
“There’s never enough money to do what you want,” Garcia says. “We’re leveraging resources to attack multiple problems.” For Garcia, the ESHIP Summit was a chance to better understand and imagine the end goal of the development happening in Brownsville. “What I’ve learned is the characteristics of highly functioning systems,” she says, “and how collaboration is essential.”
Turning around an entire community’s idea of itself isn’t exactly easy. Brownsville is behind the curve in developing as a tourist destination, Garcia says. “Right now the challenge seems to be changing the perception of what’s successful, or what could be successful.” Some people believe that in a relatively poor community, building nature trails is a waste of taxpayer money that could be better spent improving public transportation or other services.
But Garcia sees the potential to make her community much stronger — and healthier too. The progress happening today is a steep departure from her experience growing up in Brownsville, which as recently as 2012 was the poorest city in America, with a median income of less than $30,000 a year. The majority of residents are Hispanic, and a CDC study found that the rates of obesity and diabetes were among the highest in the country. Almost 40 percent of residents lack health insurance, according to the most recent census data available. Growing up, Garcia says she had no idea that the health disparities and poverty levels were so severe.
After graduating from the University of Texas at Brownsville (now the University of Texas Rio Grande) with a degree in environmental science, Garcia got an internship with the city and started to learn more about her own community. “I felt like my eyes were opened,” she says. “I started becoming aware of what the issues really were here, and why there were challenges to development.” The city had already started to work on some initiatives to reduce poverty and improve health outcomes, and Garcia decided she wanted to be involved.
Today, Garcia’s department is partnering with Rails to Trails Conservancy to connect 10 local communities with new pathways. The UT School of Public Health in Brownsville has provided grant funding to help promote the new trails and healthy living in general. And the city is taking advantage of a local utility program to dredge and restore tributaries of the Rio Grande that have filled with sediment, organizing new trails around these resacas. The university’s architecture program is designing birding blinds (small shelters that help observers watch birds without startling them) to line the new trails. “Everyone has a role to play,” Garcia says.
That includes entrepreneurs, who are key to making the “active tourism” initiative a success. The city is looking for ways to incentivize small businesses to take advantage of the new walking and biking pathways. “You cannot be active without the [proper] gear,” Garcia says. “Even to go fishing, you need poles and lines, and people to take you out on boats to show you where things are.”
More businesses are needed, she says, to showcase the city’s assets — new companies like outdoor tour operators or kayak and paddleboard rental shops will help market the community as a fun, dynamic place.
“There are constantly things to do now,” Garcia says.

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Sumit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.
 

Can This Ambitious Plan Both Preserve History and Revitalize a City?

Infrastructure determines how we live, says Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta planner. But he’s not just talking about the tedious methods for relieving road congestion or figuring out how to efficiently transmit water, gas and electricity to every home. No, Gravel’s got something more personal in mind. Infrastructure, to him, determines how people interact and bond, children grow up, residents spend their time and communities preserve their heritage. “Infrastructure is the foundation of social life and economy and culture,” he tells NationSwell. That may sound grandiose, but thinking big hasn’t stopped Gravel before. He’s the visionary behind the mother of all urban redevelopment projects: a 22-mile metamorphosis known as the BeltLine, linking Atlanta’s unused railroad tracks and abandoned industrial zones in a gigantic loop of public transit, green parks, walking and biking trails and neighborhood revitalization.
“If we build highways and off-ramps, then guess what? We end up with a way of life that’s dominated by cars. If we build walkable communities with transit, we get something that’s entirely different,” Gravel says. “The BeltLine is catalyzing a new way of life, a new kind of infrastructure. It’s supporting something other than what Atlanta is known for, which is car dependency, and it’s working.”

City planners hope that long-term infrastructure projects, including the BeltLine, will alleviate the traffic that clogs Atlanta highways.

By picturing what kind of city he wanted to live in, Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis. Cathy Woolard, former city council member and gay rights advocate who’s readying to replace Mayor Kasim Reed (who’s in the midst of serving his second term) in 2017, provided invaluable early assistance and got the massive 25-year project up and running by 2005. Gravel personally helped oversee its rollout with a full-time role at city hall. Yet working in government bureaucracy quickly tested his nerves. He loved meeting all the different stakeholders interested in the BeltLine — from local restaurant owners to fellow urban planning wonks — but, as he told Ozy, “The politics of it got too much.” Gravel quit after five months. (He notes he continued to be involved in the BeltLine’s development through volunteer work, advocacy and private-sector work.)
Ryan Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis.

A decade later, the BeltLine has generated $2.5 billion in economic development, and Gravel wrote a book about infrastructure, out last month. Recently, Gravel announced he’s rejoining the planning process from within the mayoral administration, by serving as manager of the Atlanta City Design project, a new design studio that will sketch out long-term plans for Atlanta’s growth after at least six months of public meetings at Ponce City Market. Writing in an email, he made clear that the job isn’t a long-term position: “My role … is as a consultant. And by this time next year, I’m guessing it will be over/near over.” But on the phone, he communicates enthusiasm for the project’s ambitious goal. Essentially, Gravel wants to find out what makes Atlanta tick and preserve those elements through a projected boom in population.
In January, Mayor Reed welcomed Gravel back to city hall. ”His vision to transform old railroad corridors into a 22-mile transit greenway has spurred economic development across the city, improved the quality of life for residents and led to a total transformation for Atlanta,” Reed said. Part of that renewal has been an in-migration to Atlanta’s downtown. Regarded as the capital of the South, the urban center of Atlanta dwarfs in size compared to the city’s suburbs. Fewer than one in 10 people live downtown out of the 5.7 million that claim the metro area home. Stretching out 50 miles in every direction, the outer ring of the nine-county area was once the hotspot for new growth. Now, people are pouring back into downtown. ”There’s a limit to the sprawl,” Matt Hauer, head of the University of Georgia’s Applied Demography Program, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re seeing much more urban revitalization and growth in the central metro counties.”
With so much in flux, Gravel’s assessment of what defines Atlanta will be all the more important. “The purpose of City Design is to identify the things that are special about Atlanta, then embed those things in the decisions about how the city grows in the future,” Gravel says. In other words, he believes that Atlanta’s history and environment should inform every planning decision. The BeltLine, in repurposing old railroads, for instance, would get high marks for its nod to Atlanta’s beginnings and its reclaiming of industrial land. The neighborhood containing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace and burial site in the Historic Fourth Ward have been connected to the BeltLine via a trail and a 17-acre park, but there’s plenty of other sites from the Civil Rights Movement to safeguard and integrate.
“We have been so car-centric that you didn’t experience the city in an intimate way,” Reed explains to The New York Times. “We are changing Atlanta into a city that you can enjoy by walking and riding a bike.”
There’s not much precedent for this type of metropolitan-wide planning in North American cities. Workers within individual departments may come up with an idea for housing stock or parks and recreation, but they’re almost never joined together in one unified vision. (Gravel points to only one prior example in the United States that he can find: Chicago’s Burnham Plan in 1909.) That’s because the hardest part is getting everyone to sign off on one big plan.
By taking hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions all being taken into account, the BeltLine has run up against some major political hurdles (typical for massive government undertakings). Not surprisingly, the biggest tiffs involved money. When the stock market took a nosedive in 2008, it looked as if the BeltLine wouldn’t get built. Under then-mayor Shirley Franklin, the city set up a new process, known as tax-allocation districts in 2005, to borrow school tax revenues to fund the initial construction (to be returned upon the project’s completion), but it didn’t go into effect until a state constitutional amendment was approved in 2009.  Construction resumed, but when the city missed its payments on the $162 million owed by 2030, Reed received a sharp rebuke from Atlanta’s school superintendent, including threats of a lawsuit. “Bikes or books?” one graduate student at George State University asked. “What does Atlanta support more?
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

This February, three years after that budget fight turned nasty, Reed brokered a deal that offered less money, but with a guarantee the schools would be paid first. He argued that funding the BeltLine would foster a more robust tax base — a $30 billion increase is hoped for by 2030 — filling both the city and the school’s coffers. The deal “will allow the Atlanta BeltLine to recover from the worst recession in 80 years. And then, when the Beltline is strong and able again, it can make payments at a higher level,” he promised. The school board unanimously agreed.
Across the rest of the city, however, individuals still questions if they will be able to cash in on the investment. Neighbors bordering the city’s new lifeline worry that gentrification will drive up rents to sky-high prices. There’s plenty of evidence in other cities to support their point. For instance, in Southern California’s Elysian Valley, proximity to the Los Angeles River redevelopment — a concrete blight that’s now a natural asset — drove up the median price per square foot 28.3 percent in one year.
Gravel hopes people see that the answer is not to leave the city as it is, without improvements, in the hopes of warding off gentrification. That’s not to say, there won’t be unintended consequences, he admits. But if anything, this is where planning is all the more important, preparing ways to keep housing affordable while sprucing up a neighborhood’s character.
Gravel looks around him for all the signs that the BeltLine’s already improving Atlanta. “It’s not just people commuting or exercising, they’re going out on dates, going to the grocery. That to me is a huge measure of success. To me, it’s changing the way that people live their lives,” he says. With more long-term planning still to come, we can expect to see a new model for urban growth born in the south in the decades ahead.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Atlanta City Design as a “committee.” It is a design studio. The article also said that Ryan Gravel was nervous about his new position, which was incorrect. It also stated that Mayor Reed set up the tax-allocation districts. That work was done under Mayor Shirley Franklin. NationSwell apologies for these errors.

Have an Idea About What Your City Needs? This Organization Wants to Hear It

An estimated 80 percent of citizens in the United States live in urban areas, prompting civic planners to get creative as more Americans return to the city.
That creativity is no longer confined to municipal governments as more cities embrace technology, entrepreneurship and social innovation. A great idea can be hatched anywhere, which is why the Knight Foundation is offering to foster any number of them through its Cities Challenge.
Armed with $15 million to spend over the next three years, the Knight Foundation announced an open call to fund grants for ideas that make cities function better in one of its 26 communities, where the Knight brothers own newspapers. The invitation is extended to anyone — including local governments, nonprofit groups, students, startups and teachers.

“One of our real objectives here is to surface new people who have good ideas and ought to get a hearing,” says Carol Coletta, vice president of community and national initiatives for the foundation.

The preliminary process involves only two questions: What’s your idea? And what do you hope to learn from the work? The foundation has not decided how many grants it will award the first year, but expects to invest $5 million in one or more of the 26 cities this year.

While the idea may seem simple vague, Coletta tells Governing that by opening up the process, the foundation is aiming to attract new talent and new individuals outside the nonprofit circle.

“We’re really trying to make it very open so we’ll surface some new people, people we don’t know. That’s why we’ve made the bar to enter so low,” she says.

“Because we’re a mobile society, there’s a sense that cities today are offering what the most mobile Americans want in a lifestyle. Cities are the greenest way to live and they can also offer a more efficient and productive lifestyle,” she says. “For a lot of reasons, people are focused on cities today and that’s a very good thing.”

The application process began Oct. 1 and runs through Nov. 14.

MORE: America’s Three Largest Cities Band Together to Promote U.S. Citizenship

If Another Superstorm Hits, This Dirt Barricade Will Protect NYC

Everyone — but especially New Yorkers — remember Superstorm Sandy’s seemingly endless destruction back in 2012. Costing the region billions of dollars, it was an example of what nature could do to our infrastructure and our society.
Preventing damage like what occurred is crucial — and a big part of what needs to be done to prepare for the future. That’s what the winning project of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design contest aims to do. And there’s no better way to do it than to also make some beautiful public space in the process.
The Bridging Berm is a new project on Manhattan’s lower east side. While there’s no timeline for completion, once it is finished, it will shelter 150,000 residents and a power sub-station from the effects of storms and rising sea levels.
The 2.19 miles along the East River that the Bridging Berm will occupy is currently a public park, though it has few entrances and is very isolated from the city. The Bridging Berm will change that — improving both access and the public space itself. Even more importantly, it will raise the riverbank to nine feet above its current level. Had this been around during Sandy, there still would have been four feet to spare.
Jeremy Barbour of Tacklebox Architecture tells Next City that “the strength of the proposal is in the way they have addressed both the vertical and the horizontal through a series of programmed berms and bridges that mediate the boundary between the waterfront and the edge of the city — defining a place for community gathering and a way to inhabit the in-between.”
And a defining place it will be, with bike paths along the water, boating and fishing areas, as well as athletic fields. Clearly, there will something for everybody.
This multipurpose space is just one of three components to the larger “BIG U” proposal in the Rebuild By Design contest; roll-down storm gates on the FDR bridge as well as a berm-and-educational facility in lower Manhattan are also part of the plan.
The Bridging Berm could have the largest impact, though. With such a dense population and the power station in the area, not to mention the improved public space, it is an exceptional urban planning vision.
DON’T MISS: 8 Inspiring Urban Renewal Projects

If Another Disaster Strikes, New York City Has a Plan to House Displaced Residents

Hurricane Sandy unleashed a lot more than just wind and rain on New York City. As a result of the devastating storm, the city had thousands of displaced residents.
Big Apple officials learned a lot from the natural disaster, and one of the most important lessons is ensuring that citizens unable to return to their homes have a safe housing alternative while the city pieces itself back together.
Which is why the New York Office of Emergency Management is designing a housing prototype to hold refugees should another natural disaster strike the city. The “Urban Post Disaster Housing Prototype,” helmed by architect and Pratt Institute professor Jim Garrison, is a multi-story housing unit comprised of prefabricated modules that can be constructed in just 15 hours, according to Fast Company.

“A long time ago, we had a conversation about what it would take to house the homeless,” Garrison said. “People were coming up with all sorts of elaborate cardboard boxes. Finally, we came to our senses, in that a home for a homeless person is no different than a home for anyone else.”

The prototype includes three 480-square-foot-bedrooms assembled to form a walk-up on stilts while also providing wheelchair access. But the emergency housing project could also serve as an affordable housing model, according to Garrison, who says that the prototype could last 20 years.
In fact, part of the design includes ensuring energy efficiency through cross-ventilation and a balcony system that shades the unit from summer sunlight, which can save a resident two months a year from using an air conditioner, according to Garrison.

He’s also entertained the possibility of placing the unit on a barge anchored to the harbor, but it’s still unclear if it could weather severe storms.

For now Garrison is performing experiments on the prototype, which is perched on a hill near his firm in Brooklyn. As part of the test, The Pratt Institute and The New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering plan to invite residents to use the prototype for up to five days.

“The idea of this housing was to make it versatile enough so that you could install it in neighborhoods so that residents aren’t displaced, so they’re not sent to other neighborhoods,” Garrison said. “Your children can still go to the same schools they were part of. You can still be part of the social and economic circle of your neighborhood.”

MORE: Hurricane Katrina Inspired This Man to Revolutionize Emergency Housing

 
 

Why Boston Asked Its Youth to Determine How to Spend $1 Million

As America inches closer to the 2015 election, a new wave of initiatives to engage the country’s youth will soon follow. But instead of launching social media campaigns or canvasing college campuses to capture their attention, Boston is empowering young people to care by involving them in the budget process.
Earlier this year the city launched the Youth Lead the Change project, a participatory budget (PB) process inviting young people between the ages of 12 and 25 to give input into how Boston spends $1 million in public capital. The project—the first of its kind in the United States—was limited to “bricks and mortar” funding, ranging in categories including education, community culture, parks/environment/health and streets and safety.
Young Bostonians worked on designing the PB process as well as with city officials on project proposals, spending priorities and current projects in place. The pilot included projects ranging from improving community centers and renovating parks to neighborhood safety and creating new public art space.
Officials then set up voting booths throughout the city at schools, transit stops and community centers from June 14 to June 20. Young people were encouraged to vote for four of the 14 projects showcased, using digital tools such as SMS, Vimeo videos with Mayor Marty Walsh and a custom built platform for ideation collection, according to New York University’s Governance Lab. Young Boston residents joined Mayor Walsh to celebrate the winners this week, which include:
1. Franklin Park Playground and Picnic Area upgrade ($400,000)
2. Boston “Art Walls,” public spaces for local artists to display work ($60,000)
3. Chromebook laptops for three area high-school classrooms ($90,000)
4. Skatepark feasibility study ($50,000)
5. Security cameras for the community near Dr. Loesch Family Park ($105,000)
6. Paris Street Playground makeover ($100,000)
7. Renovate sidewalks and lighting around two Boston parks ($110,000)
The city worked in collaboration with the Participatory Budget Project (PBP), a nonprofit geared towards assisting local, national and international organizations with empowering citizens to become decision makers in the public budget process. More national cities like Chicago and New York have also pledged to use participatory budget practices in partnership with PBP, but perhaps the key to unlocking greater civic participation is focusing on America’s next generation.
Rather than targeting political messaging to young people, let the youth be the architects creating that message. If we begin to foster an environment that empowers young people to be a part of the solution, improving parks and creating art space is just the start of where we can take American progress.
MORE: How Mobile Apps Help Local Governments Connect with Citizens

Southwest Airlines Sets Its Sight on Cities, Not Skies

Southwest Airlines is taking its services on the ground, giving cities a boost with urban design.
The national airline has partnered with New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces to launch a three-year initiative — the Heart of the Community grant program — working with cities to revitalize urban areas through construction of new or redesigned public spaces or funding new or ongoing programs.
Southwest has already completed three pilot projects in Detroit, San Antonio and Providence, Rhode Island. Up next? The company will turn its attention to Baltimore, where they’ll work with the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore to rehab the city’s Pratt and Light Plaza.
“We’re in the business of taking people from place to place,” said Marilee McInnis, Southwest’s senior manager of communications, “so we want to support and create and revitalize these places.”
The Pratt and Light area, which the Downtown Partnership’s vice president of communications Michael Evitts described as a “glorified, huge sidewalk,” was built in the 1960s to connect two interstate highways, according to Fast Company. The vast empty, concrete space is currently used to house a farmer’s market. But the city has long sought to revamp the area and the funding from Southwest will give the initiative new interest and fresh ideas from community members.
MORE: 5 European Urban Renewal Projects That Could Help America
The Downtown Partnership will host community workshops to welcome local ideas and hopes to finalize a plan by the fall.

“A lot of what downtown Baltimore is trying to do is undo the best thinking of the previous generation,” Evitts said. “Urban planning in the ’60s was very dictatorial. There was a lot of concrete; people were an afterthought.” Now, it’s more about “encouraging those human moments within urban design.”

The Heart of the Community program is currently accepting applications for 2015 and plans to announce grants for two or three additional communities by the year’s end. Each city will receive funding depending on the project, but the company has not disclosed how much it plans to donate over the next three years.

Have an idea to give your city a facelift? Submit your application by September 15. The only parameter? Your community must fall within one of the 95 urban regions served by Southwest.

How an Innovative Parking Program May Cut Downtown Traffic by One Third

In most towns and cities, parking meters are considered the third rail of urban politics. Just the mention of meters and rate increases spawned recent protests in Chicago, Buenos Aires and Cape Verde, an island off the coast of Africa. Others have gone further: When Coogee, a resort town outside of Sydney, Australia, proposed installing meters, protesters tried to earn a spot in the Guinness World Records book by making the largest human-formed “NO” ever recorded. And when the town of Lewes, in East Sussex, England, installed meters in 2004, someone in the area responded by blowing up 14 meters, causing more than £20,000 worth of damage. As Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the leading thinkers on parking, puts it: “I think people use the reptilian cortex of the brain to think about parking. It’s the most primitive part of the brain, for making fight or flight decisions, and it deals with territorial decisions. Parking is a territorial issue.”

No one likes to pay for parking — even Shoup. But when cities don’t charge a reasonable rate at meters, we end up with more traffic on the road and fewer people shopping at neighborhood businesses.
Here’s why: Most towns and cities, when they install meters, charge the same amount for every neighborhood, no matter the time of day. That might seem fair at first glance, but it goes against the basic principle of supply and demand. While the supply always stays the same, different neighborhoods draw different numbers of people, and that demand changes by the time of day, day of week and by the month and season.
MORE: 9 Surprising Infrastructure Innovations Happening Right Here in America
And getting prices wrong causes major problems. If, for example, a city starts charging a high meter rate in a small shopping district that receives only a modest amount of traffic, many people will refuse to pay and just drive right past. As Shoup points out, that has major detrimental effects: “Businesses will lose customers, and drivers will not take advantage of spaces that are available.” Los Angeles recently experienced this exact problem. “When they doubled the price of parking in the city,” Shoup says, “you could see entire blocks that were empty.”
If, on the other hand, you charge a below-market rate for a popular district, you have the opposite problem — people will stay parked in the spots all day. Phil Lesser, a business owner in San Francisco’s popular Mission District and the vice president of government/media relations for the Mission Merchants Association, says his fellow business owners fear that exact problem: “Street parking has always been a key component of commercial corridors. If [customers] come down and can’t find a spot and leave, that doesn’t help the merchants.”
Beyond that, the cheap on-street prices means that drivers will just keep circling the block until a space becomes free, which not only contributes to pollution but also creates traffic problems: Studies have shown that as much as 30 percent of all traffic in downtown areas is caused by drivers hunting for parking spaces. That traffic is further exacerbated in the evenings, because parking is often free after 6 p.m. What happens when parking is free? Drivers start hunting for spaces at 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., circling the block in the middle of rush hour — making things particularly hellish for traffic-mired cities. Shoup and his students did a parking study in one small neighborhood in Los Angeles that found that the highest levels of space-hunting happened between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. “The city’s parking policy was congesting traffic at the very time people wanted to drive home,” he says. “The city is telling you to idle in traffic at the very time people want to go home.”
The solution, argues Shoup, is a pretty simple one: Make prices for on-street parking dynamic, or more like the prices for hotels or flights. An area that sees a ton of interest — a popular shopping district during the afternoon, for example — would have higher meter rates than a quieter neighborhood. A few blocks away, on a quieter street, the rates would be cheaper, enticing people to the area. Those prices would fluctuate, depending on the time of day and the season of the year to ensure that a few parking spaces are always available.
ALSO: What’s the Country’s Best Smart-Growth Project? You’ll Be Surprised
In 2011, San Francisco implemented a dynamic-pricing pilot program in a few neighborhoods with the help of a $19.8 million federal grant. The program, which the city dubbed “SFpark,” installed smart meters that would change pricing for morning, afternoons and evenings, with the goal of trying to reach a target of having streets around 85 percent full. Today, if you want to park down by the popular Ferry Building on Saturday afternoon, you can expect to pony up $4.50 per hour. Willing to walk a few blocks? You might only pay $1.00 per hour.
Lesser of the Mission Merchants Association says that the business owners were initially “wary” of the plan, as were many people — San Francisco residents feared that the new rate system was an attempt to jack up rates and boost parking revenue. That hasn’t come to pass. Rates, which used to average $2.73 per hour across the city, now average only $2.41 — a drop of 12 percent. Depending on the neighborhood and time of day, the rate varies from $0.25 per hour  to $6.00 per hour. Every few weeks, the parking authority tweaks the rates to try to hit their targeted ratio. “After 13 rate changes, we’ve seen zero complaints,” says Jay Primus, manager of the program. “In a town like San Francisco, people would let us know [if they had complaints].”
Revenue from the parking meters is up slightly, but the new system — which makes it finally easy to find and pay for a space — has drastically cut down on parking tickets. “We dramatically reduced the number of parking tickets, which is great for our customers,” Primus says. “Anecdotally, what we’ve heard is that people are much happier because, finally, parking is easier to find and easier to pay for.” The shop owners, too, have welcomed the program. “Anything that will help people find parking and get them out of their cars — we’re all in favor of that,” says Lesser. “We’d like it if all our neighbors could live above us and walk or bike to us, but the automobile is still an integral part to people’s lives.”
Primus and SFpark are currently finalizing a report on the pilot program’s results, which will be released in June. While Primus is unable to reveal the data until then, he does tell me that San Francisco has become a popular stop for delegations from American and international cities struggling to manage their own parking. Los Angeles, Berkeley, Calif., and Seattle have started small pilots with the help of local and federal grants, while Rio de Janeiro — which is currently trying to clean up its infrastructure for the 2016 Olympic Games — sent representatives who were enthused by SFpark. “They made the pitch to the mayor [of Rio], and the mayor just loved it,” says Shoup, who also met with the Rio representatives. “They recommended 7,000 meters, and the mayor said no — 20,000. They just put out a request-for-proposal. A parking system would be a legacy of the Games.”
In the end, instituting a supply-and-demand system for parking might be the easiest and cheapest way to reduce traffic. “Every big city has parking,” Primus says, “and almost every city has parking management infrastructure — and changing how a city manages that system is a very powerful way to achieve their goals. It’s easy in a sense that it’s more policy- and technology-based, and not infrastructure. It’s cheaper than building a subway network.”
DON’T MISS: 6 Steps for Building Better Bike Infrastructure 

What Happens In Vegas…

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, is partnering with Las Vegas to help transform the city’s downtown into more than just a hard-partying gambling hub. Hsieh and other investors have put up $350 million to start the Downtown Project with the goal of transforming downtown Vegas into “the most community-focused large city in the world,” creating “a vibrant, connected urban core.” The effort was already underway when Hsieh moved Zappos’ headquarters to nearby Henderson, Nevada, in 2004.  But after Las Vegas built a new environmentally friendly city hall and eased restrictions on small businesses, Hseih decided to buy the old city hall in 2010 and moved Zappos’ headquarters there. Now he hopes to encourage tech companies and startups in Vegas and make the city more family-friendly. Vegas will always be known for the things it does best—glitz and gambling—but it might also become known as a place for innovative new businesses and creative communities.

Oregon has an Indiegogo Campaign to Give Portlanders a Huge Off-Road Bike Park

Portlanders have been talking in their sustainable libraries and wheat grass shot-shops about building a big, new off-road bike park. The city, and state, listened. Oregon teamed up with Indiegogo, and is looking to raise $100,000 to turn 38 acres of unused earth into a bike utopia. This could be the beginning of a new era of infrastructure investment; crowdfunding is big, but the government hasn’t so much as dipped its toe in the communally-funded pool. Since the recession, budgets have been slashed, and infrastructure projects have been stalled. Oregon could pave the way for cities and states around the country to repair their bridges and bottom lines.
[Image: Build Gateway Green, Indiegogo]