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.
 

The Simple Change to Traffic Lanes That Will Make Our Streets Safer

There’s a well-intentioned but flawed characteristic of America’s roads: They’re way too wide.
The standard 12-foot wide traffic lane we see in most parts of the country are a death trap, according to Jeff Speck’s incredibly detailed and extensively researched essay in The Atlantic’s CityLab.
The Washington D.C-based city planner argues that wider roads cause drivers to travel faster, and thus, cause way more damage if they hit another vehicle, bicyclist or pedestrian. The ideal road width, he contends, is 10-feet wide because drivers will slow down thinking there’s less space to cruise.
The reason why our country’s roads got so wide in the first place is because many states and counties believe that bigger lanes (some as wide as 14-feet) are safer and reduce congestion. However, this design is especially dangerous in communities where there’s more foot traffic.
MORE: D.C., New York City and Boston Named Tops for Foot Traffic
Speck points out that even though accidents happen on 10-foot lanes just as often as 12-foot lanes, since cars are traveling slower, it’s less likely to result in a fatality if someone is hit. “According to a broad collection of studies, a pedestrian hit by a car traveling 30 m.p.h. at the time of impact is between seven and nine times as likely to be killed as one hit by a car traveling 20 m.p.h,” he writes.
For those who are wondering if 10 feet is enough space for their large SUV or truck, Speck counters that in his hometown of D.C., there are even 8-foot lanes that work wonderfully.
With 34,000 people killed on American roads annually, it’s time to look at what changes need to be made immediately.
Speck’s most important point is this: “What would happen if these lanes were reduced to 10-feet wide, as proposed? Three things. First, cars would drive more cautiously. Second, there would be roughly eight feet available on each side of the street for creating protected cycle lanes, buffered by solid curbs. Third, the presence of these bike lanes would make the sidewalks safer to walk along. All in all, an easy, relatively inexpensive win-win-win that DOT [the Department of Transportation] could fund tomorrow.”
DON’T MISS: Houston Bikers Need Safe Roads. Here’s the Simple Plan to Make That Happen.

What Do Toddlers and Senior Citizens Have in Common?

When most of us picture a public park, we see a vision of squealing kids climbing around on playground equipment and adults jogging and walking their dogs.
But UCLA professor Madeline Brozen, who directs the school’s Complete Streets Initiative, and her colleagues are challenging communities in the U.S. to form a new idea of how parks can contribute toward keeping a rapidly aging population healthy.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, collaborated with Brozen on an award-winning toolkit that advises communities how they can create mini “parklets” in urban areas without a lot of green space. During that time, she realized that seniors weren’t using public parks as much as other age groups. The team wondered if this is because, unlike some in Asia and Europe, U.S. parks are almost never designed with the needs of elders in mind — instead emphasizing playground equipment and ways for younger adults to recreate.
So Loukaitou-Sideris, Bronzen, and other colleagues are now working on a project that will investigate what seniors need from public parks and how to design parks in order to attract those in their golden years. They plan to pay particular attention to the needs of low-income, urban seniors who don’t have a lot of recreational options.
“What we are trying to do with this project,” Loukaitou-Sideris tells Sharon Hong of UCLA Newsroom, “is, first of all, find knowledge from different fields about what an open space or public park for seniors should look like, how it should be different for different groups of seniors, incorporate some of the voices of senior citizens, create guidelines for future such spaces, and hopefully even apply this knowledge towards the creation of a park.”
With the population of Americans aged 65 or older expected to double between 2000 and 2030 to 72.1 million, this kind of thinking about people who are often forgotten by city planners is a must.
MORE: States Are Working to Keep Seniors On Their Feet
 

These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring

Have you ever passed by an uninspiring stretch of your city and thought, ‘What this place needs is a beer garden?’
The citizens of several cities in Colorado did, and now they’re taking urban renewal into their own hands, creating temporary spruce-ups of blighted areas to show what is possible — and perhaps inspire permanent changes in the future. In Golden, community members zeroed in on a couple of blocks of a street named Miners Alley. That particular stretch was just steps away from downtown, but the spaces weren’t being put to any inspiring use. As Colleen O’Connor writes for the Denver Post, the street is “mostly used for deliveries to businesses that front bustling Washington Avenue.” But during the first weekend of June, citizens threw a street party called Better Block Golden there.
The volunteer-run event featured a pop-up beer garden, bands, art projects for kids, new landscaping, a vibrant Aspen tree mural, café seating and plenty to eat and drink. “If we like it, we can start making some permanent changes,” Golden’s Mayor Marjorie Sloan told O’Connor.
The project was inspired by The Better Block, a website that tracks and encourages such local improvements to urban landscapes across the country and around the world. Elsewhere, Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, offers a free guide on how to pull off quick city transformations like “guerilla gardening” and “pavement-to-parks” on its website.
Several other Colorado cities are getting in on the block-improvement movement, including Colorado Springs, where the group Colorado Springs Urban Intervention is hanging signs pointing the way for pedestrians to find easy and safe urban places to walk. They also transformed an ill-used block into the site of Curbside Cuisine, a gathering of food trucks.
“We wanted to change the dialogue on Colorado Springs,” co-founder of Colorado Spring Urban Intervention John Olson told O’Connor. “Instead of dreaming about things, let’s do it. Stop the chatter, and show that it will work. We heard too many times that Colorado Springs isn’t Portland, and it won’t work. But it’s doing fantastic.”
So the next time you walk past a blighted block, don’t be surprised by the transformations yet to come.
MORE: Cycling Tourism Has the Potential to Transform this Hardscrabble New Mexico Town
 

Can Living in a City Give You a Leg Up in Life?

We’ve been hearing for years that people who live in cities tend to be thinner and more active than those who live in suburbs—all that walking and climbing stairs seems to contribute—but a new study finds that people who live in densely-packed cities also are more likely to be agile in a different way: climbing the economic and social ladder.
The study by Smart Growth America and the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Urban Center is significant because it quantifies urban sprawl. Sprawl is not just about how much land is occupied by a city. As the authors write, “sprawl is not just growth, but is a specific, and dysfunctional, style of growth.” The study shows that the health benefits that correlate with city living are specific to dense cities, where residents have lower rates of obesity and diabetes. Residents of sprawled-out cities such as Atlanta do not show the same benefits as do those living in packed-in places such as New York.
Reid Ewing of the University of Utah, lead researcher on the study, told Lane Anderson of Deseret News, “Urban places provide higher likelihood of moving up the social ladder. Compact places provide better access to jobs, better transit and more integration.” The study judged Los Angeles to be relatively dense compared to Atlanta and other sprawling places, and found that a child in L.A. has a 10 percent chance of moving from the bottom of the income scale to the top, while an Atlanta-based low-income child has only a 4 percent of chance of such a rise.
Ewing said that one factor in this difference might be transportation—denser cities tend to have better public transportation, which gives citizens of all income levels more access to better jobs and schools, but is especially important for low-income people who may not have a car. Better mixing between people of different ethnicities and economic levels might contribute to the social mobility, too. “In dense areas, there are more chances for networking, for meeting people, more chances of getting better salaries and jobs,” he said. And riding the train also seems to keep people thinner—train riders are 6.5 pounds lighter than car drivers, according to The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and they’re 81 percent less likely to ever become obese. One twist: the study found that kids get more exercise in the suburbs where they can run around in backyards and playgrounds, and adults get more exercise in cities, where they are forced to hoof it.
The authors of the study hope their findings will encourage more cities to implement healthy changes, such as bike-share programs, more mixed-use developments, and improved transportation. Or, as Ewing asks, “It’s time to ask the question again, how can we make cities better?”
MORE: More College Graduates Moving Into Cities

How All These Snowstorms Could Make for Better Roads and Cities

Public planners studying street traffic patterns have long known that the wider the street, the more likely drivers are to speed and drive recklessly. This winter, many of them are tweeting photos of the patterns cars have left in the snow, revealing spaces where sidewalks could be widened, making it easier for pedestrians to cross the street and enhancing driver safety. The patterns are called “sneckdowns”—a combination of the words “snowy” and “neckdowns,” curb extensions that can calm traffic.
The piles of snow are keeping drivers from attempting aggressive passing maneuvers, just as wider sidewalks would if they were built. Planners in favor of these curb extensions point to the photos to show that drivers aren’t using these swaths of street anyway, so why not widen the sidewalk there? In other words, these annoying snowstorms are creating a free way to study traffic patterns to guide future street planning.
Philadelphia has already implemented this idea, widening sidewalks based on snow patterns in 2011. Prema Gupta, the director of planning for Philly’s University City District, told Angie Schmitt of Streetsblog USA that snow pattern photos “quickly made the case that there’s right-sizing to do here. For us it was just a really compelling way of showing there was way too much street and not nearly enough place for people.” So these relentless snowstorms that have made much of the country difficult to traverse this winter just might help everyone’s commute become easier in the future.
MORE: Here’s A Simple Way to Get Your Community Interested in Better Bike Lanes