It’s Our Density, I Mean, Our Destiny

While attending an awards ceremony in Louisville last year, hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I was struck by an idea that the late Owsley Brown II put forth about our city during his acceptance of the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. Brown essentially remarked that Louisville should not grow for the sake of growth, but should strive to create the best quality of life for the current residents and let the greatness of our city attract the people and businesses that would fuel our growth.

I walked away that evening wondering how our community could follow that advice and improve our quality of life, specifically in terms of our built environment. How could we create initiatives that would benefit the entire region and make Louisville a place that would not only retain our current residents, but would also attract people from other cities and regions?

The phrase “quality of life” is subjective and can evoke different visions for different people. However, there are elements related to our built environment – such as parks and open spaces, access to amenities, a sense of place, neighborhood options, and transportation – that touch every corner of our city.

In many ways our city already provides a great quality of life. We have an extensive and growing system of parks, relatively affordable and diverse housing, and an ever-increasing array of restaurants, shops, and nightlife options, as well as storied and unique neighborhoods. It is this variety of options Louisville offers that makes it possible for a wide range of people to find a quality of life that suits their needs and desires, whether it is in a condominium downtown or a farmhouse on the edge of the city.

With a better idea of what is working in our community, we can then turn our attention to what is not working or where we lack options that potentially offer the greatest approach to making the greatest improvements to our community’s quality of life.

Three major quality of life issues related to our built environment come to mind almost immediately. There are great neighborhoods throughout the city that offer a wide range of variety in form, housing options, and amenities, but we lack a truly dense, walkable urban neighborhood. We also need to improve the existing walkable areas throughout our community to offer more variety outside the urban core. And it is no secret that we are incredibly reliant on the car to get around the city. Aside from a bus system that is stretched to the very limit, we currently lack substantial alternative modes of transportation. All of these issues affect the region and all are tied to the form of our built environment.

First off, our city needs to have a serious and open discussion about residential density and get beyond the far-too-common association with crowded spaces, higher crime rates, traffic congestion, and a generally dirtier environment. These mental images stem to some degree from historic visions of cities in the early to mid-20th century. It is this view that helped fuel the outward migration to the suburbs across the country. However, most cities no longer resemble the smoke-filled factory scenes of the past. Cities around the country are reinvesting in their urban cores and providing vibrant neighborhoods with the 24-hour lifestyle that young and old alike seek to experience. Dense, vibrant neighborhoods at a city’s core are important to the regional economy and overall quality of life and instill the sense of place that is valued not only by residents but also by visitors.

While discussing on NPR how his city had managed to avoid some of the problems facing others around the country during the economic downturn, Mick Cornett, Oklahoma City mayor, talked about the city’s downtown revitalization efforts.

“There’s a lot to the quality of life that a person is looking for,” said Cornett. “And we’ve been able to convince the people that live in the suburbs that the vibrancy of the core is directly proportionate to the quality of life in the suburbs. And so the people in the suburbs are willing to invest in downtown.”

Cornett’s statement echoes recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The Research Department of Cleveland Fed looked at urban growth and decline over four decades of census data and found that growing cities and regions have maintained their population density, or even seen an increase, while shrinking cities suffered from a hollowing out of their urban cores.

Though Louisville has a wide range of neighborhood options, we don’t currently offer a cohesive, dense urban experience that many similar-sized, sought-after cities such as Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota provide. Higher density residential neighborhoods provide the number of people needed to support the much-sought-after retail in our urban core and more efficiently utilize utilities. They also make systems of public transportation and other alternative modes of transportation, such as safe bicycle infrastructure, viable. These walkable neighborhoods offer an integrated connection to amenities in which most daily needs are accessible without the need for a car. In recent years, Louisville has made great progress in strengthening downtown neighborhoods. But there remains great development potential around the Central Business District to create the vibrant, dense urban neighborhood that our city lacks. In particular, the area between downtown and Old Louisville from Broadway to Kentucky Street, as well as the area commonly referred to as Shippingport just west of 9th Street between Market Street and the Ohio River, has excellent potential for development.

Farther away from downtown there is also a need to bring selective density to areas on the edge and within the city, while acknowledging that not everyone wants to live in the middle of the action. The right approach to residential density should take on different forms and degrees that are tailored to specific locations. A model and form of density that works in one area of the city cannot simply be superimposed on another neighborhood within the same city, let alone one from another region entirely. We need to develop a shared understanding of what density could look like and make sure that we use local examples with community-driven input to establish how density should look on an individual site basis.

At the very core of this polycentric notion is the idea that there should be compact centers throughout the city, mainly located along major corridors, where people can take care of daily needs, as well as enjoy entertainment and other activities, without relying on long or frequent trips by car.

St. Matthews, Middletown, Shively, and Jeffersontown are a few existing examples of town centers outside of Louisville’s Central Business District. These areas have several blocks of shops, banks, restaurants, and other amenities in a core area. This concentration of development radiates and transitions into more residential neighborhoods as you move away from the city center. Some of the most well known entertainment corridors in the city, such as Bardstown Road, string together nodes of activity that almost appear to be continuous stretches of shops and restaurants. In these existing town centers, and other potential locations around the community, we should focus efforts on strengthening the urban fabric and connectivity, in order to create vibrant places that celebrate each unique area’s character and people.

These town centers should be connected by a robust and varied transportation system, critically important not only to our quality of life but our sustainability as a community. We need to think about how our citizens will get around in 20 to 50 years. Whether you lean more toward the expectation that technologies will come along to offset fuel prices or toward the notion that cars will become a thing of the past, it just doesn’t make sense to put all our eggs in one basket. Separated and safe bicycle infrastructure, as well as bus rapid transit, and streetcar systems are all potential alternative modes of transportation – modes that our regional peer cities of Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Columbus, and Nashville are taking seriously and implementing.

Separated or protected bike lanes offer the possibility of actually riding a bike somewhere with your 6-year-old child and not being accused of child endangerment. You don’t have to be a spandex weekend warrior to understand the value of being able to take safe, leisurely bike rides around the city, no matter what part you may be in. This is not just a downtown issue either. In fact, the suburbs may be at an advantage when it comes to truly safe and separated bike lanes, due to the extra space between the roads and the buildings. Riding a bicycle for utilitarian purposes, exercise, or leisure is something everyone should have an opportunity to enjoy. The Louisville Loop offers a great addition to our bicycle infrastructure, but it will be those bicycle connections from the inside of the city to the loop that will have the greatest impact on daily life.

We need to seriously think about other alternatives as well, which includes rail. One of the major arguments expressed against streetcars in Louisville is that we just don’t have the density necessary to make it work. This argument has some merit, if you ignore the potential that streetcars provide as a tool for economic development. The fixed track for a streetcar system provides the certainty to businesses, residents, and others that the route won’t change in a few years. Even if you agree that we do not have the density to support such a system, we should be working toward building that density to make it viable.

Cincinnati recently committed to building a 4-mile streetcar loop that will run through a developing, yet currently very vacant, area known as Over-the-Rhine. This would be approximately the same distance as a loop that ran from the KFC Yum! Center to Cardinal Boulevard and back. This route would capture a great deal of residential and student population along the way, while providing an incentive to create a dense urban neighborhood in the area between Broadway and Old Louisville that is currently approximately 62 percent covered by surface lots. It would not only foster development, but would reduce the need for parking in our urban core, freeing up even more space for development.

Streetcars and high quality bicycle infrastructure are not cheap. And Louisville doesn’t necessarily need to keep up with the Cincinnatis of the country. Actually, we do if we want to remain regionally competitive, let alone globally competitive. This infrastructure offers more than just alternative forms of transportation; it creates an excitement and anticipation that could provide the shot in the arm our city needs.

Developing a dense neighborhood in the city’s core and strong town centers around the community connected by an advanced transportation network will take time. Cities typically cannot change overnight, at least not in a positive way. It takes a considerable amount of planning, innovation, and leadership to alter or even fine-tune the current course. To position our city to prosper over the long term, we will need a well-developed, communitywide vision on how we can create the best quality of life for our citizens today and tomorrow.

-Patrick Piuma

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