Good Urban Design Reduces Diabetes

[PonderInc]

It makes such sense, it's a wonder it made the news.   People who live in walkable neighborhoods with access to healthy food are less likely to get Type II diabetes than those who don't. 

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=338&articleid=20091013_13_A8_Typedi563542&archive=yes

In 1958, the prevalence of Type II diabetes was 0.9 percent of the US population. By 2000 it had climbed to 4.4 percent, and it's projected to hit 7.2 percent in 2050.

So well-designed, walkable neighborhoods could have a significant impact on public health, and the costs associated with disease.  Perhaps it's time we took notice.

[Red Arrow]

Unfortunately, a lot of Americans choose unhealthy food and will continue to do so as long as it's available.  Exercise is available for those that want it.

What you suggest will make it easier for those who choose to eat healthy and exercise to do so.

[PonderInc]

True enough about food choices.  (I always feel like a real American when I belly up to the soda fountain for my unlimited refill at a restaurant, and top off my 32 oz plastic cup with a nice dose of sugar and/or carcinogens.  And, yes, I do that.)

My point is about urban design.  I've lived in walkable neighborhoods, and I've lived in car cultures.  When I lived in a walkable neighborhood, I walked a lot more.  It wasn't "exercise" it was just an enjoyable part of my day.  I could walk to the store.  I could walk to dinner.  I could walk to the river to see the sunset.  I could walk to work on beautiful days.  I could walk to meet friends for a drink.

I currently live in a "car culture" neighborhood.  There are only a couple places to walk to eat, but the arterials are unsafe for pedestrians, they often lack sidewalks, and are unattractive visually.  The neighborhood is attractive enough, but there aren't any sidewalks, and not all streets "go through" (only some are on a grid).  The separation of land uses means that there are fewer interesting, unique destinations nearby.  Which is to say: the area is uninviting, and unmotivating to folks who might like to walk instead of drive.

I don't mind walking a mile, but I like it to be attractive and interesting.  Otherwise, it's just exercise.

And although I love my house and my neighbors and the mid-century 'hood, I'll eventually move back to a neighborhood where walking is part of the "quality of life."

[Renaissance]

The point about Americans making choices is well taken.  Suburban neighborhood design has been, at least in part, a response to consumer demands.

I think, though, that the demands of the consumer are shifting towards the kind of walkable neighborhoods you describe.  The city should make sure the zoning code makes it easy for residents to reshape their neighborhoods according to the the choices they want to make, rather than locking development patterns into obsolete modes.

[Townsend]

Sidewalks please.

I'd walk alot more to a destination (in my case the 21st and Yale area) if there were some sidewalks on Yale.

I think that's the case in a number of areas.

[PonderInc]

It's hard to appreciate the role of urban planning (or the lack of urban planning) b/c we're so used to the status quo.

However, next time you fly into a city, take a look out your window during the approach.  

From the air, you can see at a glance the billions of dollars that were spent to build (& maintain) the network of roads and highways (spreading out as far as the eye can see and often traversing empty land).  You'll notice how suburban housing is allowed to spring up willy-nilly (often obliterating prime farmland) and with no thought of how the neighborhood will connect to the services residents will require.  (Jobs, shopping, entertainment, etc).  You'll see the ratio of parking lot to actual building area (4:1 or so)...with most lots half empty.  You'll notice how spread out everything is, and how impossible this system is for anyone without a car.

Then, another observation.  I was recently in Seattle, where the highways have an HOV lane (for any car with two or more people).  The shocker there?  When you filter out the cars with two or more people...just how many people drive solo.  This always interests me.  Why do we each need thousands of pounds of steel and petrochemicals to transport a hundred lbs of human flesh.  The wastefulness of our post-WWII land use and transportation paradigm is astonishing, illogical, and obscene.

And, so common, we don't even notice.

[Red Arrow]

People have been moving out of the "Big City" in this country long before the automobile.  Some of them moved to places that became cities in their own right.  East of the Mississippi River, a bit over 100 years ago you would have been complaining about how folks were using the train and (real) trolley like we use the car, to get out of town. There were also wagon trails and, yep, turnpikes.  Rail transport traversed a lot of open land going between cities.  A lot of that space filled in but I will admit the transportation solution was more defined.  Still, a lot of farm land was converted to housing.

HOV lanes seem elitist to me.  How many billions of $ are spent to build and maintain HOV lanes for rubber tired vehicles only to reduce the utility of them by restricting traffic.   Light rail might have been a better answer.  I have only known a few drivers that wanted to risk driving their car on a set of railroad tracks that were not filled in around the rails like in cities with (real) trolleys. (The tread width of many american cars is remarkably close to the distance between the rails of standard gauge railroads.)

We all know that parking lot size is dictated by the upcoming holiday shopping season.  I cannot disagree that it seems like a waste of land but tell that to the retailers beside them.  The downtown businesses like Renbergs, Frougs, and JC Penny certainly don't need the parking space.  Oh, wait a minute, people mostly went to the suburban stores with abundant free parking and the downtown stores don't need the parking space because they don't exist anymore.  Buying more than an armful of stuff makes having a car to store things while you continue shopping very convenient.  The automobile may be responsible for a lot of inefficiencies but it has enabled a life better than living in rundown, deteriorating downtown tenements for a lot of people.

[PonderInc]

The downtown businesses like Renbergs, Frougs, and JC Penny certainly don't need the parking space.  Oh, wait a minute, people mostly went to the suburban stores with abundant free parking and the downtown stores don't need the parking space because they don't exist anymore.  Buying more than an armful of stuff makes having a car to store things while you continue shopping very convenient.  The automobile may be responsible for a lot of inefficiencies but it has enabled a life better than living in rundown, deteriorating downtown tenements for a lot of people.

Here's something to consider:

In Tulsa, in 1966, we had a thriving, densely populated city that was able to provide services to it's residents.  Downtown was not characterized by "deteriorating tenements."  It was an active and thriving city center.  It had schools, shops, houses, apartment buildings, business headquarters, theaters, civic clubs, grocery stores, etc, etc, etc.

In 1966, however, Tulsa annexed so much land, it tripled its size overnight.  It went from 57 square miles to 175 square miles.  Suddenly (and ever since), the city has struggled to provide basic services and infrastructure to it's enormous land mass.  As a result, the city has been under pressure to develop anything it can in sprawling areas, in an attempt to grab essential tax dollars.



Where development had previously progressed in an orderly and logical manner, it now was at the mercy of developers and builders who wanted to make a quick buck.

So, yeah, folks were buying cheap land and big lots far from the city center.  A growing array of suburban living options became available. As a result, you had to have a car.  (As people and housing were dispersed over a larger and larger area, it became more difficult to provide working transit.)  With all the wide open space, it was easier to build stores on big lots and strip malls...which, naturally catered to the car.  And, since everyone needed a car for everything, it's no surprise that folks started shopping at their shiny, new stores (located miles from home, but including nice, big parking lots).

However, my point is that urban planning decisions (or the lack thereof) drove (pun intended) our current, car-dependent way of life.

If you're interested in the history of Tulsa's development, there's a fascinating paper on the City Council website, written by Jack Blair in 2004: "A History of Tulsa Annexation."

http://www.tulsacouncil.org/pdfs/R&PD/other_reports&presentations/Annexation%20History.pdf

[Red Arrow]

PonderInc,

I lived in suburban Philadelphia until August of 1971 when the family moved here.  111th & Memorial was out in the boonies which is what my parents wanted.  By then, the shopping centers at 41st & Yale were there.  That is where we went to shop.  I think Sears was at 21st and Yale.  Bud's Thriftywise in Bixby had groceries but his prices reflected his captive market.  It wasn't much farther to the Tulsa large grocery stores so we went there except for the occasional loaf of bread or quart of milk.  There were a few small stores sprinkled along Memorial. "Deteriorating tenements" wasn't so much directed at Tulsa as a statement in general for cities.  Philadelphia had already started "Urban Renewal" (bulldozing rundown places and leaving nothing) by the late 60s.

Whether or not annexing so much land was in Tulsa's best interest will probably be debated forever.  The IDL certainly had some ill effects on the urban lifestyle but should not have been enough to kill it.  Why did "everyone" leave for the suburbs?  Why were they unsatisfied with dense urban life?  The car may have enabled the exodus but did it cause it?  Even in pre-1966 Tulsa neighborhoods, there were many areas where going to the grocery store was more convenient with a car so the precedent was already established.  Neighborhoods had houses with driveways and garages.  People shopped at department stores downtown because there weren't any such businesses anywhere else.  The remaining fact is that except for a possible core of "downtown", Tulsans already needed to own a car.  Light rail fans call the shift from (real) trolleys to buses and cars the "Transit Holocaust".  The areas annexed in 1966 would have been developed eventually regardless of whether Tulsa annexed them.   The car allowed the helter-skelter arrangement of living vs employment centers compared to older cities that expanded to the suburbs with rail transportation a half century earlier.  I am not sure that urban planning would have changed much without draconian measures such as prohibiting commercial development or not providing water and sewer and thereby requiring lot sizes larger than most wanted to to buy in order to support water wells and septic tanks. Not providing services while charging city taxes would have slowed development some but probably not stopped it.  One good side might have been that two lane roads may have still been sufficient, but I doubt it.

My point is that what happened in Tulsa was as much a result of a desired lifestyle of the times as it was by a presence or lack of planning.  The present trend toward higher density will most likely result in greater efficiency in using resources but city services will need to be expanded.  Water, sewer, power, trash disposal, and transportation are the first ones that come to my mind. Tulsa's previous density and established infrastructure may allow some time to plan but if our density continues to grow as urbanite fans wish, plans to accommodate those needs will probably be met with the same response provided to  the infrastructure in south Tulsa.  A day late and a dollar short.

[MichaelBates]

Here's something to consider:

In Tulsa, in 1966, we had a thriving, densely populated city that was able to provide services to it's residents.  Downtown was not characterized by "deteriorating tenements."  It was an active and thriving city center.  It had schools, shops, houses, apartment buildings, business headquarters, theaters, civic clubs, grocery stores, etc, etc, etc.

In 1966, however, Tulsa annexed so much land, it tripled its size overnight.  It went from 57 square miles to 175 square miles.  Suddenly (and ever since), the city has struggled to provide basic services and infrastructure to it's enormous land mass.  As a result, the city has been under pressure to develop anything it can in sprawling areas, in an attempt to grab essential tax dollars.

Where development had previously progressed in an orderly and logical manner, it now was at the mercy of developers and builders who wanted to make a quick buck.

So, yeah, folks were buying cheap land and big lots far from the city center.  A growing array of suburban living options became available. As a result, you had to have a car.  (As people and housing were dispersed over a larger and larger area, it became more difficult to provide working transit.)  With all the wide open space, it was easier to build stores on big lots and strip malls...which, naturally catered to the car.  And, since everyone needed a car for everything, it's no surprise that folks started shopping at their shiny, new stores (located miles from home, but including nice, big parking lots).

However, my point is that urban planning decisions (or the lack thereof) drove (pun intended) our current, car-dependent way of life.

If you're interested in the history of Tulsa's development, there's a fascinating paper on the City Council website, written by Jack Blair in 2004: "A History of Tulsa Annexation."

Tulsa's leaders made a lot of mistakes in the '60s, but I don't think the 1966 annexation was one of them. Low-density suburban development was going to continue, driven by many other forces -- some political, some societal. The big annexation ensured that a lot of that development happened within Tulsa's city limits, so we continued to capture sales and property tax revenue. It did, of course, also make us liable for providing infrastructure and services to that vast area. If those areas had developed at the same density of the pre-1966 city, we'd have been better able to finance that infrastructure and those services.

Prior to 1966, Tulsa would add new subdivisions to the city as they were built and as the developers requested annexation. One of the arguments for a large annexation was that new developments would be built within the city limits and under the city's building and planning codes. Another argument was that annexation was a defensive move, as suburban municipalities began to annex fence lines that would constrain Tulsa's potential growth. (I'm not sure why Tulsa opted for full annexation rather than fencing future growth areas.)

It's funny: Planning documents from the late '50s expected that the City of Tulsa's population would approach one million by the end of the 20th century. The planners seemed to expect new development at the same density.

Tulsa's urban renewal began in the mid-60s as well; DTU leaders were talking about clearing out the old commercial blocks between the tracks and 3rd as early as 1957. The radial expressway system was mapped out in '56.

Downtown decline was going to happen and was already well underway by 1966. The problem is that the actions Tulsa took then to try to stem that decline hindered and are still hindering the recovery process. Those American cities that didn't ring their downtowns with expressways, required historic preservation, were selective about demolition, and avoided the use of superblocks and pedestrian malls were better positioned for downtown revival.