Richard Florida Rides Again!

I rarely read Roanoke.com, that fount of pedantic, navel-gazing journalism that never forgets its mission to make the Star City relevant to something, anything, outside its surrounding mountain ranges. But this article has several phrases that jump out at me (emphasis added):

Roanoke, if it wants to attract young adults, could benefit from a more “urban feel” enhanced by downtown bars with live music that would appeal to members of a creative work force.

[...]

The metro area has some strengths, including quality of education, outdoor recreation opportunities and a clean environment.

But just having streams and trails for recreation isn’t enough; they need to be accessible from neighborhoods, the study said.

The study focuses on five elements of urban living and zeroes in on one need in particular: Roanoke’s social and cultural amenities.

[...]

“For the young business people we’re talking about attracting, for making Roanoke a ‘cool city,’ they’re going out on Friday and Saturday nights but I don’t see their activities including live music performances,” Locke said.

Creative, young poeple, live music and outdoor recreation … these are the things picked out by Richard Florida, co-author of The Creative Class, an influential book that suggests older cities need to revitalize their downtowns in order to attract young, affluent people whose entire lives revolve around going out at night. Some cities like Pittsburgh have tried to implement Florida’s ideas, with varying results. The article quoted above doesn’t mention Florida or The Creative Class, just Virginia Tech farm team Roanoke College as the source of the study that reached the shocking and thoroughly non-obvious conclusion that vibrant cities are fun because there are things to do there. I wondered enough to go over to Google though, and sure enough:

It is no secret that many medium size cities like Roanoke,VA are bleeding young adults to more urban areas, especially during the 1990s. Roanoke’s city manager had a vision to be proactive in addressing this important, but not urgent issue, by creating a staff person to implement many of Mr. Florida’s ideas.

I always thought Florida’s approach was somewhat backwards–he basically advocates attracting young adults by somehow creating the cultural institutions that you can only have if the young adults are already there. A retirement community can’t make a techno club, and like many writers on planning, Florida completely ignores the economic fundamentals. Buffalo is already a happening town, but not many people want to move there because the job market sucks. The article does partly get at those things in its focus-free Roanoke.com way.

Other cities have advantages that Roanoke lacks, he said. Charlottesville has 20,000 college students who are heavily into liberal arts studies; Richmond is a large city and it has Shockoe Bottom, where bars with live music have been on the scene for many years.

Bars with live music struggle even in Blacksburg, where students outnumber those in Charlottesville but are focused on engineering and technical studies, Locke said.

[...]

“It would be a mistake to think creating more music venues and bars would do the trick,” O’Hara said. Those kinds of establishments need to be within the “urban feel” category of being walkable and diverse.

Said Locke: “You have to build the scene, not the venue. We have great venues that are not being supported” by attendance.

Wait…

Today’s lunchtime theme is “something isn’t right here”, and our first entry comes via Clint’s blog. It’s a heartwarming tale of a chance meeting on an overnight flight. Two strangers in the night; she looked at him, he looked at her, he was overcome coming all over her:

An off-duty Northwest Airlines employee was arrested after a woman on a flight from Seattle complained that the man had ejaculated on her.

My Favorite…

Search terms somehow leading to this blog:

Left steak out all day
borg cube making

Spam subject lines:

resurrection elk

Metro WiFi Coming to Alexandria

Early last year, Alexandria ran a pilot program called “Wireless Alexandria“, offering free public WiFi at the waterfront end of King Street. The couple times I tried it, it sort of worked. I could connect to the network, but web browsing was a no-go. I didn’t think about it again until this spring when our studio class began work on an inventory of Alexandria’s environment-related programs. It’s a stretch to call WiFi an environmental program, though you could say it promotes public health in the sense of making it more attractive for people to be outdoors.

Anyway, in updating my knowledge of Wireless Alexandria, I found that not only is it still going, but the city has granted a franchise to Earthlink to build a network covering the entire city. Most of this network will be sold as a service, but in exchange for the franchise Earthlink will make it free in certain public areas. This time those will cover not just the waterfront but most of the parks and public buildings throughout the city. That’s a cutting-edge public amenity for the midatlantic.

The technology, though, is cutting-edge for anywhere. The TROPOS wireless routers use a proprietary “self-organizing” protocol that’s claimed to dynamically route based on observed throughput, with predictive self-healing to compensate for interference, dead routers etc. They claim a 100% improvement in throughput compared to other protocols, but the really cool feature is that it sends off-net traffic to a single wired connection (or I imagine they’ll have two for redundancy) as opposed to having a wired backbone connection for every router. Much cheaper.

It also allows regular old WiFi clients to go mobile by handing them off, cellular-style, to the next router. That could have some interesting implications for Vonage users. The new citywide network is supposed to be completed this fall.; I’ll definitely be waiting to compare their pricing to what I’m currently doing for internet access. Ain’t technology grand?

Carbon Offsets?

Donald Sensing argues that Al Gore’s now-infamous electricity hogging isn’t that big a deal, considering things like his secret service detail, running his business out of his home, the guest accommodations that a man in his position makes extensive use of, and so forth (link via Instapundit.) He’s probably right, as far as it goes, though it still makes it hard to take Gore seriously when he tells me to live …as I currently do, while he uses 20 times the electricity of the average American home. Anyway, the more interesting point is Sensing’s discussion of carbon offsets:

Okay, the carbon offset thing seems a shell-game scam to me, and even the vaunted Economist magazine seems to agree. Gerard Van Der Leun appropriately compared offsetting to the pre-Reformation practice of the Catholic Church of selling indulgences. It worked like this: you, a sinner, could pay money to the Church, which would draw from its (claimed) bank of religious virtue and apply it to you personally.

As I argued in the comments to that Economist post, if we assume that a carbon offset actually offsets carbon emissions as advertised, then it will in fact alter the supply-and-demand equation to where the person buying the offsets has incentive to consume less energy. But I was ignoring another aspect that I’m now starting to think is more important. How is the purchase of an offset related to the purchase of energy?

I was assuming that you buy one offset per unit of energy purchased, thus raising the price of a unit of energy to reflect the cost of disposing the emissions. That’s a market-based solution because it internalizes the externality of harmful emissions. The resulting total energy consumption reflects people’s willingness to pay for both producing and using energy, and cleaning up after it.

But as currently available, carbon offsets don’t seem to follow that model. In most cases, they are notionally related to the purchaser’s energy consumption, but are purchased separately and at a different time than the energy. So, you commit the ’sin’ of consuming carbon-emitting energy, and then ‘cleanse your soul’ later by buying carbon offsets to (theoretically) make up for the emissions. That does indeed resemble the old papal indulgences, in that it gives the buyer only a hazy pricing signal on their energy consumption, while allowing them to feel that they’re on the side of righteousness in the climate change debate.

Yes, in theory the buyer knows when they’re paying at the pump that they’re also going to have to pay more later for offsets, but if you think about, say, people’s attitude toward tax refunds, it’s doubtful there’d be much connection in most minds. The more likely result is that, feeling yourself in a ’state of grace’ with regard to carbon emissions, you’ll use the same or more energy instead of becoming more efficient.

So to be effective, carbon offsets have to be attached to each unit of energy purchased. That sounds like …a carbon tax. While I’m not a fan of taxes in general, if the voting public chooses to do try to marketize the emissions externality, that seems like the only workable way to do it. And again, none of this addresses the issue of whether emissions are actually being offset. Unless that’s happening, then no money should go to taxes or offsets.

I Got Places to Go…

My former (now that he’s graduated and passed to me the mantle of longest-running Master of Urban and Regional Planning candidate) classmate Alan Fogg has an op-ed in today’s Post. The piece is based on his major paper and calls for Tysons Corner to have its own ZIP code, making it really “Tysons Corner”, instead of Vienna or McLean depending which side of Route 7 you’re on.

The Shopping Bag Building really isn’t part of Vienna, whose identity is centered a few miles southwest on Maple Avenue, near Church Street, the town hall and the future town green.

Likewise, Tysons Corner Center really isn’t part of McLean, whose identity is centered a few miles northeast along Chain Bridge Road and Old Dominion Drive.

In a sensible world, the Shopping Bag Building and Tysons Corner Center would both be in Tysons Corner, which the Census Bureau already designates as a place. It’s a 4.9-square-mile area where 18,540 people live and about 110,000 people work. It’s the headquarters of two Fortune 500 companies — Capital One Financial Corp. and Gannett Co. — and home to two super-regional malls that attract thousands of shoppers daily.

From its long-ago beginning as a remote rural crossroads, Tysons has grown into a modern metropolis complete with four freeway interchanges, more than a dozen skyscrapers, state of the art shopping malls, the dot com era’s hottest nightclub, and as Alan mentions, two Fortune 500 corporate headquarters. It inspired Joel Garreau’s seminal best-seller Edge City, which chronicled the transformation of the suburbs from bedroom community to economic powerhouse. And in the next decade it will become the first link in the next-generation intra-suburban Metrorail lines. So three cheers for Tysons Corner …and hey, it’s not too late to rename Route 7 “Alan Fogg Boulevard”!

The Prince of Whales

I guess that’s my lousy suggestion for Prince Charles’ new nickname after he told this, er, whopper concerning a Big Mac the other day:

On a tour of a diabetes centre, Prince Charles asked a nutritionist: “Have you got anywhere with McDonald’s? Have you tried getting it banned? That is the key.”

Yeah, now that we’ve solved all other problems in the world, it’s time to ban a hamburger. But wait, there’s more supersized mocking!

Er, no. You see, old chap, if you’re worried about nutrition, it turns out that a Big Mac, according to figures published yesterday, has nothing on one of your own comestibles. A Duchy Originals organic Cornish pasty has 264 calories per 100g, and a Big Mac only 229 calories; a Duchy Originals pasty has 5.5g of saturated fat, a Big Mac just 4.17g.

Any other business owner would know their product well enough to avoid making idiotic public statements about it, but I guess His Royal Highness is too busy for such common concerns. Maybe he’s been using his own product and the arteries to his brain are blocked? Either way, it’s pretty impressive when your food is even less healthy than McDonalds. And coincidentally, I just had a great idea for a documentary. Morgan Spurlock, call your office!