Print this articleBy MICHELINE MAYNARD
Published: May 3, 2007
ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 2 - On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in mid-March, hundreds of food lovers packed a tent on Detroit Street in front of Zingerman's Delicatessen here, lining up for samples to celebrate the deli’s 25th anniversary.
Zingerman's, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., also does business by mail.
Kristen Hogue delivers a tray a food at Zingerman's deli, which may be more popular outside its hometown of Ann Arbor than it is there.
They could taste bread from Zingerman's Bakehouse, barbecued pork from Zingerman's Roadhouse, fresh goat cheese from the Zingerman's Creamery and coffee that Zingerman's roasts itself.
The variety startled some people who still think of Zingerman's as simply a red brick building on a cobblestone street. Yet, as it turned 25, Zingerman's had gone beyond being simply a deli to being a gourmet enterprise with sales of more than $30 million expected this year. And it is now known across the United States thanks to its catalog and mail-order business.
But neither the festivities nor the variety would have been possible if Zingerman's co-founder, Paul Saginaw, had not dragged his business partner, Ari Weinzweig, to a bench in front of the deli about 15 years ago and demanded that they start thinking about where they wanted their business to wind up.
Mr. Weinzweig was reluctant to break away from his routine of running the deli, then generating about $6 million a year in sales, to brainstorm. But Mr. Saginaw insisted.
Two years later, the result was a vision for what they hoped to achieve by 2009 — well beyond the 5-year or even 10-year plans that most businesses scope out for themselves. But at that time Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig wanted to send their employees a message that the business, which was facing increased competition and many proposals to expand or franchise, had a solid future. Its customer-friendly approach and emphasis on expensive but high-quality products would not be abandoned as the company grew.
That kind of long-range thinking is hardly typical in the food business, where restaurants and gourmet stores can hang around for years, then vanish overnight.
"If they want to look out that far in advance, great, but it is unusual," said Jim Anderson, a management counselor with Score, a nonprofit organization that provides advice to small business owners.
Plans of three to five years are more the norm for businesses the size of Zingerman's, he said. "The biggest criticism levied against this would be that we’re not smart enough to project that far into the future," Mr. Anderson said. "But to criticize what they've done would be foolish, because they’ve been so successful."
The deli alone has earned Zingerman's an exalted status among food lovers, said Michael Ruhlman, the author of a number of books on the food business.
"Places like Zingerman's are important for two reasons: they become arbiters of taste in America’s booming artisanal food industry simply by what they choose to put in their stores; and second, they are fundamental middlemen between the artisan producer and the consumer," Mr. Ruhlman said. "There’s not a lot the consumer can do, really, to get Iberian ham, but Ari can."
Both Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig thought Zingerman's could be more than just a corner store, however. When they brainstormed back in the early 1990s, they thought Zingerman's could handle as many as 15 different businesses, generating $20 million a year in sales, with the deli at the heart of the enterprise.
They were off-base on several counts. Zingerman's revenue swelled 50 percent greater than that, to an estimated $30 million this year, with eight separate operations, including a bakery, restaurant, coffee-roasting company and catering business, as well as a training business meant to share Zingerman's people-friendly management approach.
And though 2009 is still 19 months off, Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig are brainstorming again on a vision for the year 2020, which they have begun sharing with their fellow managers, employees and even, via a newsletter, customers.
By then, Mr. Saginaw wants to expand the operations on the corner of East Kingsley and Detroit Streets, home to the original deli, its outdoor seating and a coffeehouse called Zingerman's Next Door. There could be as many as 18 businesses: the company is weighing ventures like a microbrewery, a small hotel, fish and meat-smoking business and a publishing house.
Paul Saginaw, left, and Ari Weinzweig are celebrating 25 years of being in the food business. Despite expectations of more than $30 million in sales this year, their profit margins are fairly slim. But they seem unfazed. "Our goal in 2020 is to leave our world better than it was when we came here," Mr. Weinzweig said.
Zingerman's is making it clear that it plans to stay in the Ann Arbor area, bringing food products from around the region, the country and the world to Southeast Michigan. Mr. Weinzweig likens that philosophy to the French word "terroir" meaning "of the earth," or the idea that food and wine reflect the area where it is produced.
In the case of Zingerman's, that means the Midwest and specifically, this college town where Zingerman's has sometimes eclipsed the University of Michigan as its most notable attraction - among food enthusiasts, at least. The late New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple called it "the deli of my dreams." It was a campaign stop for the Democratic hopeful John Kerry in 2004.
"Zingerman's is unique in that it has a continental reach" in the United States, said Peter Foynes, curator of the butter museum in Cork, Ireland, who led a butter-tasting program at the deli last month. "I can think of no food premises in Europe that has that kind of reach."
Mr. Saginaw added: "We're better known outside of Ann Arbor than we are in Ann Arbor. You're always underappreciated in your own hometown. And that's good, because it keeps you in your place."
To be sure, Zingerman's touches a nerve here. Locals have learned to avoid the deli on peak days and times, like weekend afternoons, when lines filled with out-of-towners run around the corner and street parking is nearly impossible to find (the deli has no lot of its own, and city parking enforcement is rigid.)
Some bypass the deli altogether to visit Zingerman's other shops south of town near Ann Arbor’s small airport, where the company makes its bread, gelato and cheese.
Likewise, the deli's prices, which approach New York levels, raise plenty of Midwestern eyebrows. Its sandwiches, available in "nosher" and "fresser" sizes, run $12.50 and $13.99, respectively, for a Reuben, and $8.99 and $10.50 for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. A blintz is $3.99, and a hot dog with bacon, cheddar and ketchup (albeit homemade) is $7.99.
So it may come as a surprise to learn that Zingerman's profit margins, which it openly shares with its employees, are razor thin. The deli, which is expected to generate sales of nearly $10 million this year, is forecast to earn only about a 3.5 percent return. Its mail-order business, the next largest at nearly $8 million in annual sales, is expected to earn about 5 percent.
One reason margins are not higher, said Grace Singleton, who manages the deli, is the company's commitment to high-quality products.
"The price difference between regular turkey and free range isn’t just 20 percent higher, it’s three times as much," she said. "Could we do something different? Sure. Would it be authentic and feel as great? No."
Some of that determination stems from Mr. Weinzweig's curiosity about food, which he, a Chicago native, began acquiring after he graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Russian history.
He met Mr. Saginaw, a Detroit native, while working at Maude's, a defunct cafe in Ann Arbor. Though neither was a trained chef, they bought the deli’s original location in 1982, deciding that the community was ripe for a business that would echo a traditional New York deli.
At the beginning, only the two men and a handful of employees ran the business. Mr. Saginaw often called his mother during Jewish holidays for cooking tips.
Now, the tiny deli is crammed with meats from Niman Ranch, the California specialty producer, cheeses from the United States and Europe, honeys from France, vinegars from Italy and an entire wall of olive oils. That is in addition to the rye bread and bagels produced in Zingerman’s own bakery and the fresh cream cheese it makes to go with them.
Even though they now have 545 employees, Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig can frequently be spotted there and at Zingerman's Roadhouse, opened in 2003, which concentrates on American classics like fried chicken, barbecue, grits and seafood.
During a busy week, Mr. Weinzweig and Mr. Saginaw joined the company's partners for a regular meeting.
The gathering, punctuated with laughter and words of praise for a number of employees, included a brainstorming session on a name for a packaged ice coffee (candidates included Joe Cool, Witches Brew and Java the Hut, a take-off on the "Star Wars" character.)
There was also a lively debate over whether the company should spend money on a new payroll system, as well as an on-the-spot interview of a new manager, who was drilled not only on his background but on his favorite gelato flavor, dulce de leche.
Managers also discussed the company’s latest financial data. Zingerman's pushes its employees to take an interest in its financial picture, which helps determine their generous compensation. Along with hourly wages, vacation time (as much as six weeks after 20 years), health and dental care and food discounts, full-time employees receive "gain sharing," which pays out if their part of the company exceeds its annual business plan, Ms. Singleton said.
The structure also helps explain why margins remain low even as revenue has risen. To pay employees, support local producers and contribute to the community, "a big piece of it is charging enough money," Mr. Weinzweig said.
But Mr. Saginaw said profit, in itself, was not Zingerman's motivation. "We've had dozens and dozens of opportunities to franchise, sell the name, take the check and walk away," Mr. Saginaw said.
Instead, Mr. Weinzweig said, the idea was to create a special experience. "Our goal in 2020 is to leave our world better than it was when we came here," he said.
Published: May 3, 2007
ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 2 - On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in mid-March, hundreds of food lovers packed a tent on Detroit Street in front of Zingerman's Delicatessen here, lining up for samples to celebrate the deli’s 25th anniversary.
Zingerman's, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., also does business by mail.
Kristen Hogue delivers a tray a food at Zingerman's deli, which may be more popular outside its hometown of Ann Arbor than it is there.
They could taste bread from Zingerman's Bakehouse, barbecued pork from Zingerman's Roadhouse, fresh goat cheese from the Zingerman's Creamery and coffee that Zingerman's roasts itself.
The variety startled some people who still think of Zingerman's as simply a red brick building on a cobblestone street. Yet, as it turned 25, Zingerman's had gone beyond being simply a deli to being a gourmet enterprise with sales of more than $30 million expected this year. And it is now known across the United States thanks to its catalog and mail-order business.
But neither the festivities nor the variety would have been possible if Zingerman's co-founder, Paul Saginaw, had not dragged his business partner, Ari Weinzweig, to a bench in front of the deli about 15 years ago and demanded that they start thinking about where they wanted their business to wind up.
Mr. Weinzweig was reluctant to break away from his routine of running the deli, then generating about $6 million a year in sales, to brainstorm. But Mr. Saginaw insisted.
Two years later, the result was a vision for what they hoped to achieve by 2009 — well beyond the 5-year or even 10-year plans that most businesses scope out for themselves. But at that time Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig wanted to send their employees a message that the business, which was facing increased competition and many proposals to expand or franchise, had a solid future. Its customer-friendly approach and emphasis on expensive but high-quality products would not be abandoned as the company grew.
That kind of long-range thinking is hardly typical in the food business, where restaurants and gourmet stores can hang around for years, then vanish overnight.
"If they want to look out that far in advance, great, but it is unusual," said Jim Anderson, a management counselor with Score, a nonprofit organization that provides advice to small business owners.
Plans of three to five years are more the norm for businesses the size of Zingerman's, he said. "The biggest criticism levied against this would be that we’re not smart enough to project that far into the future," Mr. Anderson said. "But to criticize what they've done would be foolish, because they’ve been so successful."
The deli alone has earned Zingerman's an exalted status among food lovers, said Michael Ruhlman, the author of a number of books on the food business.
"Places like Zingerman's are important for two reasons: they become arbiters of taste in America’s booming artisanal food industry simply by what they choose to put in their stores; and second, they are fundamental middlemen between the artisan producer and the consumer," Mr. Ruhlman said. "There’s not a lot the consumer can do, really, to get Iberian ham, but Ari can."
Both Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig thought Zingerman's could be more than just a corner store, however. When they brainstormed back in the early 1990s, they thought Zingerman's could handle as many as 15 different businesses, generating $20 million a year in sales, with the deli at the heart of the enterprise.
They were off-base on several counts. Zingerman's revenue swelled 50 percent greater than that, to an estimated $30 million this year, with eight separate operations, including a bakery, restaurant, coffee-roasting company and catering business, as well as a training business meant to share Zingerman's people-friendly management approach.
And though 2009 is still 19 months off, Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig are brainstorming again on a vision for the year 2020, which they have begun sharing with their fellow managers, employees and even, via a newsletter, customers.
By then, Mr. Saginaw wants to expand the operations on the corner of East Kingsley and Detroit Streets, home to the original deli, its outdoor seating and a coffeehouse called Zingerman's Next Door. There could be as many as 18 businesses: the company is weighing ventures like a microbrewery, a small hotel, fish and meat-smoking business and a publishing house.
Paul Saginaw, left, and Ari Weinzweig are celebrating 25 years of being in the food business. Despite expectations of more than $30 million in sales this year, their profit margins are fairly slim. But they seem unfazed. "Our goal in 2020 is to leave our world better than it was when we came here," Mr. Weinzweig said.
Zingerman's is making it clear that it plans to stay in the Ann Arbor area, bringing food products from around the region, the country and the world to Southeast Michigan. Mr. Weinzweig likens that philosophy to the French word "terroir" meaning "of the earth," or the idea that food and wine reflect the area where it is produced.
In the case of Zingerman's, that means the Midwest and specifically, this college town where Zingerman's has sometimes eclipsed the University of Michigan as its most notable attraction - among food enthusiasts, at least. The late New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple called it "the deli of my dreams." It was a campaign stop for the Democratic hopeful John Kerry in 2004.
"Zingerman's is unique in that it has a continental reach" in the United States, said Peter Foynes, curator of the butter museum in Cork, Ireland, who led a butter-tasting program at the deli last month. "I can think of no food premises in Europe that has that kind of reach."
Mr. Saginaw added: "We're better known outside of Ann Arbor than we are in Ann Arbor. You're always underappreciated in your own hometown. And that's good, because it keeps you in your place."
To be sure, Zingerman's touches a nerve here. Locals have learned to avoid the deli on peak days and times, like weekend afternoons, when lines filled with out-of-towners run around the corner and street parking is nearly impossible to find (the deli has no lot of its own, and city parking enforcement is rigid.)
Some bypass the deli altogether to visit Zingerman's other shops south of town near Ann Arbor’s small airport, where the company makes its bread, gelato and cheese.
Likewise, the deli's prices, which approach New York levels, raise plenty of Midwestern eyebrows. Its sandwiches, available in "nosher" and "fresser" sizes, run $12.50 and $13.99, respectively, for a Reuben, and $8.99 and $10.50 for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. A blintz is $3.99, and a hot dog with bacon, cheddar and ketchup (albeit homemade) is $7.99.
So it may come as a surprise to learn that Zingerman's profit margins, which it openly shares with its employees, are razor thin. The deli, which is expected to generate sales of nearly $10 million this year, is forecast to earn only about a 3.5 percent return. Its mail-order business, the next largest at nearly $8 million in annual sales, is expected to earn about 5 percent.
One reason margins are not higher, said Grace Singleton, who manages the deli, is the company's commitment to high-quality products.
"The price difference between regular turkey and free range isn’t just 20 percent higher, it’s three times as much," she said. "Could we do something different? Sure. Would it be authentic and feel as great? No."
Some of that determination stems from Mr. Weinzweig's curiosity about food, which he, a Chicago native, began acquiring after he graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Russian history.
He met Mr. Saginaw, a Detroit native, while working at Maude's, a defunct cafe in Ann Arbor. Though neither was a trained chef, they bought the deli’s original location in 1982, deciding that the community was ripe for a business that would echo a traditional New York deli.
At the beginning, only the two men and a handful of employees ran the business. Mr. Saginaw often called his mother during Jewish holidays for cooking tips.
Now, the tiny deli is crammed with meats from Niman Ranch, the California specialty producer, cheeses from the United States and Europe, honeys from France, vinegars from Italy and an entire wall of olive oils. That is in addition to the rye bread and bagels produced in Zingerman’s own bakery and the fresh cream cheese it makes to go with them.
Even though they now have 545 employees, Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig can frequently be spotted there and at Zingerman's Roadhouse, opened in 2003, which concentrates on American classics like fried chicken, barbecue, grits and seafood.
During a busy week, Mr. Weinzweig and Mr. Saginaw joined the company's partners for a regular meeting.
The gathering, punctuated with laughter and words of praise for a number of employees, included a brainstorming session on a name for a packaged ice coffee (candidates included Joe Cool, Witches Brew and Java the Hut, a take-off on the "Star Wars" character.)
There was also a lively debate over whether the company should spend money on a new payroll system, as well as an on-the-spot interview of a new manager, who was drilled not only on his background but on his favorite gelato flavor, dulce de leche.
Managers also discussed the company’s latest financial data. Zingerman's pushes its employees to take an interest in its financial picture, which helps determine their generous compensation. Along with hourly wages, vacation time (as much as six weeks after 20 years), health and dental care and food discounts, full-time employees receive "gain sharing," which pays out if their part of the company exceeds its annual business plan, Ms. Singleton said.
The structure also helps explain why margins remain low even as revenue has risen. To pay employees, support local producers and contribute to the community, "a big piece of it is charging enough money," Mr. Weinzweig said.
But Mr. Saginaw said profit, in itself, was not Zingerman's motivation. "We've had dozens and dozens of opportunities to franchise, sell the name, take the check and walk away," Mr. Saginaw said.
Instead, Mr. Weinzweig said, the idea was to create a special experience. "Our goal in 2020 is to leave our world better than it was when we came here," he said.
Trade publication ranks 362 metropolitan areas
Saturday, April 21, 2007
BY STEFANIE MURRAY
News Business Reporter
As cities in pursuit of economic growth begin to rely more on the people who live in them rather than the natural or transportation features that surround them - like rivers, rich soil or railroads - Ann Arbor is better positioned than almost any other place in the nation to prosper.
That's according to trade publication Expansion Management's fifth annual Knowledge Worker Quotient, which earlier this month ranked Ann Arbor first in the country for its knowledgeable workforce.
The publication considered demographic factors like college education levels as well as the nearness of local colleges and universities and their research and development spending, and the number of scientists, engineers and medical doctors.
It ranked 362 metropolitan statistical areas for their ability to provide talented workers and an "innovative environment.''
"These are the communities that will thrive and prosper in the future,'' Expansion Management wrote, noting that having a major research university contributes tremendously to having a top-notch work force for knowledge-based businesses.
Ann Arbor also ranked No. 10 among the 362 areas for college-educated workers.
"Since this whole Pfizer closure announcement, we've been so engaged in the community with identifying the work force.'' said Elizabeth Parkinson, spokeswoman for local economic development agency Ann Arbor Spark. "What's become really clear is we have some of the most talented workers, I would say not only in the country but in the world.
Contact Stefanie Murray at smurray@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6932.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
BY STEFANIE MURRAY
News Business Reporter
As cities in pursuit of economic growth begin to rely more on the people who live in them rather than the natural or transportation features that surround them - like rivers, rich soil or railroads - Ann Arbor is better positioned than almost any other place in the nation to prosper.
That's according to trade publication Expansion Management's fifth annual Knowledge Worker Quotient, which earlier this month ranked Ann Arbor first in the country for its knowledgeable workforce.
The publication considered demographic factors like college education levels as well as the nearness of local colleges and universities and their research and development spending, and the number of scientists, engineers and medical doctors.
It ranked 362 metropolitan statistical areas for their ability to provide talented workers and an "innovative environment.''
"These are the communities that will thrive and prosper in the future,'' Expansion Management wrote, noting that having a major research university contributes tremendously to having a top-notch work force for knowledge-based businesses.
Ann Arbor also ranked No. 10 among the 362 areas for college-educated workers.
"Since this whole Pfizer closure announcement, we've been so engaged in the community with identifying the work force.'' said Elizabeth Parkinson, spokeswoman for local economic development agency Ann Arbor Spark. "What's become really clear is we have some of the most talented workers, I would say not only in the country but in the world.
Contact Stefanie Murray at smurray@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6932.
Trade publication ranks 362 metropolitan areas
Saturday, April 21, 2007
BY STEFANIE MURRAY
News Business Reporter
As cities in pursuit of economic growth begin to rely more on the people who live in them rather than the natural or transportation features that surround them - like rivers, rich soil or railroads - Ann Arbor is better positioned than almost any other place in the nation to prosper.
That's according to trade publication Expansion Management's fifth annual Knowledge Worker Quotient, which earlier this month ranked Ann Arbor first in the country for its knowledgeable workforce.
The publication considered demographic factors like college education levels as well as the nearness of local colleges and universities and their research and development spending, and the number of scientists, engineers and medical doctors.
It ranked 362 metropolitan statistical areas for their ability to provide talented workers and an "innovative environment.''
"These are the communities that will thrive and prosper in the future,'' Expansion Management wrote, noting that having a major research university contributes tremendously to having a top-notch work force for knowledge-based businesses.
Ann Arbor also ranked No. 10 among the 362 areas for college-educated workers.
"Since this whole Pfizer closure announcement, we've been so engaged in the community with identifying the work force.'' said Elizabeth Parkinson, spokeswoman for local economic development agency Ann Arbor Spark. "What's become really clear is we have some of the most talented workers, I would say not only in the country but in the world.''
Contact Stefanie Murray at smurray@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6932.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
BY STEFANIE MURRAY
News Business Reporter
As cities in pursuit of economic growth begin to rely more on the people who live in them rather than the natural or transportation features that surround them - like rivers, rich soil or railroads - Ann Arbor is better positioned than almost any other place in the nation to prosper.
That's according to trade publication Expansion Management's fifth annual Knowledge Worker Quotient, which earlier this month ranked Ann Arbor first in the country for its knowledgeable workforce.
The publication considered demographic factors like college education levels as well as the nearness of local colleges and universities and their research and development spending, and the number of scientists, engineers and medical doctors.
It ranked 362 metropolitan statistical areas for their ability to provide talented workers and an "innovative environment.''
"These are the communities that will thrive and prosper in the future,'' Expansion Management wrote, noting that having a major research university contributes tremendously to having a top-notch work force for knowledge-based businesses.
Ann Arbor also ranked No. 10 among the 362 areas for college-educated workers.
"Since this whole Pfizer closure announcement, we've been so engaged in the community with identifying the work force.'' said Elizabeth Parkinson, spokeswoman for local economic development agency Ann Arbor Spark. "What's become really clear is we have some of the most talented workers, I would say not only in the country but in the world.''
Contact Stefanie Murray at smurray@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6932.
IT is a fine feeling to step into the elevator of an apartment building, press the button marked “PH” and take a ride to the top — or at least near the top. And at a time when the wealthiest New Yorkers are getting even wealthier, there are more buildings in Manhattan with many more of these elevator buttons that bespeak the privileges of penthouse living.
Christine Harris, a 34-year-old director at UBS Global Asset Management in Manhattan, expects to experience that feeling when she and her boyfriend move into their $2.5 million 11th-floor penthouse on the northern edges of Chelsea when the apartment is completed next summer.
Speaking by telephone over the clatter of the UBS trading floor, Ms. Harris calmly envisioned opening her apartment to friends for French feasts and glasses of pinot, and unwinding after work on her private 700-square-foot terrace.
“It’s just nice to come home on a summer night and have a bottle of wine when you’re in all of this madness in the city,” she said.
While many Manhattan developers are scrambling to find buyers for their newly constructed and converted luxury apartments, they say they’re having little trouble selling their penthouses, which have become the trinkets of choice in the wake of the city’s record Wall Street bonus season. These apartments, which have accounted for just 2.5 percent of the sales transactions in Manhattan over roughly the last two decades, are now often selling faster than the cheaper studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments.
At Ms. Harris’s new building, the Onyx at 261 West 28th Street, Bronfman Haymes Real Estate Partners has contracts to sell all three of the building’s penthouses, while 30 of the other 52 units remain unsold.
At 170 East End Avenue (at 88th Street), Skyline Developers sold one penthouse for $12 million, and the one next door for $14 million. Skyline’s president, Orin Wilf, said he had turned down an offer of $14.5 million to see if he could get $16 million for each of the two remaining penthouses. Fifty-one of the 93 units are unsold in the building. He said he had negotiated on prices for apartments on the lower floors in the past.
Mr. Wilf says he thinks that the penthouses will sell even better when buyers see the completed apartments. “We’re in no rush to sell them,” he said while standing in one half-constructed penthouse over the barks of dogs in Carl Schurz Park, 19 stories below.
Even at 15 Central Park West (at 61st Street), all 15 penthouses in the project’s two buildings have been sold for prices as high as $45 million, while about 30 of the building’s 202 units remain unsold. “I wish we had 20 more to sell,” said William Lie Zeckendorf, a co-chairman of Zeckendorf Development.
Penthouses, which once were identified more with bachelors and newlyweds seeking terrace space for their cocktail parties, are even attracting the stroller crowd, which seems to like the extra bedrooms and terraces found in the newer residential buildings.
When Gregory O’Hara, a private equity investor, needed to relocate his family to New York from Miami, his wife, Glorimar, started looking for homes that would give them some outdoor space for their 14-month-old son, Henry.
The couple bought a $5.5 million triplex at 5 East 13th Street. Standing in the penthouse she will move into next month, Ms. O’Hara described her plans to set up a swing set, sandbox and outdoor movie theater on the terrace as Henry grinned and toddled his first tentative steps.
“It may be great for a bachelor, but it’s great for a family,” Ms. O’Hara said. “We have lots of outdoor space.”
Brokers say that Wall Street and hedge fund executives are often the first in line for penthouses, because the apartments confirm their “master of the universe” status among their neighbors.
Maureen Carroll, who previously worked on Wall Street and who now has her own brokerage firm specializing in selling apartments to Wall Street executives, had one client turn down an apartment when he found out there was a better one in the building.
The “second best” notion apparently contradicts these executives’ self-image. “They’re not going to live in a building where they’re the second-largest shareholder or there’s another unit that’s larger,” Ms. Carroll said. “The game doesn’t stop when you go home at night.”
Average prices for penthouses in Manhattan jumped by 16.6 percent to $2.3 million in 2006, from $2 million in 2005, according to data collected by the Miller Samuel appraisal company. The number of deals jumped to 225 in 2006, from 184 in 2005. Jonathan J. Miller, the company’s president, predicts these numbers will grow in 2007 because most penthouse buyers like Ms. Harris have not yet closed on their new condominiums.
These strong penthouse sales are persuading more developers to push the limits on how they define penthouses, and in some cases, they are making them more lavish than ever before. Shaun Osher, the chief executive of Core Group Marketing, which is handling the Onyx, is advising developers on the 25 other projects his company represents, to design all of their penthouses with more elaborate finishes so that they can ask even higher prices.
Josh Guberman, the president and chief executive of the Core Development Group (which has no relation to Mr. Osher’s firm), sold the O’Haras their triplex at 5 East 13th only 48 hours after sales began last summer. He said he now planned to divide one penthouse in his next project, on the Upper East Side, into two duplexes, which will be priced at $5.5 million each.
Edward Minskoff, the president of Edward J. Minskoff Equities Inc., sold five penthouses at 101 Warren Street in TriBeCa at prices ranging from $4 million to $20 million within 10 days of its opening last April. Since then, he has sold about 150 of the building’s 227 apartments. He is now building more apartments on top of the building than he had originally planned.
Donald J. Trump, who has been trying to sell his penthouse on the 31st and 32nd floors of 502 Park Avenue (59th Street) for $32 million on and off for the last two years, is now enlarging the master bedroom suite to about 1,400 square feet, up from 665 square feet, by enclosing an existing terrace and building a new terrace on top. He said he now planned to list the apartment at $42 million because the new terrace space will be on the higher floor and will open from the living room.
While Mr. Trump’s penthouse is, in fact, on the top two floors, he contends that the definition of a penthouse has now become broader, a point his peers have also caught on to.
“Penthouses are starting to go lower and lower in terms of the top of the building,” Mr. Trump said. “The top three, four or even five or six floors of the building can be defined as penthouses. The key is the number you put on the elevator.”
Mr. Trump says he typically builds six floors of penthouses in his towers. Mr. Minskoff calls the apartments on the 34th and 35th floors at 101 Warren “sky homes” and the apartments on the 32nd and 33rd floors penthouses.
On the other hand, at the Onyx, Matthew Bronfman and Evan Haymes stick to a strict interpretation: only the apartments on the top floor, the 11th, are called penthouses.
There are also penthouses in far shorter buildings. Mr. Guberman refers to the apartments on the top floor of his six-story building at 5 East 13th Street as penthouses, and he plans to do the same for his Upper East Side duplexes.
Michael Morris, a professor in Columbia’s psychology department and the head of a social intelligence program at its business school, said the trend in penthouses revealed a marked preference for displays of conspicuous consumption. He said the people buying the penthouses exhibit their wealth by purchasing real estate that is physically higher than their neighbors’, even if their apartments offer little more than views of surrounding buildings.
In many cases, he said, such buyers would rather have a penthouse on a high floor of a new building than an apartment in a prestigious but shorter building like the Dakota. “It’s a very simple marker of status,” Professor Morris said. “It’s very easy to see. It’s very easy for other people to see.”
But some penthouse buyers reject the idea that their purchases have anything to do with status. They say that newly constructed penthouses typically offer the most room, highest ceilings and most expansive terraces. They emphasize the privacy that such spaces can create in the heart of Manhattan.
Maria Bosoni and her husband, Alexandre, have put down a deposit for the $12 million penthouse on the 19th floor of 170 East End Avenue. The Bosonis currently live in a penthouse in the Bloomberg Tower.
Ms. Bosoni sees no special cachet in the “penthouse” designation. “It makes no difference to us,” she said. “It’s just that the penthouse is the better apartment. It makes for a better apartment because of the square footage and the height.”
Brokers agree that while their buyers are pretty direct about what they want from their penthouses, they also like the fact that newly built versions have more room than those of the past.
Servants were typically the city’s earliest inhabitants of apartment buildings’ top floors, because getting up there involved climbing so many stairs. Few New Yorkers wanted to spend time on terraces because of the black soot spewing from the elevated trains.
Kathy Sloane, a senior vice president of Brown Harris Stevens and the broker for Mr. Trump’s apartment at 502 Park, said that buyers who think they want a prewar penthouse may not like what they find.
“Penthouses were more difficult to sell because they’re often quirky,” she said. “They weren’t designed to be penthouses. People weren’t necessarily ready to take on the task of making a great penthouse out of a lot of rooms.”
Developers are also expanding the definition of penthouse to link it more to lifestyle than to height. Mr. Guberman is adding play areas to the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-floor apartments at a second East Side project, at 433 East 74th Street, to attract family buyers. He plans to call the seventh-floor apartments penthouses and the fifth- and sixth-floor units “flex” penthouses.
“A penthouse talks to the world of exclusion and privacy,” Mr. Guberman said. “It doesn’t really matter if it has five stories or eight stories. Once you get up there, it’s about having your own oasis separate and removed from the balance of the building.”
Mr. Minskoff, the creator of sky homes and penthouses at 101 Warren, said that even he can be confused by the definitions he has come up with. “They’re all very large apartments with high ceilings almost at the top of the building,” he said. “I’m not sure if you can absolutely differentiate.”
Mr. Trump is cautious about how long the penthouse craze may last and won’t say how many penthouses he may build in his next New York project, a condo in SoHo that won’t be completed for two and a half years. But he contends that penthouses will always have more allure than brownstones, with their understated charms.
“I live in a beautiful penthouse because I love the views,” Mr. Trump said. “I look at brownstones: You’re looking at garbage cans, and you look at air-conditioning units. You just can’t compare.”
Christine Harris, a 34-year-old director at UBS Global Asset Management in Manhattan, expects to experience that feeling when she and her boyfriend move into their $2.5 million 11th-floor penthouse on the northern edges of Chelsea when the apartment is completed next summer.
Speaking by telephone over the clatter of the UBS trading floor, Ms. Harris calmly envisioned opening her apartment to friends for French feasts and glasses of pinot, and unwinding after work on her private 700-square-foot terrace.
“It’s just nice to come home on a summer night and have a bottle of wine when you’re in all of this madness in the city,” she said.
While many Manhattan developers are scrambling to find buyers for their newly constructed and converted luxury apartments, they say they’re having little trouble selling their penthouses, which have become the trinkets of choice in the wake of the city’s record Wall Street bonus season. These apartments, which have accounted for just 2.5 percent of the sales transactions in Manhattan over roughly the last two decades, are now often selling faster than the cheaper studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments.
At Ms. Harris’s new building, the Onyx at 261 West 28th Street, Bronfman Haymes Real Estate Partners has contracts to sell all three of the building’s penthouses, while 30 of the other 52 units remain unsold.
At 170 East End Avenue (at 88th Street), Skyline Developers sold one penthouse for $12 million, and the one next door for $14 million. Skyline’s president, Orin Wilf, said he had turned down an offer of $14.5 million to see if he could get $16 million for each of the two remaining penthouses. Fifty-one of the 93 units are unsold in the building. He said he had negotiated on prices for apartments on the lower floors in the past.
Mr. Wilf says he thinks that the penthouses will sell even better when buyers see the completed apartments. “We’re in no rush to sell them,” he said while standing in one half-constructed penthouse over the barks of dogs in Carl Schurz Park, 19 stories below.
Even at 15 Central Park West (at 61st Street), all 15 penthouses in the project’s two buildings have been sold for prices as high as $45 million, while about 30 of the building’s 202 units remain unsold. “I wish we had 20 more to sell,” said William Lie Zeckendorf, a co-chairman of Zeckendorf Development.
Penthouses, which once were identified more with bachelors and newlyweds seeking terrace space for their cocktail parties, are even attracting the stroller crowd, which seems to like the extra bedrooms and terraces found in the newer residential buildings.
When Gregory O’Hara, a private equity investor, needed to relocate his family to New York from Miami, his wife, Glorimar, started looking for homes that would give them some outdoor space for their 14-month-old son, Henry.
The couple bought a $5.5 million triplex at 5 East 13th Street. Standing in the penthouse she will move into next month, Ms. O’Hara described her plans to set up a swing set, sandbox and outdoor movie theater on the terrace as Henry grinned and toddled his first tentative steps.
“It may be great for a bachelor, but it’s great for a family,” Ms. O’Hara said. “We have lots of outdoor space.”
Brokers say that Wall Street and hedge fund executives are often the first in line for penthouses, because the apartments confirm their “master of the universe” status among their neighbors.
Maureen Carroll, who previously worked on Wall Street and who now has her own brokerage firm specializing in selling apartments to Wall Street executives, had one client turn down an apartment when he found out there was a better one in the building.
The “second best” notion apparently contradicts these executives’ self-image. “They’re not going to live in a building where they’re the second-largest shareholder or there’s another unit that’s larger,” Ms. Carroll said. “The game doesn’t stop when you go home at night.”
Average prices for penthouses in Manhattan jumped by 16.6 percent to $2.3 million in 2006, from $2 million in 2005, according to data collected by the Miller Samuel appraisal company. The number of deals jumped to 225 in 2006, from 184 in 2005. Jonathan J. Miller, the company’s president, predicts these numbers will grow in 2007 because most penthouse buyers like Ms. Harris have not yet closed on their new condominiums.
These strong penthouse sales are persuading more developers to push the limits on how they define penthouses, and in some cases, they are making them more lavish than ever before. Shaun Osher, the chief executive of Core Group Marketing, which is handling the Onyx, is advising developers on the 25 other projects his company represents, to design all of their penthouses with more elaborate finishes so that they can ask even higher prices.
Josh Guberman, the president and chief executive of the Core Development Group (which has no relation to Mr. Osher’s firm), sold the O’Haras their triplex at 5 East 13th only 48 hours after sales began last summer. He said he now planned to divide one penthouse in his next project, on the Upper East Side, into two duplexes, which will be priced at $5.5 million each.
Edward Minskoff, the president of Edward J. Minskoff Equities Inc., sold five penthouses at 101 Warren Street in TriBeCa at prices ranging from $4 million to $20 million within 10 days of its opening last April. Since then, he has sold about 150 of the building’s 227 apartments. He is now building more apartments on top of the building than he had originally planned.
Donald J. Trump, who has been trying to sell his penthouse on the 31st and 32nd floors of 502 Park Avenue (59th Street) for $32 million on and off for the last two years, is now enlarging the master bedroom suite to about 1,400 square feet, up from 665 square feet, by enclosing an existing terrace and building a new terrace on top. He said he now planned to list the apartment at $42 million because the new terrace space will be on the higher floor and will open from the living room.
While Mr. Trump’s penthouse is, in fact, on the top two floors, he contends that the definition of a penthouse has now become broader, a point his peers have also caught on to.
“Penthouses are starting to go lower and lower in terms of the top of the building,” Mr. Trump said. “The top three, four or even five or six floors of the building can be defined as penthouses. The key is the number you put on the elevator.”
Mr. Trump says he typically builds six floors of penthouses in his towers. Mr. Minskoff calls the apartments on the 34th and 35th floors at 101 Warren “sky homes” and the apartments on the 32nd and 33rd floors penthouses.
On the other hand, at the Onyx, Matthew Bronfman and Evan Haymes stick to a strict interpretation: only the apartments on the top floor, the 11th, are called penthouses.
There are also penthouses in far shorter buildings. Mr. Guberman refers to the apartments on the top floor of his six-story building at 5 East 13th Street as penthouses, and he plans to do the same for his Upper East Side duplexes.
Michael Morris, a professor in Columbia’s psychology department and the head of a social intelligence program at its business school, said the trend in penthouses revealed a marked preference for displays of conspicuous consumption. He said the people buying the penthouses exhibit their wealth by purchasing real estate that is physically higher than their neighbors’, even if their apartments offer little more than views of surrounding buildings.
In many cases, he said, such buyers would rather have a penthouse on a high floor of a new building than an apartment in a prestigious but shorter building like the Dakota. “It’s a very simple marker of status,” Professor Morris said. “It’s very easy to see. It’s very easy for other people to see.”
But some penthouse buyers reject the idea that their purchases have anything to do with status. They say that newly constructed penthouses typically offer the most room, highest ceilings and most expansive terraces. They emphasize the privacy that such spaces can create in the heart of Manhattan.
Maria Bosoni and her husband, Alexandre, have put down a deposit for the $12 million penthouse on the 19th floor of 170 East End Avenue. The Bosonis currently live in a penthouse in the Bloomberg Tower.
Ms. Bosoni sees no special cachet in the “penthouse” designation. “It makes no difference to us,” she said. “It’s just that the penthouse is the better apartment. It makes for a better apartment because of the square footage and the height.”
Brokers agree that while their buyers are pretty direct about what they want from their penthouses, they also like the fact that newly built versions have more room than those of the past.
Servants were typically the city’s earliest inhabitants of apartment buildings’ top floors, because getting up there involved climbing so many stairs. Few New Yorkers wanted to spend time on terraces because of the black soot spewing from the elevated trains.
Kathy Sloane, a senior vice president of Brown Harris Stevens and the broker for Mr. Trump’s apartment at 502 Park, said that buyers who think they want a prewar penthouse may not like what they find.
“Penthouses were more difficult to sell because they’re often quirky,” she said. “They weren’t designed to be penthouses. People weren’t necessarily ready to take on the task of making a great penthouse out of a lot of rooms.”
Developers are also expanding the definition of penthouse to link it more to lifestyle than to height. Mr. Guberman is adding play areas to the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-floor apartments at a second East Side project, at 433 East 74th Street, to attract family buyers. He plans to call the seventh-floor apartments penthouses and the fifth- and sixth-floor units “flex” penthouses.
“A penthouse talks to the world of exclusion and privacy,” Mr. Guberman said. “It doesn’t really matter if it has five stories or eight stories. Once you get up there, it’s about having your own oasis separate and removed from the balance of the building.”
Mr. Minskoff, the creator of sky homes and penthouses at 101 Warren, said that even he can be confused by the definitions he has come up with. “They’re all very large apartments with high ceilings almost at the top of the building,” he said. “I’m not sure if you can absolutely differentiate.”
Mr. Trump is cautious about how long the penthouse craze may last and won’t say how many penthouses he may build in his next New York project, a condo in SoHo that won’t be completed for two and a half years. But he contends that penthouses will always have more allure than brownstones, with their understated charms.
“I live in a beautiful penthouse because I love the views,” Mr. Trump said. “I look at brownstones: You’re looking at garbage cans, and you look at air-conditioning units. You just can’t compare.”
By VIVIAN S. TOY
When developers talk about who will buy all the high-end condominiums that they are building or planning to build in Manhattan, empty nesters invariably make the list.
And since the oldest baby boomers turned 60 this year, more and more of them are becoming empty nesters, in many cases with more disposable income than their parents had before them.
But not all of the baby boomers being drawn to New York City are wealthy retirees seeking aeries on Central Park. The city is also luring middle-class suburbanites on the lookout for houses and condos in Brooklyn and Queens. Not yet of retirement age, but with children grown up, they see the city as the place where they want to grow old, and they are making the move as part of a future retirement plan.
They are wooed not only by the city’s cultural attractions, but also by lower property taxes, better public transportation, a highly accessible health care system and the chance to be closer to city-dwelling children.
Louis and Susan Greer are empty nesters who have decided to pack up their five-bedroom house on a six-acre spread in Campbell Hall, N.Y., in Orange County, and move to Brooklyn. They are seeking either a one-family house for under $600,000, or a two-family for under $800,000.
Mr. Greer’s 2-hour-and-15-minute “commute from Hades” to his job in Lower Manhattan was one factor, but he said it was rising property taxes that finally persuaded him and his wife to start their Brooklyn house hunt. “That was the nail in the coffin,” he said, “because we don’t have children at home anymore, and most of the taxes go to schools.”
William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said people like the Greers are at the leading edge of a baby boomer trend of “young seniors” with grown children. (Baby boomers are generally defined as people born in 1946 through 1964.)
“Especially as they reach early retirement, as in ages 50 to 55,” Mr. Frey said, “baby boomers will be testing out areas like New York for the longer term.”
According to a report issued by Mr. Frey with the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington last month, the baby boomers who do not age in place or, like previous generations, move to sunnier climes, will be lured into big cities.
“You can’t really compare baby boomers with previous generations,” Mr. Frey said, “because boomers are forever young. They also have education levels and cultural interests that would suggest they might be more likely to find cities attractive.”
The number of older residents moving into New York and other cities is still smaller than the number who move out to the suburbs or to places like Florida and Arizona, but demographers, economists and gerontologists say that “in migration” numbers are sure to grow as baby boomers age.
Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist and founder of Age Wave, a consulting firm that focuses on baby boomers’ retirement, described them as generally wanting more out of the experience than the typical resort lifestyle associated with golf courses and recreation rooms. As a result, he said, boomers will probably move in increasing numbers to cities and college towns.
“Life that is nothing but leisure is not appealing to them,” he said. “They’re dreaming of action. They want to be around bookstores and coffee shops and art galleries, and they will be less about showing up at senior centers and more about taking classes at N.Y.U. or finding a way to the Cream reunion at Madison Square Garden,” which he noted was sold out for three nights straight last year.
The Greers, who have three grown children, started their search for a house in the city in May and have already seen more than 50 houses, mostly in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. They chose Brooklyn because they lived in Dyker Heights until three years ago and Mr. Greer’s mother still lives in the Bensonhurst house where he grew up.
They originally moved out of the borough because they were fed up with the rumbling and rattling of trucks — their house was on a favored detour off of the Belt Parkway. They love having a huge garden in Orange County, but deer have eaten everything they have planted. Besides, they said, they never have enough time to enjoy the outdoors.
Mrs. Greer admits that she has been extremely particular in their Brooklyn hunt. “You can ask my husband — I can find something wrong with any house,” she said. To which Mr. Greer responded with a nod, “You can quote that.”
But she is unapologetic — because, she said, “when I move this time, I want it to be the last time.” They are still years away from retirement — Mr. Greer is 55 and Mrs. Greer 45 — but they nonetheless want their next home to be the place they retire to.
“We think that New York City is a great place to be if you’re an older person,” Mr. Greer said.
Mrs. Greer said they had already resigned themselves to having a smaller kitchen and even forgoing a garage, as long as they found a house with a decent-sized backyard.
"We want to be able to go for walks in parks, be near the express bus and the subway, and be able to walk to restaurants," Mr. Greer said, adding: “It’s beautiful out where we are now. The air is great and we can see the mountains, but there’s nowhere to go and nobody to do it with."
Brokers across the city who have worked with empty nesters moving in from the suburbs say that while retirees may move lock, stock and barrel to be near their grown children and grandchildren, younger boomers may initially use the apartments they buy as pieds-à-terre.
Alan Nickman, an executive vice president at Bellmarc Realty, said he had helped many empty nesters buy apartments in the city. “These are people who have done reasonably well, but they don’t have to be gazillionaires,” he said. “They can spend $500,000 to $600,000 for a studio or a one-bedroom before they’re fully retired, but the majority of them are thinking about making this a permanent place when they finally do retire.”
For baby boomers moving from other parts of the country, or from suburban areas where home prices have not reached the dizzying heights that they have in Manhattan, moving to the city can be a financial stretch.
Pat and Manny Fuchs knew when they decided to leave Rochester Hills, Mich., last year that their real estate dollars wouldn’t go as far in New York City. They sold their 2,400-square-foot Michigan home for about $325,000 and paid about twice as much for less than half the space in Lincoln Towers, near Lincoln Center.
“Rochester Hills was a nice, comfortable middle-income area,” Mr. Fuchs said. “But we knew we were in for a price shock, so we factored it in.”
He and his wife are retired and in their 50s. They are originally from the Chicago area, but chose New York because, Mrs. Fuchs said, it “has more of all the good things that we love about Chicago — it’s like Chicago on steroids.” They love being within walking distance of Broadway shows and museums. “In some ways,” Mr. Fuchs said, “it was very liberating to get rid of the cars and to downsize.”
Joe and Debbie Karp are another active couple in their 50s who see themselves someday retiring to New York City. The Karps are born-and-bred New Yorkers who moved to Florida in the 1970s and now live in Palm Beach. With their two sons nearly out of college, they decided last fall to buy a one-bedroom apartment near Lincoln Center.
They plan to start by spending about 12 weeks a year in the city, but their eventual goal is to spend only their winters in Florida. “We see what happens to people in the suburbs,” said Debbie Karp, who is 55. “When you lose your car, you become a prisoner. If and when we retire in an official sense, I would want to do it in New York.”
Mr. Karp, who turns 60 next month and practices elder law, agrees. “Although all of my clients are moving to Florida from New York,” he said, “I’m going to be the Floridian moving to Manhattan.”
Shelley Morris and her husband, Seth, have just started the process of reversing the typical migration from city to suburb. They are still debating whether to give up their suburban lives in Bedford, N.Y., and get a large two-bedroom apartment in the city, or to get a smaller apartment and still keep a country house for weekend use.
Either way, they’re ready for a big change, because their house has become very quiet since their daughter graduated from college and moved into the city.
“It just crept up on me that I was living in a community with a lot of young families and fewer and fewer empty nesters my age,” said Ms. Morris, who is 49. “And I worry that if you’re in an isolated place, you can become reclusive and that’s not really a good thing, especially as you get older.”
Others are making the switch more gradually. In Kew Gardens, Queens, for instance, many of the Long Island homeowners who have considered moving into the Park Lane Tower, a new condominium, have been reluctant to downsize so significantly from their large suburban homes, said Aroza Sanjana, the broker for the building.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “no matter how many closets we have, it can’t compare to the space they have in the suburbs.” Instead, many have bought apartments for their grown children but are keeping the apartments in their own names. “The parents are very picky about it because it’s not just for their child,” she said. “They envision moving into it themselves eventually.”
Vincent Koo, owner of Exit Kingdom Realty in Forest Hills, said that his office had worked with many Long Islanders looking to downsize and move to Queens. “We see a lot of people who want to cut down on the commute,” he said, “and property taxes are a big issue for them.”
Gary Englehardt, an economist at Syracuse University who has studied housing trends among baby boomers, foresees “a lot of competition for suburbanite baby boomers” among developers. Even though cities like New York may attract many of them, he said, builders are working hard to create retirement communities to keep them in the suburbs.
Mr. Dychtwald of Age Wave said cities might have to do some retrofitting to accommodate an aging population better. “Cities are really geared for people in their early 20s,” he said. To make things easier for people with weakening vision and slower gaits, he suggested, restaurants might consider better lighting, city officials might want to lengthen the time it takes for a traffic light to change.
“We’re not talking about a new alien form of baby boomer,” he said, “just older people who will have more time and probably more money to spend who are looking to take in all that the city has to offer.”
But Judy and Jay Greenfield, who moved to the Upper East Side from Mamaroneck, in Westchester, last summer to be closer to their children and grandchildren, said they had found the city perfectly suited for a couple in their early 70s.
“When you reach our age,” Mr. Greenfield said, “everything has a reduced price. You get these big reductions in transportation and in the subway, even pregnant women offer me their seats. But I don’t take them.”
When developers talk about who will buy all the high-end condominiums that they are building or planning to build in Manhattan, empty nesters invariably make the list.
And since the oldest baby boomers turned 60 this year, more and more of them are becoming empty nesters, in many cases with more disposable income than their parents had before them.
But not all of the baby boomers being drawn to New York City are wealthy retirees seeking aeries on Central Park. The city is also luring middle-class suburbanites on the lookout for houses and condos in Brooklyn and Queens. Not yet of retirement age, but with children grown up, they see the city as the place where they want to grow old, and they are making the move as part of a future retirement plan.
They are wooed not only by the city’s cultural attractions, but also by lower property taxes, better public transportation, a highly accessible health care system and the chance to be closer to city-dwelling children.
Louis and Susan Greer are empty nesters who have decided to pack up their five-bedroom house on a six-acre spread in Campbell Hall, N.Y., in Orange County, and move to Brooklyn. They are seeking either a one-family house for under $600,000, or a two-family for under $800,000.
Mr. Greer’s 2-hour-and-15-minute “commute from Hades” to his job in Lower Manhattan was one factor, but he said it was rising property taxes that finally persuaded him and his wife to start their Brooklyn house hunt. “That was the nail in the coffin,” he said, “because we don’t have children at home anymore, and most of the taxes go to schools.”
William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said people like the Greers are at the leading edge of a baby boomer trend of “young seniors” with grown children. (Baby boomers are generally defined as people born in 1946 through 1964.)
“Especially as they reach early retirement, as in ages 50 to 55,” Mr. Frey said, “baby boomers will be testing out areas like New York for the longer term.”
According to a report issued by Mr. Frey with the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington last month, the baby boomers who do not age in place or, like previous generations, move to sunnier climes, will be lured into big cities.
“You can’t really compare baby boomers with previous generations,” Mr. Frey said, “because boomers are forever young. They also have education levels and cultural interests that would suggest they might be more likely to find cities attractive.”
The number of older residents moving into New York and other cities is still smaller than the number who move out to the suburbs or to places like Florida and Arizona, but demographers, economists and gerontologists say that “in migration” numbers are sure to grow as baby boomers age.
Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist and founder of Age Wave, a consulting firm that focuses on baby boomers’ retirement, described them as generally wanting more out of the experience than the typical resort lifestyle associated with golf courses and recreation rooms. As a result, he said, boomers will probably move in increasing numbers to cities and college towns.
“Life that is nothing but leisure is not appealing to them,” he said. “They’re dreaming of action. They want to be around bookstores and coffee shops and art galleries, and they will be less about showing up at senior centers and more about taking classes at N.Y.U. or finding a way to the Cream reunion at Madison Square Garden,” which he noted was sold out for three nights straight last year.
The Greers, who have three grown children, started their search for a house in the city in May and have already seen more than 50 houses, mostly in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. They chose Brooklyn because they lived in Dyker Heights until three years ago and Mr. Greer’s mother still lives in the Bensonhurst house where he grew up.
They originally moved out of the borough because they were fed up with the rumbling and rattling of trucks — their house was on a favored detour off of the Belt Parkway. They love having a huge garden in Orange County, but deer have eaten everything they have planted. Besides, they said, they never have enough time to enjoy the outdoors.
Mrs. Greer admits that she has been extremely particular in their Brooklyn hunt. “You can ask my husband — I can find something wrong with any house,” she said. To which Mr. Greer responded with a nod, “You can quote that.”
But she is unapologetic — because, she said, “when I move this time, I want it to be the last time.” They are still years away from retirement — Mr. Greer is 55 and Mrs. Greer 45 — but they nonetheless want their next home to be the place they retire to.
“We think that New York City is a great place to be if you’re an older person,” Mr. Greer said.
Mrs. Greer said they had already resigned themselves to having a smaller kitchen and even forgoing a garage, as long as they found a house with a decent-sized backyard.
"We want to be able to go for walks in parks, be near the express bus and the subway, and be able to walk to restaurants," Mr. Greer said, adding: “It’s beautiful out where we are now. The air is great and we can see the mountains, but there’s nowhere to go and nobody to do it with."
Brokers across the city who have worked with empty nesters moving in from the suburbs say that while retirees may move lock, stock and barrel to be near their grown children and grandchildren, younger boomers may initially use the apartments they buy as pieds-à-terre.
Alan Nickman, an executive vice president at Bellmarc Realty, said he had helped many empty nesters buy apartments in the city. “These are people who have done reasonably well, but they don’t have to be gazillionaires,” he said. “They can spend $500,000 to $600,000 for a studio or a one-bedroom before they’re fully retired, but the majority of them are thinking about making this a permanent place when they finally do retire.”
For baby boomers moving from other parts of the country, or from suburban areas where home prices have not reached the dizzying heights that they have in Manhattan, moving to the city can be a financial stretch.
Pat and Manny Fuchs knew when they decided to leave Rochester Hills, Mich., last year that their real estate dollars wouldn’t go as far in New York City. They sold their 2,400-square-foot Michigan home for about $325,000 and paid about twice as much for less than half the space in Lincoln Towers, near Lincoln Center.
“Rochester Hills was a nice, comfortable middle-income area,” Mr. Fuchs said. “But we knew we were in for a price shock, so we factored it in.”
He and his wife are retired and in their 50s. They are originally from the Chicago area, but chose New York because, Mrs. Fuchs said, it “has more of all the good things that we love about Chicago — it’s like Chicago on steroids.” They love being within walking distance of Broadway shows and museums. “In some ways,” Mr. Fuchs said, “it was very liberating to get rid of the cars and to downsize.”
Joe and Debbie Karp are another active couple in their 50s who see themselves someday retiring to New York City. The Karps are born-and-bred New Yorkers who moved to Florida in the 1970s and now live in Palm Beach. With their two sons nearly out of college, they decided last fall to buy a one-bedroom apartment near Lincoln Center.
They plan to start by spending about 12 weeks a year in the city, but their eventual goal is to spend only their winters in Florida. “We see what happens to people in the suburbs,” said Debbie Karp, who is 55. “When you lose your car, you become a prisoner. If and when we retire in an official sense, I would want to do it in New York.”
Mr. Karp, who turns 60 next month and practices elder law, agrees. “Although all of my clients are moving to Florida from New York,” he said, “I’m going to be the Floridian moving to Manhattan.”
Shelley Morris and her husband, Seth, have just started the process of reversing the typical migration from city to suburb. They are still debating whether to give up their suburban lives in Bedford, N.Y., and get a large two-bedroom apartment in the city, or to get a smaller apartment and still keep a country house for weekend use.
Either way, they’re ready for a big change, because their house has become very quiet since their daughter graduated from college and moved into the city.
“It just crept up on me that I was living in a community with a lot of young families and fewer and fewer empty nesters my age,” said Ms. Morris, who is 49. “And I worry that if you’re in an isolated place, you can become reclusive and that’s not really a good thing, especially as you get older.”
Others are making the switch more gradually. In Kew Gardens, Queens, for instance, many of the Long Island homeowners who have considered moving into the Park Lane Tower, a new condominium, have been reluctant to downsize so significantly from their large suburban homes, said Aroza Sanjana, the broker for the building.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “no matter how many closets we have, it can’t compare to the space they have in the suburbs.” Instead, many have bought apartments for their grown children but are keeping the apartments in their own names. “The parents are very picky about it because it’s not just for their child,” she said. “They envision moving into it themselves eventually.”
Vincent Koo, owner of Exit Kingdom Realty in Forest Hills, said that his office had worked with many Long Islanders looking to downsize and move to Queens. “We see a lot of people who want to cut down on the commute,” he said, “and property taxes are a big issue for them.”
Gary Englehardt, an economist at Syracuse University who has studied housing trends among baby boomers, foresees “a lot of competition for suburbanite baby boomers” among developers. Even though cities like New York may attract many of them, he said, builders are working hard to create retirement communities to keep them in the suburbs.
Mr. Dychtwald of Age Wave said cities might have to do some retrofitting to accommodate an aging population better. “Cities are really geared for people in their early 20s,” he said. To make things easier for people with weakening vision and slower gaits, he suggested, restaurants might consider better lighting, city officials might want to lengthen the time it takes for a traffic light to change.
“We’re not talking about a new alien form of baby boomer,” he said, “just older people who will have more time and probably more money to spend who are looking to take in all that the city has to offer.”
But Judy and Jay Greenfield, who moved to the Upper East Side from Mamaroneck, in Westchester, last summer to be closer to their children and grandchildren, said they had found the city perfectly suited for a couple in their early 70s.
“When you reach our age,” Mr. Greenfield said, “everything has a reduced price. You get these big reductions in transportation and in the subway, even pregnant women offer me their seats. But I don’t take them.”
America's Smartest Cities
By Elisabeth Eaves
We hear a lot about brain drain, the flow of highly-educated workers away from economically-stagnant regions. The flip side: Some places are magnets for the brightest of the bright. And whether you want to locate your new biotech firm near hotshot recruits, or you just want to socialize with the smart set, our list of America’s 10 smartest cities provides a roadmap.
Using data from Sperling’s BestPlaces ( www.bestplaces.net), we looked at data from the 200 biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S. and ranked them based on the percentage of the population age 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, educational attainment isn’t a perfect proxy for intelligence. Plenty of innovators--perhaps most famously Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) founder Bill Gates--were college dropouts. Still, taken collectively, education is a good, if incomplete, guideline to the level of intellect and capability you’ll find in a given area.
In Pictures: America's 10 Smartest Cities
Boulder, Colo. may seem like a surprising winner, but it’s no ordinary university town. The University of Colorado’s students and staff account for about 38,000 of the city population of 282,200. Boulder, though, is also sticky enough to keep many of its own graduates around--and attract others.
“Boulder is recognized as a very exciting town to go live in,” says Bert Sperling, founder of Sperling’s BestPlaces. “It’s attracting young degree holders who want to go somewhere with an outdoor lifestyle.” If they don’t come for the mountain scenery, it’s for the employment opportunities. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in Boulder, has more than 120 Ph.D. researchers on staff and hosts hundreds of visiting scientists.
Other urban areas on our list also benefit from a high quotient of university faculty. Third-place Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, while Durham, N.C., which ranks sixth, is home to Duke University. The Fort Collins-Loveland metropolitan area, home to Colorado State University, came in seventh.
Some of our winners are no-brainers, so to speak. Cambridge, Mass., home to both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ranks fourth, with 43.4% of a population of 1.47 million holding a university degree. A slew of biotech firms are located there, as is a major research center owned by pharmaceutical giant Novartis (nyse: NVS - news - people ).
If you ever question the wisdom coming out of our nation’s capital, don’t blame a lack of education. Washington, D.C., (together with its Virginia suburbs, Arlington and Alexandria) ranks eighth, a fact probably related to its many lawyers. Bethesda, Md., a D.C. suburb and a growing metropolitan area in its own right, comes in second place. It’s home to the National Institutes of Health, which employs 18,627, and Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT - news - people ), which employs 135,000 in the aerospace and defense sector.
Silicon Valley, not surprisingly, makes an appearance on our list, with the metropolitan area around San Jose, Calif., coming in at No. 10. Home to corporations including Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) and hundreds of other technology icons, there's a reason that 2.4% of the region's population holds a Ph.D.
Still, when it comes to doctorates, small towns are the standouts. Looking at all metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or greater, Ithaca, N.Y. ranks No. 1. Home to Cornell University, a whopping 7.92% of residents hold Ph.D.s. Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University is located, is second, at 7.2%. Other university towns round out the top five: In State College, Penn., the figure is 6.04%; for Corvallis, Ore., it’s 5.63%; and in College Station, Tex., it’s 5.14%.
We can’t guarantee that moving to any of these hubs of mental wattage will make you any smarter, but at least you’ll benefit from the sort of perks demanded by highly educated citizens, like good schools and a vibrant cultural scene. Not incidentally, many of our top ten are pretty places, from the California sunshine to the leafy streets of New England. Degrees aside, those smart people are clever at making lifestyle choices too.
By Elisabeth Eaves
We hear a lot about brain drain, the flow of highly-educated workers away from economically-stagnant regions. The flip side: Some places are magnets for the brightest of the bright. And whether you want to locate your new biotech firm near hotshot recruits, or you just want to socialize with the smart set, our list of America’s 10 smartest cities provides a roadmap.
Using data from Sperling’s BestPlaces ( www.bestplaces.net), we looked at data from the 200 biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S. and ranked them based on the percentage of the population age 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, educational attainment isn’t a perfect proxy for intelligence. Plenty of innovators--perhaps most famously Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) founder Bill Gates--were college dropouts. Still, taken collectively, education is a good, if incomplete, guideline to the level of intellect and capability you’ll find in a given area.
In Pictures: America's 10 Smartest Cities
Boulder, Colo. may seem like a surprising winner, but it’s no ordinary university town. The University of Colorado’s students and staff account for about 38,000 of the city population of 282,200. Boulder, though, is also sticky enough to keep many of its own graduates around--and attract others.
“Boulder is recognized as a very exciting town to go live in,” says Bert Sperling, founder of Sperling’s BestPlaces. “It’s attracting young degree holders who want to go somewhere with an outdoor lifestyle.” If they don’t come for the mountain scenery, it’s for the employment opportunities. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in Boulder, has more than 120 Ph.D. researchers on staff and hosts hundreds of visiting scientists.
Other urban areas on our list also benefit from a high quotient of university faculty. Third-place Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, while Durham, N.C., which ranks sixth, is home to Duke University. The Fort Collins-Loveland metropolitan area, home to Colorado State University, came in seventh.
Some of our winners are no-brainers, so to speak. Cambridge, Mass., home to both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ranks fourth, with 43.4% of a population of 1.47 million holding a university degree. A slew of biotech firms are located there, as is a major research center owned by pharmaceutical giant Novartis (nyse: NVS - news - people ).
If you ever question the wisdom coming out of our nation’s capital, don’t blame a lack of education. Washington, D.C., (together with its Virginia suburbs, Arlington and Alexandria) ranks eighth, a fact probably related to its many lawyers. Bethesda, Md., a D.C. suburb and a growing metropolitan area in its own right, comes in second place. It’s home to the National Institutes of Health, which employs 18,627, and Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT - news - people ), which employs 135,000 in the aerospace and defense sector.
Silicon Valley, not surprisingly, makes an appearance on our list, with the metropolitan area around San Jose, Calif., coming in at No. 10. Home to corporations including Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) and hundreds of other technology icons, there's a reason that 2.4% of the region's population holds a Ph.D.
Still, when it comes to doctorates, small towns are the standouts. Looking at all metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or greater, Ithaca, N.Y. ranks No. 1. Home to Cornell University, a whopping 7.92% of residents hold Ph.D.s. Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University is located, is second, at 7.2%. Other university towns round out the top five: In State College, Penn., the figure is 6.04%; for Corvallis, Ore., it’s 5.63%; and in College Station, Tex., it’s 5.14%.
We can’t guarantee that moving to any of these hubs of mental wattage will make you any smarter, but at least you’ll benefit from the sort of perks demanded by highly educated citizens, like good schools and a vibrant cultural scene. Not incidentally, many of our top ten are pretty places, from the California sunshine to the leafy streets of New England. Degrees aside, those smart people are clever at making lifestyle choices too.
By William Watch - published in Ann Arbor Business Review
It's remarkable what beer and pizza can spawn. Later this month, many of the nation's top commercial real estate pros will convene in Detroit, along with 300-400 members of the local real estate community and U-M students, to discuss redeveloping Detroit and other real estate issues.
Beer and pizza made it happen. At least that's Peter Allen's explanation.
Allen, a long-time Ann Arbor developer and U-M adjunct professor, is the founder of the University of Michigan/Urban Land Institute Real Estate Forum that this month marks its 20th anniversary.
The forum is the impetus for the visit to Detroit by such icons of the real estate industry as Sam Zell, Stephen Ross, Albert Ratner and Richard Baron.
The seed for the U-M/ULI Forum was planted by Allen, whose zeal for real estate is matched only by his passion for the students he teaches his at the U-M Business School. It was Allen who in 1986 organized an after-class meeting of students at an Ann Arbor eatery.
Over beer and pizza at Dominick's, the group discussed real estate job opportunities. With that, the forum was launched.
When it convened again the following year, real estate trends and issues were added to the forum agenda and speakers from the national real estate scene were invited to take part.
That meeting set in motion a chain of events that sparked the forum's evolution over the last 20 years from an informal, intimate gathering of students to its present status as one of the must-do events for commercial real estate professionals in Michigan, and indeed, the Midwest.
Now a two-day event incorporating workshops, roundtable discussions, bus tours of development opportunities and presentations by renowned real estate leaders, the forum regularly draws hundreds of men and women - seaonsed professionals and fresh-faced, young students to discuss and debate the key issues affecting their industry.
For students, the forum offers opportunities far beyond the chance to rub shoulders with icons of the industry.
Shortly after its creation, the forum began presenting scholarships to graduate level students in the schools of business, architecture and urban planning, law, public policy and engineering.
It has since awarded thousands of dollars to hundreds of U-M students.
Moreover, with the launch last year of the U-M Graduate Real Estate Development Certificate Program, funded by the forum, its reach into real estate education extends well beyond the actual two-day event. Through the immensely popular Certificate Program, the forum will continue to promote and shap real estae education for years to come.
If you ask Allen, he's not the least bit surprised by the success of the forum or its progeny.
"I always knew the subject was important," said Allen. "But I give credit to Doug Kelbaugh and Joe White," dean of the Taubman College and former dean of the U-M Business School.
"They got all the academic elements aligned behind it. It was my vision, but they made it happen," Allen said.
As one who has attended every forum, I can attest that there are many lessons learned, but perhaps no more important one than this: If you aspire to make something happen - like launching a new initiative and watching it flourish and grow, you can try the beer and pizza approach.
Better yet, find someone with the stamina, drive and commitment of Peter Allen and then... just let him go.
It's remarkable what beer and pizza can spawn. Later this month, many of the nation's top commercial real estate pros will convene in Detroit, along with 300-400 members of the local real estate community and U-M students, to discuss redeveloping Detroit and other real estate issues.
Beer and pizza made it happen. At least that's Peter Allen's explanation.
Allen, a long-time Ann Arbor developer and U-M adjunct professor, is the founder of the University of Michigan/Urban Land Institute Real Estate Forum that this month marks its 20th anniversary.
The forum is the impetus for the visit to Detroit by such icons of the real estate industry as Sam Zell, Stephen Ross, Albert Ratner and Richard Baron.
The seed for the U-M/ULI Forum was planted by Allen, whose zeal for real estate is matched only by his passion for the students he teaches his at the U-M Business School. It was Allen who in 1986 organized an after-class meeting of students at an Ann Arbor eatery.
Over beer and pizza at Dominick's, the group discussed real estate job opportunities. With that, the forum was launched.
When it convened again the following year, real estate trends and issues were added to the forum agenda and speakers from the national real estate scene were invited to take part.
That meeting set in motion a chain of events that sparked the forum's evolution over the last 20 years from an informal, intimate gathering of students to its present status as one of the must-do events for commercial real estate professionals in Michigan, and indeed, the Midwest.
Now a two-day event incorporating workshops, roundtable discussions, bus tours of development opportunities and presentations by renowned real estate leaders, the forum regularly draws hundreds of men and women - seaonsed professionals and fresh-faced, young students to discuss and debate the key issues affecting their industry.
For students, the forum offers opportunities far beyond the chance to rub shoulders with icons of the industry.
Shortly after its creation, the forum began presenting scholarships to graduate level students in the schools of business, architecture and urban planning, law, public policy and engineering.
It has since awarded thousands of dollars to hundreds of U-M students.
Moreover, with the launch last year of the U-M Graduate Real Estate Development Certificate Program, funded by the forum, its reach into real estate education extends well beyond the actual two-day event. Through the immensely popular Certificate Program, the forum will continue to promote and shap real estae education for years to come.
If you ask Allen, he's not the least bit surprised by the success of the forum or its progeny.
"I always knew the subject was important," said Allen. "But I give credit to Doug Kelbaugh and Joe White," dean of the Taubman College and former dean of the U-M Business School.
"They got all the academic elements aligned behind it. It was my vision, but they made it happen," Allen said.
As one who has attended every forum, I can attest that there are many lessons learned, but perhaps no more important one than this: If you aspire to make something happen - like launching a new initiative and watching it flourish and grow, you can try the beer and pizza approach.
Better yet, find someone with the stamina, drive and commitment of Peter Allen and then... just let him go.
Ann Arbor project limits parking, stresses 'green' building ideas - by Jennette Smith (Crain's Detroit Business)
Buyers at the Kingsley Lane loft project in Ann ARbor don't get an automatic parking pass for underground parking on site.
In fact, the developers are encouraging buyers to bike, walk or park cars in a deck down the street if they wish because underground parking is sold separately - and is only available for about half of the buyers at the 50-unit project.
Kingsley lane developers Peter Allen and Mark Berg expect to begin construction on the residential project in August. The project applies green building concepts from top to bottom to the site at Kingsley and Ashely streets in the northern part of downtown Ann Arbor.
The project is planned with light-gauge steel construction supported with cement, low-emitting paints, bamboo and cork floors and highly energy efficient windows and appliances.
Berg and Allen are including smaller, more affordably priced units in the mix for the project. Prices run from $220,000 to $600,000, with half of the lofts under $300,000. The units are 425 square feet to more than 1,400 square feet.
"By making these a bit smaller, the overall cost point (of using green building techniques) is not out of line," Berg said. "Buyers are willing to pay for that."
Buyers will have options to live an "Ikea-style" lifestyle with space-conscious cabinetry that has, for example, a kitchen island that doubles as a table.
But Allen said the lifestyle change of encouraging more walking is a larger issue for the enviornment than some of the green construction materials.
"In suburbia you have to drive to everything," he said. "This kind of housing ... you begin to use a bike, get closer to your job, culture and dining."
Kingsley Lane is giving away tennis shoes and bikes to home buyers as part of its marketing efforts. In addition, buyers receive a two-year lease at the nearby Ann Ashley parking deck to store their car. For those who want to pay for the on-sire parking, that is available for $25,000. The project has 25 underground parking spaces.
The plan "decouples the price of the parking from the price of the unit," Berg said. That contrasts to most high-rise loft projects, where the high cost of building underground parking can add $40,000 to $50,000 to every unit, he said.
Allen and Berg have 13 reservations so far. THey plan to begin construction once they have 50 percent of the units sold. The Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors reports that May condominium sales in the city limits were steady, with sold listings on the market for about 90 days and an average sales price of $206,316.
Neal Warling, CEO of ANn Arbor-based Bluestone Realty Advisors, said Kingsley Lane matches with what the city has pushed for: smaller, more affordable units.
"Ann Arbor is a very environmentally conscious community," he said. "I think this sort of building should be well-received."
THe parking solution is a new idea, and the project should be appealing to "a core of software developers and entrepreneurial companies who want to be close to downtown," Warling said.
Kingsley Lane will include retail and office space in addition to the loft units, when a historic building renovated for the model and sales office is made available for lease. The four-story Kingsley Lane West building will include 15 lofts and five penthouses. Kingsley Lane East is a ninestory tower with th ebalance of the units. The historic building, a former butcher shop at 111 W. Kingsley, is 3,000 square feet.
Allen said the project will apply Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design concepts as outlined by the U.S. Green BUilding Council, but the partners are still deciding if they will seek formal certification. The LEED rating provides third-party verification of green features.
Guy Bazzani, a green developer in Grand Rapids, said he expects the green-building trend to spread to more Michigan residential projects. West Michigan was ahead of the curve on green building, primarily because companies such as Herman Miller and Steelcase pushed the issue. Michigan has more commercial or educational LEED projects than residential so far.
"It's healthier for the occupants. ... We have cut our energy costs in half in our buildings," said Bazzani, owner of Bazzani Associates Inc. who lives in a LEED-certified histroic building.
Developments in more desnely populated downtowns, such as Ann Arbor, also lend themselves to less parking and more walking, Bazzani said. Devlopers and communities should do as much as they can to encourage such projects, he said.
The contractor on Kingsley Lane is J.C. Beal, and the residential brokerage handling sales is Charles Reinhart Co.
Buyers at the Kingsley Lane loft project in Ann ARbor don't get an automatic parking pass for underground parking on site.
In fact, the developers are encouraging buyers to bike, walk or park cars in a deck down the street if they wish because underground parking is sold separately - and is only available for about half of the buyers at the 50-unit project.
Kingsley lane developers Peter Allen and Mark Berg expect to begin construction on the residential project in August. The project applies green building concepts from top to bottom to the site at Kingsley and Ashely streets in the northern part of downtown Ann Arbor.
The project is planned with light-gauge steel construction supported with cement, low-emitting paints, bamboo and cork floors and highly energy efficient windows and appliances.
Berg and Allen are including smaller, more affordably priced units in the mix for the project. Prices run from $220,000 to $600,000, with half of the lofts under $300,000. The units are 425 square feet to more than 1,400 square feet.
"By making these a bit smaller, the overall cost point (of using green building techniques) is not out of line," Berg said. "Buyers are willing to pay for that."
Buyers will have options to live an "Ikea-style" lifestyle with space-conscious cabinetry that has, for example, a kitchen island that doubles as a table.
But Allen said the lifestyle change of encouraging more walking is a larger issue for the enviornment than some of the green construction materials.
"In suburbia you have to drive to everything," he said. "This kind of housing ... you begin to use a bike, get closer to your job, culture and dining."
Kingsley Lane is giving away tennis shoes and bikes to home buyers as part of its marketing efforts. In addition, buyers receive a two-year lease at the nearby Ann Ashley parking deck to store their car. For those who want to pay for the on-sire parking, that is available for $25,000. The project has 25 underground parking spaces.
The plan "decouples the price of the parking from the price of the unit," Berg said. That contrasts to most high-rise loft projects, where the high cost of building underground parking can add $40,000 to $50,000 to every unit, he said.
Allen and Berg have 13 reservations so far. THey plan to begin construction once they have 50 percent of the units sold. The Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors reports that May condominium sales in the city limits were steady, with sold listings on the market for about 90 days and an average sales price of $206,316.
Neal Warling, CEO of ANn Arbor-based Bluestone Realty Advisors, said Kingsley Lane matches with what the city has pushed for: smaller, more affordable units.
"Ann Arbor is a very environmentally conscious community," he said. "I think this sort of building should be well-received."
THe parking solution is a new idea, and the project should be appealing to "a core of software developers and entrepreneurial companies who want to be close to downtown," Warling said.
Kingsley Lane will include retail and office space in addition to the loft units, when a historic building renovated for the model and sales office is made available for lease. The four-story Kingsley Lane West building will include 15 lofts and five penthouses. Kingsley Lane East is a ninestory tower with th ebalance of the units. The historic building, a former butcher shop at 111 W. Kingsley, is 3,000 square feet.
Allen said the project will apply Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design concepts as outlined by the U.S. Green BUilding Council, but the partners are still deciding if they will seek formal certification. The LEED rating provides third-party verification of green features.
Guy Bazzani, a green developer in Grand Rapids, said he expects the green-building trend to spread to more Michigan residential projects. West Michigan was ahead of the curve on green building, primarily because companies such as Herman Miller and Steelcase pushed the issue. Michigan has more commercial or educational LEED projects than residential so far.
"It's healthier for the occupants. ... We have cut our energy costs in half in our buildings," said Bazzani, owner of Bazzani Associates Inc. who lives in a LEED-certified histroic building.
Developments in more desnely populated downtowns, such as Ann Arbor, also lend themselves to less parking and more walking, Bazzani said. Devlopers and communities should do as much as they can to encourage such projects, he said.
The contractor on Kingsley Lane is J.C. Beal, and the residential brokerage handling sales is Charles Reinhart Co.
Online titan does its own search for office site where it plans to spend millions, hire 1,000
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
News Business Reporter
Google, the Internet powerhouse whose name has become synonymous with online searches, plans to invest between $20 million and $50 million in an office in the Ann Arbor area that could employ 1,000 or more people in the next five years.
The deal to bring the company here, expected to be announced today, hinges on approval by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. of a 20-year tax credit at its board meeting today. The board is almost certain to make way for the significant investment that documents say would create $165 million in new state revenue.
The company has not picked a location yet, but Mayor John Heiftje said city officials have been told that Google is most interested in downtown Ann Arbor.
Executives at the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company said Michigan and Ann Arbor in particular, has the motivated, creative and high-minded people it desires as employees as it expands to meet demand for its advertising products.
It is one of the most significant job creation announcements in years because it not only infuses much-needed employment into a sagging state economy, it also helps establish Ann Arbor as a leader in the highly desirable information technology industry.
"I think it's a tipping-point kind of project that signals to the world that Michigan is the state to come to if you have cutting-edge technology,'' Gov. Jennifer Granholm said.
State officials say that, in addition to the 1,000 direct jobs, Google could create an additional 1,200 related jobs in Michigan to support the work in Ann Arbor.
Google would become one of the largest private employers in the area.
The state's tax credits are worth $38 million, said Jim Epolito, president and chief executive officer of the MEDC.
Assuming the board agrees to the tax credit, Google will begin recruiting immediately, advertising positions on its Web page: www.google.com/jobs. The jobs, primarily sales, marketing and business positions, would pay an average of $47,000 a year.
"We expect to have the office up and running by this fall,'' said David Fischer, director of online sales and operations for Google, told The News.
Hieftje said Ann Arbor was picked over other cities such as Boulder, Colo.
"It is the high quality of life we offer,'' Hieftje said. "It's the vibrancy of downtown and it's the talented pool of potential employees that attract companies like Google. These are the kinds of jobs Ann Arborites can do.''
He said city staff has been involved in the discussions.
"We'll be working the governor on a financing package,'' Hieftje said. "At this point, there are no discussions I know about the city's contribution.''
"This is huge for Ann Arbor,'' said City Council Member Leigh Greden, D-3rd Ward. "This proves that Ann Arbor can lead the way in Michigan's economic revitalization.''
Local connections
Google, established in 1998 by University of Michigan graduate Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is one of the fastest growing companies in the country, both in terms of revenue and employees. It had 6,800 workers worldwide at the beginning of April - 1,100 more than at the end of 2005.
Its search engine accounts for 43 percent of all Internet searches. Nearly all of its $6.1 billion in revenue in 2005 came from advertising. The office in Ann Arbor would be servicing the company's main advertising product, AdWord.
The AdWord system allows businesses to bid against one another for use of a search term. The winner then pays Google a set amount every time a Web surfer clicks on their Web link from Google's search page.
"Google's philosophy is to go out, find and hire the best talent we can,'' Fischer said. "We recognize that perhaps not everyone wants to live in California. As we looked around at where we might be able to find the best and brightest and most motivated individuals, Michigan jumped out at us.''
Specifically, Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan was a big factor as was the lifestyle and mentality of the people who live here, Fischer said.
Page, who graduated in 1995 from U-M with a bachelor's degree in engineering and graduated from East Lansing High School, also influenced the decision, Fischer said.
"Larry Page ... knows firsthand about the strong talent pool in and around Ann Arbor,'' Fischer said.
He sits on the university's College of Engineering Advisory Board. During an engineering college commencement address in Ann Arbor in 2005, he asked students whether they would be interested in working for the company.
How the deal happened
Google already has a small office in Ann Arbor that is dedicated to the archiving of U-M's seven million volumes contained in the school's libraries to make them available in digital format. The office has fewer than 20 employees.
The Ann Arbor News reported last June that an agent for Google had contacted local real estate brokers to scout locations but has not reported anything since then.
Granholm said that report prompted state officials to court Google and to stop information about it from leaking to the media.
Michael Finney, CEO of Ann Arbor Spark, a technology business development organization, and the Washtenaw Development Council, said he was contacted about a month ago about Google.
he council has helped Google scout locations and although none has been selected, he said there are three "communities'' in and around Ann Arbor in the pool of site candidates.
Any municipality chosen would have to approve a property tax abatement in order for the company to get the state tax credits.
Finney said a company with 1,000 employees likely would need at least 200,000 square feet, and there are very few existing offices in the Ann Arbor that meet that criterion.
Fischer said the company may move into temporary space until a permanent office can be leased or a new office built.
"All options are on the table,'' he said.
Leasing an office would require a lower investment - apprximately $20 million - while building a new complex would run around $50 million, according to state documents.
One local real estate official said the company was interested in being close to the U-M campus. There isn't enough space in one office building large enough to accommodate that number of employees.
Several real estate brokers mentioned that the Earhart Corporate Center near Plymouth Road and US-23 had 200,000 square feet available and could be a contender. That would be close to U-M's north campus, but several miles from downtown Ann Arbor.
Fun and interesting company
No matter what location is chosen, the office is likely to be one of the coolest around. Google prides itself on creating an innovative, fun and interesting environment.
n the early days of the company, desk "chairs'' were inflatable exercise balls and computers were mounted on doors sitting on sawhorses. Dogs roamed the halls and the company hired the Grateful Dead's former chef to cook meals.
Its employees hold equity in the company as a motivational tool and are expected to work with zeal, but to have fun.
"We all work hard, and take our work seriously, but don't take ourselves seriously,'' Fischer said.
Grady Burnett, the director of online sales and operations for the new Michigan office - and a University of Michigan alumnus, said his biggest challenge would be handling the recruitment of hundreds of new employees and establishing Google's corporate culture here.
"I think ultimately, really establishing the culture of the company and allowing us to expand on that in Ann Arbor'' will be his challenge, Burnett said.
It's unclear how quickly jobs will be added, but Fischer said the company is gearing up. Google will be transferring some people, including Burnett, from California but most of the staff will be new hires.
George Fulton, an economist at the University of Michigan, performed the economic impact analysis for the state used by the MEDC to determine the value of the investment. The model he used predicts the company will produce $2 billion in personal income for workers over the next 20 years.
The development is significant to the local economy because of the gain in jobs, something that could support the struggling real estate market and bolster the retail and service sectors.
But, Fulton said, more importantly, the expansion would attract other tech business.
"The image enhancement. That's really one of the major impacts because it puts Ann Arbor even more on the map as a center for information, technology and scientific innovation,'' Fulton said.
The cool factor of Google puts not only Ann Arbor, but all of Michigan on the map.
Granholm said it's the type of company she hopes will convince college students to stay in the state.
"It is so excellent for those young people trying to decide whether to stay in Michigan post graduation or go somewhere else,'' she said. "They should stay.''
Epolito said the combination of Google along with the expansion of other tech businesses in Ann Arbor and the life sciences initiative at U-M could begin a snowball of new-economy jobs in the region and state.
"For us, this is a home run,'' he said. "I think in the state, we've hit some singles and some doubles along the way, but this is a home run.''
Epolito said Google never tried to play Michigan against another state, but that the state always felt as though it was competing against others.
"In the end, we put our absolute best economic package on the table, that we think could potentially compete with any state,'' he said. When the deal is public "there will be a lot other states that probably could have surpassed it, but I don't think it was all about that.''
Tim Marshall, president of the Bank of Ann Arbor, said the announcement points to a strong future for the area.
"It's a sign of the future. ... Ann Arbor has shown a nice track record of attracting and growing technology-based companies and this just a continuance of that progress.''
News business reporter Stefanie Murray and staff reporter Tom Gantert contributed to this report. Mike Ramsey can be reached at mramsey@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6864.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
News Business Reporter
Google, the Internet powerhouse whose name has become synonymous with online searches, plans to invest between $20 million and $50 million in an office in the Ann Arbor area that could employ 1,000 or more people in the next five years.
The deal to bring the company here, expected to be announced today, hinges on approval by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. of a 20-year tax credit at its board meeting today. The board is almost certain to make way for the significant investment that documents say would create $165 million in new state revenue.
The company has not picked a location yet, but Mayor John Heiftje said city officials have been told that Google is most interested in downtown Ann Arbor.
Executives at the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company said Michigan and Ann Arbor in particular, has the motivated, creative and high-minded people it desires as employees as it expands to meet demand for its advertising products.
It is one of the most significant job creation announcements in years because it not only infuses much-needed employment into a sagging state economy, it also helps establish Ann Arbor as a leader in the highly desirable information technology industry.
"I think it's a tipping-point kind of project that signals to the world that Michigan is the state to come to if you have cutting-edge technology,'' Gov. Jennifer Granholm said.
State officials say that, in addition to the 1,000 direct jobs, Google could create an additional 1,200 related jobs in Michigan to support the work in Ann Arbor.
Google would become one of the largest private employers in the area.
The state's tax credits are worth $38 million, said Jim Epolito, president and chief executive officer of the MEDC.
Assuming the board agrees to the tax credit, Google will begin recruiting immediately, advertising positions on its Web page: www.google.com/jobs. The jobs, primarily sales, marketing and business positions, would pay an average of $47,000 a year.
"We expect to have the office up and running by this fall,'' said David Fischer, director of online sales and operations for Google, told The News.
Hieftje said Ann Arbor was picked over other cities such as Boulder, Colo.
"It is the high quality of life we offer,'' Hieftje said. "It's the vibrancy of downtown and it's the talented pool of potential employees that attract companies like Google. These are the kinds of jobs Ann Arborites can do.''
He said city staff has been involved in the discussions.
"We'll be working the governor on a financing package,'' Hieftje said. "At this point, there are no discussions I know about the city's contribution.''
"This is huge for Ann Arbor,'' said City Council Member Leigh Greden, D-3rd Ward. "This proves that Ann Arbor can lead the way in Michigan's economic revitalization.''
Local connections
Google, established in 1998 by University of Michigan graduate Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is one of the fastest growing companies in the country, both in terms of revenue and employees. It had 6,800 workers worldwide at the beginning of April - 1,100 more than at the end of 2005.
Its search engine accounts for 43 percent of all Internet searches. Nearly all of its $6.1 billion in revenue in 2005 came from advertising. The office in Ann Arbor would be servicing the company's main advertising product, AdWord.
The AdWord system allows businesses to bid against one another for use of a search term. The winner then pays Google a set amount every time a Web surfer clicks on their Web link from Google's search page.
"Google's philosophy is to go out, find and hire the best talent we can,'' Fischer said. "We recognize that perhaps not everyone wants to live in California. As we looked around at where we might be able to find the best and brightest and most motivated individuals, Michigan jumped out at us.''
Specifically, Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan was a big factor as was the lifestyle and mentality of the people who live here, Fischer said.
Page, who graduated in 1995 from U-M with a bachelor's degree in engineering and graduated from East Lansing High School, also influenced the decision, Fischer said.
"Larry Page ... knows firsthand about the strong talent pool in and around Ann Arbor,'' Fischer said.
He sits on the university's College of Engineering Advisory Board. During an engineering college commencement address in Ann Arbor in 2005, he asked students whether they would be interested in working for the company.
How the deal happened
Google already has a small office in Ann Arbor that is dedicated to the archiving of U-M's seven million volumes contained in the school's libraries to make them available in digital format. The office has fewer than 20 employees.
The Ann Arbor News reported last June that an agent for Google had contacted local real estate brokers to scout locations but has not reported anything since then.
Granholm said that report prompted state officials to court Google and to stop information about it from leaking to the media.
Michael Finney, CEO of Ann Arbor Spark, a technology business development organization, and the Washtenaw Development Council, said he was contacted about a month ago about Google.
he council has helped Google scout locations and although none has been selected, he said there are three "communities'' in and around Ann Arbor in the pool of site candidates.
Any municipality chosen would have to approve a property tax abatement in order for the company to get the state tax credits.
Finney said a company with 1,000 employees likely would need at least 200,000 square feet, and there are very few existing offices in the Ann Arbor that meet that criterion.
Fischer said the company may move into temporary space until a permanent office can be leased or a new office built.
"All options are on the table,'' he said.
Leasing an office would require a lower investment - apprximately $20 million - while building a new complex would run around $50 million, according to state documents.
One local real estate official said the company was interested in being close to the U-M campus. There isn't enough space in one office building large enough to accommodate that number of employees.
Several real estate brokers mentioned that the Earhart Corporate Center near Plymouth Road and US-23 had 200,000 square feet available and could be a contender. That would be close to U-M's north campus, but several miles from downtown Ann Arbor.
Fun and interesting company
No matter what location is chosen, the office is likely to be one of the coolest around. Google prides itself on creating an innovative, fun and interesting environment.
n the early days of the company, desk "chairs'' were inflatable exercise balls and computers were mounted on doors sitting on sawhorses. Dogs roamed the halls and the company hired the Grateful Dead's former chef to cook meals.
Its employees hold equity in the company as a motivational tool and are expected to work with zeal, but to have fun.
"We all work hard, and take our work seriously, but don't take ourselves seriously,'' Fischer said.
Grady Burnett, the director of online sales and operations for the new Michigan office - and a University of Michigan alumnus, said his biggest challenge would be handling the recruitment of hundreds of new employees and establishing Google's corporate culture here.
"I think ultimately, really establishing the culture of the company and allowing us to expand on that in Ann Arbor'' will be his challenge, Burnett said.
It's unclear how quickly jobs will be added, but Fischer said the company is gearing up. Google will be transferring some people, including Burnett, from California but most of the staff will be new hires.
George Fulton, an economist at the University of Michigan, performed the economic impact analysis for the state used by the MEDC to determine the value of the investment. The model he used predicts the company will produce $2 billion in personal income for workers over the next 20 years.
The development is significant to the local economy because of the gain in jobs, something that could support the struggling real estate market and bolster the retail and service sectors.
But, Fulton said, more importantly, the expansion would attract other tech business.
"The image enhancement. That's really one of the major impacts because it puts Ann Arbor even more on the map as a center for information, technology and scientific innovation,'' Fulton said.
The cool factor of Google puts not only Ann Arbor, but all of Michigan on the map.
Granholm said it's the type of company she hopes will convince college students to stay in the state.
"It is so excellent for those young people trying to decide whether to stay in Michigan post graduation or go somewhere else,'' she said. "They should stay.''
Epolito said the combination of Google along with the expansion of other tech businesses in Ann Arbor and the life sciences initiative at U-M could begin a snowball of new-economy jobs in the region and state.
"For us, this is a home run,'' he said. "I think in the state, we've hit some singles and some doubles along the way, but this is a home run.''
Epolito said Google never tried to play Michigan against another state, but that the state always felt as though it was competing against others.
"In the end, we put our absolute best economic package on the table, that we think could potentially compete with any state,'' he said. When the deal is public "there will be a lot other states that probably could have surpassed it, but I don't think it was all about that.''
Tim Marshall, president of the Bank of Ann Arbor, said the announcement points to a strong future for the area.
"It's a sign of the future. ... Ann Arbor has shown a nice track record of attracting and growing technology-based companies and this just a continuance of that progress.''
News business reporter Stefanie Murray and staff reporter Tom Gantert contributed to this report. Mike Ramsey can be reached at mramsey@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6864.
College Towns -- the Next Retirement Meccas?
Thursday, June 15, 2006
[Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D.]
Mom and Dad may have chosen to stay put in the house they worked so long and hard to pay for. But for many of us, a more adventuresome model is emerging -- one where healthy and active folks in their later years disperse literally around the world.
Why shouldn't they? The kids are destined to move away again and again when working with today's rapidly restructuring and decentralized corporations. What's keeping you from picking up stakes and looking for something better?
The good news is you don't have to go far if you don't want to. For most folks, a college town in the U.S. has everything they'll need and want. Start with pocketbook issues. College towns tend to boast a variety of rewarding, flexible employment opportunities through the university and small businesses that surround it.
Because teachers and students typically don't have a lot of money, these towns often have low tax rates, affordable housing, and a reasonable cost of living. Beyond all that, crime rates tend to be low, and there are many cultural attractions, educational opportunities and leisure activities.
Universities Mine a Sweet Spot
Moving back to your alma mater, or any region dominated by a university, is a blistering trend. As Boomers reach their next life stage many will recall those exciting college days and seek to recreate the best parts.
And universities -- finding themselves in a sweet spot -- will make the most of it. They have quite accidentally acquired a valuable lifestyle brand and will see aging Boomers as an important constituency, offering not just continuing education and class auditing but special housing to woo you back to campus. Instead of organizing your life around the third tee, you might prefer to do it around a coffee house or lecture hall.
In recent years, dozens of special housing communities have sprouted near college campuses to attract the growing number of older adults looking for a place that will continue to stimulate their minds and bodies. John and Betty Jean Rife found their ideal spot in Oak Hammock, an adult community with ties to his alma mater, the University of Florida. The community in Gainesville, Fla., offers campus privileges similar to those of faculty, a fitness center, massage therapy, and a computer lab.
John coveted the chance to hone his computer skills, and his wife looked forward to learning to be an artist. "We looked at retirement places pretty much all over the South," said John. This one kept the Rifes close to their children as well as former classmates.
For This Couple, Rejuvenation
After more than 20 years of living in Southern California, Elliot and Patricia Mininberg thought they would make Santa Fe, N.M., their later-life home. But when they visited friends who had moved to Charlottesville, Va., a college town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, everything changed.
"We fell in love with the place. It's very peaceful and beautiful, and there are plenty of cultural activities," said Elliot, a professor at California State University, Northridge. They bought a house on the spot even though Elliot returns to California to teach one semester a year.
Patricia loves the historic downtown pedestrian mall. Elliot enjoys playing tennis at the Boar's Head Sports Club, which is owned by the University of Virginia but offers memberships to the public. "Everything here -- from home and car insurance to utilities and state income taxes -- costs about half what we paid in California," says Elliot.
Another big selling point is its mild, four-season climate. "In California, one becomes used to day after day of sameness," says Elliot. "Here, the seasons change, and the leaves disappear. There's an annual rejuvenation."
Your Alma Mater and Beyond
When considering any college town, look for one where the town isn't so large that the general population overwhelms and dilutes the university's influence. The campus should be walking -- or at least biking -- distance from the town square. If you live on or near campus, will you be too close to frat row and unwanted beer bashes? If you live far from campus, will you have convenient transportation, including a place to park?
Inquire at the university if events it sponsors are marketed to the general population. Does the school invite the community to participate through reduced noncredit-class tuition for adults?
To get started, think of your own alma mater and that of friends. To expand your search, try helpful Web sites found at Money.com (which has a cost-of-living calculator and real estate comparisons), FindYourSpot.com (which weighs 40 criteria in matching your needs), and BestPlaces.net (where you can throw into the mix such concerns as the unemployment rate and expected job growth).
Your research may take you to faraway lands. Venezuela is a beautiful country with relatively low costs of living. Finland, Norway, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Australia are rated as the cleanest countries on earth. Luxembourg, Denmark, and Iceland are among the wealthiest nations per capita. Countries deemed to have the highest quality of life include Norway, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, and Australia. Brazil is known for easy access to airports. No country provides more educational choice than India, home to a staggering 8,407 universities.
Favorite College Towns
But most folks can find everything they want in one of the America's idyllic university hamlets -- from affordability to safety to intellectual stimulation. Here are some of our favorites:
* Ann Arbor, Mich. This is the home of the University of Michigan. Yes, it's cold in the winter, but this midwestern enclave makes up for it in charm. The university is at the center of the town's cultural life, from plays to live music. This is a Big 10 school, and home football and basketball games are marquee events. Yet you're just an hour from Detroit for a taste of true big-city life, and an abundance of lakes and beaches are within easy reach. Ann Arbor has 147 parks, a Bicycle Touring Society, and a Ski Club open to all.
* Eugene, Ore. This is home to the University of Oregon, where adults can audit classes and attend campus events for one low annual fee. Homes are reasonably priced, and the views in the Willamette Valley can't be beat, framed by the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges and just two hours from Portland and an hour from the Pacific Ocean. "Money" describes it like this: "The surrounding area is a nature lovers' paradise the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined: Natural forests punctuated by volcanic peaks, wilderness inhabited by black-tail deer, elk, red-tail hawks, bear, and cougar; and 21 state parks, including nine-mile-long Detroit Lake."
* South Oxford, Miss. This is home to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). William Faulkner and John Grisham have called this home. Oxford is a bastion of Southern culture and tradition, rich with literary and historical heritage. In addition to the concerts and theatrical performances on campus, non-students can attend brown-bag luncheons with visiting notables. There's a local choral group and band, giving musicians an outlet and music lovers easy access to performances.
You can travel the world and not find a better setup for the next chapter of your life than in America's college towns.
Adapted from "The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life" by Ken Dychtwald Ph. D. and Daniel J. Kadlec
Thursday, June 15, 2006
[Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D.]
Mom and Dad may have chosen to stay put in the house they worked so long and hard to pay for. But for many of us, a more adventuresome model is emerging -- one where healthy and active folks in their later years disperse literally around the world.
Why shouldn't they? The kids are destined to move away again and again when working with today's rapidly restructuring and decentralized corporations. What's keeping you from picking up stakes and looking for something better?
The good news is you don't have to go far if you don't want to. For most folks, a college town in the U.S. has everything they'll need and want. Start with pocketbook issues. College towns tend to boast a variety of rewarding, flexible employment opportunities through the university and small businesses that surround it.
Because teachers and students typically don't have a lot of money, these towns often have low tax rates, affordable housing, and a reasonable cost of living. Beyond all that, crime rates tend to be low, and there are many cultural attractions, educational opportunities and leisure activities.
Universities Mine a Sweet Spot
Moving back to your alma mater, or any region dominated by a university, is a blistering trend. As Boomers reach their next life stage many will recall those exciting college days and seek to recreate the best parts.
And universities -- finding themselves in a sweet spot -- will make the most of it. They have quite accidentally acquired a valuable lifestyle brand and will see aging Boomers as an important constituency, offering not just continuing education and class auditing but special housing to woo you back to campus. Instead of organizing your life around the third tee, you might prefer to do it around a coffee house or lecture hall.
In recent years, dozens of special housing communities have sprouted near college campuses to attract the growing number of older adults looking for a place that will continue to stimulate their minds and bodies. John and Betty Jean Rife found their ideal spot in Oak Hammock, an adult community with ties to his alma mater, the University of Florida. The community in Gainesville, Fla., offers campus privileges similar to those of faculty, a fitness center, massage therapy, and a computer lab.
John coveted the chance to hone his computer skills, and his wife looked forward to learning to be an artist. "We looked at retirement places pretty much all over the South," said John. This one kept the Rifes close to their children as well as former classmates.
For This Couple, Rejuvenation
After more than 20 years of living in Southern California, Elliot and Patricia Mininberg thought they would make Santa Fe, N.M., their later-life home. But when they visited friends who had moved to Charlottesville, Va., a college town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, everything changed.
"We fell in love with the place. It's very peaceful and beautiful, and there are plenty of cultural activities," said Elliot, a professor at California State University, Northridge. They bought a house on the spot even though Elliot returns to California to teach one semester a year.
Patricia loves the historic downtown pedestrian mall. Elliot enjoys playing tennis at the Boar's Head Sports Club, which is owned by the University of Virginia but offers memberships to the public. "Everything here -- from home and car insurance to utilities and state income taxes -- costs about half what we paid in California," says Elliot.
Another big selling point is its mild, four-season climate. "In California, one becomes used to day after day of sameness," says Elliot. "Here, the seasons change, and the leaves disappear. There's an annual rejuvenation."
Your Alma Mater and Beyond
When considering any college town, look for one where the town isn't so large that the general population overwhelms and dilutes the university's influence. The campus should be walking -- or at least biking -- distance from the town square. If you live on or near campus, will you be too close to frat row and unwanted beer bashes? If you live far from campus, will you have convenient transportation, including a place to park?
Inquire at the university if events it sponsors are marketed to the general population. Does the school invite the community to participate through reduced noncredit-class tuition for adults?
To get started, think of your own alma mater and that of friends. To expand your search, try helpful Web sites found at Money.com (which has a cost-of-living calculator and real estate comparisons), FindYourSpot.com (which weighs 40 criteria in matching your needs), and BestPlaces.net (where you can throw into the mix such concerns as the unemployment rate and expected job growth).
Your research may take you to faraway lands. Venezuela is a beautiful country with relatively low costs of living. Finland, Norway, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Australia are rated as the cleanest countries on earth. Luxembourg, Denmark, and Iceland are among the wealthiest nations per capita. Countries deemed to have the highest quality of life include Norway, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, and Australia. Brazil is known for easy access to airports. No country provides more educational choice than India, home to a staggering 8,407 universities.
Favorite College Towns
But most folks can find everything they want in one of the America's idyllic university hamlets -- from affordability to safety to intellectual stimulation. Here are some of our favorites:
* Ann Arbor, Mich. This is the home of the University of Michigan. Yes, it's cold in the winter, but this midwestern enclave makes up for it in charm. The university is at the center of the town's cultural life, from plays to live music. This is a Big 10 school, and home football and basketball games are marquee events. Yet you're just an hour from Detroit for a taste of true big-city life, and an abundance of lakes and beaches are within easy reach. Ann Arbor has 147 parks, a Bicycle Touring Society, and a Ski Club open to all.
* Eugene, Ore. This is home to the University of Oregon, where adults can audit classes and attend campus events for one low annual fee. Homes are reasonably priced, and the views in the Willamette Valley can't be beat, framed by the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges and just two hours from Portland and an hour from the Pacific Ocean. "Money" describes it like this: "The surrounding area is a nature lovers' paradise the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined: Natural forests punctuated by volcanic peaks, wilderness inhabited by black-tail deer, elk, red-tail hawks, bear, and cougar; and 21 state parks, including nine-mile-long Detroit Lake."
* South Oxford, Miss. This is home to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). William Faulkner and John Grisham have called this home. Oxford is a bastion of Southern culture and tradition, rich with literary and historical heritage. In addition to the concerts and theatrical performances on campus, non-students can attend brown-bag luncheons with visiting notables. There's a local choral group and band, giving musicians an outlet and music lovers easy access to performances.
You can travel the world and not find a better setup for the next chapter of your life than in America's college towns.
Adapted from "The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life" by Ken Dychtwald Ph. D. and Daniel J. Kadlec
If escalating fuel costs and explosive growth in traffic congestion have you contemplating trading your car tires for tennis shoes, Ann Arbor Developer Peter Allen has you in his sights. In fact, Allen will pay for the tennis shoes, and throw in a new bike too.
Allen, president of Peter Allen & Associates, an Ann Arbor real estate development firm, thinks people are increasingly opting to hit the streets with their feet instead of putting the pedal to the metal on the now not-so-open roads. In fact, as the developer of Kingsley Lane, a new Ann Arbor loft-home project, where on-site parking is optional, he's banking on it.
Roughly 57,500 people commute to Ann Arbor each day, according to Washtenaw Area Transportation Study (WATS). "Commuting time wasted in the car is a growing local problem,' said Allen. Indeed, projections call for commute times to lengthen. "The built environment can enable that scenario or can help to change it by providing residences, like Kingsley Lane, that encourage people to be less reliant on their cars and to walk to work, the grocer, resturants and entertainment venues, and to conduct their personal business," said Allen. "We think it's smart development, and we believe area homebuyers will respond to it."
Located at the corner of Kingsley Lane and Ashley Street, Kingsley Lane will offer 12 diverse loft plans ranging from 425 square feet to 1,400 square feet in both one-and two-level floor plans.
The development's location at the north edge of downtown Ann Arbor with close proximity to shopping, dining, and cultural activities-makes it easy to leave the car parked for days. I encourage folks to do just that. Allen and his partners are giving each Kingsley Lane homebuyer a free pair of walking shoes along with a new bicycle. And, to stow their car while they walk, buyers will have options. Explained Mark Berg, development Partner, "One of the things we learned from our focus groups and early pre-sales, was that younger buyers often prefer the lower prices available by making expensive underground parking an option." All buyers will receive a complimentary two-year lease at the nearby Ann Ashley parking deck-just 70 steps away. For those who need their car even closer at hand, on-site parking is available as an option.
"Few cities of any size offer such an eclectic and accessible array of shopping, dining and entertainment experiences as Ann Arbor," said Allen. "It's very easy to abandon your car and explore the richness of the city on foot or by bike."
Christopher Weinberger, professor of practice and director of the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan, and himself an advocate of walk-able living spaces, believes Allen has the right idea. According to Weinberger, nearly one-third of U.S. households desire what he refers to as "walk-able urbanity--a place to live and/or play in a walk-able environment." Yet the national housing market strongly lacks this type of housing with less than five percent supply currently available.
The Kingsley Lane development further encourages walk-able living by offering live-work space combinations. With the ground floors of both its buildings zoned for office or retail space, it is possible for a gallery or cafe owner, retailer or professional service provider to live just up the stairs from their workplace.
Allen's passion for walkable living environments, like the one he and partner Mark Berg have created at Kingsley Lane, is matched only by his passion for Ann Arbor itself. The Kingsley Lane development and sales team is comprised of six local residents who have lived in the Ann Arbor area for a combined total of 150 years. In addition to Allen, it includes Mark Berg, the property owner; Marc Reuters, the architect; Fred Beal, the contractor, Tracy Wick handling marketing; and Lisa Stelter, of the Charles Reinhart Co. Realtors, who is handling sales of the project.
Their love for the city and its unique qualities is evident in every aspect of the project. They believe strongly that what is good for the earth and for one's health is good for all. To that end, the Kingsley Lane design team has incorporated "green" finishes and appliances such as low-VOC paints, formaldehyde-free cabinetry, Engergy Star appliances, as well as renewable material options like cork, sea-grass and bamboo flooring, which offer Kingsley Lane homeowners both relibale health benifits and lowered cost of ownership.
Allen, president of Peter Allen & Associates, an Ann Arbor real estate development firm, thinks people are increasingly opting to hit the streets with their feet instead of putting the pedal to the metal on the now not-so-open roads. In fact, as the developer of Kingsley Lane, a new Ann Arbor loft-home project, where on-site parking is optional, he's banking on it.
Roughly 57,500 people commute to Ann Arbor each day, according to Washtenaw Area Transportation Study (WATS). "Commuting time wasted in the car is a growing local problem,' said Allen. Indeed, projections call for commute times to lengthen. "The built environment can enable that scenario or can help to change it by providing residences, like Kingsley Lane, that encourage people to be less reliant on their cars and to walk to work, the grocer, resturants and entertainment venues, and to conduct their personal business," said Allen. "We think it's smart development, and we believe area homebuyers will respond to it."
Located at the corner of Kingsley Lane and Ashley Street, Kingsley Lane will offer 12 diverse loft plans ranging from 425 square feet to 1,400 square feet in both one-and two-level floor plans.
The development's location at the north edge of downtown Ann Arbor with close proximity to shopping, dining, and cultural activities-makes it easy to leave the car parked for days. I encourage folks to do just that. Allen and his partners are giving each Kingsley Lane homebuyer a free pair of walking shoes along with a new bicycle. And, to stow their car while they walk, buyers will have options. Explained Mark Berg, development Partner, "One of the things we learned from our focus groups and early pre-sales, was that younger buyers often prefer the lower prices available by making expensive underground parking an option." All buyers will receive a complimentary two-year lease at the nearby Ann Ashley parking deck-just 70 steps away. For those who need their car even closer at hand, on-site parking is available as an option.
"Few cities of any size offer such an eclectic and accessible array of shopping, dining and entertainment experiences as Ann Arbor," said Allen. "It's very easy to abandon your car and explore the richness of the city on foot or by bike."
Christopher Weinberger, professor of practice and director of the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan, and himself an advocate of walk-able living spaces, believes Allen has the right idea. According to Weinberger, nearly one-third of U.S. households desire what he refers to as "walk-able urbanity--a place to live and/or play in a walk-able environment." Yet the national housing market strongly lacks this type of housing with less than five percent supply currently available.
The Kingsley Lane development further encourages walk-able living by offering live-work space combinations. With the ground floors of both its buildings zoned for office or retail space, it is possible for a gallery or cafe owner, retailer or professional service provider to live just up the stairs from their workplace.
Allen's passion for walkable living environments, like the one he and partner Mark Berg have created at Kingsley Lane, is matched only by his passion for Ann Arbor itself. The Kingsley Lane development and sales team is comprised of six local residents who have lived in the Ann Arbor area for a combined total of 150 years. In addition to Allen, it includes Mark Berg, the property owner; Marc Reuters, the architect; Fred Beal, the contractor, Tracy Wick handling marketing; and Lisa Stelter, of the Charles Reinhart Co. Realtors, who is handling sales of the project.
Their love for the city and its unique qualities is evident in every aspect of the project. They believe strongly that what is good for the earth and for one's health is good for all. To that end, the Kingsley Lane design team has incorporated "green" finishes and appliances such as low-VOC paints, formaldehyde-free cabinetry, Engergy Star appliances, as well as renewable material options like cork, sea-grass and bamboo flooring, which offer Kingsley Lane homeowners both relibale health benifits and lowered cost of ownership.
GREEN MANHATTAN
Why New York is the greenest city in the U.S.
By David Owen
Published in The New Yorker
10/18/04
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and
unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian
environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite
contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the
extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a
dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot,
and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because
space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our
electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth
Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think
of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and
diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of
environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest
community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most
devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless
burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The
average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t
matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United
States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work
by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in
general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is
more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fiftyfirst
in per-capita energy use.
“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an
environmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant
for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers
lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they
would require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge
lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwatering
their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.” The key to New York’s relative
environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is
more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half
million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to
be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energyefficient
residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts
of land for the rest of America to sprawl into.
My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in suburbs, and
we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughter in a huge city. Shortly after she
learned to walk, we moved to a small town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety
miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeenhundreds,
is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pine
trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing by at the bottom of the hill.
Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the
end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned
nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.
Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went
from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New
York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hours in 2003—and our house doesn’t even have
central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon
after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’t have
a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired;
the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.)
My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand miles a year
between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our
house requires a car trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumes
almost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each
transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from
our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the Btus
produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our
two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.
When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild, unspoiled
landscapes—the earth before it was transmogrified by human habitation. New York City
is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial
environment, in which the terrain’s primeval contours have long since been obliterated
and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central
Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often
have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem
somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and
greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic
congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around
structures. But most such changes would actually undermine the city’s extraordinary
energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of
them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates
more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most
other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental
impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot
spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.
If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however,
the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about four thousand residents,
spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town
limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight
million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of
energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible
to miss, because you’d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors
and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made
all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space
equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.)
Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment, while making the
problems harder to see and to address.
Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many drawbacks. Even
wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem cramped to Americans living
almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend of mine who grew up in a town house in
Greenwich Village thought of his upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he
visited a classmate from the suburbs and was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars,
and the swimming pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live like this?
Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the cars
and cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmental reasons, New
York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an
especially alarming concentration in East Harlem.
Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’s population,
dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most
discouraging environmental ills. To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems,
dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge
we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not
how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is
how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely
embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans,
including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as
“pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” New York is the place
that’s fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach
anyone about being green?
New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s
remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a
succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents
was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of
a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward
expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out—a city with a harbor
around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more
shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the
world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove
early development inward and upward.
A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by
merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or
empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually
humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer
together, thereby increasing their accessibility—a point made forty-three years ago by the
brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book “The Death and
Life of Great American Cities.”
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of
Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could
easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the
automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the
wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932,
John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said,
“The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the
automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the
growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural
conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a
prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste.
New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and automobile
use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward growth has been virtually
unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early settlers came to the area partly out of a
desire to create space between themselves and others, and whose main development
began late enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample
is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same time as
Manhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The District of Columbia’s
original plan was created by an eccentric French-born engineer and architect named
Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary
War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern Washington’s most
striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the
sweeping public lawns and ceremonial spaces.
Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—the most
European—of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a mess. L’Enfant’s
expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and the low, widely separated
buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destinations.
There are many pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but the city is difficult to
get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross, the traffic circles are like obstacle
courses, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane
Jacobs calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s many arresting observations is that
parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating dead ends that prevent
people from moving freely between neighborhoods and by decreasing activity along their
edges.) Many parts of Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are
plenty of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example, but good luck
finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery store. The city’s horizontal, airy
design has also pushed development into the surrounding countryside. The fastestgrowing
county in the United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding
western edge of the Washington metropolitan area.
The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the preservation of
wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of
the program is to arrest the mindless conversion of undeveloped countryside into
subdivisions, strip malls, and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site
features a slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling suburban
intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energy-efficient
developments by implementing a few modifications, among them widening the sidewalks
and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial uses, moving buildings
closer together and closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to
pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public transportation—all
fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth.
In a recent telephone conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in
Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions and the
modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with
Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets,
mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses.
The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would
prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City
would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is
trying to persuade.
An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more people out of cars
and into public transit. In many parts of the country, though, public transit has been
stagnant or in decline for years. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority
and Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all
the transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly four times as
many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority combined.
New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban planners and
environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather than an example, and to act as
though Manhattan occupied an idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying
principles apply everywhere. “The basic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the
Regional Planning Association, told me, “is that you need density to support public
transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you get above a certain density two things
happen. First, you get less travel by mechanical means, which is another way of saying
you get more people walking or biking; and, second, you get a decrease in the trips by
auto and an increase in the trips by transit. That threshold tends to be around seven
dwellings per acre. Once you cross that line, a bus company can put buses out there,
because they know they’re going to have enough passengers to support a reasonable
frequency of service.”
Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the fastestgrowing
among the top ten, yet its public transit system accounts for just one per cent of
the passenger miles that New York City’s does. The reason is that Phoenix’s burgeoning
population has spread so far across the desert—greater Phoenix, whose population is a
little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much
land—that no transit system could conceivably serve it. And no amount of browbeating,
public-service advertising, or federal spending can change that.
Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own efforts to nurture
public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums to make it easier for people to get
around in cars. When a city’s automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard
response has long been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening
existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem worse, by generating
what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new highway lures
passengers from public transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it
possible for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from urban
centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing automobile congestion is as
self-defeating as building new highways, because unclogging roads, if successful, just
makes driving seem more attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would
be to eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby forcing more
drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives—in effect, “induced transit.”
One reason New Yorkers are the most dedicated transit users in America is that
congestion on the city’s streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average
speed of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk walker, and in
midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side streets move so slowly that they
appear almost to be parked. Congestion like that urges drivers into the subways, and it
makes life easier for pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they
constitute less of a physical threat.
Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is not well
understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent transportation-related projects
and policy decisions may in the long run make the city a worse place to live in by luring
passengers back into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and
widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the city’s toll
bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River bridges, and the current
renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the federally funded hundred-and-thirty-ninemillion-
dollar Outboard Detour Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the
F.D.R. from being inconvenienced while the work is under way).
Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates rather than
discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is considering
extensions to some of the most distant branches of its system, and those extensions, if
built, will allow people to live even farther from the city’s center, creating new, nondense
suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it to malls and
schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate them. Transit is best for the
environment when it helps to concentrate people in dense urban cores. Building the
proposed Second Avenue subway line would be environmentally sound, because it would
increase New Yorkers’ ability to live without cars; building a bullet train between Penn
Station and the Catskills (for example) would not be sound, because it would enable the
vast, fuel-squandering apparatus of suburbia to establish itself in a region that couldn’t
support it otherwise.
On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the third floor of
my house, when the lights blinked, my window air-conditioner sputtered, and my
computer’s backup battery kicked in briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout
of 2003, which halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern
states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually traced to Ohio,
but public attention often focussed on New York City, which had the largest
concentration of affected power customers. Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior
energy adviser for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over
deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I
attended a conference on global warming where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise
energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And
my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy
prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for
the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business
relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest
terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of
those do you think is worse for the environment?’ ”
People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as people who
don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use less than the urban average. A
truly enlightened energy policy would reward city dwellers and encourage others to
follow their good example. Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than
almost any other American electricity customers; taxes and other government charges,
most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can constitute close to twenty per
cent of the cost of power for residential and commercial users in New York. Richard
Miller, after leaving his job with New York City, went to work as a lawyer in
Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred by his thinking about the
environment. He believes that state and local officials have historically taken unfair
advantage of the fact that there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays
more than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by far the city’s
largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of
driving is kept artificially low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don’t pay
property taxes, for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “the burden of improving the
city’s air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which contribute only a small
percentage of New York City’s air pollution, than it has on cars—even though motor
vehicles are a much bigger source.”
Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held
a show called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century.” A
book of the same name was published in conjunction with the show, and on the book’s
dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square, also known as the Condé Nast Building,
a forty-eight-story glass-and-steel tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a
few blocks west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two
floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was considered a
major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan, a principal of Fox & Fowle
Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote in an article in Environmental Design &
Construction in 1997, “When thinking of green architecture, one usually associates
smaller scale,” and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain
Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm based in Snowmass,
Colorado. The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-foot, superinsulated, passivesolar
structure with curving sixteen-inch-thick walls, set into a hillside about fifteen miles
north of Aspen. It was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for
green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins, who is R.M.I.’s cofounder
and chief executive officer.) R.M.I. contributed to the design of 4 Times Square,
which has many innovative features, among them collection chutes for recyclable
materials, photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-wall
construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.
These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true ecological
impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power generated by the photovoltaic
panels supplies less than one per cent of the building’s requirements.) The two greenest
features of 4 Times Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it
is situated in Manhattan.
Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically wasteful,
because large amounts of energy are expended in their construction, and because the
buildings place intensely localized stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems.
But density can create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures that it
does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per
square foot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they present
relatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from
the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating season.
(The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where one building often directly
abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips and Robert Gnaizda, published in
CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found that an ordinary apartment in a typical building
near downtown San Francisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house
in Davis, a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall buildings also do a
significant part of their daily coming and going in elevators, which, because they are
counterweighted and thus require less motor horsepower, are among the most energyefficient
passenger vehicles in the world.
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Condé Nast Building
contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you
divided it into forty-eight one-story suburban office buildings, each averaging thirty-three
thousand square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and
then added parking and some green space around each one, you’d end up consuming at
least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d have to provide infrastructure, the
highways and everything else.” Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square
doesn’t even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who
work inside it don’t need one. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not
only necessary but are required by law. If my town’s zoning regulations applied in
Manhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for
every hundred square feet of office floor space. The Rocky Mountain Institute’s
showcase headquarters has double-paned krypton-filled windows, which admit seventyfive
per cent as much light as ordinary windows while allowing just ten per cent as much
heat to escape in cold weather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in the
building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a
very poor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin land more
than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior
space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of them
work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings are in a thinly
populated area, they force most employees to drive many miles—including trips between
the two buildings—and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks,
snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a single floor of a big
building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments nearby, many of
them would be able to give up their cars, and the thousands of visitors who drive to
Snowmass each year to learn about environmentally responsible construction could travel
by public transit instead.
Picking on R.M.I.—which is one of the world’s most farsighted environmental
organizations—may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many other farsighted
environmental organizations, shares responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city
bias of American environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is
widely used for sprawl: “urbanization.” Thinking of freeways and strip malls as “urban”
phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and
Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It
also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.’s famous headquarters—which
sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest
significant public transit system—is sprawl.
When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be considered the
greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then asked, “Is it because they’ve
started recycling again?” Her question reflected a central failure of the American
environmental movement: that too many of us have been made to believe that the most
important thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each week to
set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling is popular because it
enables people to relieve their gathering anxieties about the future without altering the
way they live. But most current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the
environment, and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and
Michael Braungart point out in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,”
most of the materials we place on our curbs are merely “downcycled”—converted to a
lower use, providing a pause in their inevitable journey to a landfill or an
incinerator—often with a release of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable
effects.
By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from the
newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty million or so gallons of
oil we consume every day. We all know this at some level, yet we live like alcoholics in
denial. How else can we explain that our cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuelefficient
at the same time that scientists have become more certain and more specific
about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline?
On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment
which I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a terminal illness, because they’re
so unsettling that they may make me less upset about being snatched from life in my
prime. At the top of the pile is “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,” by David
Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which was published
earlier this year. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap
oil,” Goodstein begins. In succeeding pages, he lucidly explains that humans have
consumed almost a trillion barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of
the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we
have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but when we have reached the halfway
point, because at that moment, for the first time in history, the line representing supply
will fall through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that point
within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already; that various well-established
laws of economics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions for
almost everything; and that “civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in
this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”
Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy nightmare are
our cars and the asphalt-latticed country we have built to oblige them. Those cars have
defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It
makes its driver a self-sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.
Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By helping us to
live at greater distances from one another, driving has undermined the very benefits that
it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San Martín, an architecture professor and the head of the
graduate urban-design program at the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to
the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking—which you likely
won’t—they are going to tell you that they love living in Phoenix because they have a
beautiful house and three cars. In reality, though, once the conversation goes a little bit
further, they are going to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV,
because there is absolutely nothing to do.” One of the main attractions of moving to the
suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia
and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with
the help of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that get
worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely
self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of.
In 1801, in his first Inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that the American
wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining agrarian patriots “to
the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate
highway system, and his arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated
(and, in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of sprawl. The
standard object of the modern American dream, the single-family home surrounded by
grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car that put it within our reach. But what a terrible
price we have paid—and have yet to pay—for our liberation from the city.
Why New York is the greenest city in the U.S.
By David Owen
Published in The New Yorker
10/18/04
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and
unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian
environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite
contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the
extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a
dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot,
and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because
space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our
electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth
Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think
of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and
diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of
environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest
community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most
devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless
burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The
average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t
matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United
States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work
by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in
general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is
more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fiftyfirst
in per-capita energy use.
“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an
environmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant
for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers
lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they
would require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge
lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwatering
their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.” The key to New York’s relative
environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is
more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half
million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to
be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energyefficient
residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts
of land for the rest of America to sprawl into.
My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in suburbs, and
we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughter in a huge city. Shortly after she
learned to walk, we moved to a small town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety
miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeenhundreds,
is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pine
trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing by at the bottom of the hill.
Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the
end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned
nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.
Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went
from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New
York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hours in 2003—and our house doesn’t even have
central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon
after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’t have
a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired;
the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.)
My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand miles a year
between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our
house requires a car trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumes
almost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each
transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from
our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the Btus
produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our
two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.
When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild, unspoiled
landscapes—the earth before it was transmogrified by human habitation. New York City
is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial
environment, in which the terrain’s primeval contours have long since been obliterated
and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central
Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often
have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem
somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and
greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic
congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around
structures. But most such changes would actually undermine the city’s extraordinary
energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of
them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates
more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most
other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental
impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot
spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.
If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however,
the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about four thousand residents,
spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town
limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight
million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of
energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible
to miss, because you’d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors
and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made
all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space
equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.)
Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment, while making the
problems harder to see and to address.
Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many drawbacks. Even
wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem cramped to Americans living
almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend of mine who grew up in a town house in
Greenwich Village thought of his upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he
visited a classmate from the suburbs and was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars,
and the swimming pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live like this?
Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the cars
and cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmental reasons, New
York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an
especially alarming concentration in East Harlem.
Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’s population,
dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most
discouraging environmental ills. To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems,
dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge
we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not
how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is
how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely
embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans,
including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as
“pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” New York is the place
that’s fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach
anyone about being green?
New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s
remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a
succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents
was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of
a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward
expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out—a city with a harbor
around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more
shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the
world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove
early development inward and upward.
A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by
merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or
empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually
humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer
together, thereby increasing their accessibility—a point made forty-three years ago by the
brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book “The Death and
Life of Great American Cities.”
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of
Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could
easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the
automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the
wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932,
John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said,
“The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the
automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the
growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural
conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a
prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste.
New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and automobile
use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward growth has been virtually
unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early settlers came to the area partly out of a
desire to create space between themselves and others, and whose main development
began late enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample
is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same time as
Manhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The District of Columbia’s
original plan was created by an eccentric French-born engineer and architect named
Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary
War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern Washington’s most
striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the
sweeping public lawns and ceremonial spaces.
Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—the most
European—of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a mess. L’Enfant’s
expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and the low, widely separated
buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destinations.
There are many pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but the city is difficult to
get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross, the traffic circles are like obstacle
courses, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane
Jacobs calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s many arresting observations is that
parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating dead ends that prevent
people from moving freely between neighborhoods and by decreasing activity along their
edges.) Many parts of Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are
plenty of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example, but good luck
finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery store. The city’s horizontal, airy
design has also pushed development into the surrounding countryside. The fastestgrowing
county in the United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding
western edge of the Washington metropolitan area.
The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the preservation of
wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of
the program is to arrest the mindless conversion of undeveloped countryside into
subdivisions, strip malls, and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site
features a slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling suburban
intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energy-efficient
developments by implementing a few modifications, among them widening the sidewalks
and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial uses, moving buildings
closer together and closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to
pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public transportation—all
fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth.
In a recent telephone conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in
Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions and the
modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with
Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets,
mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses.
The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would
prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City
would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is
trying to persuade.
An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more people out of cars
and into public transit. In many parts of the country, though, public transit has been
stagnant or in decline for years. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority
and Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all
the transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly four times as
many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority combined.
New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban planners and
environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather than an example, and to act as
though Manhattan occupied an idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying
principles apply everywhere. “The basic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the
Regional Planning Association, told me, “is that you need density to support public
transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you get above a certain density two things
happen. First, you get less travel by mechanical means, which is another way of saying
you get more people walking or biking; and, second, you get a decrease in the trips by
auto and an increase in the trips by transit. That threshold tends to be around seven
dwellings per acre. Once you cross that line, a bus company can put buses out there,
because they know they’re going to have enough passengers to support a reasonable
frequency of service.”
Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the fastestgrowing
among the top ten, yet its public transit system accounts for just one per cent of
the passenger miles that New York City’s does. The reason is that Phoenix’s burgeoning
population has spread so far across the desert—greater Phoenix, whose population is a
little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much
land—that no transit system could conceivably serve it. And no amount of browbeating,
public-service advertising, or federal spending can change that.
Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own efforts to nurture
public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums to make it easier for people to get
around in cars. When a city’s automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard
response has long been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening
existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem worse, by generating
what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new highway lures
passengers from public transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it
possible for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from urban
centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing automobile congestion is as
self-defeating as building new highways, because unclogging roads, if successful, just
makes driving seem more attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would
be to eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby forcing more
drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives—in effect, “induced transit.”
One reason New Yorkers are the most dedicated transit users in America is that
congestion on the city’s streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average
speed of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk walker, and in
midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side streets move so slowly that they
appear almost to be parked. Congestion like that urges drivers into the subways, and it
makes life easier for pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they
constitute less of a physical threat.
Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is not well
understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent transportation-related projects
and policy decisions may in the long run make the city a worse place to live in by luring
passengers back into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and
widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the city’s toll
bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River bridges, and the current
renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the federally funded hundred-and-thirty-ninemillion-
dollar Outboard Detour Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the
F.D.R. from being inconvenienced while the work is under way).
Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates rather than
discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is considering
extensions to some of the most distant branches of its system, and those extensions, if
built, will allow people to live even farther from the city’s center, creating new, nondense
suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it to malls and
schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate them. Transit is best for the
environment when it helps to concentrate people in dense urban cores. Building the
proposed Second Avenue subway line would be environmentally sound, because it would
increase New Yorkers’ ability to live without cars; building a bullet train between Penn
Station and the Catskills (for example) would not be sound, because it would enable the
vast, fuel-squandering apparatus of suburbia to establish itself in a region that couldn’t
support it otherwise.
On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the third floor of
my house, when the lights blinked, my window air-conditioner sputtered, and my
computer’s backup battery kicked in briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout
of 2003, which halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern
states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually traced to Ohio,
but public attention often focussed on New York City, which had the largest
concentration of affected power customers. Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior
energy adviser for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over
deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I
attended a conference on global warming where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise
energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And
my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy
prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for
the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business
relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest
terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of
those do you think is worse for the environment?’ ”
People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as people who
don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use less than the urban average. A
truly enlightened energy policy would reward city dwellers and encourage others to
follow their good example. Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than
almost any other American electricity customers; taxes and other government charges,
most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can constitute close to twenty per
cent of the cost of power for residential and commercial users in New York. Richard
Miller, after leaving his job with New York City, went to work as a lawyer in
Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred by his thinking about the
environment. He believes that state and local officials have historically taken unfair
advantage of the fact that there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays
more than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by far the city’s
largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of
driving is kept artificially low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don’t pay
property taxes, for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “the burden of improving the
city’s air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which contribute only a small
percentage of New York City’s air pollution, than it has on cars—even though motor
vehicles are a much bigger source.”
Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held
a show called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century.” A
book of the same name was published in conjunction with the show, and on the book’s
dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square, also known as the Condé Nast Building,
a forty-eight-story glass-and-steel tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a
few blocks west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two
floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was considered a
major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan, a principal of Fox & Fowle
Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote in an article in Environmental Design &
Construction in 1997, “When thinking of green architecture, one usually associates
smaller scale,” and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain
Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm based in Snowmass,
Colorado. The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-foot, superinsulated, passivesolar
structure with curving sixteen-inch-thick walls, set into a hillside about fifteen miles
north of Aspen. It was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for
green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins, who is R.M.I.’s cofounder
and chief executive officer.) R.M.I. contributed to the design of 4 Times Square,
which has many innovative features, among them collection chutes for recyclable
materials, photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-wall
construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.
These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true ecological
impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power generated by the photovoltaic
panels supplies less than one per cent of the building’s requirements.) The two greenest
features of 4 Times Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it
is situated in Manhattan.
Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically wasteful,
because large amounts of energy are expended in their construction, and because the
buildings place intensely localized stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems.
But density can create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures that it
does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per
square foot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they present
relatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from
the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating season.
(The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where one building often directly
abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips and Robert Gnaizda, published in
CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found that an ordinary apartment in a typical building
near downtown San Francisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house
in Davis, a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall buildings also do a
significant part of their daily coming and going in elevators, which, because they are
counterweighted and thus require less motor horsepower, are among the most energyefficient
passenger vehicles in the world.
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Condé Nast Building
contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you
divided it into forty-eight one-story suburban office buildings, each averaging thirty-three
thousand square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and
then added parking and some green space around each one, you’d end up consuming at
least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d have to provide infrastructure, the
highways and everything else.” Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square
doesn’t even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who
work inside it don’t need one. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not
only necessary but are required by law. If my town’s zoning regulations applied in
Manhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for
every hundred square feet of office floor space. The Rocky Mountain Institute’s
showcase headquarters has double-paned krypton-filled windows, which admit seventyfive
per cent as much light as ordinary windows while allowing just ten per cent as much
heat to escape in cold weather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in the
building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a
very poor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin land more
than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior
space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of them
work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings are in a thinly
populated area, they force most employees to drive many miles—including trips between
the two buildings—and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks,
snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a single floor of a big
building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments nearby, many of
them would be able to give up their cars, and the thousands of visitors who drive to
Snowmass each year to learn about environmentally responsible construction could travel
by public transit instead.
Picking on R.M.I.—which is one of the world’s most farsighted environmental
organizations—may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many other farsighted
environmental organizations, shares responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city
bias of American environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is
widely used for sprawl: “urbanization.” Thinking of freeways and strip malls as “urban”
phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and
Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It
also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.’s famous headquarters—which
sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest
significant public transit system—is sprawl.
When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be considered the
greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then asked, “Is it because they’ve
started recycling again?” Her question reflected a central failure of the American
environmental movement: that too many of us have been made to believe that the most
important thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each week to
set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling is popular because it
enables people to relieve their gathering anxieties about the future without altering the
way they live. But most current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the
environment, and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and
Michael Braungart point out in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,”
most of the materials we place on our curbs are merely “downcycled”—converted to a
lower use, providing a pause in their inevitable journey to a landfill or an
incinerator—often with a release of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable
effects.
By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from the
newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty million or so gallons of
oil we consume every day. We all know this at some level, yet we live like alcoholics in
denial. How else can we explain that our cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuelefficient
at the same time that scientists have become more certain and more specific
about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline?
On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment
which I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a terminal illness, because they’re
so unsettling that they may make me less upset about being snatched from life in my
prime. At the top of the pile is “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,” by David
Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which was published
earlier this year. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap
oil,” Goodstein begins. In succeeding pages, he lucidly explains that humans have
consumed almost a trillion barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of
the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we
have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but when we have reached the halfway
point, because at that moment, for the first time in history, the line representing supply
will fall through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that point
within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already; that various well-established
laws of economics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions for
almost everything; and that “civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in
this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”
Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy nightmare are
our cars and the asphalt-latticed country we have built to oblige them. Those cars have
defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It
makes its driver a self-sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.
Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By helping us to
live at greater distances from one another, driving has undermined the very benefits that
it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San Martín, an architecture professor and the head of the
graduate urban-design program at the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to
the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking—which you likely
won’t—they are going to tell you that they love living in Phoenix because they have a
beautiful house and three cars. In reality, though, once the conversation goes a little bit
further, they are going to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV,
because there is absolutely nothing to do.” One of the main attractions of moving to the
suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia
and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with
the help of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that get
worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely
self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of.
In 1801, in his first Inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that the American
wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining agrarian patriots “to
the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate
highway system, and his arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated
(and, in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of sprawl. The
standard object of the modern American dream, the single-family home surrounded by
grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car that put it within our reach. But what a terrible
price we have paid—and have yet to pay—for our liberation from the city.
Builders could 'buy' density
Plan trades rights on farm space for taller buildings downtown
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
BY TRACY DAVIS
News Staff Reporter
A new twist on Ann Arbor's landmark farmland preservation program could greatly expand its scope.
Transfer of development rights is an idea recently introduced into the community conversation about saving agricultural land, and could allow officials to get more mileage out of the city's greenbelt program without further cost to taxpayers.
And though it's a new concept for many, it's already gaining steam.
Earlier this month, the Huron River Watershed Council announced it had received a $65,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation to promote and study a transfer of development rights program. The hope is to familiarize people with the idea and create support for it, said Chris Riggs of the watershed council.
A transfer of development rights, or TDR, program works by having two "zones'' - a sending zone and a receiving zone. Land is preserved and development slowed in the sending zone, typically a rural agricultural area that is under development pressure, in exchange for increasing density in the receiving zone, a more developed area closer to municipal services.
Around here, that might work like this: A builder buys development rights on a farm in a neighboring township, then transfers the ownership of rights to the city. In return, the city grants the developer the right to build a project, say, downtown, at greater density than would otherwise be permitted.
"Basically, you're bringing private money to the table to help save resources in the community,'' said Jennifer Dempsey of the American Farmland Trust.
An important element of TDR that makes it different from outright purchase of development rights, which is what the greenbelt program does, is that it directly ties preservation of open space to creation of new development in urban areas.
That was a key criticism during the greenbelt campaign: While land would be preserved, there was no obvious answer to where development could occur in its place. Opponents and some voters voiced concerns that housing would be pushed farther from town, and that competition for land would drive home prices up.
TDR, said Huron River Watershed Council Director Laura Rubin, "makes greater densities more palatable to people, because you are directly tying density and open space.''
"We talk a lot about building as much as we can downtown to stop sprawl, but ... anything we do alone won't stop sprawl,'' said Planning Commissioner James D'Amour. "There has to be a quid pro quo. With transfer of development rights, when you do have a new development that might happen downtown or in city limits, you specifically develop something and they contribute to the program.''
But the idea faces obstacles that make transferring development rights more complex than just buying them outright.
For starters, there is no enabling legislation in Michigan that permits transfer of development rights. That doesn't mean it's necessarily illegal, but there's no case law to help determine whether it's legal or not.
A city TDR committee and city attorneys recently sat down to discuss that issue, said Jennifer Hall, chairwoman of the city planning commission, who also sits on the TDR committee and the greenbelt advisory commission.
"It may just need to be tested,'' said Hall, who said she advocates that approach rather than waiting on state legislation. "It may have to be some sort of bold move the city has to take.''
Politics are another issue. While local leaders say there is support for greater density downtown, there is some vocal opposition from some people who say higher density translates into taller buildings.
And there is the issue of cooperation between governmental units. Because the sites are likely to cross municipal borders, that complicates matters.
A number of TDR programs exist around the country, and they vary in effectiveness, experts say. Some programs have never gotten off the ground; others have saved thousands of acres.
According to the 2000 survey by the American Farmland Trust, 50 jurisdictions nationwide had TDR ordinances on the books at the time.
Of those, three programs had been revoked and only 15 programs had protected more than 100 acres of farmland. A mere eight had protected more than 1,000 acres of farmland.
One of the oldest and most successful TDR programs is the one in Montgomery County, Md., which is often looked to as a model by other communities. To date, the program has protected 48,584 acres using TDR.
But it wasn't easy getting it started, notes John Zawitoski, director of planning and promotion for the county, and one of the biggest problems was identifying receiving zones the community could agree on.
"When you are being a trailblazer and you're charting uncharted waters, you are going to live and learn,'' he said. "We made mistakes.''
Despite the potential obstacles, the political will to make such a program happen is gaining steam here. At a joint meeting in March between some members of the Greenbelt Advisory Commission and the City Planning Commission, a committee was formed to look at feasibility issues of a TDR program.
And a city such as Ann Arbor, where voters have several times overwhelmingly agreed to tax themselves to preserve land, is good place to see how it might work in Michigan, some say.
Mayor John Hieftje said he supports the idea and that it would be a good complement to the greenbelt program.
"We're uniquely situated to be able to take advantage of something like that,'' he said, noting that another way the program might work would be to have developers simply pay into the greenbelt fund.
Developer Peter Allen offered to do so when his Kingsley Lane project in northwest downtown was up for a vote. In addition to offering several units of affordable housing in the development, he offered $50,000 to help kick-start a TDR program. The City Council accepted, adding the money to the greenbelt fund.
Allen said he supports a TDR program, and thinks other developers would be as well.
"I think any smart developer is going to say, 'I can do six, but I want to go eight,''' he said. Under a TDR they can "buy'' the extra two stories, while helping to preserve farmland and open space, he said.
Despite the support, TDRs aren't a sure bet by any stretch, experts say.
"We have some notable challenges,'' said Barry Lonik, a local land-use consultant. "I think the potential is there. But it takes even more leadership in the absence of other supportive mechanisms.''
"I think it's premature to say it will work in Ann Arbor,'' said Rubin, who has spoken publicly in favor of examining the idea at several meetings. "There are issues we need to look at and get public input on. But ... from what we have seen around the country, it's worth looking into.''
Tracy Davis can be reached at tdavis@annarbornews.com
or 734-994-6856.
U-M promotes car sharing
Officials hope service will reduce campus traffic and congestion
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
BY DAVE GERSHMAN
News Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan wants to bring car sharing to campus in time for next fall, hoping to sign a deal with a national company like Zipcar, Inc.
Details are still up in the air, but the idea is to make car sharing, a trend on some campuses and major cities, another transportation option for professors, staff and students 21 and older.
Companies like Zipcar rent cars by the hour to members, who make arrangements over the Internet and use a credit card-like key to pick up the car from a designated parking lot. Gas is covered by the company and drivers don't need their own basic insurance. When they're done, they leave the car in the same spot they found it.
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"What we're thinking of right now is to start small and have six vehicles on campus, two on North Campus, two on Central Campus and two on the medical campus,'' said Dave Miller, executive director for parking and transportation services.
U-M has issued a request-for-proposals and bids are due later this month. U-M officials have talked to representatives of Zipcar, Inc. The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., declined comment on U-M's plans.
Car sharing would be attractive to people who'd rather not drive to campus, Miller said, but feel they need to drive because they might need quick access to car - such as the staff member who has to dash across the city for a lunchtime meeting. Some students bring cars to Ann Arbor but only use them to get away on weekends, he said.
Car sharing would take some vehicles off the city's roadways, Miller said. The service is part of U-M's attempt to discourage students from bringing cars to campus and to encourage more employees to commute by bus or carpool, he said.
Sarah Hines is a graduate student who's excited by the idea. She had a car "on and off'' during the past academic year. She shared it with her brother in Chicago. She usually rode her bike to get around Ann Arbor, but there are times when a car would have been useful to pick up lots of groceries or pick up friends at the airport.
"So many people I know of here have cars,'' she said, "but it's mostly for the occasional convenience factor.''
Depending on responses to the RFP, members of the general public might be able to use the car sharing service, Miller said.
While a car sharing service could operate without going through the university, this way U-M will provide dedicated spaces for the cars on campus and it's willing to guarantee a minimum amount of revenue for the company during a start-up period, said Miller.
"Our intention is that after a period of time, four or six months, they'll reach a revenue threshold where (the service) is sustainable. But we're willing
Officials hope service will reduce campus traffic and congestion
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
BY DAVE GERSHMAN
News Staff Reporter
The University of Michigan wants to bring car sharing to campus in time for next fall, hoping to sign a deal with a national company like Zipcar, Inc.
Details are still up in the air, but the idea is to make car sharing, a trend on some campuses and major cities, another transportation option for professors, staff and students 21 and older.
Companies like Zipcar rent cars by the hour to members, who make arrangements over the Internet and use a credit card-like key to pick up the car from a designated parking lot. Gas is covered by the company and drivers don't need their own basic insurance. When they're done, they leave the car in the same spot they found it.
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"What we're thinking of right now is to start small and have six vehicles on campus, two on North Campus, two on Central Campus and two on the medical campus,'' said Dave Miller, executive director for parking and transportation services.
U-M has issued a request-for-proposals and bids are due later this month. U-M officials have talked to representatives of Zipcar, Inc. The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., declined comment on U-M's plans.
Car sharing would be attractive to people who'd rather not drive to campus, Miller said, but feel they need to drive because they might need quick access to car - such as the staff member who has to dash across the city for a lunchtime meeting. Some students bring cars to Ann Arbor but only use them to get away on weekends, he said.
Car sharing would take some vehicles off the city's roadways, Miller said. The service is part of U-M's attempt to discourage students from bringing cars to campus and to encourage more employees to commute by bus or carpool, he said.
Sarah Hines is a graduate student who's excited by the idea. She had a car "on and off'' during the past academic year. She shared it with her brother in Chicago. She usually rode her bike to get around Ann Arbor, but there are times when a car would have been useful to pick up lots of groceries or pick up friends at the airport.
"So many people I know of here have cars,'' she said, "but it's mostly for the occasional convenience factor.''
Depending on responses to the RFP, members of the general public might be able to use the car sharing service, Miller said.
While a car sharing service could operate without going through the university, this way U-M will provide dedicated spaces for the cars on campus and it's willing to guarantee a minimum amount of revenue for the company during a start-up period, said Miller.
"Our intention is that after a period of time, four or six months, they'll reach a revenue threshold where (the service) is sustainable. But we're willing