Here’s the simple statement: there is no reason to lose the trees on Kirby Drive or to widen the lanes a few inches.

Actually, there is one conceivable reason, and surely no one actually thinks this is a good idea. That is, if you move the curbs back enough, Centerpoint would be required to move – or bury – their poles and wires. This has been a goal of Kirby property owners for decades. But the subterfuge of using the City’s last-century design manual to force the widening of lanes in order to achieve that esthetic end could not possibly be in play here…could it?

The Upper Kirby District has been saying it has to widen the lanes, narrow the pedestrian realm, and destroy all the trees because the City is forcing it to do that. Certainly, the Public Works department has been adamant about sticking to the guidelines.

We have analyzed this before so I won’t repeat all of that, but here are the basic issues:

1. The street will be torn up no matter what in order to increase storm drain capacity, which we are told is inadequate. If you work where I work, a few blocks from Kirby, and several times a year you get caught in a flood, unable to get your car out onto the street, you are inclined to agree that bigger storm drains will be helpful.

2. The plan to put a median in the street will, in fact, improve safety, and should cut serious crashes roughly in half (and also reduce friction, and thus congestion). The median would replace the center lane, which is the source of most of the friction and many of the crashes on the street. It is the only change to the street that merits adoption. (It should also be adopted south of 59 as well, but the merchants there prefer the serious crashes and congestion in order to enable left turns everywhere, so there won’t be a median there.)

3. The “comfort” of some drivers of large vehicles has been cited as a reason to widen the lanes slightly, at the expense of pedestrians and trees. This is a purely frivolous argument. Comfort is the enemy of safety. There is evidence that the more complicated a street situation is, the more people pay attention to what they’re doing, rather than talking on the phone, or watching television. In any event, in 5 years there will be many fewer Hummers and SUVs on the streets than there are today. This is because the number of people who are willing to support the costs of gasoline for large trucks is dwindling very fast. By the summer of 2010, when we are told gas prices will be around $7 a gallon, the current lane size will seem entirely adequate.

4. Light rail transit service is coming to Richmond at Kirby and further north on Kirby development is becoming focused on pedestrians. Pedestrian comfort, safety, and convenience should be paramount.

The only reason this ridiculous plan is moving forward is because citizens apparently don’t care enough to let the Mayor and Council Member Anne Clutterbuck know their feelings. In nearly a year of talking about it, I have not found a single person who supports the widening, except Council Member Clutterbuck, Mayor White, the board and staff of the Upper Kirby District, and the head of the Public Works department. I’m sure there are others. I’m just saying that in many dozens of meetings and conversations I haven’t found them. Exploring local blogs and many areas of comment, you simply can’t find people saying “I can hardly wait until the trees are gone, and the truck drivers can feel comfortable going faster, and the pedestrian realm is narrowed.”

Other links:
Kirby Drive reconstruction plans pose important questions, trade-offs (Robin Holzer)
Kirby trees doomed, forester says (Gulf Coast Institute)
Trees for Houston vs the Upper Kirby District TIRZ (Tory Gattis)
Kirby: the math (Christof Spieler)
Trees for Houston
Kirby project starts Monday (Houston Chronicle)

A lot of video and many of the presentations from the Congress for the New Urbanism held in Austin a few weeks ago are now available online. There is also a Congress Blog with news and video interviews with some of the presenters.

Note that the presentations page is just one of several. Links to more pages, which go back through some previous events, are at the bottom.

James Howard Kunstler on the future of the world
Perhaps the most provocative - and entertaining - speaker at CNU was James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler is the author of many books, a couple of which skewered the pattern of suburban development as “the greatest misuse of resources in the history of the world.”

At CNU, he led off with this statement: “We have a comprehensive failure of leadership in America; not just George Bush, but business leaders, media, elected officials - all have failed.”

Kunstler also predicted the collapse of tourism as airlines face higher fuel prices. He noted that in the previous week three airlines had gone into bankruptcy because of fuel prices. “We desperately need to rebuild the railroads in America or we’re not going anywhere,” he said. He predicted that maritime shipping would become much more dominant, and that places like Houston, with waterfronts, should invest heavily in them.

Suburbia, he said, is “coming off the menu.” Kunstler predicted “The great metroplexes are going to fail,” with cities densifying at cores and new work focused on small towns and small cities that are scaled for efficiency and success. “Replace your retail fantasies with an agricultural component,” he told the New Urbanists.

Kunstler has a new book called “World Made by Hand,” a novel about a future in which pretty much everything has collapsed and people are back to a rural way of life, separated from other places.

His entire speech is available in a podcast. Note: It’s the one called Episode 86, at the top. There is a long intro from the person who recorded it. Alternatively, this is a direct link to the mp3 of the same thing.

Who should lead the charge against Kunstler’s ideas? Stephen Colbert, of course. Here’s a pretty funny, but interesting, exchange:

Developers on The Competitive Advantage of New Urbanism
Four top developers talked about the market for New Urbanism. Among other comments all agreed that in this troubled market, they aren’t feeling the problem and they are significantly outselling their conventional competitors. One noted that he was making 4-5 sales a month while his competition was selling once a month. Another insisted there are real economic reasons to do New Urbanism; “this is not just about aesthetics,” he said.

Land savings were a huge issue, with one developer saying “We can do 30 acres successfully while conventional competitors need 200 acres for the same level of sales.”

Other comments:
“It’s all going to quality. That’s where the sales, revenues, and margins are.”

“There is a new trend to urbanism itself. Many of the public builders are moving into the cities as fast as they can. This is a good sign.”

“Nearly all of our projects are public/private partnerships and that works for us and we wouldn’t change that.”

“We don’t have any 100% residential projects. The key is mixed use. If the market moves toward retail or office instead of residential, we can move more to that.”

“It’s key that in a tough market the mixed-price levels of New Urbanism mean one can move with the market, to different price points.”

A video of the whole session is available.

Original Green
Steve Mouzon
Mouzon argued that once all human habitat was sustainable and energy efficient because it had to be. Without easy transportation and air conditioning, everything was Green – Original Green. People built their own houses, raised their food, made much of what they needed.

Then, he says, came “the great decline,” which was caused by the rise of the specialist and the disappearance of the generalist. At this point we lost our green, our ability to take care of ourselves.

The components of Original Green were (in order of importance)
1. Sustainable places
2. Sustainable buildings

For places to be sustainable they have to be (in order of importance)
1. Feedable
2. Serviceable
3. Accessible
4. Defensible

For buildings to be sustainable they have to be (in order of importance)
1. Lovable
2. Durable
3. Flexible
4. Frugal

Feedable means you have to be able to get food and water in to the people.
Serviceable means not only can you gain access to the services and amenities of life but the people serving you can afford to live nearby
Accessible means you can access the place by a variety of means (other than cars)
Defensible means you live in a place where you don’t feel that your life or your possessions are in imminent danger.

When you have places like that, Mouzon says, then you can talk about sustainable buildings.

Lovable means they’re not likely to be demolished and carted off to a landfill, because people care about them.

Durable means built to last for hundreds or thousands of years.

Flexible means suitable for whatever use is necessary if it’s going to last for generations.

Frugality makes sense if we’ve done everything else before that. It’s a much bigger picture than “gizmo green.”

Mouzon refers to “The sophistication of longevity.”

He says that living traditions (that is, that which is worthy of love) comes from (in order)
1. Inspiration
2. Resonance
3. Repetition
4. Adoption

First, someone is inspired, has an idea. The idea resonates with others. Others repeat it. It becomes adopted as part of the norm, the living tradition.

Great variety within a tradition is the gateway for great plans.

He notes that in car-dependent places, to frequent a bar requires drinking and driving.

Geometries in golf carts-only places provide twice as much real estate to sell.

He says “That which can reproduce and live sustainably is green; that which is incapable of doing so is not green. This is the standard of life. Life is that process which creates all things green.”

A short video of Steve Mouzon explains his basic ideas. Scroll to the second video.

Canons for Sustainability, VMT challenge highlight Austin event
At the recent Congress for the New Urbanism XVI in Austin, “green” and “sustainability” ruled the days. Fueled by the introduction of a draft set of Canons for Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism, the Congress ended with a call for a 2030 challenge to provide leadership in a national effort to reduce vehicle miles traveled by half by 2030.

There is a short video of Doug Farr, who introduced the 2030 Challenge.

Over the next days and weeks, we’ll publish notes from presentations by various speakers. Wherever possible, we’ll provide links to pertinent material. However, the presentations themselves won’t be available from CNU for several weeks. In the meantime, there is a Congress blog with a lot of material from the event.

Life can just be so good sometimes, as it is for me at this moment. I’m sitting next to a big window looking onto our backyard jungle where the sun is coming through the trees in rays and hitting the orange fish in the little pond just so, and they swim out of it and back into it.

We just made – and then ate - a huge frittata, with some exotic zucchini from Edna, some little golden onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Glass of wine with it, at three on a sunny Sunday afternoon, can’t beat it.

Sitting in this big, bright room eating the frittata, with some fresh sliced tomatoes and some toasted olive bread, both from the Bayou City Farmers Market, we talked about painting the main wall pale apricot, and the ceiling pale blue.

This morning we worked hard in the garden for four hours, pruning a big tree and dealing with the remains, fiddling with the giant tomato plants to keep them from smothering each other, clearing out hundreds of past-their-prime nasturtiums (and collecting pounds of seeds for friends and next year), planting some new flowers, and feeding bunches of marble-sized grapes through the wire frame of the new arbor, which is an astonishingly nice addition created by the artist Mike Scranton.

Both the tomatoes and the grapevines had entangled themselves with the Meyer Lemon tree, which is heavy and drooping with 167 golf-ball-sized still-green lemons that will get to be baseball size and be incredibly delicious in the summer. We had to put a big net over the peach tree, because the peaches are now turning fiery orange and the birds are beginning to eye them. The new pear looks like it’s fine, and the new grapefruit tree, which is only four feet tall, has about 20 little grapefruit on it.

The Mexican thorn lime has just a few tiny little fruit, but all of a sudden it’s burst into flower again, so maybe we’ll get some limes for the first time. The Capital orange and the Clementine tangerine sadly don’t seem to flower, and thus haven’t produced any fruit.

Green beans are coming every night, zucchinis and cucumbers just now have little vegetable objects on them. Fried a few zucchini blossoms last night, along with some enormous Gulf shrimp. Ate the last of our spring potatoes Monday.

To be sure, life is not perfect. One of the two main longitudinal members of the wheelbarrow cracked in half, and that will be a lot of trouble to fix. Some years ago, when I had a fabulous woodshop, I would have just gone out and made a new piece for it. Although I would have made it out of oak, which would have been much better than the pine that was used originally, making the wheelbarrow basically disposable, which is pretty much the standard in the current world of More. (Those two words, Better and More, do such a great job of explaining themselves.)

Lacking a shop, here’s how I’ll make the piece. Actually, two new pieces. Might as well. Buy a piece of oak 2×4, get my friend David Gresham to rip it in half for me, to make two 2×2s, and then sit in the backyard in the evening with a glass of wine and a drawknife and shape the handles, and then some Sunday when I’m forced to because I need the damn wheelbarrow, I’ll take it apart and put the new wood in.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to work at the office and immediately get engaged in the stressful activities of modern life. But because of today, I’ll be a little more calm, and a little more mindful of how un-serious all that is, and by tomorrow evening I’ll be back in this life for a few hours. We’re going to celebrate Mother’s Day tomorrow evening with our sons and daughter-in-law, as well as celebrate her birthday. We’ll certainly have some green beans, tomatoes, and greens, not to mention some great new potatoes grown by our neighbors at their place out in Edna. Just thinking about that, I’m enjoying it already.

My judgment of my state of wellbeing is pretty high most Sundays. That’s when I think and write about quality of life, and I have to say I’m pretty happy on those days, here in our little garden paradise on 5,000 square feet of land in Montrose, in Houston, Texas, in mid-May at the gradual close of an eight-month-long set of wonderful seasons as the slow summer sets in.

Those of us who value quality would be fools to worry about criticisms that we are utopian idealists. If we are human, and we are awake, surely most of us want our lives to be of the highest quality. We have great expectations, and we think that is rational and good. We like having dreams, and perhaps we desire more than we can have. We view that situation as healthy, and part of growing, of reaching for potential.

The question is, what are the elements of this high quality of life, and are there elements that most or all us share? To the extent we do share them, we could, in theory, work together to increase their quality. In any event, we come together in tribes, villages, towns, and cities to give it a try.

In Wikipedia, quality of life starts with the idea of human wellbeing. Being well. This implies the quality of individual health plays an important role in our sense of wellbeing. At minimum, health requires good genes, good air, good water, and good food, in adequate quantities. It might also require shelter, and tools. Mobility comes into play.

Mazlow and others outline a set of human needs and attempt to prioritize and connect them. Mazlow calls the base requirements “deficiency needs,” and these include Air, Food, Water, Sex, Sleep, Homeostasis, and Excretion. (Homeostasis is the maintenance of the internal environment within tolerable limits.) Satisfying those needs has to come first in the building of a life of high quality.

Right away there are questions about how much of each of those is enough, and there are assertions that too much of any of them is problematic. So a person has to judge the sufficiency of meeting those needs as an individual, albeit within an environment of helpful carping from all sides.

Throughout human history, the quest has been for less physical, less time-consuming methods of meeting some of those needs, particularly for food and water. Today in America, the amount of effort needed to get food and water can consist of putting on the brakes and turning into a fast-food driveway, followed by a slightly annoying search for money in pockets and purses in order to pay for it, and then figure out how to get the food and drink secured along the seat and so on, and then a quick bite, and the food satisfaction is underway. Nothing to it.

Now concerns arise that this means of acquiring food has negative personal effects around the waist, and in the heart and arteries, as well as broad negative community effects ranging from air pollution to declining community fiber. General health is said to suffer in this environment as two or three of the fundamental resources of air, water, and food are degraded.

“The environment” is not some other thing to be protected for its own sake, but is the total immersive world in which we move through our days. It is “our environment,” the one that supports – or not – human health and life. The reason to protect and nurture the environment is entirely selfish in order to survive and, beyond that, to thrive, both as individuals and as a species.

The world is slowly coming around to the idea of “sustainability.” The most common definition of sustainability is “meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations.” Sustainability implies that, at minimum, there must be air, food, and water adequate for everyone to thrive. But “needs” clearly isn’t enough for human beings. We also want to satisfy desire, to realize dreams.

If we can manipulate the quality of the environment in our favor as a collaborative species enterprise, then it becomes interesting to realize that the quality of our individual lives depends on the quality of our general intent as individuals and as a species. Perhaps it is fair to say that intent becomes shared through visions and stories. That is, the quality of our lives may depend on the quality of our dreams.

Next: Quality of life beyond basic needs

In American cities, including Houston, the central topic of civic discussion is the tension between Quality and More. People who are excited about the way Houston is growing are busily gathering numbers to prove that More is happening here than in almost any other place. Forecasts tell us that we will add 3.5 million more people in the next three decades, not to mention 5 billion more square feet of buildings that, together with car facilities, will use up between 1,000 and 1,500 square miles of currently undeveloped land.

On the other hand, people who want Houston to be Better are increasingly frustrated, particularly in the City of Houston, because all the More numbers appear to point to Worse, and Worse is getting pretty tiresome. In Stephen Klineberg’s 2007 Houston Area Survey, although most Houstonians think this is a pretty great place to live, 50.3 think all this growth will make living conditions worse, while only 19.7 percent think it will make them better. (Thirty percent don’t know what to think yet.)

The notion of a high quality of life is - or should be - at the center of human self-interest. Yet in a recent survey we conducted online, asking people to choose their top three most important values from a list of eight, only 67% chose quality of life as one of those.

Perhaps this is not surprising, since the idea of quality of life has only been a powerful civic force in Houston for a relatively short time, less than a decade. People have staked out different areas of meaning about the term, but it seems clear it’s becoming the central goal, in spite of attempts to cheapen it or brush it aside in the interest of More.

The urbanist architect Andrés Duany likes to say that anybody in America has a higher standard of living than anybody in some Italian hill town, but anybody in some Italian hill town has a higher quality of life than anybody in America.

That’s the fundamental struggle, particularly in Houston. It pits the proponents of More Stuff against the proponents of Quality of Life. The More polemicist Joel Kotkin has captivated the imaginations of many of Houston’s business and political leaders with his call for squelching the efforts of “elites” to bring quality of life to America’s cities in the interest of high-speed, inexpensive (cheap) growth.

The other side is perhaps best represented by the writer Bill McKibben, whose latest book “Deep Economy” contains the assertion that More hasn’t made us happier, and calls for more attention to the things that actually improve our wellbeing and sense of satisfaction.

I have been astonished at the success of the books by Frances Mayes, who wrote “Under the Tuscan Sun,” and now has a handful of other books about this topic. As you read her, you hear her talking about how two sophisticated San Francisco intellectuals gravitated to a place where they work with their hands all day, digging and fixing and building and collapsing in bed exhausted each night. But along the way, they’ve spent time with neighbors, exchanged vegetables and recipes, shared wine and olive oil, and delved into what she calls the Italian “genius for living.” What could that mean?

This web journal will explore the Quality vs More struggle, as it captures the whole world’s attention. Next: The Meaning of the Term Quality of Life.