A Bit More Detail

Back in May 2009 I’d explored the interest of Jim Balsillie, ex-co-CEO of troubled Blackberry makers Research in Motion, in bringing a second NHL team to southern Ontario, perhaps to Kitchener-Waterloo. This never materialized, not least since the appearance of a second NHL team in the Maple Leafs’ hinterland would lead to decreased profitability and/or require the team to become better. Now in 2012, the southern Ontario city of Markham, in suburban York Region just north of Toronto, is interested in building a hockey arena with a sufficient number of seats to support a NHL team.

As the Toronto Star noted, this is part of a substantial project aimed at making Markham a coherent city. It’s a rather risky gamble, though.

For decades, Markham has been planning to create a downtown where there was none before. Because the town was cobbled together from three smaller municipalities, it never had a natural core.

Nearly 400 hectares of vacant lands straddling Highway 7 provided an opportunity.

A big chunk of that area was owned by development company Remington Group, whose chairman is Rudy Bratty.

Remington and the town hashed out a downtown core to rival any forward-thinking metropolis, with high-density dwellings, dedicated transit lanes, and ample green space. In 2007, a 20-plus year construction process began.

[. . .]

As [Brad Humphreys, a sports economist at the University of Alberta] points out, a large and expanding body of academic research shows that arenas are not the boost they might seem to be.

Humphreys, who was hired by Markham as a consultant to evaluate the town’s financial contribution, said he could not comment on the specific advice he gave.

But a report prepared by town staff echoes his basic point: that “building such an event facility does not generate significant tangible economic benefits for cities.”

As Humphreys explains, most consumers have a fixed budget for entertainment spending. A Markham resident who pays for a ticket to see the new hockey team play is probably not going to buy a movie ticket that week too. If she buys a jacket from the new team’s store, she’s not going to buy another jacket on Main Street.

The largest benefit of an arena, both Humphreys and the report agree, are intangibles: civic pride, a heightened sense of community.

[. . .]

If Markham succeeds, it could be another Winnipeg, whose “intangible” benefits from getting the Jets back would probably rival the GDP of Canada.

Or even a mini-Brooklyn, the borough Manhattanites once loved to snub, whose cool status was cemented by the acquisition of the Nets NBA team.

As in Markham, the private group which brought the Nets to Brooklyn and built the team an arena is also building a significant downtown neighbourhood centred around the sports facility.

Scott Stinson at the National Post, meanwhile, seems almost certain that any new hockey arena capable of supporting a NHL team would be used by the NHL only as a pawn in negotiations with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Could an NHL team come to Markham? It could, but only after significantly compensating the owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and only after Bettman has exhausted all other options. He’s made no secret of being loath to move teams. More likely, Markham’s council has put up $162.5-million just to help the NHL’s current owners gain some negotiating leverage.

It is a baffling turn of events. The town has tried to reassure residents that this is all no big deal, since its share of the arena costs are to be recouped via development levies that are tacked on the construction of new residential units. It won’t cost taxpayers a thing, council has purred.

Except it will. Once those millions start to roll in, it becomes public money. It could be used on pools, libraries, garbage collection, whatever. It will be used to pay down the cost of a new arena. Taxpayers, that is, will be paying for it.

Don’t worry, the town assures soothingly: There’s a business case for it. Think of the economic benefits! Except arenas don’t spur growth. Last year, I spoke with Judith Grant Long, a Harvard professor who wrote a book about public-private arena deals. She summed up her research like this: “It is very difficult to make a case that significant economic benefits are to be derived from developing new major league sports facilities.”

So there’s that. Meanwhile, what if development slows and the funding isn’t easily recouped? What if the arena runs over budget, as such things are wont to do? What if the NHL stays away? The councillors of Markham might want to talk to their counterparts in Kansas City, which built an arena in 2007 that was intended to host an NHL or NBA team.

Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok let me know that friendly if distant Canadian-Honduran relations have just become more intense: Canada is now exercising something like sovereignty over a community in Honduras, as economist Paul Romer and Honduras politician Octavio Sanchez wrote in The Globe and Mail.

Many people from around the world would like access to the security and opportunity that Canadian governance makes possible. According to Gallup, the number of adults worldwide who would move permanently to Canada if given the chance is about 45 million. Although Canada can’t accommodate everyone who’d like to move here, it can help to bring stronger governance to many new places that could accept millions of new residents. The RED in Honduras is the place to start.

[. . .]

Canadians are increasingly aware of the limits of traditional aid but remain committed to the principle that supporting international development is not only in Canada’s national interest but is the right thing to do. Recent trade agreements with Peru, Colombia, Panama and Honduras demonstrate that Latin America remains high on Canada’s development agenda.

The RED offers a new way to think about development assistance, one that, like trade, relies on mutually beneficial exchange rather than charity. It’s an effort to build on the success of existing special zones based around the export-processing maquila industry. These zones have expanded employment in areas such as garments and textiles, with substantial investment from Canadian firms such as Gildan, but they haven’t brought the improved legal protections needed to attract higher-skilled jobs. By setting up the rule of law, the RED can open up new opportunities for Canadian firms to expand manufacturing operations and invest in urban infrastructure.

By participating in RED governance, Canada can make the new city a more attractive place for would-be residents and investors. It can help immediately by appointing a representative to a commission that has the power to ensure that RED leadership remains transparent and accountable. It also can assist by training police officers.

The courts in the RED will be independent from those in the rest of Honduras. The Mauritian Supreme Court has agreed in principle to serve as a court of final appeal for the RED, but Canada can play a strong complementary role. Because the RED can appoint judges from foreign jurisdictions, Canadian justices could hear RED cases from Canada and help train local jurists.

Oversight, policing and jurisprudence are just a few of the ways in which Canada can help. Effective public involvement will also be required in education, health care, environmental management and tax administration. Such co-operation can be based on a fee-for-service arrangement in which the RED pays Canada using gains in the value of the land in the new reform zone.

Wikipedia’s Spanish-language Región especial de desarrollo, “special development region”, goes into more detail, translated into English below.

“Special development region” is the official name of an administrative division urban Honduras (colloquially called model city) subject to the national government and provided a high level of autonomy with a separate political and judicial system, and under an economic system theory based on free market capitalism. [The project involves the creation of several cities in these regions with the hope of attracting investment and creating jobs in those areas. Each region has its representative special executive or governor and will have its own laws (or constitutional status), people must voluntarily enter into this system. The Law of Special Development Regions articulates the relationship between the constitutional status of each region special and the sovereignty of Honduras.

These special areas are the application of so-called charter cities or towns have as a reference model and the experience of China’s special administrative regions (mainly the case of Hong Kong and how it served as a model city as special economic zones Shenzhen) and other countries of East Asia and Southeast Asia such as South Korea and Singapore.

The constitutional provisions that establish special development regions were raised in late 2010 and early 2011 during the government of President Porfirio Lobo, who gave official backing to economic development proposals of American economist Paul Romer who promotes the benefits of creating charter cities or towns in territories uninhabited model, with clear and stable rules (legal certainty) and open doors to capital and immigration.

I don’t know what to think of this. It’s the first time I’ve heard anything about Canada’s involvement in this concept anywhere. The Canadian government hasn’t replied, so far as I’ve heard, but this might be the sort of idea the Conservative government would go for.

People, what say you?

Over at The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer performs some pretty nice local history in three parts (1, 2, 3), using results from the 1940 census to see just who lived in his childhood neighbourhood of New York City’s East Harlem, and how.

414 East 115th Street then, like now, had five families in it. The first listed is the Squittieri clan. Dominick and Geneviene had been born in Italy in 1888 and 1890 respectively. Dominick ran a grocery store and worked a 60-hour week to earn $1300 per year — $20,800 in 2011 dollars. They rented for $35 a month, or $561 in 2011 dollars. Dominick was listed as having had two years of schooling; his wife had never been to school at all. They lived with their ten children: Carmine, 24; Alphonse, 23; James, 22; Helen, 20; Yolanda, 18; John, 17; Mary, 16; Domenick Jr., 15; Louise, 12; and Gilda, 10.

You can see the lingering effect of the Depression in the statistics. Carmine worked as a painter (a 48-hour work week) for $1190 a year — $19,100 in 2011 dollars. Alphonse was not in the labor force. It isn’t completely clear why: there is a squiggle that is probably an “H,” meaning he was doing “housework.” It could, however, be a “U,” which would indicate “unable,” meaning a disability. He was not a student. His sister, Helen, was also out of the labor force and clearly listed as doing “housework.”

James, Yolanda, and John were unemployed and looking for work. The enumerator put “new worker” as their profession. All three had been unemployed for over a year. Carmine, Alphonse, James, Helen and Yolanda had all dropped out of school in the eighth grade; John had finished one year of high school before dropping out. The four youngest children were all in school.

Of course, it was a different time. I do not know what happened to the Squittieri family, but I bet you they went on to economic success — something that a Mexican-American family with the same statistics today will probably not achieve. But I don’t know: in 2022, it might be possible to try to track them down in the 1950 census.

Amply illustrated, this genealogy of place is a must-read.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters linking to some interesting posts, one on Brazilian migration to the United States, the other on the stable and relatively high sex ratio of Siberia, the last on the sex trade and migration in Spain. Go, read.

• 80 Beats notes that the failure of North Korea’s satellite launch has had huge negative consequences for that country: diplomatic, economic, and, of course, internal.
• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton is thankful that, on the eve of the conservative Wildrose Party’s victory over the apparently not-conservative-enough Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, he doesn’t live in that province of Canada.
• Language Log has a guest post by one S. Robert Ramsey defending the esthetics of Korean script vis-a-vis Chinese as part of what seems to be a backhanded attack on Chinese script for its excessive (?) complexities.
• Marginal Revolution links to an interesting new report identifying urban growth in developing countries as the main driver of economic growth in the coming decades.
• Noel Maurer points out, in a defense of Rachel Maddow’s new book on American militarism against one criticism, that in the pre-Second World War era just as now the United States was constantly fighting little wars.
• At Savage Minds, Christopher Kelty is unimpressed by the Archaeological Institute of America’s opposition to open access for papers.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that anti-gay groups are upset with Canada’s BioWare game developer for including the potential for same-sex relationships in its online games–Star Wars is mentioned, but Mass Effect 3 also includes some.
• Towleroad takes apart the argument that the apparently orderly evacuation of the Titanic a century ago was achieved because of Christian values which have now vanished from our godless culture. Where to begin?
• Zero Geography reproduces a map of the top Twitter-using countries and finds that the United States and the United Kingdom rank alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Malaysia. Twitter is global, it seems.

• Anders Sandberg at Andart approves of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s desire to use space travel to create offworld backups for our biosphere.
• Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston–driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts’ education institutes–could serve Boston quite well.
• Two links from Centauri Dreams today, one describing the planetary system of HD 10180, a Sun-like star that supports nine planets to our eight, and the other describing hypothetical laser-based defenses for starships against interstellar dust.
• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo describes the difficulties tourism planners in destination cities have with getting people to visit sites that aren’t the most heavily trafficked.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn’t much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in Siberia.
• The Global Sociology Blog discusses what happens when celebrity culture and social networking sites like Twitter insect. The answer? It’s easier to get social capital than ever before.
• At GNXP, Razib Khan notes that Argentina–unlike English-speaking countries also products of mass European immigration–still evidences the genetic trace of indigenous populations.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio points out that, at long last, global climate change is kicking off (as expected as early as 1981).
• Registan features a guest post from Uzbekistan commentator Azamat Seitov, who discusses the possibility that the Eurasian Economic Community–a Russia-centered bloc also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–will take off. He’s skeptical.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason writes about how the CBC’s innovative programming let him learn and enjoy things he’d otherwise not have. The cutbacks will not do good things for the national broadcaster.
• Jeff Jedras at A BCer in Toronto pins the blame for the massive cost overruns in Canada’s share of the vastly overexpensive F-35 fighter program squarely on the Conservative Party and its ministers.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster shares the good news that the United States will resume producing the radioactive isotope plutonium-238 so as to provide the necessary fuel for outer-system space probes.
• Crasstalk’s Mean Ol’ Liberal reflects on the meaning of the bulls of Wall Street, not only the statue but the speculators.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that if China’s leadership really does see global geopolitics as a zero-sum phenomenon, China’s relationship with the United States may face substantially more risks than previously thought.
• At Geocurrents, Martin Lewis notes that the northern half of Mali claimed by Tuareg rebels for their national homeland actually has very large non-Tuareg populations.
• The Global Sociology Blog notes the incentives to sociopathy in the global economy.
• Noel Maurer, at The Power and the Money, notes that the Mexican city of Monterrey has a rather high population density by American standards, and a high density of police, too. Thus, its crime rate has little if anything to do with the city’s sprawl.
• Registan notes the ongoing solidification and intensification of ethnic divisions between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in southern Kyrgyzstan in the years after the deadly Osh riots.
• Torontoist’s Todd Aalgard notes that plans to immediately rebuild a platground in Toronto’s High Park are stymied by the need to meet city safety and building codes.

Liam Heneghan’s 3 Quarks Daily essay takes a look at the connection between urban ecologies and urban societies. It’s a long essay, worth considering in full; some representative samples are below.

Urban ecology, the environmental sciences youngest and most rambunctious cousin, is in a position to influence the design of the cities of the future. Its clout comes from its willingness to think big, to think about the ecology of entire cities as if they were just any other ecosystem. Urban ecologists call this big picture view the “ecology of the city”.

From this disciplinary perspective, Chicago is just another savannah, one where admittedly the commonest species is the human animal.

However, by taking this bird’s eye view of cities, is urban ecology losing sight of the bird-on-the-ground? I mean this quite literally. Is urban ecology losing it roots in natural history? Will the successful cultivation of relationships with decision makers, municipal authorities, city planners and other governmental powers-that-be, come at the expense of urban ecologists’ knowledge about birds, wildlife, beetles and the other creeping things inhabiting the city?

[. . .]

Urban ecology is not the first discipline to encounter the tensions accompanying distinctions between the bird’s-eye view and the bird-on-the-ground view of the city. An instructive example found in the work of Michel deCerteau (1925-1986) who makes of this tension a theory of the everyday interactions of people who both conform to and resist the strictures of the culture to which they belong.

[. . .]

An influential chapter in deCerteau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life is aptly entitled Walking in the City. In it deCerteau illustrated his broader thesis concerning the differences between tactics and strategies. Strategies are concerned with “force-relationships” that can be exercised when an entity can be separated from an environment. A city, a proprietor, a scientific institution serve as deCerteau’s examples here. Each can be held up and inspected as separate analyzable units, each has its own distinct place – its headquarters, or at the very least it occupies lines on a map. Tactics, on the other hand, are not so easily localized. Tactics are usually deployed on the sly, “poached” to use deCerteau’s term, on someone else’s territory.

A simple way of understanding what deCerteau’s is arguing is to contrast those individuals, institutions, or governments who have grand conceptions of the city, with the pedestrians, jaywalkers, flâneurs, who make their own plans, and take up the business of living in the city in ways that are simultaneously constrainted and resisting of these grand designs. He dramatizes the distinction by opening the chapter’s narrative from his perch on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. From there one get’s a bird’s eye view, indeed a planner’s view, of the entire city. Peering down at the insect-like pedestrians swarming beneath him, he sees in their movement a type of pedestrian-grammar.

The city may be produced by those with visions of the city, but it is consumed in a creative, one might say productive way, by those who walk in the city.

All this rarified talk becomes concrete when one thinks about the everyday practices of pedestrians treading the city streets. The act of walking becomes strange, even given a slight revolutionary tinge, when one recalls how the manners of pedestrians can cut across the designs of city managers, proprietors, planners, and other strategic officers.

[. . .]

Urban ecology which only emerged as a distinct subdiscipline in ecology in the 1970s has made a lot of its own use of the in and of distinction. The distinction is regarded as a significant conceptual leap forward. It places uni-disciplinary, small scale ecological studies on one side, and multidisciplinary, multiscalar studies, especially those that examine the human and non-human aspects of nature simultaneously, on the other.

[. . .]

A study of the physical environment, the soil, or the biota of a city or a neighborhood would be considered ecology “in” the city. These studies can be aggregated to allow for generalities to emerge. Cities tend, for instance, to have their own distinctive climatic situations. Rain is more frequently in cities than in the hinterlands. City temperatures tend to increase as population grows up to a certain limit at least. These climatic differences have, in turn, implications for vegetation growing in the city. Spring comes earlier in urban areas. Decomposition of dead organic matter occurs a little faster. Tree cover changes as cities develop (decreasing in forested areas, increasing in desert areas). Urban vegetation is weedier, with more non-natives, but diversity can be high since plant diversity oftentimes follows the money. The richer the human population the lusher is the vegetation. City mammals tend to be moderately sized carnivores. All the above insights emerge from within the “ecology in the city” paradigm.

“Ecology of the city” takes an explicitly systems view of things. By system here is meant a set of entities that interact to make a connected whole. In what manner do the elements of the city the human and non-human aspects of nature interact to contribute to an emergent whole city? Among the examples that Pickett and his colleagues give are studies of the amount of pollutants or carbon taken up (sequestered being the $100 term preferred by ecologists) by all the trees in Chicago. Studies of the flow of crucial nutrients like nitrogen (a key element for the growth of vegetation, but also a contributor to the fouling of water bodies) have been done on the scale of entire cities. For instance, fascinating whole system evaluations of nutrient flow are conducted as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where Pickett is a project leader. The resource accounting tool of “ecological footprinting”, developed by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, provides another example. Footprinting is not only a way to make us feel miserable about our personal environmental impact; it can used to have an entire metropolitan area hang its head in shame. A simple back of the envelope calculation reveals that the footprint of Chicago is larger than the state in which it is located!

In another influential early review Nancy Grimm, a professor at Arizona State University and a project leader at the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research project and her colleagues also utilize the in and of distinction and they identify similar systems-oriented hallmarks of the latter type of study. In particular, they call for integration of social science approaches with more traditional approaches to ecology, and they illustrate what this looks like with a series of increasingly sophisticated conceptual models revealing the interaction of physical, ecological, and social variables. They conclude that without insight into the integration of the human and the ecological perspectives at local and global scales urban ecology will be less effective in guiding public policy and management.

Jason Epstein at The New York Review of Books‘s blog comments on the political philosophy of New York-born and long-time Toronto resident Jane Jacobs. Epstein, it seems, would call her a conservative in the sense that Jacobs was a pragmatist uninterested in sweeping ideologies. This conservatism, he argues, is quite distinct from the ideologies of neoconservatives.

A team of filmmakers planning a documentary on Jane Jacobs asked me recently about the original reviews of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was Jane’s lifelong editor and close friend and had just written an introduction for the 50th anniversary edition of her famous critique of city planners such as Robert Moses and their destruction of vital city neighborhoods. I told the filmmakers, whose film was planned for the anniversary, that writers like Jane are usually attacked by beneficiaries of entrenched institutions and that she was no exception. But I also said that I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response to Jane’s book from New York’s so-called Upper West Side intellectuals, most of whom had recently transferred their zeal from the Marxist left to the capitalist right; many had previously supported and hoped to strengthen the moderate social welfare state but were now fiercely opposed to it.

It was one of these New York intellectual friends, a proto neocon, who first suggested that I read Jane’s article in Fortune defending vital city neighborhoods from rapacious planners, the seedling that became Death and Life. Though I had never been a socialist and have my doubts about capitalism as a necessary evil I shared my friend’s enthusiasm for Jane’s critique. But I was puzzled when he went further by denouncing Washington’s plan at the time to fluoridate the water supply as an intrusion on one’s right to let one’s teeth rot. I wondered whether he was joking—surely he would not go so far in his flight from the left as to oppose protective chemicals in the drinking water, or would he?

[. . .]

Jane of course would have found such extremism absurd. One of her biographers accurately called her a genius of common sense. She belonged to no faction or party. Her mind was so finely made as T.S. Eliot said of Henry James, that no idea could violate it and none did. She was a skeptical empiricist from head to foot. She would have been disgusted by today’s right-wing Jacobinism which calls itself conservative.

My new right-wing friends in those early days danced the classic revolutionary two step. As they defended personal autonomy from an intrusive state they also pursued institutional power for themselves: funding from the CIA and right wing foundations, jobs from the Luce magazines, conservative think tanks, crackpot millionaires, invitations to Nixon’s White House: the well traveled revolutionary route from catacombs to Vatican, from barricades to Tuilleries and Kremlin. As for Jane, her only power base except for a brief tour at Luce’s Architectural Forum was her own writing.

Go, read and comment.

Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis has a post up that takes a look at population density in the San Francisco Bay Area and its intersections with mass transit. I thought it worthwhile to highlight it given the critical importance of population density in debates on transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

A sound urban system, environmentalists now argue, is characterized by mixed-use, dense, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods focused around transit stops. Unfortunately, many of the Bay Area’s more thickly inhabited suburbs are not situated near rail lines, increasing their dependence on automobiles. By the same token, neighborhoods around metro and commuter train stations are often marked by relatively low density. Although both market forces and environmental reason call for tightly packed housing in such areas, the anti-intensification, NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) movement has forestalled development of this kind.

To demonstrate what might seem to be counter-intuitive assertions, Stanford cartographer Jake Coolidge and I have been working on a visualization scheme to show the relationship between population density and public transportation in the Bay Area. Jake’s maps and graphs are now complete, and are posted here. They focus on the Yellow Line of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which runs from the San Francisco Airport through the city to the far eastern suburbs, and Caltrain, which goes from downtown San Francisco through “the Peninsula” and Silicon Valley to San Jose and beyond. For comparative purposes, paired maps show similar systems located elsewhere in the country, the Orange Line of the Washington D.C. Metro in the case of BART, and the SEPTA Main Line in metropolitan Philadelphia in the case of Caltrain. All four maps show population density in relation to the rail-lines and their stations. Paired graphs indicate the number of persons living within half a mile radius—a reasonable walking distance—of each station on all four lines. (For a complementary analysis of demographic patterns, see the Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog).

Some interesting patterns are revealed by these maps and graphs. As the first set shows, downtown San Francisco stands out for its density. This pattern, of course, was established well before the construction of the BART line, which dates only to the 1960s. Outside of this restricted area, density in the Bay Area drops off sharply. Even Oakland, supposedly a highly urban area, is not particularly crowded. To the east of Oakland, BART runs through a highly elite, quasi-rural area around Orinda and Lafayette before it enters classical suburbia in Walnut Creek and Concord. Although a few moderately dense developments have sprouted around BART stations in this area, settlement remains relatively thin. Few people walk or even bike to these BART stations, as most are compelled to drive by the distances involved.

The Washington Metro presents some instructive contrasts. Note that much of downtown Washington has relatively few residents; although many people work in the Federal Triangle neighborhood, few live there. The highest density along the Metro’s Orange Line is found not in the District, but rather in “suburban” Arlington, Virginia, especially around the Courthouse station. The strip of land between Rosslyn and Balston presents a nice example of successful urban intensification. When the Metro line was originally opened, Arlington was sleepy, low-rise ‘burb. I lived in the Courthouse area in the late 1980s, and witnessed its rapid transformation into a vibrant urban pocket. A short stroll from the metro-line, Arlington remains as suburban as it ever was, but around each station a walkable urban neighborhood has emerged. The result is a kind of a “bead-city” stretching along the rail-line. Is it odd, I must ask, that northern Virginia has allowed such eco-friendly urban intensification, whereas the supposedly more environmentally aware Bay Area prevents it?

[. . .]

The Philadelphia pattern is quite different. Philadelphia’s high density areas are much more extensive than those of San Francisco, as can be seen on the maps. Density along the BART line in northern San Francisco, however, exceeds that of the inner stretch of the Main Line, as can be seen by comparing the two graphs. The suburban reaches of the Main Line also contrast sharply with the Caltrain Line. Whereas the density trend along the Caltrain corridor is virtually flat, that of the Main Line is steep. Over most of its extent, the Main Line passes through low-density communities characterized by “old wealth” estates. Similar neighborhoods are plentiful to the south of San Francisco, but they tend to be located away from the train tracks, towards the mountains. The one major exception is well-heeled Atherton, situated between Menlo Park and Redwood City. As Atherton’s Caltrain station operates only on weekends, it is not mapped here.

If the environmentalists’ call for a transition to a lower-carbon future is to be realized, population growth should be encouraged around transit stations. In actuality, it has been heavily discouraged in northern California. As this cartographic exercise shows, neighborhoods near the main rail lines of the San Francisco Bay Area have tremendous potential for intensification. Urbanization, in turn, would allow ailing lines, like Caltrain, to return to health.