LAI KeyNotes: September/October 2006

September/October Letter from the President

Beautiful Parliament Buildings

Dr. James A. Fawcett

The Board of Governors and the Land Economics Foundation meetings in Ottawa are reported below. It was a beautiful time to be in Ottawa, the Society is in good shape and we eagerly engaged a number of new initiatives with our leadership. More on those issues in future Letters.

We are finalizing the details of another feature for our members and our Lambda Alpha International Student Association (LAISA) student members. The website will soon have a “resume service” feature that will allow LAISA members to post their resumes. Those of you looking for students in the associated fields represented in LAI will be able to quickly have access to their resumes via this tool. We will have instructions for using the resume service in an upcoming issue of KeyNotes.

I want to make special mention of three losses we have experienced this past month. One of our most active At-Large Members, Roy Sheargold, lost his 52-year-old son after heart surgery in Sydney, Australia earlier this month. Roy has been particularly active as a member of LAI and has traveled from Australia twice a year to be with us at our Land Economics Weekends. We will miss him in Ottawa. We also lost Geoffrey McMorrough Kavanagh, one of the founding members of the London Chapter who was influential in making that chapter such a success. Geoffrey was Chairman of the architecture practice of Covell Matthews Histon International. His wife, Mari, also a member of the London Chapter, survives him. In Sacramento, we lost Hank Fisher of Hank Fisher Properties, a leader in the community and major Sacramento area homebuilder. We will miss the voices and contributions of these members and extend our deepest condolences to each of the families.

If you have not yet joined us for one of our Land Economics Weekends, I hope that you will consider joining us in the future. In the spring we will meet in Dublin, Ireland for meetings and tours then travel for a one-day event in Belfast, Northern Ireland to tour the Titanic Historic District, the largest redevelopment project in Europe. Our Executive Director, Terry Stevenson, will be sending out information about the spring meeting in the near future. It will be a rare opportunity to once again, “get beneath the skin” of two historic cities. I hope to see you there.

It’s amazing to go to the United Kingdom and experience the vitality achieved by a mixture of uses in most city centers….then you go to the outskirts of the community and you see great blocks of housing units. The majority of these were built after World War II when housing was so critically needed and the architecture of the time set the standard for these huge utilitarian blocks and the separation of uses seen in many European cities and the US.

Early in September I had the interesting experience of attending a small conference that included housing and community development organizations/ practitioners, public policymakers, financing experts, academics and public/ private developers. These small seminars have been held since 1987. It is rotated among US, UK, and Canada and hosted by the rotating host organization. This year it was held in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland hosted by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). Last conference was in Chicago by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO), next year it will be in the Eastern part of Canada hosted by the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA). Each country is limited to 25 delegates; the topics vary but always address issues of housing and community development.

Public policy and interest in mixing uses in cities has shifted in the last few years. More and more zoning, financing, architectural and policy interests look to ways to provide a mixture including housing, retail and other uses. This has been concurrent with legislative mandates in the US and sale of many of the more desirable publicly owned units in the UK which have resulted in concentrating the poorest of the poor in housing developments with under funded maintenance. Predictably a concentration of social problems has accompanied these changes.

Now, in all three countries there is an amazing focus on the benefits of incorporating housing for people of all incomes with other uses into the core of communities. Examples shown in Scotland were very forward thinking and supported by the municipal governments seemingly to a greater extent than in the US and Canada. Canada stopped building concentrations of public housing many years ago and has purposefully mixed housing for all incomes throughout their neighborhoods. They appear to have less need for corrective work in their communities. In all discussions the need to achieve a high degree of education, cooperation and coordination between housing entities, developers, local authorities and national governments (the owners!) was evident. A major educational role for the three organizations to work on.

We all recognized that these discussions have a long way to go to make successful mixed use developments the norm not the exception but beginning the conversations focuses the intent to achieve the revitalizing uses in the center of the US cities and to relieve the problems of communities with large blocks of housing with neglected maintenance needs. For public and private developers it opens up opportunities to create mixtures of uses which support each when the market is stronger for one use than another. So keep your eyes open for opportunities and your ears alert for local dialogues on the potentials to be found in situations where many objectives can be achieved by being a bit creative.

We need to consider the effects of ballot initiatives curtailing the use of eminent domain in our individual states. However, even more threatening is likelihood that HR 4128/S3873 –Private Property Rights Protections Act of 2005 may passed by Congress. This prohibits state/local gov’t use of eminent domain for economic development, enforcement through courts and penalties of broad range of federal economic development funds.

Once again Lambda Alpha International experienced warm hospitality and got an “under the skin of the city” look at the Canadian capital city from our colleagues in the Ottawa host chapter. In keeping with our North American capitals theme of the year, more than sixty members and guests attended a wonderful fall weekend in lovely Canada. Our hosts, Doug Kelly, Ottawa Chapter president and Nancy Meloshe, showed us not only the built aspects of the city but also the abundant natural resources nearby.

Our Friday expedition took us to Gatineau Park, a 361 square kilometer natural area managed by Canada’s National Capital Commission. The park forms a wedge the lower corner of which starts in the City of Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa but also a part of the National Capital Commission region. Set on an escarpment above the cities of Gatineau and Ottawa, we were amazed and envious to learn that in the winter residents of the area could travel from downtown Ottawa to the ski lifts in the park often in little more than 30 minutes. Our tour guide, Gérald Lajeunesse, is pictured describing the sights from one of the lookouts in the park.

Gerald was excellent and seeing Ottawa’s efforts to create a
green belt around the city was very visible from this vantage point.

Our Saturday tours included a visit to the former Rockcliffe Air Base, now being converted into a multiuse property by the Canada Lands Company. Rick Hughes, the Canada Lands project manager is shown describing how the Crown corporation (an arm’s length, self-financing corporation that reports to the Parliament of Canada through the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities) is redeveloping the former air base of the Canadian Defense Forces.

We want to express our gratitude to Doug Kelly and Nancy Meloshe for organizing this event and to their—and our—colleagues from the Simcoe Chapter including LAI International Secretary, Ian Lord and Simcoe Chapter President, Patrick Devine. The weekend was a great success and our members from as far away as London, Vancouver, San Francisco, Phoenix, Memphis, Washington, DC and Los Angeles all appreciated their efforts to acquaint us with their beautiful and fascinating region. Our thanks to you all. And, to our members who have not yet had the chance to join a Land Economics Weekend, please join us, it’s a great experience.