I hate Facebook games with a passion. However, the blinking lights of a particular one really caught my eye as an aspiring city planner: Cityville. Made by the creators of Farmville, this game takes everything you loved about the farm, crops and all, and brings it to the city. While those of you who prefer SimCity may be disappointed by the lack of true interaction, be excited, you get to incorporate your real friends!

For my city, the goal was to incorporate smart growth principles as much as possible. I even named the place Sustainability. Another goal was to not spend any real money in the game, but earn as much with fake money as I could.

I started out with the house options they gave me and a few plots of strawberries. A few hours later I broke ground on my downtown, adjacent to my farm operation. My first business opportunity besides the farm was a bakery(?!). My second and third options were a flower kiosk and a coffee shop.

At this point, I knew things were going downhill. Although I figured out I could move my buildings, roads and decorations(trees, flowers, even a brown cow) around, to build the city would require spamming my friends. I could build a city hall and a post office, but if no one wants to work at them, then they don’t open. And if they don’t open, I can’t increase my population. Also, the natives get restless and unhappy if they don’t have open community buildings. I also have a limited number of things(collecting rent, harvesting crops) that i can do before my energy levels run out. If I don’t earn more energy on my own fast enough, then I have to buy energy, with real money.

Either way, I’m gradually adding new buildings and figuring out what crops don’t wither if I can’t get back to them on time. As I advance in levels, I get more energy whenever I come into the game. All these things are helping me see how much the game isn’t that far off from real life. You have to staff your city buildings by spending money and/or getting friends to work there. You have to plant crops to supply your businesses(or get involved in lucrative shipping or agribusiness contracts). People will not be cool going to the same places all the time. Houses don’t fit where you want them and should be connected to streets. The only disappointment seems to be lack of transit, however, everyone in my city(really a town at this point) walks wherever they need to go.

Although there are times when the game is exhilarating and times where it bores me to tears, I’ll stick with it until I can get a sprawling (but sustainable) metropolis.

Wonder what I really think about smart growth?,Enjoy this post, from August of this year, that talks about how I see smart growth evolving to work.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter on how smart growth has made some neighborhoods flat out unaffordable. I agree, especially in that many smart growth and sustainable community measures are based on maintaining in some cases very outdated ideas. What I’m about to propose in this blog is fairly radical. I probably won’t live to see some of these attitudes die. I might lose my house as a result. However, we need to start chipping away at the following attitudes that are silently destroying communities and their ability to be sustainable.

1. Houses and the land they sit on need to be money generating machines and insanely expensive.
My mom got a great deal on our house. Such a great deal she immediately had thousands in home equity she could borrow against. However, my mom’s never been one to take out a loan she didn’t need, buy more house than we could afford and run out to buy a new car at the first crank. However, some folks weren’t so studious with their finances. Granted, some rental situations are bad (landlords not fixing things, kicking people out for no reason), but just because you have neighbors that cook curry occasionally doesn’t necessary mean you should risk your whole life savings on something that you essentially rent for 30 years or more anyway. Richard Florida’s idea of reforming renting and owning has merit. Also, I’m appalled at how inflation has driven up home prices. If we could ever accept a new paradigm of land ownership that didn’t place such a high premium on it, so many other housing issues wold be affordable.

2. Public Schools are beyond repair in some neighborhoods, therefore won’t move there or we’ll put our kids in private/charter school.
I toured  my mom’s pristine newly built public middle school yesterday afternoon (August 10th). I attended the original middle school up the road and suffered through mold allergies and sometimes broken equipment and chairs as a student. However, I was an honor graduate of the adjacent high school and magna cum laude graduate of North Carolina State University. As I passed this old building in my car on the way to the new one, I saw the new baseball field and also the new band transfer truck trailer. Both that were paid for by parent boosters. Yet, I am willing to bet that the brand new academic building will be trashed by the students within a couple years. Why, because it happened with the new addition to the older school building. It’s not always the curriculum, the teachers and the lack of technology(which the new building has plenty of). Sometimes it’s what we will value enough to pay for or take care of even though the school system won’t. Maybe we should value our schools, whether we liked going to them and/or we had children in them or not. We could say that all schools deserve some love, even if it means we have to give some of the resources ourselves. Maybe we wouldn’t have need for some of these shady new consultants that are taking the government’s money for school reform with no results. We could take that money and do what we as community members know works. I know some people will want more religion in your child’s schooling. There are ways for that to happen too while maintaining our school buildings which come standard in our neighborhoods thanks to our tax dollars. (Maybe taking the kids to church, synagogue, mosque for the extra training…) ?

3.Transit is bad. Always.
Yes, transit has it’s holes. I’ll be addressing them in a post in the near future. with the prevalence of electronic gadgets and less time to do more, being able to sit on the bus or train and read, write or listen to something is  awesome. Also, with the prevalence of social media, groups of citizens can gather to raise awareness of how much they love transit and also what needs to be improved. Greater Greater Washington does a bang-up job of doing so.

4.Too much color in a neighborhood means the neighborhood isn’t good enough.
Yes, I just pulled the card. I won’t go into too much depth here, but I will say that we need to stop being afraid of our neighbors based solely off of stereotypes of their nationalities, religions and orientations. Especially if those neighbors are willing to get your mail when you are gone,  mow your yard when you are sick, beat down the kid who tried to break into your house and give you great advice on your new tomatoes. Even if they are quiet neighbors, you never know when they’ll step up to the plate and be your best friends. Plus, what goes on behind closed doors and tall fences isn’t our business anyway, right? We’ve had too much government and developer forced segregation.

As you can guess, this is more of a rant than a full blown solutions post. However, we can’t keep ignoring some of these elephants in the room if we want true sustainable communities. What are some other attitudes we need to get over to help our communities become better?

Copyright 2007-2010 Kristen E. Jeffers

I’ve been selected as a rider ambassador for my local commuter transit system. As part of my duties, I’m to utilize some form of transit (bus, carpool or vanpool) twice a week. This is the account of my first ride on the bus on November 24, 2010.

11:49 AM ET

I was supposed to do this a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll admit, I chickened out. A part of my rider ambassador responsibilities is to talk to people. I’m only good at that when I think my ideas won’t get shot down. In the meantime, the bus just drove past. I was expecting it to come down the road from the highway, but it appears to have come out of nowhere.

Oh well, even though the bus was 10 minutes late according to the schedule, I’m glad that it just came. It also put out a person. So for now, I’m going to put down my pen, leave my car and head to the stop so I don’t miss the bus again. See you on the bus

12:46 PM ET

So I got to the stop and ended up having a nice chat with a long-haired handsome stranger. A very-well dressed long-haired handsome stranger. He’d just left a seminar at the convention center adjacent to the bus stop. He asked me for a light and as I’m not a smoker, did not have one. We chatted about culture for a bit as we waited for the bus to come back. He’s Native American, orginally from somewhere up north and travels a lot by bus, all over the country. He works in construction and we bonded over talking about prior lives in Raleigh. He also mentioned how great it was to be in Greensboro with all the cultures, but his desire to stay out of the black-white drama divide.

As we got on the bus(and the driver looked at me for being too slow and talking to much, as well as sticking my farecard in wrong), I shared with him about the new Megabus coming to Durham. Way to go for me sharing about a bus system I’m not technically supposed to be advocating for. However, good transit is good transit.

Meanwhile, the bus got to the commuter hub, where all the buses from the main three cities in the Triad, the shuttles to the airport area office parks and the airport shuttle convene. The stranger left my bus for the High Point bus. I had to leave my bus, rescan my card and get back on. The driver thought I was trying to steal a ride at first, but realized I was just that naive.

As I’m waiting for the bus to leave so I can get back to my car, I’m noticing the bus is doing a good job waiting for folks to get off the buses from various other areas. The buses are also clean and full of a diverse crowd of people. We are moving again, so I will report back when I return to my stop.

12:54 PM ET

So I made it back safely to my car in about an hour. Looking back on the ride, it was pretty smooth, even seated sideways. (I’ve ridden so many public buses  sideways, the angle doesn’t phase me). I also saw a HEAT, the college connector bus come through just as I’m writing this in my car. If I had wanted to, I could have picked up the bus and gone over to campus. Well, I know for next time.

One last thing. For being a commuter line, proximity to the stop leaves something to be desired. I had to cross five busy lanes of traffic with no crosswalk. Oh well, that’s something the mall owners should address with the transit authority.

Stay tuned for part two, where we will take a quick jaunt downtown in a way I’m not used to.

I’ve read a few of the posts lamenting the loss of urban issues (inner city problems as well as transportation and development issues) as the focus of the Congress and many state and local governments. As we are now almost two weeks past election day, what should we do?

1. Start drumming up support from the private sector. Almost every other day I hear about a developer in DC helping to pay for a new metro stop entrance. Also, in Nashville, local businesses have embraced transit as their next growth machine project through the Middle Tennessee Transit Alliance. Years ago here in Greensboro, Duke Power ( now Duke Energy) started our first public transit system to get workers to their facilities. Yonah Freemark in his Next American City blog Grassroutes just addressed how Apple Computer stepped up to re-build a subway stop in Chicago.

2. Get rid of the “Ghetto Mentality”– Veronica O. Davis just finished a great series on Greater Greater Washington from the perspective of a black woman living in a “gentrifying” neighborhood. In the third part of her series, she discusses a community conversation in which consensus was made to get out of the “ghetto victim mentality”. I want to extend this idea to anyone who believes that lack of money means the end of an issue. The root of the ghetto mentality was that  blacks marginalized into ghettos losing the ability to run businesses in their neighborhoods. Then education became the domain of the white man and gangs got bigger and bigger. However, as more time and investment has gone into education across the country, I see more students of all colors valuing the time they spend in the classroom. Black businesses are returning. WE ARE NOT MINORITIES IN OUR SPIRIT. People in the hood, keep moving forward.

3. Remind leaders who are against “new” livability, that nothing about these ideas are new.– Congressman Mica, the soon to be new transportation committee head in the House seems to think that because people are driving cars more and having more kids, that we should continue to invest in roads. However in the next breath, he mentions that his elderly mother regretted the loss of her drivers license the most, due to her in ability to drive places. He also laments the loss of rail service to his small town. Sounds like he’s still a livability advocate. Elements of the new livability, such as walkable streets, are things my parents, even in on their rural roads, had. Streetcar suburbs, nature trails, Main Street storefronts, all these things are at least 50 years old.

4. Keep doing what we already do– As urban advocates (and likewise smart suburb and rural advocates), we all know the benefits of having a better built environment can provide. These movements would not be where they are if it weren’t for the Internet connecting us and allowing us to spread the word. The Internet is not going away so fast. No one is stopping you from starting a Meetup at Starbucks. Yes, so many of our projects cost money we don’t have, but if we keep talking and getting louder, eventually hostile governments will listen.

So advocates, what else should we do to keep the fires burning?

I am very excited to have the opportunity to serve as a rider ambassador for the Piedmont Regional Transit Authority (PART), our local regional transit authority. What this means is that I will be working in a bus ride twice a week and also volunteering to work at a rider awareness event several times over 6 months.

I’m going to use this opportunity to do some write-ups, interviews and also reflect on what it’s really like to use public transportation in a place that was always built for the car it seems.

Last night at one of our many grad student gatherings, we were teasing one of the girls for having to drive through the ghetto to get home. I was really cringing on the inside, because I feel like no neighborhood is the ghetto by default. There is rundown housing, drug drops and violent crime everywhere now.

However, it has not stopped developers from promoting and stroking certain fears among potential homeowners, renters and city government leaders, who would authorize the zoning decisions. Another fear that’s even worse in my opinion is the idea that student housing is either one of two things-

• Run-down, decrepit housing that’s just a pad for sleeping and high levels of alcohol consumption.
• Overpriced, student “McMansions”, that assume you want to only live with four people.

Dan Reed over at Greater Greater Washington, among others, has lamented the lack of decent, affordable student housing, as well as the campaigns to prevent developers from building more.

I’m sure at this point you stop and say, “Why not live on campus all four years. It seems like most students want to move off so they can be free”. Well, not always true. At my current institution, there were FRESHMEN who were shorted out of the housing market on campus. Also, there are efforts to encroach in the adjacent neighborhood because the need for student housing is so much greater than supply.

If we are going to be a nation that promotes college for all, we need to work on making sure that people at least have a place to sleep that is humane and affordable at the same time. Essentially, like the workforce housing movement of the outside world, there is a need for student housing. Especially for graduate level students and those with families, housing should not automatically assume that the student’s primary occupation is drinking.

I was riding down the road and noticed a billboard advertising a shoe store. This shoe store used to be on the High Point Rd Corridor but now has moved across town to the Battleground Ave. corridor. Funny thing is, both shopping centers are unsustainable (in environmentalist terms) strip malls, that are at least 25 years old. Both have been renovated and constantly occupied in recent years. Yet, the Battleground center doesn’t have rumors of rape and drug use lingering around it. The parking lots are both kinda dark at night, but so far, I have heard of nothing criminal at the Battleground center.

Usually, I’m ready to boycott the store who thought it so easy and so vital that they leave this struggling neighborhood. However, I had to think, if I’d been raped in the parking lot(or inside one of the other stores in the mall as one account alleges), would I want to return to that area? Especially being that the target audience of most shoe stores, especially a warehouse like this one, is women, I am all for safety.

Yet, the real root of the problem is what the title of this post comes from. I can wail all day long about stores leaving the community and also the community that doesn’t support its stores. However, the folks who really need this post, will probably never read it.

The business owner would, and probably agree with me on why they made the decision to move. Yet, I’m still concerned about the community around the stores that fails to first, speak out against these kinds of moves and second speak against the behaviors that cause them. I know we are in bad economic times, but criminal behavior is not the way to go.

There’s talk of legalizing illicit drugs, to lessen the allure and dangers of selling  them in the communities where they are almost the chief economic engine. However, we also have legal gambling enterprises on the High Point Rd. corridor. I have not seen where legalizing these places has really helped the community, it just appears that our neighborhood supports these type of enterprises in high numbers. (And doesn’t need to eat. As mentioned before, we only have one grocery within the stretch that encompasses the Greensboro city limits, down from three about 15 years ago).

I’ve said on this blog before, that my vision of smarter growth, especially within the retail area is that of a sustainable community. People of all backgrounds contribute to the betterment and maintenance of their community. Streets, sidewalks, parking lots and green spaces are clean, making the places, no matter their age or lack of designer wares look inviting and chic. We charge each other fair prices and we treat each other with respect in the shopping areas.

One day, we will figure out how to reach our communities for lasting change. Until then, choir, can I get an amen? What can we do to reach these communities the way they need to be reached? Not just in terms of the built environment, but other issues such as domestic violence, drug use, education and the like.