In the debate over urban teardowns, where developers knock down 1,500-square-foot houses to build 4,500-square-foot McMansions, there are two big questions: Is there anything wrong with replacing older small houses with newer big ones? And if there is, how big is too big? Atlanta is the latest city to debate the first question and, intriguingly, may have found an answer to the second. Surely some new houses are wildly out of scale with those around them, right? Probably, but defining "out of scale" is difficult. This is where Atlanta may have made a contribution to the debate. In 2003, the city council commissioned a study by a pair of professors at Georgia Tech to establish a measurement of neighborhood scale. The professors suggested two new measures: the "faceprint," or how large the house appears in a photo taken from the curb, and the "observed building height," or how tall it appears from the same perspective. By mapping the two measures with computer graphics programs and multiplying them, you arrive at what the academics think is an objective measurement of scale: the "weighted faceprint." The difference between the average weighted faceprint of the block and the weighted faceprint of the proposed house will tell you if it's out of whack.
WHO WANTS TO BE A COP?
The thin blue line is getting thinner in many cities, as police departments struggle to fill vacancies. As a result, police recruiters are doing things that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago: running want ads, handing out bonuses to cops who recruit other cops and even walking up and down beaches during spring break, trying to talk college kids into joining. As the New York Times recently reported, departments are so understaffed they're dropping some of their physical requirements, such as maximum ages, height and weight minimums. If you can do 30 sit-ups in a minute and run a mile and a half in a little more than 14 minutes, you might be eligible to be a sheriff's deputy in Seattle. "You don't have to be Superman," one deputy told the Times. It's not that the job itself is so much harder today. Rather, something has changed among young people. "People used to live to work," an official with the International Association of Chiefs of Police told the Times. "This younger generation works to live. Working late, working weekends, that's not attractive." The newspaper noted that employment is up in the private sector, so young people can be choosier.
IN LOVE WITH TROLLEYS
There are at least 20 cities with streetcar lines and double that number with systems on the drawing board. There are streetcar lines in Tampa, Memphis and Charlotte and serious proposals to bring streetcars back to Atlanta and Seattle. There seem to be three motivations: the belief that cute, clanging trolleys will help with tourism, the idea that they're a great form of "circulator transit" and the notion that they allow for greater residential density in in-town neighborhoods as people hop on the streetcar for a short ride downtown. These are only good reasons for spending millions to lay track, string overhead wires and buy antique streetcars if the line is built as part of a larger plan of development. Portland, Oregon, showed how to do this when it built a streetcar line to connect two nearby neighborhoods with downtown. Part of the deal was that developers in these areas had to build much more densely than they had planned. The density and the streetcars worked hand in hand. More people on the street meant more riders, while the streetcar line, in turn, meant less parking was needed, so more housing could be built.
