10th Anniversary Post: West Side Greenway

 

Time Check post-flood, June 2014

Ten years ago this month, the City of Cedar Rapids had an open house at the Flamingo Events Center on the near northwest side to discuss plans for a greenway along the river where some of the worst flood damage had occurred in 2008. The greenway would stretch from Ellis Park, one of the largest and oldest parks in the city, to Czech Village, about four miles in length. Some of the ideas that were floated at the time included basketball courts, one or two boat launches, disc golf putting green, an ice rink, and a ropes course, as well as improvements to the riverside bike trail. At the time I concluded: The special elements... will serve as "demand goods" [term I cribbed from Jane Jacobs], drawing people from all parts of the city and beyond. But the ongoing success of these projects depend on the ability of planners to coordinate effectively with neighborhood and commercial development.

2024: distant view of Ellis Flats, 1618 Ellis Blvd NW
across field planned for trail, water play, skate/skills park

Federal support for west side flood protection was not approved until 2018, and only last week did the City Council approve the final version of the greenway plan. The next step is fundraising from the federal government and other sources (Payne 2024). The plan is divided into short-term (next five years) and medium-term (next ten years) phases. 

The future impact section of the plan anticipates 1-2 million annual visitors to the parks, with the middle estimates projecting $250-500 million in new investment, $60 million a year in economic benefit, and creation of 1300 jobs (p. 86). (These numbers should be taken with a grain or perhaps a pillar of salt. Does anyone ever go back and check these numbers later?) 

1st St and 1st Av NW: plans for whitewater rafting course

1st St and E Ave NW: plans for trail improvements,
Fallen Forest nature play area

Plans for the middle section ("Riverfront Park," discussed on pp. 59ff. of the plan) do not discuss its interface with the latest casino proposal. (See "Cedar Rapids Casino" 2022.) That may be prudent, because approval of the casino at the state level is by no means certain, but it's worth noting the current 1st Street NW will be rerouted and converted into a park road, and that the footprint of the park, particularly near the proposed nature play area and dog run, intrudes upon the footprint of the casino. This is fine with me, since I wish the casino would go far away, but if two would-be tourist destinations are to exist cheek-by-jowl in what used to be a residential neighborhood, it will require some thinking.

1st St and F Ave NW: dog run, parking for whitewater rafting... and casino?

1st Ave at 1st St W: still a wide, high speed highway
through the center of town 

The chain of park areas provides a number of potential benefits to nearby neighborhoods; it will be interesting to see how these considerations are balanced with the expectation of being a tourist magnet. The Time-Check Park is adjacent to development along Ellis Boulevard NW as well as existing residential areas to the west. Ellis could be a challenge for small children to cross, but overall the park should be easily accessible on foot to a lot of people. 

Not this neighbor, though: 1426 1st St NW (and others?)
stand in the way of the canoe safari and picnic grove

Ditto the gardens, water play area, toddler area, and roundhouse in the Czech Village Park on the southwest side. Its area also has planned residential redevelopment, existing residences, and a challenging through street (C Street SW, in this case). I hope there will be some routine play equipment for the littles, but the bigs ought to find more places to explore than in a typical city park. 

approximate site of B St SW woonerf
plans for toddler park, water play, playground

Accessible green spaces that are somewhat wild provide benefits to individuals as well as the overall ecology (Galle 2023). This all adds to the attractiveness of the neighborhoods. In a best-case scenario, the neighborhoods would provide steady use of the parks, with folks from farther out adding their own energy without overwhelming things, and the city will be committed to ongoing maintenance and improvement.

The big question remains from 2014: Will the Greenway project be able to evolve along with the neighborhood, while accommodating visitors from elsewhere, like our city's flagship parks? Or will it be primarily a "destination," separated and alienated from the place where it's located, like the baseball stadium, New Bo City Market, and the proposed casino (though any of these may change in time)?

MAIN SOURCES

Marissa Payne, "Cedar Rapids Will Seek Funding to Bring Greenway Plan to Life," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 29 May 2024, 1A, 8A

Greenway Parks Plan Update (City of Cedar Rapids)

10th anniversary post: Our casino, then and now

 

Bellagio Las Vegas:
Will slots ring where pancakes once were served?

Ten years ago this month, I listened to a Strong Towns interview with Steven Shultis of Springfield, Massachusetts. Shultis, then the author of the Rational Urbanism blog, defended a deal that had brought a casino to his city. It led me to compare the features he liked about the Springfield casino with the Cedar Rapids downtown casino proposal. The resulting post, entitled "Their Casino, Our Casino," marveled that Springfield, a down-on-its-luck post-industrial city, got a much better deal both in terms of revenue and design, than Cedar Rapids did. 

That point became moot the following year, because the Iowa State Racing and Gaming Commission disallowed the Cedar Rapids casino on the grounds that it would pull business from casinos in nearby towns. This is a terrible rationale--what other industry operates with this level of state protection?--but this state government seems to exist mainly to thwart cities' plans, whether those plans are good or bad. 

In 2017, Cedar Rapids saw several more casino proposals, but they too came to naught. "Bill," a commenter on my blog, lamented that "now we are looking at a gaping open space on the west side of the river." Of course, the city had created that gaping open space in order to facilitate construction of the casino, but more importantly, six years later that hole is in the process of being filled! First and First, a high-quality multi-use development, will complement the surrounding area in exactly the way the casino would not have done.

Now, the casino is back yet again. In July, the Cedar Rapids City Council approved an agreement with a private firm to set aside land for casino construction at 1st Street and F Avenue NW, maybe half a mile north of where it was going to go ten years ago (Vaughn 2023; see also "Cedar Rapids Casino" 2022). The city gets credit for persistence, if not wisdom.

Casino benefits (and maybe costs, too?) are oversold. Any positive impact of a casino on either local economic development or state tax revenue is likely to be modest at best. Existing casinos, even protected by the state's anti-competitive policy, are hardly models of revenue generation. In 2017, during the last round of casino proposals, I noted that the well-worn shops on the Bever Block downtown, which have since been demolished, vastly exceeded in taxable-value-per-acre either of the region's two most successful casinos (in Clinton and Riverside). Moreover, neither Clinton nor Riverside is a model of a thriving city.

Economic studies, once you exclude industry-sponsored work, are extremely cautious about the local impacts of casinos. (See the review of research by the Richmond Federal Reserve District (Scavette 2022.)) Mike Walden of North Carolina State University summarizes the reasons for caution (Liotta 2019):

Obviously the economy questions: Will people come to gamble in your small town? For example, [even] if this is going into a small town there are lots of opportunities for gambling, not just going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but online, on your phone, et cetera. So that's one question, will new people come?

The spending would need to be new to the local economy, not money currently being spent at other venues ("substitutability"). 

You don't just want to build this off your existing population because what happens generally is if someone is already a resident in your small town, and they're going to spend money gambling, that means they're not spending the money somewhere else [in town]. So the whole point here is to attract people from outside.

Another factor is whether attendant social problems (addiction, crime) counteract the small increase in economic activity.

Will people flock to the casino on 1st Street NW in impactful numbers? Probably not. Nationwide, counties that open gambling venues see only marginal economic improvement compared to neighboring counties without those venues (Lim 2017, Radhakrishnan 2015). Even a gambling destination like Atlantic City "has difficulty keeping a single grocery store open" (Scavette 2022, citing Burch 2021).

Cedar Rapids is not a small town, we already have grocery stores, and our economy is not struggling. So it's safe to say we will not be Vegas on the Cedar, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But businesses aren't required to be transformative before they open. Visions of tourism glory set aside, is there any reason to dislike this project? Alas, yes.

The opportunity costs for that land are painfully high. Businesses that get handed nine square blocks in the core of the city had damned well better be transformative. (See the map with the 2022 story for dimensions.)  If the casino was going to land on the edge of town, say by the extension of Highway 100, we would not be having this conversation. But we're going to land it on a huge chunk of the near northwest side that had been planned a few years ago for high-intensity urban development once flood protection was installed:

story board, 2017 Northwest side open house

As with First and First, anyone with imagination can come up with multiple projects for this territory that would blend more with the existing neighborhood and produce more return for the city: missing middle housing, a school, a corner grocery store and pharmacy, a hotel, a park, a downtown-scaled Target like the one just opened in Iowa City... anything really that wouldn't rely so heavily on out-of-town traffic and (gulp!) parking. Imagine Clinton's Wild Rose Casino--appropriately and conveniently located on the outskirts of town--plopped onto a large portion of our town's most valuable land. Make sure you have plenty of antacid before you do this, though.

The deal with Peninsula Pacific Entertainment is less advantageous to the city. In 2013, I thought we'd sold short compared to Springfield, but this version sells even shorter. Compared to the 2013 proposal, the footprint is bigger, the number of competing venues is greater, and the much-touted charitable donations the group has promised are lower. (I'm no movie expert, but I know the difference between net and gross!)

FEATURE	SPRINGFIELD	CR 2013	CR 2023
Street Position	Multiple pods within existing street grid	One pod on one megablock	One pod on even bigger megablock
Housing feature	54 market-rate apartments	None	None
Additional amenities	Bowling alley, movie theater (won’t compete with existing venues)	Restaurants, event center (competing with existing venues)	Bars, restaurants, event center, “foodertainment” center (competing with existing venues)
Annual taxation	$26 million	·       $1.2 million + 1 percent of gross receipts ·       charitable donation of 3 percent of gross receipts	·       Wagering tax information not found and may not have been decided ·       Charitable donation of 8 percent of net receipts
Legal status	Provisions fixed by voter-approved measure	Provisions evolving	Provisions evolving
Transportation	Casino workers can take bus to work, close to transit center	Limited bus service, not close to transit center	Limited bus service, far from transit center

I conclude this retrospective the same way I concluded the 2013 piece:

I expect the Linn County Casino is going to be built, and the results will not be all bad. However, despite its primo location the casino won't enhance the emerging urbanism of downtown Cedar Rapids, nor will it provide much needed connectedness between downtown and the near west side neighborhoods. How did Springfield, which is clearly in more desperate shape than Cedar Rapids, manage to swing such a favorable, far-sighted deal? How did Cedar Rapids manage to miss this opportunity?

SEE ALSO: Jim Kinney, "Taking Stock of MGM Springfield, Five Years Later," MassLive, 20 August 2023 

Urbanism updates: Northwest side and 8th Av SW

The Flamingo Restaurant on Ellis Boulevard: Better days ahead?

City development staff have held two public presentations this month, on the Northwest Neighborhood plan and the 8th Avenue SW project.

The Northwest Neighborhood, though dealing with economic change and the 2008 flood, remains a vibrant community of small homes dating from its heyday as a home for working class families. Homes remain west of Ellis Boulevard (yellow on the map above); the area between Ellis and the river (green on the map) was particularly hard-hit by the flood...

The city bought and demolished the vast proportion of the houses there, and plans a series of riverfront attractions as well as flood protection.

Once flood protection is in place, the city hopes to attract infill housing of various types along and south of Ellis. With enough population around, Ellis itself can again become a thriving commercial area. Some of the residents who were present at the meeting at St. James United Methodist Church recalled walking to the A&W (now closed), the Flamingo Restaurant (now open one night a week as an events center) and other attractions.

Bicycle routes and bus lines will link the neighborhood to the rest of the city, and the rest of the city to the greenway.

8th Avenue SW is due for resurfacing and sewer replacement, which is mostly routine (albeit not if your house is near where they'll be working). City officials announced a couple of new features of general interest. The first is a sidewalk along the north side of the street, which serves Veterans Memorial Stadium, tennis courts, Trinity Lutheran School and Cleveland Park, as well as many residences.

The sidewalk is an important addition. Although it's across the street from the ball park, people walking to the stadium are now "hung out to dry" while they wait to cross 8th. The new sidewalk will give the a place to stand, and the bumpouts will give them a clearer shot across the street. The representative from Trinity Lutheran School suggested that parents parking on the street for school events will have an easier time getting to the school along the sidewalk. There was no resident opposition, in large part because the city plans to stop dunning homeowners for the cost of installing new sidewalks. This is a very favorable development. Sidewalks, like streets--maybe moreso?--benefit the entire city, and should be funded accordingly.

The city also plans a stormwater detention facility at the intersection of 8th and Rockford Road.

At present eastbound through traffic on 8th curves to the right as they approach Rockford, but an offshoot is used by people turning left onto Rockford. This creates a triangle which is currently just grass. The city plans to close part of the offshoot, and to design catch basins in the green space.

Next to me at the meeting were an adorable woman and her even-more-adorable mother, who live next door to each other in the 1500 block of 8th and who have lived in the neighborhood for decades. The woman asked the guy from the city if it wouldn't be nice to have a rain garden in the space. He asked, with some irony, if she wanted to maintain it. She said, with utterly no irony, that she and her mother did indeed want to maintain it. So they took her name and number, and this may well happen. Every now and again, the human race makes your day!

Proposed Cedar Rapids Greenway

The Cedar Rapids Department of Parks and Recreation, along with consultants from the Iowa City design firm Confluence, met with members of the public last night to roll out the almost-final draft of plans for park development along the west side of the Cedar River known collectively as the Greenway. The ideas are elaborate and ambitious, and would take about 10-15 years to come to fruition. Any implementation will need to take into account developing plans for flood protection, which are happening along a parallel track.


The Greenway consists of three chunks, including two large swaths of residential neighborhoods (Time-Check and Czech Village) that were heavily damaged in the 2008 flood. These two portions are connected by a narrow stretch of riverfront across from downtown that already houses the McGrath Amphitheatre.


The meeting was held at the Flamingo Events Center, which has evolved from a long-established restaurant on Ellis Boulevard, and which itself was hard-hit by that flood.

Jane and the flamingo pose by the sign marking the crest of the flood)

The first step of the Greenway projects will be to remove the infrastructure that's there now, particularly streets and sewer lines. The few houses in the area that have been rebuilt will be accommodated, mostly by turning their current through streets into cul-de-sacs, but some streets will be maintained in order to provide multiple access points to the parks.

The immediate result will be a large green space.

As I mentioned, there are big plans for what happens next. A large part of the Time-Check neighborhood may see widening of the current bike trail, a boat launch, basketball courts, and a disc golf "putting green" (which seems to be less than the full course now offered at Shaver Park as well as Thomas Park in Marion). Beaches had been previously discussed, but were scrapped because of their vulnerability to the river.

The Czech Village chunk would extend for several square blocks south of the business district along 16th Avenue, which unlike the residential area has in large part been rebuilt post-flood. This map of the area shows what the city has purchased, what remains in private ownership, and what would need to be done...

...to turn it into a lot of park...

...which could accommodate a boat launch, ice rink and ropes course, among other possibilities.

The most ambitious idea proposed for the downtown area is a kayak run utilizing some things that are already in the river north of downtown across from Quaker Oats.

I like the ambitious nature of the plans, and the intention to make better public use of the river than Cedar Rapids historically has done. In a city that has few true neighborhoods, it's sad to close the book on two with extra character, though connection to the parks may help surrounding areas emerge (or re-emerge, as the case may be).

One woman at last night's meeting expressed concern about the Time-Check section's impact on traffic patterns. She argued that 1st Street west is a convenient bypass, with better traffic flow than Ellis Boulevard currently has. It looks from the map like 1st Street has become a park road, which would indeed divert traffic to Ellis. This is probably good for park development, though Chicago has developed its lakefront parks with frequent underpasses under high-speed Lake Shore Drive. Still her point is well-taken. Park development will need to coordinate with planned development along Ellis Boulevard to allow for the flow of through traffic. (This is not a problem with the Czech Village park, where 12th Avenue and C Street serve as thoroughfares outside of the proposed park.)

Bicyclists at the meeting were pleased by the wider trail in Time-Check, but connections across the river are an open question. There are currently two ways to get from downtown to the trail--A Avenue East (which becomes E Avenue West) or 1st Street West--neither of which is really comfortable, but I've done 2nd Avenue to 1st Street and it's not too bad as long as it's not rush hour. The trail connection to the Czech Village, by contrast, goes across the Bridge of Lions and is pretty smooth at any hour of the day.

More generally, Jane Jacobs's pathbreaking chapter on neighborhood parks cites many ways park projects have gone wrong or right, making the success of any given project seem uncertain and random. A key factor for her clearly is connection to vibrant surrounding. Here's how she describes the neighborhood of a successful Philadelphia park (which I won't name because I don't know Philadelphia well, and a lot can happen in 53 years):

Immediately on its edges it has in sequence, as this is written, an art club with restaurant and galleries, a music school, an Army office building, an apartment house, a club, an old apothecary shop, a Navy office building which used to be a hotel, apartments, a church, a parochial school, apartments, a public-library branch, apartments, a vacant site where town houses have been torn down for prospective apartments, a cultural society, apartments, a vacant site where a town house is planned, another town house, apartments. Immediately beyond the rim, in the streets leading off at right angles and in the next streets parallel to the park sides, is an abundance of shops and services of all sorts with old houses or newer apartments above, mingled with a variety of offices [p. 96]

In short [it] is busy fairly continuously for the same basic reasons that a lively sidewalk is used continuously: because of functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules. [p. 97]

Neighborhood parks fail to substitute in any way for plentiful city diversity. Those that are successful never serve as barriers or as interruptions to the intricate functioning of the city around them. Rather, they help to knit together diverse surrounding functions by giving them a pleasant joint facility; in the process they add another appreciated element to the diversity and give something back to their surroundings... [p. 101]

The special elements of each park I listed earlier will serve as "demand goods" [pp. 107-110], drawing people from all parts of the city and beyond. But the ongoing success of these projects depend on the ability of planners to coordinate effectively with neighborhood and commercial development.

[Jacobs's repeated reference to apartments in the first paragraph I quoted reminds me that a fellow last night told one of the consultants he doesn't like apartments. That may be because a lot of apartment buildings in Cedar Rapids are miniature slums. Or it may be a reminder that however this develops is not going to leave everyone happy.]

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Greenway plans: see comment below

Forrest Saunders, "Cedar Rapids Reveals Greenway Concepts," KCRG, 7 May 2014, http://www.kcrg.com/city-reveals-greenway-concepts-20140507 [coverage of a previous open house]

"Flood Protection: Both Sides of the River," City of Cedar Rapids, http://cedar-rapids.org/city-news/flood-recovery-progress/floodmanagementsystem/pages/default.aspx

Ellis Boulevard Area Plan site... More elaboration is in these slides from last fall's presentation

Northwest Neighbors Neighborhood Association site

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, [1961] 1992), ch. 5. See also ch. 14 for cautionary tales of parks creating boundaries to neighborhoods rather than connections with them.

Rachel Kaplan, Stephen Kaplan and Robert L. Ryan, With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature (Island, 1998).