(photo: Matthew Quinn)

Last Friday, former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, who is now president of the Congress for New Urbanism, and Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, spoke to a crowd of 50 or so at the HSBC Arena’s Harbour Club, whose tall glass windows are dominated by a view of their subject matter: the Skyway. Norquist and Bernstein spoke at the invitation of US Congressman Brian Higgins, who for many years has joined a chorus of local voices begging for the thing to be pulled down.

Built in the 1950s, the Skyway has been an object of scorn for decades: It is underused, critics say, carrying only about half its design capacity. The nearly parallel I-90, which also has excess capacity and just shed its toll barriers, makes it redundant. It is 50 years old and too expensive to maintain. It cuts off access to the city’s waterfront. It eats up prime waterfront real estate that would be incredibly valuable to developers—if only the Skyway and the limited-access section of Route 5 weren’t there, breaking up the street grid, preventing traffic from accessing the property and the rest of the city. It was a mistake 50 years ago, one of a series of compromises that cities like Buffalo made to the emerging car culture that has facilitated sprawl and drained America’s older urban centers.

Norquist and Bernstein have made Buffalo part of a national, three-year study on the salubrious effects of tearing down urban elevated highways and replacing them with at-grade urban boulevards—in Buffalo’s case, a four-lane road to the Southtowns that would make frequent intersections with the city’s street grid and the hopefully soon-to-be-developed outer harbor. (Louisville and Seattle are also subjects of the city. To read more about the study and Higgins’ position, visit www.skywayalternatives.com.) Many of Buffalo’s native new urbanists go even further, suggesting the entire waterfront section of the I-190 ought to be torn down and replaced with boulevards.

Erasing elevated highways is a subject Bernstein has studied and talked about for decades, and one Norquist knows from firsthand experience. As mayor of Milwaukee, Norquist successfully advocated for the demolition of a stretch of elevated urban freeway slightly shorter than the Skyway, but also running along waterfront property. The newly opened real estate quickly attracted $250 million in new, private investment.

After their presentation at the Harbour Club, Norquist and Bernstein sat down with Artvoice to talk about tearing down the Skyway. (You can watch the conversation at www.artvoice.com.)

Artvoice: How much of that $250 million investment in downtown Milwaukee came from outside the community?

Scott Bernstein: Most of it. A very small amount of the investment is actually public, and then the private investment comes in. It’s national and international. And that’s not new: When you had the streetcar companies here, they were private, and they raised their capital through stock offerings nationally and internationally. It was actually a pretty good deal: Cities grant the right to use the streets, streetcar companies bring in this money, sharing the cost of the paving and repaving, and you get the extra accessibility. The same thing happens in the real estate markets, where a modest public investment and redirection creates the value, and then you get the capital.

JN: If you have a piece of real estate that’s next to an asset like Lake Erie, and you put something next to it that suppresses the value, like the Skyway, okay, and you remove it, all of a sudden there’s an investment opportunity. Who knows exactly where the money would come from? It would come from the financial markets—just like it doesn’t come from the financial markets now.

AV: How much of that investment is preplanned or directed? Was their an overarching development plan in Milwaukee for the land opened up by tearing down your elevated highway?

JN: Well, yeah, but even when we really were involved I always tried to pretend like we weren’t. Because we really wanted the private market to see the opportunity. If you try to make it into a big government deal…

I would recommend that, if you’ve now released the land from the death grip of the NFTA—if their dead, gray hands have been removed from the throat of the outer harbor area—you shouldn’t go with one developer and some mega-plan. What we did in the Beerline tract, which was north of where the freeway was, 28 acres along the river, we divided it into six different districts and then rolled them out to six different developers, with six different architects, and they had to win a design competition. And we discounted the price of the land. When we first suggested the idea, people said, “Who’s going to even show up?” But it really helped once we got rid of that freeway. When we knew it was going to go, it made it a lot easier to develop that corridor.

AV: Milwaukee also adopted a new, form-based zoning code. Did that help spur development?

SB: The codes help because the developers are pretty smart these days. They know what to look for.

JN: They want to know that somebody else isn’t going to ruin the whole thing. That’s how the code helps.

SB: Zoning didn’t come to New York until the late teens and most of America until the late ’20s. But Richard Hurd in New York invented the basic appraisal formulas in 1904 and they were published for every city in the United States. So investors have been trained for a hundred years to look for street connectivity and assigning value. Coding is a reassurance that the city will not let the conditions get worse again, that they’ll actually encourage the right kind of development.

Every developer and investor in America will tell you that time is money. So if the conditions aren’t there and they have to fight for the conditions, it’s going to take a lot longer and they’re going to go to an easier place. It’s that simple. So you want to do the right thing on these investment decisions and opening them up, and then you want to come behind—

Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist

(photo: Matthew Quinn)

JN: —with a fast permitting process.

SB: That’s right.

JN: But don’t streamline it to create crap. You don’t want a streamlined process to create suburban style development; you want it to be urban.

The people who are really helped by a form-based code are the ones who can’t afford a lawyer: your small developer, your small property owner who wants to add a building, add an outbuilding, put a second floor on, whatever. When you have a code where you walk in a room and you understand that you don’t need a variance, then you don’t need a zoning attorney.

We put a form-based code in every neighborhood in the city except for downtown, where we had a special rezoning layer that functioned like a form-based code. It helped a lot. There’s been over 6,000 units of new housing added to the downtown. Buffalo would like that. And you’ll get it. I mean, why not? It’s a beautiful city. I’d love to live in a condo, look out my window in the morning at the Gold Dome Bank, sipping my coffee…

SB: Not to mention the lake.

JN: Not to mention the lake. Buffalo is really potentially a very attractive city. It’s just done a lot of dumb stuff over the past 50 years.

AV: In your talk, you broke down the economic benefits that would result from replacing the Skyway with an urban boulevard.

SB: There are three basic economic benefits here to be obtained. The first is better use of the scarce public investment dollar. On a life-cycle basis over the next 50 years, replacing the Skyway with another Skyway is going to drive costs up and keep access down. Taking the Skyway down will be a one-time cost that will lead to reconnection to the street grid, which will lead then to the second benefit. The first benefit is you remove a long-term liability. The costs are even worse because you can’t use it all the time when the weather is bad and the maintenance costs get higher and higher over time—these things vibrate, they have to be reinforced after a while, and so forth.

On the second benefit, by restoring the connection to the surface, you restore the street grid that made Buffalo great. Everything gets connected at the waterfront, and there are more connections in between.

We’re sitting practically under the Skyway right now, and it’s not hard to imagine what it looked like when the original streets went all the way through up to the original boulevard. These were served not only by vehicle traffic but by buses and streetcars, and some of those streetcars were interurban electrics, and those in turn served the two or three steam railroad stations that you had right here—so you could actually live and work here and travel all over the whole region. That added value to the local economy, and that’s why you built densely downtown here, because you had the connectivity and the access that made it work. Other businesses could do business with each other. People could live nearby and either walk to work or ride the car—but “ride the car” would have meant riding the streetcar to work.

In Portland, where they added a streetcar, they took a waterfront area like this that in turn connected to the waterfront area that was opened up when they tore down the Harbor Freeway and turned it into McCall Waterfront Park, which restored the street grid. Once you have the street grid, you can put in the light rail and then the streetcar, and then the market just poured in. It’s working so well they’re planning three more streetcars.

AV: And news of the plan draws investment to the sites of future transit connections.

SB: That’s right. The third benefit is that by restoring the connectivity and the mass transit to the area, then you don’t need as many cars per household, you don’t need to drive them as much, and you know what? The cost of living goes down.

JN: This is the concept of location efficient living.

SB: This is, in fact, what cities do for people: They make it possible to have value without having to pay as much for it. Now there are other economic benefits that come in indirectly—because there will be better traffic flow, because there will be less environmental pollution, because it’s the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gases, which we’re all going to be on the hook for. Those are indirect benefits, and we haven’t costed them out yet, but it adds up. This is real money. We’re talking about cash money on the first three benefits: better use of the public money, better real estate value and value capture and lower cost of living. Those are the ideas.

AV: There is at least a perceived divide between urban and suburban interests here. How do you make an argument for tearing down the Skyway to commuters from Buffalo’s southern suburbs, who use it every day?

JN: Well, it does save people time during off-peak hours. It probably even saves some people time during peak hours. But it’s not worth it. You’re talking about huge investment on the one hand and a huge suppression of real estate value on the other. For what? If it was such a good idea, would you put an elevated freeway on the French coast at St. Tropez and Cannes? Would the film festival be better if it had an elevated freeway along the water separating it so people could drive faster around the coast?

(photo: Matthew Quinn)

It’s a coast. It’s not in the interest of Hamburg to have crappy coastline north of it. That doesn’t add value. I mean, look at Detroit. The suburbs of Detroit can feel really proud. They have won every battle at the legislature in Lansing…and Detroit is in ruins. They are the suburbs of a city in ruins. And then you take a suburb of San Francisco or a suburb of Boston: What has more value? The value of a suburb next to a valuable city is much higher.

There will be some people who will say, “I drive on this, how can you do this to me?” Well, you don’t replace it with an obstacle course. You put in a street that will move fairly quickly. It’s not going to make that much difference. But for the person who uses it, if they really want to drive on a freeway, there’s one that’s not being used to its full capacity in the Thruway, the I-90, that’s parallel.

SB: I think the issue here is that too many people move out to the suburbs chasing a cheaper house, and with bad connectivity the house price goes down, but they end up with two or three cars per household and their cost of living goes up.

Places like Hamburg and the university can become destinations as well as origins, and you get two-way traffic which is better supported on the city streets. Then you get the infill in between; you increase the urban character in those suburban locations, you reduce the peak traffic overall; and the whole thing flows a lot better. But you fool yourself into thinking you can do better if you have couple of high-capacity lanes, like the Skyway here, that load up at peak commuting time. On the Thruway you have the same problem. And if you plan them in isolation from everything else, neither the traffic nor the real estate work half as well as they do when you do it the other way around.

That’s the lesson from around the country. In San Francisco, when the federal government threatened to withhold the federal money if they tore these things down, they said, “Fine.” And they voted themselves a tax to expand the mass transit system and tear down the [elevated highway] system. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently, they voted in their master plan to find a way to tear down the elevated freeway that kept the east and west divided for 50 years.

Every place we look, this bad decision—made around the time the interstate system was planned, when a few zealous highway planners took the opportunity to build something like this—and a little short-term federal and state money basically took the opportunity to do the right thing off the table for five decades. This stuff is all 50 years old right now and falling down, and there isn’t enough money to keep it up, and everybody wants to improve their urban character wherever you look. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Akron or Buffalo or San Francisco.

JN: It’s just not a smart thing to have an elevated roadway next to your coastline. As a real estate investment, public infrastructure should support things that add value to the community, add value to the economics of the community. This is infrastructure that suppresses value. It’d be like investing in something that you know is going to make you poor.

SB: I mean, if you had to spend an extra minute a day traveling, I think it would be worth it, particularly if there was a better place to go to. If you follow your waterfront vision, you’re going to have some of the best parks and trails and amenities, as well as nighttime events, restaurants. When the weather is nice, outdoor concerts; when it’s not, indoor concerts.

JN: If they built a freeway on Cape Cod out to Provincetown—

SB: Which they proposed.

JN: If they had built that, people who lived at the end of that would probably think, “Don’t get rid of it.” If they already had it, they’d say, “Don’t get rid of it.” But today if they proposed building that, everybody would say it’s stupid idea.

SB: Here’s another piece of the economics of it: By spending too much on driving around, people aren’t able to qualify as easily for things like down payments on mortgages. So we end up with, in effect, housing for cars instead of for people, which makes no sense whatsoever. Or retirees don’t have as much money to afford a place, or people don’t have the money to make it possible to house their aging parents. I will admit it: I am part of the special interest group in the United States that has parents, and I’d like them to be able to retire next to where I live. I like the zoning that allows the density that would allow me to convert my older built garage into an apartment, and it’s illegal.

In Buffalo, what we’re proposing here isn’t rocket science; it’s a return to common sense, a taking charge of your own economy. The decisions that happened here were decisions to let distant people determine the future. This fight is going on in Seattle right now. And they’re pretty close to deciding “Well, instead of tearing it down and building a new one, or instead of tearing it down and building a tunnel, maybe we should do a boulevard.” On the day that Seattle’s city council voted to consider the boulevard as a legitimate concern, one of the influences was a guy named Jim Ellis, who’s in his 80s now, and who tried over 40 years ago to get [an urban boulevard] along with a light rail. He sent a note over saying, “Sorry I can’t be with you. By the way, today’s the day the bonds on the light rail system would have been paid off.”

I think if you’d made the right decisions 50 years ago, you’d have a waterfront and those initial investments would be paid off.

JN: At the end of World War Two, all Buffalo had to do was nothing. If they’d just left the place alone, today it would be a lot more valuable.

SB: And now you have to do like the old 7-Up campaign: “Just undo it.”

JN: It’s like recovering from the stroke. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as if these ideas were coming from people who were trying to do the wrong thing. Maybe a few weird extremes like the GM thing—taking over streetcar lines and all that—but highway engineering was a tremendously idealistic endeavor in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. These guys were idealists. Some of them would have been really good Democrats, New Dealer types, but they were wrong. Some of them knew it was wrong, like Norman Bel Geddes, who went to Roosevelt to talk to him about the interstate works. He said to him, “Don’t mix these things with the cities. Just build them in between the cities.” But they ignored that.

They were trained to be idealists, but now the whole basis of that idealism is under question.

SB: You know, you’re going to get a new state DOT secretary soon, and that person is going to have to tell the truth to Governor-elect Spitzer, which is that the candy store is no more; there’s no money in the bank to rebuild all these things. And the state demographer is going to tell the governor that people are looking to move back into cities, not away from them, because the population is getting older, households are getting smaller, and we need a different set of housing types than are being produced right now. And a third person is gonna say, “Hey, these guys are right about the cost of living.” For households making less than $50,000 a year, which is most of our population, transportation now costs more than housing.

If I lived here and I was an independent civic leader, I’d put together a campaign with a name like Reconnecting Buffalo: Making It Work for Everybody, hold a town meeting, get a citizens plan together and never, ever let anyone forget that people actually want it—that they want their waterfront back, they want the streets back and they want the jobs back. This could be the catalytic investment and decision that makes people feel like they’re taking charge again.

It’s your community. The question isn’t which of the out-of-town professionals you’re going to live for, it’s what you believe in your heart is actually worth working for. When you find that, you will find that people will stop leaving Buffalo, because the problem with saying that people vote with their feet is that people who are smart enough to vote with their feet know how to make a decision. You don’t want to get rid of those; you want them to stay and fight.

That’s what makes an economy vibrant, because people feel invested in it and they’re going to keep trying harder to find a way to make it better and better and better. A good way to knock the wind out of that good feeling is to make the same dumb decision all over again.

There you have it: What do you want to do?

JN: [Smiles.] Duh.