From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
By Whitney Gould
Traverse the neighborhood around the intersection of W. Fond du Lac and W. North avenues and one of the first things that strikes you in this landscape of time-worn houses, struggling businesses and beautiful old churches is the number of vacant lots. In block after block, they're like missing teeth.
What if, as part of the strategy for rejuvenating the area, some of these accidental open spaces were turned into mini-parks or community gardens?
In an area with more pressing social concerns, parkland might seem like a frill. But Henry Hamilton begs to differ. "For long-term economic development, you must have a beautiful neighborhood," says Hamilton, a community activist who co-chairs the NAACP's environmental justice committee. "Open space can enhance property values. And here, you wouldn't even have to tear down a house to get it."
The Urban Open Space Foundation agrees. The non-profit, which promotes the creation of vest-pocket parks, plazas, gardens and other forms of "green infrastructure," has joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in nudging the city to give a higher priority to open space in the comprehensive neighborhood plan under development for the Fondy/North corridor.
The partnership has numbers on its side: Statistics show that, not counting nearby Tiefenthaler and Carver parks, only 1.75% of this high-density neighborhood is in open space, compared with 10% of the land area countywide.
Mike Maierle, the city's long-range planner, notes that the neighborhood plan already includes extensive language calling for usable, accessible green space. "The last thing we want," he says, "is to be perceived as anti-open space."
But the NAACP and the foundation want more specifics spelled out in the plan, according to the foundation's executive director, Heather Mann. And Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, who handily survived Tuesday's primary election, has supported the two citizen groups.
The cause got another boost recently when the foundation won a grant of $90,000 from the U.S. Forest Service to assist the city in open-space planning for the corridor. The group still has to raise an equal amount from other sources, and it faces an even bigger challenge in getting new green spaces funded, because the city is not in the park business and the county can barely maintain the parks it has. That's one reason that former Mayor John O. Norquist was generally cool to expanding open space.
But with creative partnerships, it can be done. Possible options include tax-incremental financing, in which the increased property value from redevelopment is used to underwrite public improvements (a tool used in adding parkland to the booming Beerline redevelopment area along Commerce St.); business improvement districts, in which commercial property owners tax themselves for such amenities; private donations; and grants from foundations and corporations and government sources.
There's also talk about starting an urban version of the state's Stewardship Program, which has tended to concentrate on acquiring natural areas in the countryside.
The Fondy/North neighborhood isn't the only place where green infrastructure is taking root. There's a push to beef up open space in redevelopment of the Park East corridor. The plan for renewing the Menomonee Valley envisions extensive open space, especially along the Menomonee River. And the Historic Third Ward Association, in revising its neighborhood plan, is looking at ways to green up the area, including land swaps with developers for creating plazas near the river.
It's no easy task. "Everyone insists, 'I shouldn't have to pay for it,' " says Einar Tangen, president of the Third Ward's business improvement district.
Still, there are good arguments for finding a way to make it happen. As Tangen notes, "It's claustrophobic to be in a city surrounded by skyscrapers. Any urban neighborhood that has maintained its value will have significant green space. To not do it is to create the conditions that drove people out of the cities in the first place."
Besides adding value to neighborhoods and making cities more competitive with suburbs, open space consumes less in public services than development does. It absorbs runoff that would otherwise pollute waterways. It reduces the "urban heat island" effect by which the collective warmth of paved surfaces boosts global temperatures.
Steve McCarthy, a landscape architect active with the Urban Open Space Foundation, thinks the emerging revival of places like the Menomonee Valley, Park East corridor and the Fondy/North area makes this the perfect moment for green infrastructure to take hold here.
If we do this right, he says, "we have the potential to change the national image of Milwaukee."
I agree. And the idea is hardly revolutionary. More than a century ago, the pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted imagined ribbons of green threading their way through cities like Milwaukee, providing respite to rich and poor alike. Olmsted's emerald vision deserves renewal.
Posted by Admin at March 9, 2004 04:55 PM