Cities: November 2019 Archives

A Farewell to Dairy Queens - Texas Monthly

"The old saying that every Texas town has a Dairy Queen is no longer true for many communities, especially the agricultural hamlets of the Panhandle, which have been disproportionately affected by a spate of closures. On October 30, Vasari LLC, which operated about 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 stores, 10 of them in the Panhandle.

"In Haskell, about 150 miles southeast of Lockney, city manager Janet Moeller was so concerned when she heard about the closure in her town that she called her counterpart in Graham to see if the owners of its Dairy Queen would buy the Haskell site and reopen it. So far, nothing has come of the request. 'It's devastating for Haskell,' she said....

"Dairy Queen reached Texas in 1946, when Missouri businessman O. W. Klose and his son, Rolly, bought the franchise rights and opened a store on Guadalupe Street in Austin, near the University of Texas campus. Rather than selling just ice cream and desserts, though, Klose added burgers and other savory items, which set Texas Dairy Queens apart from others across the country."

Haskell is near where my father-in-law grew up. Stamford, where he went to high school, lost its Dairy Queen around 15 years ago (it was an antique store, then a nail salon, and now a Mexican restaurant), but they have a locally-owned drive-in, the Dixie Dog (whose steak fingers are renowned), and a Sonic. I have to wonder how much of an effect Sonic has had on the decline of DQ in Texas. Despite the similar menus, Sonic doesn't provide the indoor space to visit with your neighbors that Dairy Queen provided.

When We Make It Hard to Build, We Give Developers More Power Over Our Communities -- Strong Towns

"There's a much deeper source of dysfunction here, and that is that it's so onerous to develop in San Bruno (or virtually anywhere in coastal California), and there are so many costly regulatory hurdles and delays involved that it's virtually only viable to do so at an enormous scale like 425 or 600 apartments. Imagine jumping all those same hurdles just to build 20 or 30 apartments on a much smaller piece of land. Who would be crazy enough to try?

"This is a system designed to turn each individual development proposal into a high-stakes battle. And when that's the case, the only developers in the arena will be the ones big enough to throw their weight around....

"The biggest problem with 'Make developers give something back to the public' is that a city's efforts to do so end up ramping up the cost and complexity of development until the game is even more stacked in favor of the biggest projects and the deepest pockets. And that, in turn, even more dramatically raises the incentive to shout 'Make them give something back!'

"In an ideal world, we'd have hundreds of small infill projects going on at once. San Bruno could still get that 475 new apartments (or far more than that) but spread over dozens of sites instead of all in one gargantuan building. The culture of negotiation and dealmaking would be less dominant, because it's not practical to operate that way with small projects. For example, the logistical complexity of trying to impose inclusionary zoning on small projects is such that almost all such ordinances exempt individual homes or projects below a certain number of units (20, perhaps, or even 50).

"What should replace it is a culture of consistent rules applied consistently. With a steady stream of small projects going up all over the place, you'd have a steadier stream of revenue flowing into the city's coffers, and a stream less dependent on the approval or denial of any one specific proposal. The small-scale developer can't throw their weight around--but nor does the city need to throw its weight around."

One man zoned huge swaths of our region for sprawl, cars, and exclusion - Greater Greater Washington

Historical sketch of a planner who shaped zoning and urban design in St. Louis, the Metro Washington area, and many other cities.

"On Wedges and Corridors is regularly cited as the framework underlying Montgomery [County, Maryland,]'s current plans, and the county's agricultural reserve faithfully fulfills its vision for the wedges. But the county's success in creating lively urban centers rests on its rejection of the plan's prescription for the 'urban ring' - the area inside and just beyond the Beltway that suburbanized before 1960.

"As he had in the District in the 1920s, [Harland] Bartholomew made preservation of upscale single-family neighborhoods a paramount goal. 'How many more people,' On Wedges and Corridors asks, 'can crowd into your community before you feel completely "hemmed in"?... Without planning, a prospective home owner can buy a piece of property and a house, but he cannot purchase an unchanging environment.'"

The article quotes Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law about the effect of the work Harland Bartholomew did in St. Louis:

"The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments. With no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations."

Two years later, Tulsa city officials would attempt to use land use regulation to prohibit residents from rebuilding the destroyed Greenwood district, with the intention of repurposing the land for industrial use.