Las Urbanistas

Along the streets of Far Rockaway, many recently built two- and three-family town houses sit waiting for even one family to move in. Some have boarded-up windows, while others have clumps of garbage in driveways that have never seen a car. Desperate developers hoping to cover their bets — and stem their losses — tape up both For Rent and For Sale signs inside windows that face nearly deserted streets.

The same blocks were once home to sprawling single-family houses with wraparound porches. But during the superheated real estate market of just a few years ago, longtime residents sold out to developers who rapidly demolished the old to build rows of plain vanilla town houses sold, it seemed, to anyone who could sign a mortgage application.

But as the market cooled and credit got tighter, many of the new homes sat empty. On a few blocks, developers have built nothing but plywood walls to hide the weed-choked lots after the old houses were torn down.

 

“Folks just went crazy and got into the feeding frenzy,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., whose Far Rockaway office is wedged between undeveloped lots and mostly vacant town houses. “They thought money was going to come to everybody left, right and center. Irrational exuberance is what I call this.”

The empty homes and undeveloped lots, he said, are part of the unacknowledged effects of the larger credit and foreclosure crisis in minority neighborhoods, where subprime and predatory loans were common. Real estate values rose steadily, as did the optimism of aspiring first-time buyers, who entered into mortgages without fully understanding the terms of the loan or the responsibilities of ownership. When budgets got tight, they could always refinance, they were told.

Not anymore. Now, in large swaths of Mr. Sanders’s district in southeastern Queens, For Sale signs are as common as trees, as people try to bail out before losing what little equity remains in their homes. Similar scenes are found in central Brooklyn and the northeast Bronx, strongholds of minority homeowners whose fortunes have declined. While regulators have long been reluctant to rescue individuals they considered victims of their own greed or bad decisions, entire communities are now facing the consequences.

“Whole neighborhoods are wiped out, crime increases, the neighborhood’s reputation goes down, quality of life is undermined, and people can’t sell their houses,” said Susan Saegert, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who recently completed a study of homeowners facing foreclosure. “That has already happened in Ohio and the Rust Belt. And it is starting to happen in New York.”

This has not come as a surprise to housing policy analysts and advocates who have been warning about the disastrous consequences of the freewheeling subprime market. At least five years ago, they sounded alarms over the spike in foreclosures among elderly homeowners who had been persuaded to take out costly refinancing loans to do repairs or raise money for emergencies. More recently, they saw a surge of first-time buyers taking out $500,000 mortgages at unfavorable terms even though they earned only $50,000 or less annually.

Sarah Ludwig, the executive director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, said many people — first-time buyers who relied upon one-stop shops that provided a mortgage broker, appraiser and lawyer, and homeowners who refinanced their existing mortgages — were lured by offers of low monthly payments on adjustable rate loans. But those loans could become unaffordable once the interest rates reset, as is expected to happen in the coming months for many mortgages that began in 2005.

Ms. Ludwig’s group estimates that by year’s end, at least 14,700 homeowners in the city could be in default, mostly in minority neighborhoods, which she said were singled out for these loans.

“We have seen for the last 10 years a very serious problem with the concentration of high-cost loans, foreclosures and people losing their homes,” she said. “What is the toll of these loans?”

In many cases, when the true costs are revealed, the brokers who arranged the mortgages at unfavorable terms have long moved on with their fees, while the original lenders have already sold the loans on the secondary market to banks that used them to back securities. Increasingly, housing advocates have taken to task the big banks that scooped up these high-risk loans.

“The mortgage broker and the lender know this would not work if Wall Street had not been willing to buy these loans,” said Oda Friedheim, a Legal Aid Society lawyer in Queens who deals with many homeowners. “I look at this as a civil rights issue in those neighborhoods where people thought having a home was key to building individual wealth. But what happened is the wealth people built through their hard work has been transferred to Wall Street.”

Predatory lending was just part of a larger problem facing people whose budgets were already stretched thin, Dr. Saegert found in her study. In many cases, she said, family responsibilities pushed stressed homeowners over the edge. “We saw people who had relatives move into an apartment in the house and not pay anything,” she said. “They use resources but don’t contribute, and that just stretches you out more. We had one older couple who took in grandchildren when their daughter died, but they were on a fixed budget and had no way to take on the extra jobs to support them.”

She noted that while people often felt shame at their financial predicament, their efforts to get help were often rebuffed by companies who handled the payments. Unaware of local housing groups that could counsel them, many homeowners skipped paying other debts, ran up huge credit card bills or fell victim to so-called foreclosure rescue scams that tricked them into signing over their deeds.

“Their state of mind is the worst,” Dr. Saegert said. “The people who can legitimately help them are already overwhelmed and not looking for new clients. The people who are not legit are looking for them and they treat them nice. That is why people end up signing papers now not even thinking about it.”

When Carolene Brown and her husband, Patrick, faced foreclosure on their two-bedroom home in the Bronx, hardly a week went by that they were not visited by a friendly stranger offering to help. Five times, she said, they paid $500 in cash to swindlers, who claimed they could stop the foreclosure. In time, a friend of her husband’s offered to help them save the house. Instead, she said, they wound up signing over the deed to him and had the house sold out from under them.

“People always came to us to help,” said Ms. Brown, who said she has contacted prosecutors to help her reclaim her home. “I’m a strong person, and I do not like to talk about certain things. My family is big, and they could have helped me out. But I do not like to complain and ask for stuff. I always said I’d try to make this on my own.”

Councilman Sanders has heard that often.

“People always believe they can turn it around,” he said. “But in the end, they’re out of here and go to live with one of their children or wherever people go when they’re dying of shame.”

Along the many side streets of Arverne, where low-flying planes approaching Kennedy Airport regularly drown out conversation, Mr. Sanders pointed to block after block where homes were for sale or where failed developments turned into rushed rentals. Even closer to his office in Far Rockaway, unsold town houses have been rented to people he said are receiving government subsidies.

“That creates a different problem of changing the composition of the community,” he said. “They tip it from working class and middle class and into a concentration of poverty. You put people into homes who never learned how to manage living in one.”

Down one block of such homes, young men darted inside at the sight of strangers. Outside another drab development, overflowing garbage cans sat atop dusty patches of weeds and gravel.

“There always seemed to be an endless supply of people willing to buy these,” Mr. Sanders said. “Now the chickens have come home to roost. And the community is the one that’s hurt.”

A LIGHT patter bounced off the titanium fish scales of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as a tour bus pulled up beside “Puppy,” Jeff Koons’s 43-foot-tall topiary terrier made of freshly potted pansies. A stream of tourists fanned out across the crisp limestone plaza, tripping over each other as they rushed to capture the moment on camera. After the frisson of excitement dimmed, they made their way down a gently sloping stairway and into the belly of the museum, paying 10.50 euros to see the work of an artist that most had never heard of.

It was a ritual that repeated itself several times an hour, like a well-run multiplex. And if Anselm Kiefer, the controversial post-war German artist, was eclipsed by the metallic blob that held a retrospective of his work, consider how Bilbao, a rusty port city on the northern coast of Spain, stacked up to the very museum that put it on the cultural map.

“We don’t know anything about Bilbao besides the Guggenheim,” said Luigi Fattore, 28, a financial analyst from Paris, who was taking pictures of his girlfriend under the puppy. As if to underscore the point, they showed up at the museum’s doorstep with their suitcase in tow. “We’ve arrived half an hour ago,” he said, “and went straight to the Guggenheim. Aside from the museum, we don’t have any plans.”

Such is the staying power of Frank O. Gehry’s architectural showstopper, 10 years after it crash-landed on the public psyche like a new Hollywood starlet. The iridescent structure wasn’t just a new building; it was a cultural extravaganza.

No less an authority than Philip Johnson deemed it “the greatest building of our time.” The swooping form began showing up everywhere, from car ads to MTV rap videos, like architectural bling. And in certain artistic and architectural social circles, a pilgrimage to Bilbao became de rigueur, with the question “Have you been to Bilbao?” a kind of cocktail party game that marked someone either as a culture vulture or a clueless rube.

“No one had heard of Bilbao or knew where it was,” said Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum and a former architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Nobody knew how to spell it.”

The Guggenheim changed that overnight. Microsoft Word, Mr. Riley noted, added “Bilbao” to its spell checker. And as word of the Guggenheim spread, tourists of all stripes began converging onto the small industrial city — the Pittsburgh of Spain — just to check it off their list.

“I’ve been down there four times,” Mr. Riley added proudly. “That’s probably more than most.”

Even for those who couldn’t spell “Bilbao,” let alone pronounce it (bill-BAH-o), the city became synonymous with the ensuing worldwide rush by urbanists to erect trophy buildings, in the hopes of turning second-tier cities into tourist magnets. The so-called Bilbao Effect was studied in universities throughout the world as a textbook example of how to repackage cities with “wow-factor” architecture. And as cities from Denver to Dubai followed in Bilbao’s footsteps, Mr. Gehry and his fellow starchitects were elevated to the role of urban messiahs.

But what has the Bilbao Effect meant for Bilbao?

I first visited Bilbao in 1999, a lone, wide-eyed tourist who had read about the “Miracle in Bilbao” on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, in which the paper’s architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, likened the “voluptuous” museum to “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” And on that cold and dark March afternoon, when the lush green folds of the region’s coastal mountains were shrouded behind a gray veil, the Guggenheim indeed glinted like a blonde metallic bombshell.

After loading my 35-millimeter camera, I took pictures of the museum’s sinuous curves, surreptitiously ran my fingers across the titanium shingles and marveled at the galleries’ lack of right angles. Oh, there was art, too: Jenny Holzer’s soaring L.E.D. columns, a collection of sketches from Albrecht Dürer to Robert Rauschenberg and — caged behind a chain-link fence in a parking lot — one of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses” for a future exhibition.

But the thing that struck me most, more than the dazzling architecture or cool art, was the horrible smell. Here was this magnificent museum, the most celebrated piece of architecture in a generation, and yet the river beside it was as brown as sludge and as putrid as a sewer — a world-class museum swimming in third-world biohazard.

The Guggenheim, I later learned, was built on a former shipyard, and the Nervión River, which snakes through Bilbao to the Bay of Biscay, was the nexus of Spain’s Industrial Revolution. Blessed with iron-rich mountains, railroads and an excellent port, Bilbao blossomed in the late 19th century with metalworks and shipbuilding. But a century of belching factories turned the mighty Nervión into a toxic cesspool, earning the city the unflattering nickname “El Botxo,” the Basque word for hole.

But the iron mines eventually gave out; shipbuilding moved to Asia. And when the Guggenheim opened its doors in October 1997, what remained was a Dickensian waterfront of rusting cargo rigs and hollow warehouses. Farther up the river, grease-coated factories croaked along its lifeless banks, like a cemetery for the Industrial Age.

The rest of the city hadn’t fared much better. The boulevards radiating from the Guggenheim may have evoked grandeur with their neo-Baroque facades and monumentality, but they were caked in soot and sadly devoid of street life. Sure, there were other signs of design — the caterpillar-like entrances by Norman Foster for a new metro system, a sweeping footbridge by Santiago Calatrava — but they only made the city seem dingier, like a polished fork in a tray of dirty silverware.

But if Bilbao wasn’t exactly ready for its tourist spotlight, the gray industrial air gave the city a raw authenticity and gritty undercurrent that was charmingly provincial. In the Casco Viejo quarter, on the other side of the river, the urine-soaked cobblestones and graffiti-covered walls (mostly in support of the Basque separatist group E.T.A.) may have needed a good scrub. But it felt like a real neighborhood, warts and all, that was proudly oblivious, bordering on rude, to tourists.

In the morning, stumpy grandmothers waited in line for fresh bread and Bayonne ham at antiquated shops. By noon, old men sat in dingy pintxos bars drinking txakoli, a semi-sparkling white wine. And when the weekend rolled around, the dark alleyways vibrated with roving bands of Basque youths stumbling between pubs and drinking kalimotxos, a local concoction made from cheap wine and cola. The futuristic Guggenheim seemed to be in another city, far removed from the grubby fish markets and well-tended flower boxes that gave old Bilbao its character.

That cultural schism, however, began to dissolve. In its first year, the Guggenheim was clocking about 100,000 visitors a month. And rather than drop off precipitously like a summer blockbuster, attendance rates have leveled off to “a cruising speed of around one million visitors a year,” said Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the Guggenheim’s director, adding that the vast majority were from outside the Basque region, and more than half from other countries. By the end of 2006, some nine million visitors had paid homage to Gehry’s miracle.

THE impact on this city of 354,000 was dramatic. Charmless business hotels and musty pensions were supplanted by trendy hotels like the Domine Bilbao and a Sheraton designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. The rusty shipyards near the Guggenheim were razed for a manicured greenbelt of playgrounds, bicycle paths and riverside cafes. A lime-green tram was strung along the river, linking the Guggenheim to Casco Viejo and beyond.

And all across the city, a who’s who of architects added their marquee names to Bilbao’s work-in-progress skyline: Álvaro Siza (university building), Cesar Pelli (40-story office tower), Santiago Calatrava (airport terminal), Zaha Hadid (master plan), Philippe Starck (wine warehouse conversion), Robert A. M. Stern (shopping mall) and Rafael Moneo (library), to name just a few. It’s as if Bilbao went on a shopping spree, commissioning a trophy case of starchitects and Pritzker Architecture Prize winners.

A tangle of construction cranes today rises over the city’s terra-cotta rooftops, but the changes are already apparent at the street level. Bilbao, a muscular town of steelworkers and engineers, is slowly becoming a more effete city of hotel clerks and art collectors.

The city’s main artery, Gran Vía de Don Diego López de Haro, is no longer a soot-stained canyon of bank offices. In the tradition of the Champs-Élysées, the sidewalks were widened, curbside parking removed and stone buildings scrubbed. On a warm Friday last May, shoppers streamed out of countless Zara boutiques. Men in natty business suits sat on benches, smoking cigarettes and reading El País. In front of the opulent Hotel Carlton, a handsome couple was being married.

The beautification was echoed throughout the city. Traffic circles like Plazas Campuzano and Indauxtu had been transformed into piazza-like parks, with sculptural lampposts, ergonomic benches and ultramodern landscaping. In place of polluting cars, laughing children now use them as impromptu soccer fields.

Casco Viejo was almost unrecognizable. The graffiti had been erased. The stone facades sandblasted. And old butchers shared the sidewalk with H & M and Billabong.

At lunchtime, crowds converged on upscale pintxos bars like Sasibil, grazing on octopus and Iberian ham sandwiches, which were exhibited like jewelry under polished glass cases and halogen lights. After sundown, well-dressed couples strolled through the warren of alleyways and tunnels, now brightly illuminated by cheery shop windows and klieg-like streetlamps.

But the most striking metamorphosis wasn’t cosmetic: the Nervión River no longer stank. With the sludge-spewing factories gone and sewage treatment plants installed, the river began to heal itself. It may not be as blue as the Danube (the color today is more like a rusty green), but within an hour of my arrival, I spotted a lone sculler in a red jersey, gliding by a pair of cormorants.

The cleaner water, however, hasn’t necessarily brought more tourists upriver. Despite a host of tourist information centers, including a glass shed outside the Guggenheim staffed with professional guides and a rainbow of color brochures, Bilbao remains very much a one-attraction town.

On a cloudless Sunday morning, the Museo de Bellas Artes — with important works by El Greco, Francis Bacon and Eduardo Chillida — was nearly empty, despite a 2001 expansion and being just a quick stroll from the Guggenheim. Maybe that’s why the museum closes at 2 p.m. on Sundays. (At least it was open. The city — restaurants, grocery stores, cafes — shuts down on Sundays; everything, that is, except the Guggenheim.)

The Maritime Museum, which traces the city’s port and sailing history, was completely deserted, save for the bored-looking woman at the ticket counter. Even the Moyúa neighborhood next to the Guggenheim, which should have benefited from the Bilbao Effect most acutely, is far from tourist ready. There’s one postcard store across the street and a couple of hip restaurants nearby, but this residential district is otherwise filled with featureless stucco apartments, five-and-dimes and plain bodegas. A clutch of art galleries have sprung up along Calle Juan Ajuriaguerra, but its proximity to the Guggenheim is merely coincidental.

“There’s no art market in Bilboa,” said Javier Gimeno Martiñez-Sapiña, who owns the year-old photogallery20. “I don’t think the Guggenheim has helped. It’s still very hard for local artists to sell art here. They have to go to Madrid or Barcelona.”

No wonder many guidebooks still devote as many pages to the Guggenheim — reprinting floor plans, offering tips and expounding on the museum’s design — as they do the rest of Bilbao. On paper at least, Bilbao seems to have it all: world-class museum, fine Basque cuisine, a rollicking night life and lots of shopping. But like the new bike paths that were rarely used during my visit, the city lacks the critical mass of attractions to take it from a provincial post-industrial town, to a global cosmopolitan city. And in the meantime, it is losing the shabby edge that gave the city its earlier appeal.

The concentration of first-rate architecture is astounding, even without Gehry’s titanium masterpiece. But architecture alone does not a city make. Bilbao is all dressed-up, but hasn’t figured where to go.

“Our local culture still hasn’t integrated with the Guggenheim,” said Alfonso Martínez Cearra, the general manager of Bilbao Metropoli-30, a public-private partnership that is guiding the city’s revitalization. “This is still an industrial city.”

The disconnect between Bilbao the brand, and Bilbao the city was on display one Saturday night, when the narrow streets of Casco Viejo were once again packed with young bar-hoppers. The smell of marijuana wafted from a crowd outside a bar on Calle de Somera. In the group was Ikel, a 22-year-old studying to be an engineer, like his father.

“I’ve never been to the Guggenheim,” Ikel said between puffs, as mechanical street cleaners starting scrubbing beer and urine from the cobblestones. “It’s for tourists.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Flights from New York to Bilbao, with stopovers in either Paris or Madrid, start at about $700 for travel next month on a number of airlines, including Iberia. From Bilbao airport, a taxi to the city center is about 25 euros ($35 at $1.40 to the euro).

Most attractions can be reached by foot, though the futuristic metro system is an attraction in itself. A BilbaoCard, for unlimited metro and tram rides, plus museum discounts, starts at 6 euros for a day and can be purchased on the city’s tourism Web site (www.bilbao.net/bilbaoturismo).

WHERE TO STAY

Iturrienea Ostatua (Santa Maria Kalea 14; 34-944-16-15-00; www.iturrieneaostatua.com) offers Old World charms and exposed oak beams in the heart of Casco Viejo, with rates staring at 60 euros. Ask for a room with a balcony overlooking the cobblestone street.

Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao (Alameda de Mazarredo 61; 34-94-425-33-00; www.granhoteldominebilbao.com) is across the street from the Guggenheim and has 145 modern rooms starting at 140 euros a night. The rooftop terrace offers great views of the museum and surrounding hills.

Hesperia Bilbao (Campo Volantín 28; 34-94-405-11-00; www.hesperia-bilbao.es) is a trendy newcomer, next to Santiago Calatrava’s footbridge over the Nervión River, and has 151 boutique-style rooms starting about 90 euros.

MUSEUMS

Guggenheim Bilbao (Abandoibarra 2, 34-94-435-90-80; www.guggenheim-bilbao.es). Open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Monday. Admission is 10.50 euros.

Museo de Bellas Artes (Museo Plaza 2, 34-94-439-60-60 www.museobilbao.com). Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m, Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission 5.50 euros.

By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate Friday, September 21, 2007

In San Francisco the concept of change carries great currency when it comes to food, technology, family and politics, but utter the word in the context of a peeling Victorian facade or a distressed brick warehouse, and people will begin muttering about “neighborhood character” and “the way it’s always been.”

Sure, we have the Federal Building and the de Young Museum expressing San Francisco’s newfound willingness to tiptoe into the 21st century, but these buildings ain’t where folks sleep. Over the years I’ve heard too many rants from architects to forget that getting permits for an innovative design can be an uphill battle — especially if the property lies in a “well-established” neighborhood (a.k.a. somewhere with historic homes occupied by middle-class home owners with time to organize neighborhood groups). When it comes to residential architecture, our fair city gives new meaning to the phrase “arch conservative.”

So when I saw that the American Institute of Architects’ San Francisco chapter was offering a weekend of home tours “showcasing modernism at its finest,” I was curious about how a new generation of residential buildings was fitting into our well-loved urban landscape.

 

What did these esteemed “state of the art” single-family homes and architect/developer multi-family buildings say about the place of modern architecture in San Francisco’s infamously protective neighborhoods? Which neighborhoods were more open to innovation amidst all the vintage Victorian, Edwardian, Mediterranean and mid-century? And while we’re at it, how had these architects managed to get permits for homes without bay windows?

The first thing I noticed is that the heart of modernism beats (if it beats anywhere) on the east side of the city. With the exception of one house in the outer Richmond, every showcased building was located in the South of Market or in easterly ‘hoods like Potrero Hill, Noe Valley, the Mission and Bernal Heights. The reasons for this are many: Bernal, for instance, though infamous for its neighborhood design groups, also has the most empty lots, which have attracted a generation of designers and architects. But all of these neighborhoods have areas with a surprising diversity of housing stock all cheek- and-jowl next to one another.

“It often depends how much diversity there is in the existing context,” says Neal Schwartz of Schwartz and Architecture, whose Potrero three-level home plus office was featured in the tour. “In Potrero, for instance, there’s an amazing diversity of styles, so it’s easier to do contemporary architecture in that context.”

Schwartz’s renovation embodies the other evident fact about these “new modernist buildings.” All but one of the single-family homes on the tour were not technically new construction but “additions,” “revitalizations” or “expansions.” In the logic of the city’s planning codes, it’s far easier to gut a home and add two extra floors than get permits to demolish an existing home and build something new. (Demolitions are possible, but the home must be sufficiently dilapidated to qualify.)

“The limitations against demolishing are a good thing in the sense that they prevent developers from mowing down a block and destroying the existing fabric,” says Andrew Sparks, an associate with Levy Art and Architecture, a firm that showcased a total renovation in Diamond Heights. “But when it’s applied to a single owner it’s very difficult. Getting a demolition permit can take two years alone. And though sometimes it’s cheaper and better to demolish the home, instead they have to renovate what they already have.”

“This is a renovation with a large extension,” Owen Kennerly of Kennerly Architecture and Planning told me from the rooftop deck of an extravagant stone and steel modernist dream house on 27th Street in Noe Valley. “We kept the front room, which was the living room.” Yet looking at the open spaces, massive staircases, and floor-to-ceiling windows of the three-floor home, it’s difficult to imagine where a single scrap of the old structure might have been. Kennerly says that this home — despite its larger- than-life modernist presence — got virtually no resistance from the neighbors.

So does this mean it’s actually easier to get approval for contemporary designs? It depends on who you ask.

“San Francisco prides itself on being the most liberal city on the planet,” says Ross Levy, founder of Levy Art and Architecture. “But until recently we’ve had a relatively homogeneous building stock. Other cities — like Barcelona, London, Madrid, which are more secure in their history, have embraced modern architecture. But it is getting easier and more acceptable. It’s also more in demand. People are realizing that these are fantastic places to live. Even here, when people buy Victorian homes, we gut them — because no one wants to live in those rooms.”

“It’s still a struggle,” says Sparks. “But it probably will always be a struggle to some extent. Because in doing contemporary architecture, you’re trying to do something new, you’re exploring new materials and exploring space, you’re trying to respond to people’s contemporary lifestyles.”

Other architects suggest that things are finally changing as the populace realizes modernism doesn’t mean cheapo boxes on the hill. “You have to make a good case for change with the planning department,” says Kennerly. “But they understand that with good use of materials, good design actually contributes to the neighborhood.”

David Baker, founder of David Baker + Partners, contends that even the neighborhood groups have changed: “If there’s a meeting and someone asks why the building doesn’t look like the Victorians next to it, then some other neighbor will stand up and say, ‘Because we’re not living in the 19th century.’”

Yet there are still institutional and community obstacles — obstacles which effect designs, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Currently all buildings over 50 years old can be subject to an historic designation which in turn triggers certain guidelines limiting any alteration of the facade. “Typically the facades of buildings with historical designations can’t be changed more than 25 percent,” explains Sparks, “So we have to work very strategically.”

Sometimes, altering a facade can actually help to unify the look of the neighborhood. Schwartz says that since his home remodel began as an “ugly” 1950s home which was far smaller than existing homes surrounding it, creating a larger facade was actually “healing the disruption.”

The outcome may be a taller profile — more or less equal to the buildings around it. But it’s also far from ostentatious: a simple stucco front with moderately sized windows in low-key earth tones. With a couple of exceptions, almost all the buildings on the tour — be they warehouses in SOMA or single family homes in residential neighborhoods — are so inconspicuous that they act as camouflage for the extravagance within.

This of course can be a sly design strategy: “I designed the facade so that someone not interested in design might walk by and not notice it,” says Schwartz, “But for someone into contemporary architecture, they might notice the mahogany windows or the bamboo on the third floor deck and think: Hey, something’s going on in there.”

But the low-key exterior functions as a survival strategy for concealing the secret and sometimes extravagant) modern design within. One warehouse on a scrappy street in the Mission which harbors 10,000 feet of ultra modern grooviness designed by Stanley Saitowitz of Natoma Architects Inc., exhibits no exterior signs of alteration, except for its flat, monochromatic black facade. Like a secret agent clad all in black, it seems to be whispering: Forget you ever saw me.

Residents soon will be dialing 657. The Public Utilities Commission voted to create an overlay in the 714.

Don’t want to fork out for a Prius? Can’t see tanking up with ethanol? Can’t afford solar panels for your roof?

Not to worry, you can still do something to fight global warming: Live closer to work.

That’s one conclusion of a major national report published Thursday by the nonprofit Urban Land Institute.

Forty percent of the planet-heating gases that Californians emit come from transportation, according to the report’s authors, and with its booming population and sprawling suburbs, the state’s greenhouse emissions will continue to soar unless it dramatically changes the way it builds cities and suburbs.

The report, “Growing Cooler: Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change,” analyzed scores of academic studies and concluded that compact development — mixing housing and businesses in denser patterns, with walkable neighborhoods — could do as much to lower emissions as many of the climate policies now promoted by state and national politicians.

Up to now, climate policy has primarily focused on such things as higher fuel economy for cars and trucks, cleaner fuels, greener building standards, lower power plant emissions, and international treaties. But a growing consensus of experts is also homing in on the everyday zoning decisions of local officials and county planners.

Since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has risen three times faster than the population and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations. And it is getting worse: The U.S. Department of Energy projects that between 2005 and 2030, driving will increase 59%, far outpacing an estimated national population growth of 23%.

“We can no longer afford to ignore land use,” said Steve Winkelman, director of the Transportation Program at the Center for Clean Air Policy, and one of the report’s authors. “Urban development is both a key contributor to climate change and an essential factor in combating it.”

The world’s top climate scientists agree that human activity is largely driving the heating of the planet, with potentially catastrophic consequences, including a rise in sea levels, spreading deserts, widespread species extinction and severe weather. International and national policy experts say that limiting the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 to 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century.

Such reductions would require politically difficult measures.

In the case of land use, decisions are made at the local level, so any interference by state and national politicians is certain to meet with resistance.

In California, where the state’s 2006 global warming law requires emission reductions to 1990 levels by 2020, land use is being hotly debated.

The Legislature came to a halt this summer when Republicans held up the budget in an effort to exempt localities from global-warming-related lawsuits. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown had sued San Bernardino County and pressured other counties to account for greenhouse gases in their development plans.

A hotly contested bill sponsored by Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) would require regional planning groups to set targets for reducing greenhouse gases, and could stop millions of dollars in federal, state and local transportation funds from being spent on roads that could encourage sprawl.

The bill, which passed the Senate but was carried over until next year, is hotly opposed by the California building industry, the League of Cities and other groups that want the state to stay out of local planning decisions.

The Urban Land Institute report, however, highlights the massive turnover expected in the nation’s housing and commercial structures. According to Chris Nelson, a researcher at Virginia Tech, two-thirds of the structures in the U.S. in 2050 will have been built between now and then. Construction will include 89 million new or replaced homes, and 190 billion square feet of new offices, stores and institutions. If only 60% of that development is clustered in mixed-use, compact areas, it could slash greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 7%, the report said.

The nation’s changing demographics may make that easier. “We have a senior tsunami coming,” said Don Chen, founder of the advocacy group Smart Growth America. “Baby boomers are trading in their big houses for condos closer to town. These folks are demanding walkable neighborhoods. We need to pressure governments to give them choices.”

The study called for the upcoming $300-billion federal transportation funding bill to reward, rather than discourage, compact growth. “Funding today is tied to vehicle-miles-traveled,” Chen said. “So areas are rewarded for driving more.”

Compact growth, according to the study, allows consumers to spend less on gas and saves taxes that would otherwise be spent on pumping water and building new roads to far-away subdivisions. “Southern California’s regional planners have found that by locating new housing near transit corridors, they can save $48 billion that they would have spent on new roads,” said Amanda Eaken, a planning consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The California Chamber of Commerce and the California Building Industry Assn. declined to comment on the report, but James Burling, litigation director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has battled environmentalists over land-use issues, dismissed “the latest anti-sprawl crusade based on global warming” as “no different from every other anti-sprawl campaign from Roman times to the present.”

“So long as people ardently desire to live and raise children in detached homes with a bit of lawn, there is virtually nothing that government bureaucrats can do that will thwart that,” he said.

By Bill Brubaker Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 18, 2007; 11:56 AM

In cell phone speak, Sprint Nextel Corp. hit a dead spot last night in its bid to build a 106-foot cellular tower — disguised as an agricultural silo — near the village of Philomont in rural western Loudoun County.

Los Angeles Tops the List in National Study

By Jonathan Mummolo Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; 11:30 AM

The spirit-sapping, schedule-scuttling congestion of the Washington area has grown so severe that the region is now in a tie for the second-worst traffic in the nation — a notch higher on an ignominious chart no city aims to top. Only drivers in freeway-filled Los Angeles endure rush hour delays more brutal than Washingtonians, according to a national study released today.

Washington and Atlanta pulled into a second-place tie with the San Francisco-Oakland region, which had held strong in second place for years, according to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute of 2005 conditions. Drivers in all three areas sit in gridlock for an average of 60 hours a year, equivalent to a week-and-a-half of work — or vacation.

The Washington area had been No. 3 in the previous study.

“We’re the world’s capital with world-class gridlock,” said John B. Townsend II, public and government affairs manager for AAA Mid-Atlantic.

The numbers for Washington area drivers are cringe worthy: They sat through more than 127 million hours of delays at a cost of $1,094 per rush-hour traveler. They wasted nearly 91 million gallons of fuel. A projected 218 lane miles or 74 million more transit riderswould have to be added each year just to maintain current congestion levels.

Though changes in the report’s methodology resulted in Washingtonians spending fewer hours stuck in congestion than in previous studies, things are most assuredly not improving, the authors cautioned.

On the contrary, the new analysis shows a worsening picture, with the area’s delay figures and national rank climbing steadily since the report first came out in 1984. A generation ago, Washington area drivers sat through a paltry 16 hours of congestion, placing the region at a respectable 18th in the nation. By 1985, the region had cracked the top 10 and by 1994 it was in the top five.

The Washington region is “afflicted with economic prosperity,” said the study’s co-author, Timothy J. Lomax. “Booming economies almost always see rapid growth and congestion . . . It’s a lot easier to put up an office building or a subdivision or a shopping center than it is to put in the transportation system needed to serve all that travel.”

Though increasingly difficult to thwart, the causes of congestion are not mysterious. The report cites large populations, shipping demands, slow construction of new roads and transit and such events crashes, breakdowns and bad weather that cause unpredictable delays.

Lomax noted that the delay figures account for all rush-hour travelers — whether they are riding their bikes to the corner store or sitting in a bumper-to-bumper nightmare on the way to the office — meaning that many area drivers well exceed the 60-hour average.

Overall, the study found a nation lodged in traffic jams. “Congestion . . . is getting worse in regions of all sizes,” the study states, and it reports staggering figures at the national level: 4.2 billion hours of delays, an increase of 200 million hours from 2004; 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel; and an annual cost of $710 per traveler, up from an inflation-adjusted $260 in 1982.

Perhaps most discouragingly for the Washington area, many of the solutions suggested in the report — using mass transit and HOV lanes, telecommuting, building new roads and relieving chokepoints — are already being done. Even with a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Springfield interchange and plans to expand Metro rail in Northern Virginia and build a new 18-mile highway across the Maryland suburbs, there are simply too many people to move from here to there.

“We’re not even close to keeping up, much less catching up,” said Alan Pisarski, a traffic analyst from Fairfax County, who has authored the “Commuting in America” series. “We’ve just got such a dramatic backlog of work to be done.”

Good news was hard to find in the report. Even Atlanta’s apparent improvement in certain categories isn’t cause for celebration, experts said. Yearly congestion in the Georgia metropolis dropped from a revised 73 hours to 60 hours between 2000 and 2005. While Lomax said that drop was partly due to increased service patrols, experts caution that the figures are likely due to the expanding geography of the region into more rural areas and a rapid growth in population, both of which would water down per-capita averages.

“I wouldn’t be looking to Atlanta as a model of the solution,” Pisarski said.

The study is sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association and the University Transportation Center for Mobility and is based on data compiled by state and federal traffic agencies in 437 urban areas. Its results are obtained by comparing traffic counts and miles of road lanes to estimate congestion levels.

This year’s report employs a number of methodological changes and includes data from more localities and revised population estimates. For the Washington region, it also incorporates newly available data from the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration, Lomax said.

Ronald F. Kirby, director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said he was hesitant to place too much weight on Washington’s shifting rank given the change in technique by the study’s authors.

“I guess my question would be, ‘Is the change in ranking real, or a result of the different methodology?’ ” Kirby said.

Kirby, whose organization has released a regional report based on aerial photographs since 1993, said Washington congestion is indeed worsening overall, but that it is very time- and location-specific and has actually improved in some spots.

There is one cause for hope: Washington is unlikely to ever overtake Los Angeles, where drivers spend a whopping 72 hours a year mired in delays.

With a whoosh, the pack of bicyclists bears down on an automobile starting to pull away from the curb in front of the Brookside Golf Club in Pasadena.

“Car!” shouts one of the riders in the front. “Car!” repeats someone deep within the pack.

As one, the 150 cyclists veer slightly to the left and careen past the startled driver. In a flash, they’re gone.

Rattled, the motorist peers into his rearview mirror searching for more bicyclists. But there are none.

“A lot of time, people are not used to seeing a bicycle travel at this speed. They misjudge how fast these bicycles will be on you,” said racer Fernando Burgos, who has stopped next to Rosemont Avenue to watch his friends zoom past. “They probably think the bikes are going 12 miles an hour, when in fact they’re going 25 miles an hour.”

Or 35 or 40 miles an hour. That’s how fast they ride twice a week around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

For 60 years bike racers riding handlebar-to-handlebar in packs — known to bicyclists as a “peloton” — have trained and conditioned themselves by pedaling laps around the famed football stadium. The tighter the racers group themselves together, the less wind resistance they experience. And the faster they go.

There are occasional mishaps. They can run into cars, sideswipe pedestrians or joggers, and veer into each other. Lately, though, the bicyclists have been on a collision course with Pasadena city leaders.

Officials have set a deadline for peloton riders to help figure out how to coexist with others when they circle the outside of the football stadium.

As many as 150 pack riders turn out each Tuesday and Thursday for Rose Bowl rides. Beginning promptly at 5:55 p.m., bicyclists take 10 laps around a three-mile loop, ending at about 7:05 p.m. The rides are held during summertime months when daylight saving time is in effect.

But the early evening hours are also prime exercise time for thousands of joggers, walkers, skaters and baby-stroller pushers who also enjoy circling the stadium while the sun is setting beyond the arroyo’s steep wall.

Bike racers sometimes crash into pedestrians. And clash with motorists, golfers and soccer players.

Complaints involving the encounters prompted an investigation by the Pasadena Police Department, which led to a proposed crackdown on peloton riders at the Rose Bowl and elsewhere in the city.

Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian told City Council members that pack racing had grown dangerous. He played a video of peloton riders speeding around the Rose Bowl, forcing automobiles off the roadway, swerving around recreational bicyclists and joggers, and spilling over the streets’ yellow lines into oncoming traffic lanes.

Melekian said the pack riders are seemingly unorganized, with no group in charge or in a position of authority to set rules or procedures.

His officers cannot enforce traffic laws during the twice-weekly rides because the cyclists are in a tight pack and are dressed in similar uniforms and helmets, Melekian said.

“Identifying individual riders gets to be problematic,” he said. “The reality is there are some concerns that once the peloton gets going there could be chain-reaction crashes” if police tried to pull a rider over.

Councilman Sidney Tyler said the pack riders were spectacular — but dangerous.

“I do find the pelotons interesting to watch, but intimidating, particularly when they come up behind me or groups of pedestrians trying to enjoy the experience of the Rose Bowl,” Tyler said at a council meeting. “There are enormous numbers of people trying to enjoy the experience down there too.”

The city criticism roiled the local biking community — and prompted peloton fans to go on the offensive.

“The Rose Bowl ride is famous across the country,” said Katie Safford, a national cycling champion who lives in Pasadena. She told the council that despite the pack’s unorganized look, tradition dictates that newer riders are educated by veterans on how to maneuver.

“We can’t go fast enough riding two abreast to get the training we need,” Safford said.

The city talked about a ban on bicyclists riding more than two abreast without a permit. Bike riders across Los Angeles responded by demanding that they be allowed to self-police the Rose Bowl rides and work with city leaders on ways to control traffic during the Tuesday and Thursday evening pelotons.

Private meetings followed with bicyclists, police and Rose Bowl operators. Everyone agreed to cool the rhetoric and work for the next six months on a compromise.

Among the changes now being considered: Turning the roadway loop around the Rose Bowl into a one-way street, limiting automobile traffic during the Tuesday-Thursday rides, and requiring joggers and walkers to move counterclockwise toward oncoming bicyclists.

Back at the Rose Bowl, it appeared the bike riders were being extra cautious. They stayed on their side of the roadway. They shouted out warnings to each other when motorists pulled in front of them. They refrained from yelling at joggers and walkers who absent-mindedly stepped in their path.

“We’re working together to try and make a workable arrangement so all user groups are treated equally and we’re not singled out as the mean guys here,” said rider Pat Nay, a Pasadena sports massage therapist. “Because we’re not.”

Burgos, a Redondo Beach psychotherapist, described fellow pack riders as “law-abiding citizens” who care about Pasadenawhether they live there or not.

“Pasadena provides us with a safe opportunity, and we want to respect the city and what they’ve given us. We want to pass this on to the next generation,” he said.

It seemed to be working.

Exercise walker Bob Kirby, a semi-retired investment consultant from La Canada Flintridge, said he believes all Rose Bowl users can peacefully coexist.

“I stay out of their way and they’ve been courteous to me,” he said of the cyclists. “I think a lot of people don’t pay attention. I’ve seen some of the riders go down because they’ve been sideswiped and what have you. And that’s sad because people are so irresponsible.”

On the other side of the Rose Bowl, Kristin Rozsa of La Crescenta was pushing 1-year-old daughter Isabelle in a baby stroller as the colorful peloton whizzed by.

“Isabelle loves looking at them. They seem to stay out of our lane,” Rozsa said. “The city shouldn’t ban them.”