As America starts taking baby steps toward building a respectable passenger rail network in this country, there remains the sad, barely acknowledged fact that twenty years ago, a major party presidential candidate was campaigning on precisely this idea. Then he became the first victim of a real Karl Rove-style media sliming, and the rest is history.

But Michael Dukakis still knows more about making rail work than most of America’s national political talent put together. With Obama dropping $13 billion as a down payment on a high speed rail system, we were curious what the Duke–now back in Boston after a semester spent teaching at UCLA–thought of these developments, and what he saw as the biggest challenges ahead.

After first speaking with him in late January, we checked in with him again by phone earlier this week.

(AND: See PART II of this interview)

Did you have an inkling this $13 billion for high speed rail was coming?
Not a clue. In fact, I was a little concerned during the campaign because, while Barack was talking about infrastructure, we could never get him to be specific about rail. For example, there were opportunities to do press events around specific projects and he just never did them. Maybe that was wise, I don’t know. But I think the vice president has played a major role in this–and more power to him.

You’re happy with the result, I assume?
Are you kidding me? For us rail fanatics this is like dying and going to heaven.

(more…)

The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, is a renovated Kmart

When Circuit City announced last month that it was going out of business, everyone’s concern was naturally with the 34,000 employees that got laid off. Less noted has been the fate of the chain’s 1,500 big box stores scattered across the U.S. and Canada. The company, whose locations average about 25,000 square feet, was an anchor tenant in many malls and shopping centers. With numerous other big retailers teetering, not only are the prospects for filling Circuit City’s spaces gloomy, there will likely be a rash of follow-on closings among neighboring stores. And many analysts think the national retail shakeout is still in its early stages.

The problem of retail vacancies on this scale is so new that it hasn’t really been studied yet. Perhaps the only authority on the subject of empty big box stores is Oberlin College professor and artist Julia Christensen. She has spent the last seven years traveling around the country seeking out and documenting cases of communities reclaiming abandoned big boxes and putting them to a socially productive use–for instance, as museums, libraries, rec centers, and schools. She wrote about it all in her recently published book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press). A few days ago, we got her thoughts on how towns and cities can make beneficial use of these vacant structures and turn a hole in the local fabric into a community asset.

Studying big box reuse is such a timely and fascinating project. How did you get started?
I began the project because I grew up in a small historic town in central Kentucky called Bardstown. It’s very well preserved with over 300 buildings in the national registry of historic places–and meanwhile Wal-Mart has expanded twice there involving three sites in town. The company’s original store, abandoned so they could build a larger structure on the other side of town, remained vacant for about ten years. Eventually the town needed a new courthouse building and they decided to build on that lot. Doing so really changed the civic structure of the town. It was very intriguing.

(more…)

For a half century, it’s been easy to mock suburbia for being too comfortable, white-bread and conformist. That’s all changed in the last 18 months as many suburbs have abruptly taken on a sense of tragedy and desperation–a fact that underlies Obama’s trip to devastated Lee County, Florida, later today. Drug violence, gangs pillaging half-empty subdivisions for scrap metal, skateboarders reclaiming the pools of abandoned McMansions, and whole streets of dead lawns spray-painted green have emerged as the new symbols of life in the ‘burbs.

One man who foresaw all the ugliness is Christopher Leinberger. The Brookings Institute fellow and distinguished scholar of the suburban living arrangement has decades of experience in real estate development and urban planning. The meme of doomed suburbs went mainstream with his cover story for the Atlantic magazine last March, “The Next Slum?” The problem, he says, goes much deeper than the foreclosure crisis. It’s part of a painful societal adjustment that will take a generation or more to work through.

After heralding the crash of America’s predominant living arrangement, his latest efforts are devoted to showing how suburbs can adjust and reemerge as healthy communities. In this conversation he analyzes the roots of suburbia’s current plight and explains how three straightforward adjustments to infrastructure can save a community.

The suburbs are really suffering. What’s the short-form diagnosis?
Americans are undergoing a fundamental shift in where they want live, work, and play. So this is not just a normal cyclical downturn. We’ve structurally overbuilt retail, office, and housing, and we’ve done so in the wrong places.

So where’s the bottom? Or, rather: Is there a bottom?
It’s not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. (more…)

It’s hard not to have the sense that after twenty years of relative obscurity–or at least being thought of primarily as a guy who looks stupid in a tank gunner helmet–Michael Dukakis is poised for a renaissance. The trajectory of Al Gore could be instructive: eggheaded Dem becomes media laughing stock in the course of losing to a man named Bush but gets his mojo back as an opinion leader.

Dukakis certainly deserves to be an important voice in the national debate about how to rebuild our roads and rail. He has a black belt in transportation policy and as governor of Massachusetts had an impressive record of completing large public works projects on time and on budget.

Curious about the Duke’s thoughts on the stimulus bill and the larger project of rebuilding America’s infrastructure, we reached him recently at UCLA, where he’s teaching this semester. He talks about why the U.S. can’t build big things anymore, what he thinks about when he’s stuck in L.A. traffic, and what America would be like if he’d been elected back in ‘88.

Setting aside modesty, if you’d beaten “Poppy” Bush would we be facing an infrastructure crisis now?
Oh Christ, we’d have been at this thing all guns blazing. (more…)