Why Zoning Laws Matter - Landscaping: The Case Of Northrim Bank

This is the site of the now closed Northrim Bank branch office at 36th and Old Seward.  Notice the beautiful carpet of asphalt. Nothing is marred with soil or green in this picture.  (Though to be fair, there were a few bushes up along the building on the other side.)  This building was at this location long enough that the old Municipal code Title 21 for landscaping commercial property applied.  You can see how strict the code was.

This is where the "hybrid single point urban interchange" is planned for 36th and New Seward.  Given the state of the budget, maybe we can be spared the engineers' overbuilt creativity with exit lanes on the left, not the right. 

Now here is the new Northrim branch that just opened this week about a mile away.

And here it is from the other side. This landscaping is only a few weeks old and it already looks a million times better than their old location.

And a lot better than this location used to be. I don't have handy a good picture of the old lot, but you can get the idea from this picture of the rebuilt Sugar Shack coffee stand after it was vandalized and burned.   It's almost the same view as the one above, just a little closer.  Basically the whole space where the bank and parking lot sit now was just dirt with maybe a little bit of asphalt on one side and some weeds along Lake Otis. When we moved in here in the late 70s this lot was all birch trees. Then they all got cut down one day and it sat empty for years and years until the Sugar Shack was put on it.

I'm not sure whether the bank did this just to meet code or if they went beyond what the code required.  But I do appreciate it.

They even put trees and bushes in the ally, on the other side of the fence from the parking lot, giving the neighbors a bit of green screen. Some might say that the old Sugar Shack and old Northrim landscaping is the 'real' Alaska.  But I'd say the real Alaska was when this lot was all birch trees.  But I'll take this new landscaping over the open dirt space that's been here. 

Good Design Or Just An Accident?

This was the view from the room where the complexity presentation was held.  It's really a peaceful landscape.  What impressed me was . . . well look at the next picture.

Yes, there is a road that goes through this landscape.  But from this room, at least,  you don't see the road.  When there's no car, you don't even realize it's there.

So, I was wondering - was this designed this way?  Or just an accident?  From the second floor, you won't have this same illusion that it's just an unbroken field to the trees.

Now, on the way to the presentation, I did pass an accident.  There were at least two other cars behind me that were also involved.  I didn't see an ambulance and you couldn't crash much closer to the emergency room than this intersection right between UAA and Providence hospital.   Not sure how this car got in this position.  Well designed intersections have fewer accidents. 

 
And putting some thought into land use can avoid making terrible mistakes too.

At the complexity talk, Dr. Jamie Trammel's presentation was titled: Alternative Landscape Futures: Using Spatially-Explicit Scenarios to Model Landscape Change.

OK, that title sounds pretty academic.  Basically, he was looking at ways to look at land use by gathering data, then projecting maps of the landscape with different possible futures based on different conditions.  If you, for example, see where threatened species live, leave wilderness corridors, look at the best land for urban areas, you can make maps that show different possible land use patterns.  He gave examples from Australia, Las Vegas, and the Kenai Peninsula.   This slide probably gives a better sense of how this works. 

Clearly Trammel's work is to try to bring some sense and order to future land use rather than letting things just happen haphazardly.

This was the slide that I didn't quite understand and I didn't have a chance to ask him to explain it more fully.  But it's a diagram, as I understand it, for developing these alternative futures so that people can visualize all the data that normally is too dense for most people to make sense of. 

Awful Layout Design

I got to part B of the paper today and was startled to see this picture and headline.

These two stories just should not be placed together.  A picture of five family members matches the five people around the table above.  Someone wasn't paying attention.  I don't know enough about how the stories are laid out, but I know this is just wrong.