Using the walkability audit as a policy tool: Spotlight on Unionville, Mo

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How walkable or bikeable is your neighborhood? Hear from community advocates in Unionville, Mo., who are conducting a walkability audit with residents to better raise the issues of policy change with local leaders.

Sincere thanks to Chrissy, Ericka and Jeanie for their time and insights!

Photovoice Missouri raises livability issues

What happens when you give dozens of teens and youth cameras and tell them to document their towns and everyday lives? Turns out quite a lot. From improving or constructing sidewalks in small rural towns where youth can safely exercise and play, to increasing access to healthy foods in their communities, many Missouri youth are concerned about improving their built environment.

Our friends at the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative, part of MU Extension, worked with the MU Health Communication Research Center to recruit students and teachers for Photovoice Missouri, a year-long effort aimed at giving young people simple education and advocacy tools to talk about the issues that matter most to them. The pictures students took and shared document their everyday lives, including both the positive health behaviors they saw, and the areas where they thought improvements could be made.

Recently, a group of students were chosen as having photographed the most compelling issues facing their towns and, along with their teachers and families, they were invited to Columbia for an awards ceremony where the winning student was announced. It was a moving ceremony and was featured in the MU Extension podcast.

While the concept of Photovoice has been around for decades, it’s exciting and eye-opening to see what fresh perspectives and ideas people bring forth. Among the photos submitted by the students from Dallas, Dent, Lafayette, Mercer, Ralls, and Shelby counties, as well as the City of St. Louis, many of them related to livability issues: access to sidewalks or bike lanes, crumbling infrastructure, safety issues around getting healthy. Some students are already working with their teachers to educate their community and civic leaders on the importance of healthy and active streets and neighborhoods.

Check out Photovoice Missouri and see what youth around our state have to say and show:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photovoicemissouri/

Rural communities get livable: Spotlight on Warsaw, Mo

Missouri Livable Streets was pleased to learn about the great work going on in Warsaw, Missouri. While Warsaw is a community on the lake, many people are unaware of how much of a hidden gem it is for biking, walking and enjoying the outdoors. 

In this short video, learn how a handful of community advocates and leaders have been collaborating to make their town a more livable, vibrant community and tourist destination.

Sincere thanks to Irv, Mac, Melissa and Randy for their time and insights!

Rural Missouri on track to create more livable streets

Creating more vibrant streets and neighborhoods isn't a concern for just urban and suburban towns in Missouri. Located in northern Missouri, Unionville is a small town of approximately 2,000 residents, and local advocates are also concerned about health and wellness of residents. In this new video from Missouri Livable Streets, hear from local residents and their reasons why complete streets policies make sense for them.

Missouri Talks Getting Livable

More Missouri communities are talking about why complete streets or livable streets makes sense for them. Hear from citizens from a mix of communities about why these policies and approaches make sense for them.
Watch video

Better Block St. Joe is coming this May!

If you build it, will they come? That’s a question that community planners and advocates will be asking this May when they host “Better Block St. Joe” on May 4^th and 5^th.

For those who haven’t heard of Better Block, it is a grassroots project that originally started in Dallas, Tex. Community members who wanted to make their streets more livable, walkable and enjoyable decided to stage a “temporary block experiment.” Organizers who wanted to improve a busy area of their Dallas suburb joined together and staged a brief, real-life street improvement. Temporary bike lanes were created; sidewalks were extended and beautified with temporary café seating and trees in planters; temporary businesses were created in empty buildings.

Watch the video.

The goal? To educate local community members on how different their street could be, if they only changed their perspective and just tried something different—even if for a day.

Head north 500 miles and Community Development Planner Matt Buchanan says he first heard about the Better Block project while listening to NPR last summer. “I thought it was an awesome idea,” he explains, “and something we could do to improve things in St. Joe.”

Currently, Mo-Kan, a regional planning commission and economic development district in St. Joseph, Mo., is coordinating the effort with over 100 individuals and organizations on board. “St. Joe has a lot of history,” Buchanan says, “a lot of gorgeous old buildings in town, and so many of them are underutilized. A lot of the businesses moved to the highway on the outside of town, and we’re trying to go into those buildings and clean them up and make them look more inviting to business owners.”

As part of the plan, Mo-Kan will also have a business financing booth at their two-day event this May. Experts who can provide advice on loans and funding will be on hand to answer questions, including St. Joseph Downtown Partnership r staff. Buchanan says that they are currently looking for business applications, and anyone who has ever wanted to try out a business for the weekend, now has a chance, for free. “We have an application online,” he says, “and people can apply to set up a pop-up temporary business. There’s no cost and some of them might make some money, too.”

While economic development is a goal of Better Block St. Joe, Buchanan also says that livable or complete streets elements are critical to the project. “We’re taking out street parking and putting in more pedestrian space and bike infrastructure,” he explains. “We’re going to build some bike racks that can be left there permanently and paint some better pedestrian crossings.”

Why all the work, though? “It’s important to change some perceptions,” he continues, “especially for our downtown. A lot of people think that downtown is dead and no longer relevant. And some people might think it’s unsafe, even though it’s not. [Better Block] is a good [way] to change that perception; to get more people involved. With a project like this, people can take ownership of it. They can come in and swing a hammer themselves. When it’s the community involved, it’s a lot different than having the city do something on its own. It becomes a public event.”

For more information about how you can get involved in Better Block St. Joe, visit Mo-Kan.

Livable Streets can be beautiful streets: A conversation with John Regenbogen, executive director of Scenic Missouri

Community and bike/ped advocates often ask their planning and municipal leaders for improvements like bicycle lanes. Yet many advocates may not realize that it’s just as important to ask for trees and greenery, too. John Regenbogen, executive director of Scenic Missouri, recently raised this important but often undervalued issue with the Livable Streets team.

Part of Scenic America, Scenic Missouri has been working since the 1990s on enhancing the aesthetic look of towns, communities and the state. From creating scenic byways to reducing billboard signage, Scenic Missouri has been leading the charge to keep the Show-Me state beautiful and more enjoyable for citizens and tourists.  “We have a variety of ways we work with communities,” Regenbogen says, citing his organization’s work with communities who want to regulate cell phone towers to helping them develop community tree ordinances.

And while the economic downturn has affected many families and communities, there are still reasons to celebrate. Recalling earlier years of limited vision or commitment to improving the state’s aesthetics, he says, “People do like to bicycle and they do like to walk. Communities have been applying for transportation grants. There is a thirst for that from communities that hasn’t necessarily been public.”

To prove his point, Regenbogen describes a great example in the South Grand area of St. Louis. As part of the Great Streets Initiative, South Grand is a busy neighborhood in South St. Louis near Tower Grove Park. Four lanes of traffic cut through a business area of restaurants, shops and residences. When planners decided to make the area more livable by putting the road on a “road diet,” some were wary. The road diet would mean shaving inches off of the traffic lanes in order to widen sidewalks and create bicycle lanes.

Photo credit: Grand South Grand. Details at: SouthGrand.org

“They put in some cement concrete barriers to give a feel for what the bow-abouts might look like, the reduced lanes; and [planners] were thinking this would show some negative results,” says Regenbogen, “and [they] were pleased to see it was quite effective. [The road diet] slowed down traffic speed, ER vehicles could respond alright, and people were very responsive to that. It’s nice to say that those concrete barriers have been taken out and we’re beginning those infrastructure changes of narrowing the roads and widening the sidewalks.”

But the road diet alone isn’t what’s just making South Grand a gem for businesses and local residents. It’s going to be the greenery. Regenbogen says that one of the key elements is greening the district with trees and other shrubbery. “For St. Louis summers, street trees can do a wonderful job of reducing the temperature. They reduce storm water runoff, and trees play that additional green role in the Livable Streets movement. It’s an emerging area now, [and there are] emerging data showing the value of urban trees in New York City.”

Moreover Regenbogen points out that all of these improvements come back to the local town and community. “People are starting to understand that when you can attract people to a destination, that it is attracting economic activity. Well-designed public spaces, including the streets, are important for that. That helps anchor commercial districts, and a lot of that is key in the execution. You don’t want an urban forest where you can’t see store fronts or addresses. Or have trees that aren’t drought tolerant. People are really starting to recognize that in community improvement districts. Business associations are thirsting for ways of attracting people. [Making roads] amenable to cars, that’s not necessarily the best ways to maximize their incomes.”

And if increased economic viability weren’t reason enough, Regenbogen also highlights new research that suggests more livable communities also create more attached communities, where people want to live, work, play and worship for years to come.  “We’re seeing the link to economic growth and greater attachment,” he says. And as time goes by, “that research will be more and more compelling and more concrete.”

To learn more about Scenic Missouri, visit http://scenicmo.org/.