The Museum of Fortress Architecture

Tourists flock to visit Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Have a look at what protects them from the city just behind the harbor:







It's so easy to beat up on Baltimore for this sort of thing, but Pratt Street really is like a museum of fortress architecture, with few doors, imposing, windowless concrete facades, wide, one-way streets, half a dozen skywalks, and enough bollards to derail an invasion of tanks.

COMMUNITY CARE FACILITIES ORDINANCE

We somehow stumbled upon this heartfelt op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Daily News that made us aware of an important issue: The City of Los Angeles is considering an ordinance to outzone sober-living homes: "recovery homes" consisting mostly of people who have completed inpatient drug treatment programs. As the author of the op-ed writes, the proposed "Community Care Facilities Ordinance" would declare thousands of single-family homes in Los Angeles "boarding houses," and thereby ban them in single-family neighborhoods: "The ill-fated logic is that such uses are not appropriate for single-family zones and that these homes belong in multifamily areas." We will certainly be following this story. In the meantime, best of luck to those fighting this ridiculous piece of legislation. .

SCREEN PLANTING STRIP

We were flipping through the excellent The Suburb Reader today, and noticed this amazing 1948 subdivision plan:

The caption reads: Proposed Subdivision Plan for Urban Villas, 1948. This subdivision plan, prepared by the FHA for a black veterans' group in Atlanta, bears the hallmarks of segregated suburban planning in the South. To secure white support, black civic leaders accepted and even emphasized the fifty-foot 'screen planting strip' that separated the development from white neighbors.

This is of course analogous to the infamous concrete WALL that developers of an African American subdivision in Detroit had to build to secure FHA financing. Both are classic examples of the resourcefulness of exclusion. Note however, the presence on the subdivision plan of an inclusionary measure: the CUL DE SAC SHORTCUT.

"NO NEGROS ALLOWED" SIGN

This is pretty amazing: a man named Mark Prior posted a "NO NEGROS ALLOWED" SIGN on his Milwaukee store after "he claimed he had problems with Black people in his past and wanted to make a policy against them." The article goes on to say that "he claims that he has the right to discriminate."

QUESTIONNAIRE

Interboro is currently preparing a study of the marketing of private, master planned communities in the United States. For this, we are trying to collect marketing brochures from every master planned community built or planned in the United States between 2006 and 2008. (This hasn't been easy, for any number of reasons.) A preliminary analysis of the brochures suggests an astonishing diversification since the 1980s of both "product lines" and the marketing strategies. One of the newer, more interesting marketing strategies we have come across a few times is the questionnaire.

Private Mountain Communities is an Asheville, NC based company that describes itself as a "trusted authority on Western North Carolina living." A broker of sorts, Private Mountain Communities "matches families with communities that complement their personal taste and lifestyle." Two things stand out about this company. One, they have a storefront--sorry, a "state of the art Discovery Showroom"--in downtown Asheville where you can consult with "independent community advisors," preview community brochures, DVD's and "use interactive explorations tools" to find the community that is right for you. Second, on their website, there is something called a "Community Finder:" an application that "guides you through an easy questionnaire that analyzes your unique interests and lifestyle preferences, such as architectural tastes and preferred amenities, to produce a short list of communities that are right for you." A video on the website underlines the questionnaire's science, stating that the questionnaire is "an algorithm that really takes you down the right path so that you are getting into a subset where you fit. A concept that represents all the communities in this area in a unbiased way.”

The questionnaire is actually more benign than it sounds, asking questions like: "Which of the following area activities are essential to your decision to purchase property?" and "Which of the following on-site amenities are essential to your decision to purchase property?"

Something much less benign is described by Bill Bishop in his book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop--who was a contributor to the NAI exhibition--writes about a questionnaire that is given to prospective homebuyers in an Orange County, CA development called "Ladera Ranch" whose questions try to get at the homebuyers' values (for example Do you “like to experience exotic people and places?” Or, do you believe “extremists and radicals should be banned from running for public office?”). Here is Bishop: "The Ladera Ranch developers built one section of their subdivision for those who see the Earth as a “living system.” (It’s called “Terramor” and features bamboo floors, photovoltaic cells and, according to the developer, houses that 'might have a courtyard that conceals the front door...kind of cozy and nest-like.') Across the way is a community for those the developer labeled 'Winners.' In Covenant Hills, houses are more colonial than craftsman."

Especially in the second example, the questionnaire is one of those ingenious weapons that, like the "exclusionary amenity," creates a kind of self-sorting. It's one of those weapons that so clearly violates the spirit of the Fair Housing Act, but that seems to do nothing wrong.

PARENTAL ESCORT POLICY

We love the Atlantic Terminal. Really, we do. It ain't pretty, and it is a mall, with of the trappings being a mall brings, but it has a lot of the things that good public space should have, including, accessibility, affordability, diversity, and lots of places to sit. We were more than a little upset then, to read this article in the New York Times about their "Parental Escort Policy," which stipulates that "groups of four or more people under 21 years old and unaccompanied by a parent are not allowed to linger."

Forest City Ratner, why do you have to be such a jerk? It's hard enough to defend your mall as quality public space (something that we often do, by the way). Can you reconsider? Are the kids grouped together in four really so bad?

TEEN CURFEW

When I was 16, I was arrested for loitering - twice.

I don't recall exactly why, but sometime in 1992 or so, the Glen Rock, NJ Police Department implemented a TEEN CURFEW, which stipulated that teenagers had to be in their homes by 10:00 PM. Glen Rock, NJ, mind you, is no Watts. As I wrote in a previous entry about Glen Rock's HOCKEY RINK, the town is a wealthy, white, parochial suburb that, so far as I know, has never had any major problems with gangs, youth violence, or really crimes of any kind besides underage drinking and light drug-use. Nonetheless, the town, threatened by groups of thoroughly innocuous packs of B.D. Baggies-wearing white boys listening to the Steve Miller Band * in what we called the "Hole"--a public pocket park in our modest (though zero-lot-line!) downtown--thought it necessary to break up whatever was going on there, and thus imposed the curfew, which the local policemen--who welcomed any opportunity to flex their muscle in front of our mall girls--were very eager to enforce.

Whenever someone asks me how I got interested in urban planning, I tell them that it started here, in 1992 in Glen Rock NJ's hole, upon the earliest recorded attempt to enforce the town's curfew. When the police first came around to disperse everyone, I sat down in the middle of the hole and declared that because I was on public property, and because there had no constitutional authority to enforce this arbitrary, legally-murky curfew, I would not move.

This was of course fine with the police: I weighed 135 tops and was easy to move. They picked me up, threw me in the back of a cop car, and took me to the station. They called my parents, who picked me up and took me home. My passion for public space (and for what I would much later learn was called the "right to the city") was born. I was arrested again for the same reason a few months later.

It is a bit silly, but it's also true that the curfew was arbitrary and legally-murky, and represented an abuse of power. Teen Curfews can be less arbitrary--for example when when Baltimore last year announced a teen curfew in response to a rash of teen stabbings--but their constitutionality is regularly tested in court. The targeting of race and the unlawful imposition of martial law are two of the most prominent targets. In some cases, a curfew's “exceptions”--for example, exempting those who traveling to or from work--are deemed too difficult to enforce. In early 2010, San Diego overturned its curfew law due to ambiguous language. However instead of eliminating the law, the city is planning to rewrite it with the idea that a better-written law is the city's best bet for curbing "unsupervised kids'" role in crime. Similarly, Indianapolis recently overturned its curfew laws when it determined that they forcefully undermine adolescents' first amendment rights. Court battles like these summarize the legal and ethical controversy of exclusion caused by curfew laws.

* Let it be known that I neither wore B.G. Baggies nor listened to the Steve Miller Band.

** Thanks to Interboro's intern Matt Lohry for research assistance for this post.

LIGHT RAIL

One thing that's great about Baltimore's light rail is that it doesn't stop at the city-county line. Instead it connects BWI and Glen Burnie to the south to Hunt Valley to the north. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the Baltimore light rail steered clear of the sort of city-county infighting that killed, stalled, or undermined so many regional public transportation initiatives. As I learned on a recent trip to Ruxton, there is an awkward five-mile stretch between the Falls Road and Lutherville stations where the light-rail doesn't stop. As you might expect, this is because a group of "concerned citizens"--in this case, the Ruxton-Riderwood-Lake Roland Area Improvement Association--organized against them for fear they would, in the words of one woman interviewed for a 1992 Baltimore Sun article, "bring the wrong element into our community." Not surprisingly, the Ruxton-Riderwood-Lake Roland Area is one of the wealthiest and whitest in the region.





I don't know why the Maryland Transit Administration bowed to the Improvement Association, but it goes without saying that in addition to being totally racist, it is totally wasteful. You have the track, you have the people (many of whom are commuters), what a missed opportunity it is to not have the stops. (In this sense, it's sort of the inverse of elevated expressways like Brooklyn's Gowanus Expressway, which, when it was built, went through poorer neighborhoods that couldn't access it because there were no exit ramps between Manhattan and Brooklyn's wealthier southern suburbs.)

This sounds like ancient history but it is not: a similar battle is being fought today by Canton, who is fighting Baltimore's new Red Line, presumably for many of the same reasons Ruxton fought the original line when it was being planned in the late 1980s. The argument against light rail in Canton is arguably more nuanced (most opponents claim only to be opposed to a "surface" Red Line), and the racial implications less clear-cut (many residents in the mostly African-American neighborhood of Edmondson Village also oppose a surface Red Line), but parallels can certainly be drawn.

LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION

Last week we wrote about St Bernard Parish's BLOOD RELATIVE ORDINANCE. It turns out that a similar--though arguably slightly less sinister--weapon of exclusion is being deployed right here in New York City: the LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION.

We had just returned from a visit to Brooklyn's Sea Gate, and were doing some research on gated communities in New York City. (From what we can tell, outside of Staten Island--and not counting Park Avenue co-ops, Gramercy Park, or luxury rental towers, which some argue are effectively the same thing as gated communities--New York City has four gated communities: Sea Gate, Breezy Point, Edgewater Park, and Silver Beach Gardens.) This led us to research "co-op communities," an ownership model that all gated communities in New York happen to share. Co-op communities are a little bit different than co-op buildings. In the former, residents own their homes but lease the land from owners’ collectives. Owners pay a monthly maintenance fee for streets, common areas, and, in the cases above, the beach. Of course, with co-ops come co-op boards. While co-op boards can be famously exclusionary (just ask Richard Nixon, Calvin Klein, or Mariah Carey), they are 100% legal, and in fact do not even have to disclose what they are looking for in a buyer or explain why they reject someone.

Nonetheless, what was illegal, at least according to the Fair Housing Justice Center, was for the co-op community at Edgewater Park to use LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION to steer blacks away from Edgewater Park. As the New York Times reports, the lawsuit filed by the Fair Housing Justice Center "claims the co-ops’ requirement that buyers procure three recommendation letters from current residents, who are overwhelmingly white, had a discriminatory effect." (A recent Architect's Newspaper story on gated communities in New York City notes that in 2000, Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens were 82 percent white, 12 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.)

This begs the question: what makes these LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION different from those that exclusive Manhattan co-ops require? Why doesn't the Fair Housing Justice Center take them to court? One answer is that it looks like Edgewater Park was caught practicing RACIAL STEERING. Another is the allegation that the LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION "requirement" is not applied to whites, who "are told that a seller or the sellers' friends - whom the applicants do not otherwise know - can provide the references." But on another level, excluding people from a community in the city does seem more pernicious than excluding people from a building on the city. As urban theorists from Christopher Alexander to Leslie Martin to Kees Christiaanse have pointed out, pockets of homogeneity in the city are desirable, so long as they are open, connected, and accessible. If not everyone can live in a Park Avenue co-op, at least everyone can enjoy the same public amenities--handsome streets, Central Park, etc.--that those who do live in the co-ops enjoy. I don't want to overemphasize this point, but it does highlight an important difference: neither you nor I can enjoy Edgewater Park's beaches.

In any case, we're looking forward to hearing how this lawsuit progresses.

BLOOD RELATIVE ORDINANCE

The other day, Interboro had a surprise visit from Nurhan Gokturk, our pal from grad school who we hadn't seen in a while. After grad school, Nurhan moved to New Orleans, where he started a company building affordable, modular, New Orleans-style shotgun houses (this was in 2002 or so, before Katrina). Since then, Nurhan has built close to 100 scattered-site units.

This in itself is worth of an Arsenal of Inclusion entry, but we'd like to focus here on an exclusionary tactic that Nurhan encountered. When we asked Nurhan how he gets his sites, and whether or not he had been able to acquire scattered-site housing in "non-impacted" areas or "opportunity zones" (i.e., white suburbs), he said he tried (in St. Bernard Parish), but was thwarted by something that is even creepier than it sounds: a “blood-relative ordinance.” After Katrina, the Parish's Council President introduced an ordinance mandating that owners of single family homes that had not been rentals previous to Hurricane Katrina could only rent said single-family homes to their blood relatives (the Parish had previously introduced a moratorium on multi-family housing). An article we found in The Root called "Keeping St. Bernard Parish White" makes the obvious conclusion: "With an 88 percent white population which owned 93 percent of the housing stock before the storm, it was pretty clear at whom that ordinance targeted: black people, particularly those dislocated from their homes, and especially those who lived in the demolished public housing projects."

This is one of those weapons on the Arsenal of Exclusion--like EXCLUSIONARY AMENITIES or CONDITIONS, COVENANTS and RESTRICTIONS--that makes you want to throw up your hands and give up, or at least take a cynical attitude towards fair housing laws that, no matter how carefully we craft them, can always be circumvented. The BLOOD RELATIVE ORDINANCE is a reminder that evil is really creative, cleaver, and determined.

Fortunately, so is good. As reported here, soon after the ordinance was introduced in 2005, The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC), a private, non-profit civil rights organization filed a lawsuit in federal court to force the Parish to repeal the ordinance and the moratorium on multi-family housing. The Parish repealed the blood-relative language of the single family ordinance in February of 2008.

SAFE HAVEN

Interboro has been doing a lot of research on aging in New York City. Our research focuses on the phenomenon of Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) and the Social Service Providers (SSPs) that serve them. Our thesis is that by retroactively servicing buildings with the sorts of amenities that aging adults would otherwise move to purpose-built retirement facilities to access, NORC SSPs keep the elderly in the city, and thereby contribute to generational diversity.

To research this, we have been visiting a lot of NORCS, where we talk to elderly residents, interview NORC SSP Directors, and study how the elderly experience the city. We always walk away from these site visits with new entries for the Arsenal of Exclusion / Inclusion.

Here's an example: last week, we interviewed Ron Bruno, Director of Morningside Retirement and Health Services, Inc., the NORC SSP that serves elderly residents of Morningside Gardens, a 982 unit, multi-racial, middle income housing development in West Harlem. Ron mentioned that when Morningside Gardens opened in 1957, it was something of a safe haven for interracial couples and same-sex couples (many of whom still live in the development). If this doesn't sound shocking, remember that in 1957, plain old interracial housing--whether public or private--was controversial, and hardly the norm. Most of New York City's housing (and all of Baltimore's public housing) was segregated by race. Interracial housing that welcomed interracial and same-sex couples would have been unheard of. Morningside was way ahead of its time. How did this happen?

As it turns out, this amazing piece of history is under-researched, and so far as Ron or I can tell, it isn't known exactly how it happened. Was there an official decree? Was there a pioneering couple who disseminated word in the interracial and same-sex communities that Morningside was very tolerant? I see a dissertation in the making. (Morningside's tolerance was a news topic for a short while in 2003, when two residents of Morningside--Gustavo Archilla and Elmer Lokkins--got married in Canada after living together for 60 years.)

From a 2008 essay by a journalist (and Morningside tenant) named Beatrice Gottlieb called "The Historical Background of Morningside Gardens," we learn that the project's sponsors (Barnard College, Columbia University, Corpus Christi Church,International House, Jewish Theological Seminary, the Juilliard School of Music, Riverside Church, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary) had envisioned a residential community that would be attractive and convenient for their own employees, but were disappointed by a lukewarm response. "There were, however, many applications from others, some of whom expressed interest in the project’s social point of view and enthusiasm about a 'real cooperative.'"

Interestingly, Morningside Gardens has always been pretty racially integrated. A 1950 survey of the 36-square-block neighborhood that defined the Morningside Manhattanville redevelopment area (part of which was cleared to make way for the projects) found the area to be 27 percent Negro, 22 precent Spanish-speaking, 4 percent Oriental, and the remainder, non-Puerto Rican white. The original tenants of the Gardens were 75 percent white, 20 percent black, 4 percent Asian, and 1 percent Puerto Rican. Today, Ron estimates that there is a similar racial mix.

NORC SSPs, middle-income housing, and integrated housing are integrative in and of themselves, but when combined with the sort of tolerance demonstrated by Morningside Gardens, they are even more so.

GATE

Is Sea Gate the only gated community in New York? The policeman (or more accurately, the private security guard) who wouldn't let us in to see it said that it was. But surely there are some on Staten Island, right? Googling around, there are references to it being the "first" gated community, the "oldest" gated community, and the "largest" gated community: all of these adjectives imply that there are or will be others.

A New York Observer article makes the case that Manhattan's new luxury rentals--"clean, secure, exclusive (but not out of reach), and outfitted with amenities like grill stations, manicured rooftop lawns, and foosball tables"--are New York City's gated communities. Others have argued that there is no real difference between a gated community and a coop (especially a coop with strict coop boards, as you are likely to find on Park Avenue). Gramercy Park is private and gated: does it count?

Here's what we can piece together: outside of Staten Island, New York City has four "real" gated communities: Sea Gate, Breezy Point, Edgewater Park, and Silver Beach Gardens. Sea Gate is indeed the oldest: its gates went up in 1898. All four are "coop communities:" communities in which residents own their homes but lease the land from owners’ collectives (owners pay a monthly maintenance fee for streets, common areas, and, in these cases, beaches). All four are also (surprise) very white. A recent Architect's Newspaper story on the topic notes that in 2000, 75 percent of Sea Gate are white, 7.4 percent are black and 9.4 percent Hispanic. "In Breezy Point more than 99 percent of the residents are white. In Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens, white residents make up 82 percent of residents. The neighborhood is 12 percent Hispanic, but only 1 percent black."

We visited Sea Gate (or anyway, Sea Gate's perimeter) on a very warm, sunny, August Sunday, when, presumably, the guards are on high alert from insurgent sunbathers. We were surprised at how militaristic it looked and felt

SITE SELECTION

Hollander Ridge's PERIMETER FENCE--which I wrote about in the previous post--is only one chapter in the former housing project's amazing story. Another crucial chapter has to do with its SITE SELECTION. What you first notice about the site is that it is totally separated from its surroundings. Here's how a HUD consultant described it in 1996: “Hollander Ridge is located on the far northeast edge of the City of Baltimore on a parcel of land bounded by expressways on two sides and a major arterial road (Route 40) to the south. . . .The property is approximately four miles from downtown Baltimore, but effectively cut off from the rest of the city by Interstate 95.

Take a look at a Google aerial of the site:



Hollander Ridge's isolation isn't (or wasn't) coincidental. On the contrary, it was the result of a compromise of sorts. In the 1970s, HABC was under pressure to site public housing in "non-impacted" areas: areas that weren't overwhelmingly African-American and poor. In fact HUD decided that it would not grant approval for new public housing units in impacted areas unless those units were balanced by units in
white neighborhoods. A HABC official put it this way: "As our urban renewal effort is presently devoted almost exclusively to inner city areas where our city’s worst housing is located, and as we try to provide housing for the same economic group which is being displaced . . ., there is a great need for new public housing units in these areas. Because of the HUD’s requirement, it was necessary . . . to find a site in a White neighborhood for a large number of units to balance the significant amount of housing to be built on urban renewal lots."

Hollander Ridge, which is in a white census tract in a non-impacted area, was conceived of from the start as a development of "balance units" that would win HABC favor with HUD. But again, a compromise was made. Here's the HUD consultant again: "Although technically a non-impacted site, it is an extremely isolated location that is inconvenient to schools, churches, shopping, laundry facilities, or other services, especially for those without cars. Vehicular access to the site is provided by a guarded checkpoint on the north side of Pulaski Highway (Route 40). Originally, the property was also accessible through residential streets that served the Rosedale community to the northeast. However, because of crime problems over the years, these access points have been blocked by barricades."

I don't want to come down too hard on HABC here, for whom siting public housing in non-impacted, white areas was virtually impossible, and who had to make the sorts of compromises alluded to above. Clearly, the real enemy here is home-rule, which gives racists the ability to exclude in the first place. Still, Hollander Ridge was a terrible, terrible place to site public housing, a fact perhaps best evidenced by the fact that it was imploded at the ripe old age of 24.

PERIMETER FENCE

Today, I rode my bike to Hollander Ridge, or anyway what used to be Hollander Ridge (it was demolished on July 9, 2000). Hollander Ridge was a 1,000-unit public housing development built in 1976 by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City on a 60-acre parcel at the city / county line. Hollander Ridge was virtually 100% African-American when it was demolished.

I biked to Hollander Ridge to see this wrought iron perimeter fence:





I learned about this fence while reading Judge Marvin Garvis’s Thompson v. HUD decision, which devotes 12 pages (out of 322) to its remarkable story.

In 1998, HABC, with the approval and financial support of HUD, Senator Barbara M ccluskey, then Mayor Kurt Schmoke, the Rosedale Community, and a few Hollander Ridge residents constructed the 8-foot tall, spiked, wrought iron fence around the perimeter of Hollander Ridge to separate it from the adjacent, predominantly white suburban community of Rosedale. The result was something very strange and perhaps unprecedented: a gated community created by outsiders to keep insiders in (well, I suppose a prison is a precedent for this).

The fence is the product of a HUD pilot project to seek solutions for crime in HUD-supported public housing. HUD, with feedback from HABC, selected Hollander Ridge as the focus of the pilot, and the Department of the Treasury deployed a Secret Service team to study the site and make suggestions for improving public safety. By that time, crime was rampant at Hollander Ridge. Garvis describes "check days" (days when elderly residents would receive their monthly social security checks), when “the high-rise area was, in effect, an open air drug and sex market.” The Secret Service Team’s report, entitled “Operation Safe Home," confirmed the existence of serious public safety problems at Hollander Ridge, and recommended, among other things, that “A fence perimeter [be established] around the community limiting pedestrian access.” It was built in 1998.

But the fence—which cost as much as $1.7 million according to a Baltimore Sun article—wouldn’t have been built had the white Rosedale residents not organized and complained that the city-county line was too porous, and that the crime from Hollander Ridge was lowering Rosedale property values, and making Rosedale less safe. As Garvis notes, while some were motivated by legitimate concerns (in 1996 an elderly Rosedale woman was slain in her home), “certainly, some of these Baltimore
County residents were motivated by racial animus directed against the African-American residents of Hollander Ridge."

And how. Thinking about it, I'm reminded of John Carpenter's 1981 anti-urban classic Escape from New York, which posits New York City as giant, maximum-security prison, complete with fortified bridges and tunnels to keep the riff-raff out of the suburbs on the other side. (Remember the scene when The Duke, played by Isaac Hayes, gets sprayed with bullets trying to climb the border wall?) It also makes me think of Kenneth Jackson's essay “Gentleman’s Agreement,” where Jackson writes that although they are not physical boundaries, “the boundaries between our cities and our suburbs are as real and effective as both the fortifications of medieval Europe or the gated communities of our own time.” This 8-foot tall, spiked, $1.7 million wrought-iron perimeter fence built along Baltimore’s city-county line is a surreal landmark that--like Detroit's infamous HOLC wall--speaks volumes about race relations in metropolitan America.

BICYCLE BAN

Interboro just received the new issue of Reclaim, the magazine we get for being members of Transportation Alternatives. After reading the issue's depressing story about the MTA's dire financial situation, and getting mad all over again at the State Legislature for nixing congestion pricing, voting "no" on east river tolls, and stealing $143 million from the MTA to plug budget gaps, we came across a story about a town in Colorado (Black Rock) that banned bicycle riding because it is in "the best interest of its citizens, its businesses." The latter are primarily casinos (the town's population is 118).

Is this even legal? Is there a precedent for it? A quick Google search turns up a handful of bike bans and proposed bike bans: In Missouri, St. Charles County Council member Joe Brazil proposed banning bicycles from several roads around the town of Defiance. In Kansas, the community of De Soto banned bicycles from 83rd Street in their town, citing safety issues on a two-lane road with no shoulders. A bicycling.com article thinks that the Black Hawk ordinance is not enforceable, and that if it is not addressed, it could create a frightening legal precedent. The bicycling.com article concludes that in Colorado, where local authorities are authorized to regulate the operation of bicycles, cities do not have the authority to regulate whether you can operate your bicycle.

The good news is that it looks like the lawyer of good are fighting back against the lawyers of evil. There's even a "boycott Black Hawk" Facebook page (1,705 likes!).

In the meantime, "BICYCLE BAN" wins a place in our Arsenal of Exclusion.