Livable Cities: Long Beach, Ca & Springfield, Mo

There are perhaps few other cities that could serve as a better model of promoting a “livable city” than Long Beach, California. The city’s troubled downtown, a depression in the early 1990s, and the downsizing of McDonnell Douglas all placed Long Beach on the verge of not being livable. Despite these significant losses and setbacks, Long Beach made an excellent comeback. The plan to make Long Beach livable again was divided into three areas, all of which were integrated with one another: implementing transportation, implementing housing and community developments, and improving environmental benefits.

Strategies to improve transportation in Long Beach included supplemental transportation to existing mass transit and alternate transportation to encourage diverse land use. First is the Runabout. The Blue Line, which terminates in the First Street Transit mall, created considerable downtown congestion. In response, the Runabout was installed. The Runabout serves as a shuttle service that runs a continual circuit between common hotels, restaurants, and entertainment locations, reducing transportation congestion in the downtown area. Second, the Promenade in Downtown Long Beach, is home to an extensive development of Non-Motorized Transportation or N.M.T. Pedestrian traffic is encouraged by the Promenade’s proximity to shopping locations and bicycle traffic is encouraged by the nearby Bikestation. The Bikestation provides guarded bicycle storage, maintenance and repairs, and route information to persons utilizing their bicycle as a form of N.M.T. The N.M.T. of the Promenade linked with the congestion reduction of the Runabout and the pre-existing Blue Line promoted livability in Long Beach through diverse land use and access. Queensway Bay also provided alternate transportation options with its extended system of bikeways and walkways and land-use allocation, which encouraged pedestrian over transit traffic.

Pine Avenue of Long Beach serves as a perfect example of community and housing strategies that promote a more livable city. Community efforts included construction of 3 million square feet of office space, a 30 acre shoreline park, 4 hotels with over 1600 rooms, a World Class convention center and a multitude of Plaza Shopping malls. This investment has paid off substantially for Long Beach. In the 1950s, Pine Avenue was home to adult movie theatres, tattoo parlors, and taverns catering to military personnel – causing many of its once prominent and bustling stores to have vacant fronts. Now, with the extensive community investment, Pine Avenue has seen an economic comeback with 15,000 permanent jobs in the area due to the development. The result: a cleaner, more livable, and better retail and commercial district that does its part to promote a livable Long Beach. Queensway Bay also underwent community improvements as well, with the building of the Long Beach aquarium and the construction of a 2000 foot long retail and entertainment attraction center. There have also been several housing improvements and developments as well. A mixed-use land development called Pine Project was constructed to promote improved residential growth. This complex consisted of 142 apartments, 7000 square feet of retail space, and a 16 screen Cineplex. Long Beach has also taken steps to not only improve housing, but also to make it more affordable. The HUD HOME Investment Partnership Program is an effort that sought the redevelopment of Downtown Long Beach. Focused on the Wrigley Neighborhood and American Market Zone, the project sought to renovate existing housing and construct new, affordable housing for downtown residents. A perfect example of this was the Blackstone, a Hotel built in 1922, which was renovated in 1993 to provide 100 affordable apartments to downtown residents.

Long Beach also took significant steps to positively impact the environment for livability. The First Street transit mall not only reduced congestion with its use of the Runabout and pedestrian transportation, but it also established a balance between mass transit systems and pedestrian forms of transit by encouraging land use which promotes both. This helped the environment by reducing emissions and the impact on the city, striving all the while to make it more livable. Queensway Bay also helped reduce the environmental impact by providing vehicle-charging stations. It also utilized