New Publication on Density and Neighborhoods

Example of stepdown heights between taller buildings and SFH in Arlington VA

Hi All - I am the author of the latest Zoning Practice, a publication of the American Planning Association.  The August 2012 edition is called "Density and the Planning Edge."

I've long been frustrated with planning at this edge (having started my planning career in Arlington as an activist living on this edge but supportive of Metro-oriented density).  My main complaints are:

• There are legitimate concerns on livability that can be better addressed if included at the front end of the planning process: noise, circulation, design, restaurant smells, parks, drainage, parking, garbage pickup, traffic, loading and deliveries, crosswalks
• There are also long term impacts that can be better managed when maintenance and management are front-end topics. 
• There is no organized, central repository where local decision makers, developers and homeowners can go to see policies, stipulations, maintenance agreements, photos, plans and graphics that have worked (or fell short) in other places.
• If this is a top reason why good redevelopment and density do not take place, why are we not addressing as a planning imperative? 

I will be blogging on some really great case studies I found, but will also be on the stump to create a bigger, more helpful project.  Let me know if you are interested, or send changemakers my way (lisa[at]nisenson.net].  Any ideas of who to approach as partners or funders also welcome.

You can see the official blurb at  http://www.planning.org/zoningpractice/

To order a copy, mail a $10 check to

Zoning Practice Back Issues
American Planning Association
205 N Michigan Ave
Suite 1200
Chicago, IL 60601

Explaining Sarasota’s Malls

While the rest of the smart growth world is talking down the mall, we here in Sarasota are going the other direction.   We embrace our enclosed malls.

The map below shows the “Big Three” malls here listed as A, B, and C:

A – University Town Center – This as-yet built mall was plannedas a large mixed use center design by Moule & Polyzoides. Three years ago though, the economy and a new rowing center (a really nice one at that) changed direction of the area.  Long story short, the county let Benderson remove most of the workforce housingand revert to a big enclosed mall.  Saks Fifth Avenue announced they would relocated their store to this new mall, which sits aside I-75. 

B  - Westfield SouthGate – This is the mall that is losing Saks, and one that is not likely to gain a long promised Apple Store.  This mall sits in one of the hottest residential real estate markets going – “West of the Trail.”  The mall is also at a regionally significant intersection, where all four corners (Tamiami and Bee Ridge) are relevant.   A Trader Joe’s will soon open close to the mall.

C  - Westfield Sarasota Square – This large enclosed mall has seen better days, but will get a jolt soon with the addition of a Costco warehouse store.  This mall also sits at an interesting three-way intersection.  Benderson announced it will remake a smaller strip store, though it looks like a Home Depot will not take over an abandoned Kmart site.

There’s a lot going on here, though I didn’t pull it all together until I saw an excellent presentation at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference earlier this year (the entire webcast is here, and includes a lot of work done in Sarasota by Joe Minicozzi and Peter Katz).  Michael Pagano  (begins at 1:02 mark) presented the spatial aspects of revenue structure, which sounds weird, but is really all about how the reliance on one type of tax revenue or another influences both the location and quality of development.   His bottom line was that elected officials always seek to maximize revenue while shifting costs onto neighbors.  As such, the map below compares the "where" of development. The images are from Steve Price.

Jurisdictions are dependent on three main revenue generators: property tax, sales tax, and income tax (though this last group is really small).  Sarasota is property tax dependent (44% of total revenues) on paper, but sales tax grabs attention because of a 1% discretionary tax that stays here and infrastructure funding from sales taxes.

This helps explain some of what is going on, but also raises other issues:

• The University Town Center (A) is located along 75 at the County border to capture non-Sarasota patrons for high-end shopping.  The elimination of housing, because “the economy changed” means workers will likely live and send their kids to school in Manatee County.   A big win for Sarasota– right?  Well no.  The loser is the transportation system, because of the nonsense about the affordable housing picture changing.   For lower middle income families, the housing problem is still stark.  Moreover, lower cost housing is meaningless if the transportation budget is high.
• Southgate Mall’s loss of Saks has generated lots of talk, though the real question is whether an enclosed mall at that location is the best use.  The signals from Trader Joes will also be compelling.  What is needed is a world class area plan that includes the shopping-shed.  The main questions here are housing (hello – think property tax) and transportation infrastructure, which is abysmal for driving, walking and biking.   I think the Trader Joe’s people looked up the walk score (around 70 out of 100 points ), but did not actually walk the death trap that it is.  I talked to a nearby resident recently who would welcome new housing, and there is a fear that things will get worse for this mall before it gets better.  
• Sarasota Square – This area too needs an overarching plan, but it’s too far out of the gates with mall leasing. 

Walkable Urbanism Tour of Sarasota

Last week, the Florida Chapter of APA, the Myakka Branch of the Florida Green Building Council and the Florida House (I am a Board member of the latter two organizations) sponsored a walk tour of two local projects, Citrus Square and Janie’s Garden.   Both have won awards for design and are wonderful examples of architecturally excellent, mixed use projects.

First, here is a digital booklet of the trip.  The tour provided the 30 participants a chance to critique the project designs for aspects of walkable tourism.  We used several checklists, including LEED for Neighborhood Design, to look at the various aspects of site design and location.

Citrus Square

I’ve written about Citrus Square before (see here).  It is a privately financed project with 20 residential units above first floor retail.  The details on the tour that garnered the most attention were:

• Financing – HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have caps on gross square feet of commercial space allowed in a mixed use project (from 15-25%).  The taller the building, the less the effect.  However, with two and three story buildings like Citrus Square, these caps make first floor retail in vertically mixed-use project difficult if not impossible.  The Congress for the New Urbanism has a task force called Live/Work/Walk to address this barrier to better redevelopment. 
• Parking – Parking is distributed throughout the site, both on-street and on-site. 
• Unit size – the size of the units are small, with the smallest units (550 ft2) among the most popular.
• Cost – the cost of the highly detailed molding added about 10% to the project costs, lower than typically assumed.

Janie’s Garden

First, we were joined by Vice Mayor Willie Shaw, who happened to be biking by (at the top of every walk tour leader’s wish list when showing off walkable, bikable communities) Janie’s Garden is a multi-phase, Hope VI mixed use project.  Bill Russell, head of the Sarasota Housing Authority led the tour, and the following points were highlights

• Financing – the financing was different from Citrus Square, instead using tax credits, which are a common mechanism for financing affordable housing.   The developer and manager of Janie’s Garden is the Michael’s Company, a national leader in affordable housing development. 
• Use mix – The first business, is now open in The Market Place in Phase 2 of Janie’s Garden along Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 
• Transportation – The route for Sarasota’s bus rapid transit project is currently planned to serve this area, with a stop at Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Lemon Street.  There is some discussion on moving the route three blocks west to US 41, given the existing business and infrastructure there and new rules from the Federal Transit Administration that now favor economic development over speed.   No matter where the route eventually runs, Janie’s gardens would benefit from better links to US 41 via infrastructure, commercial activity and interaction with institutions along US 41.  For example, the retail and housing at Janie’s Garden could help support artists in the area.

Two conversations emerged that will be further explored in any future tour:

• Building Articulation – This may seem like an oddball term to non-architects.  The best way to think about articulation is the opposite: continuity.  Next time you are at a big box store, the flat walls flush doorways and lack of ornamentation are continuous design which gives the impression of large blank walls and canyons.  Walkable urbanism thrives on the opposite, where molding, windows, doors awnings and the like break up the buildings visually while still maintaining a sense of a coherent built environment. 
• The Underside of Balconies - One of the unexpected focal points from both tours was the attention to the undersides of balconies. Pedestrians are always looking around, including up.  The undersides of balconies are just one more opportunity to make the walk that much more interesting.

This was not so much new attention to balconies, but rather an important lesson in designing for slower speeds.  At 50 or 60 miles an hour, there is little need for detail.  However those who are walking and driving slowly will need to be engaged, even delighted, with what they encounter.  Quality materials, quality and interesting detail are critical not just the grist of design manuals, but your transporation and economic plans as well.

Irritating Interpretations Outside the Beltway – Infill

Smart growth advocates tend to use the terms “redevelopment “ and “infill” interchangeably as if they are the same thing.  They are not and this mistake is doing more to stop better growth patterns than support them. Moreover, big city planners who are used to redevelopment and infill serviing as shorthand for good corridor, node and small area planning might not realize how limited that definition is.

Redevelopment is typically thought of rebuilding anew where buildings once stood, or the renovation or expansion of an existing building.  Redevelopment is typically preferred in areas supported by infrastructure and transit where individual property investments will feed into a larger economic response.   Infill can include redevelopment, but also includes filling undeveloped gaps in the urban fabric where infrastructure exists. 

In real life, however, the term “infill” is being used broadly – really broadly - to describe the full range of activity from building reuse to brand new development.  The drawing below is a replica of a presentation I saw where a developer described his project between two cities sprawling towards each other as "infill." 

So what’s so irritating about this?

• We are getting sprawl mislabeled as infill
• There is a suburban focus on pad sites and outparcels - For many planners in suburbia, putting a new bank or restaurant in the middle of a parking lot is infill.  What’s wrong with that? The sale of an outparcel to CVS or McDonalds is one more property owner to deal with in the future when real planning takes place.
• We are wasting nodes– The focus on individual buildings and pad sites misses the most important point for successful infill:  It’s not the building, it’s the collection of sites in a planning area and how they fit together on several scales (for the region the community and interaction with each other).   The photo below shows a regionally important node (Bee Ridge and Beneva in Sarasota) surrounded by higher density housing and strip malls.  A grocery store just replaced its auto-oriented footprint with a new store on the same footprint and a bank developed an outparcel.  Millions of dollars to build suburban product just went into one of the best areas for coordinated planning.   It will be a long time before any of these folks see a payoff in coming to the planning table.

• Skills to do coordinated planning languish – Great redevelopment brings suburbs into tough conversations.  First, it means they will need to identify priorities and preferred redevelopment areas.  This is ridiculously hard in suburbs for reasons I don’t fully understand even after 6 years in the community.   Second, a community used to working on raw soil with one large land owner and impact fees need all new skills to coordinate multiple landowners, connect various properties and figure out who pays for what.

What do we need to do?

• We need to elevate the role of redevelopment planning areas in our conversations. Enough talk about "redevelopment" or "re-doing the strip mall."  Suburbs are redoing strip malls - into new strip malls!   The potential for retrofitting sprawl and sprawl repair is diluted with every drive-through bank and chain pharmacy that claims a key pad site in strip mall parking lots.
• We need to be clearer on the definitions along the redevelopment/infill gradient - from building rehabilitation to entire priority redevelopment areas.   This includes the opportunity costs associated with a quick project that ends up stalling economically powerful areawide planning.
• We need to help the suburbs understand the shifts in skills, local politics, planning and infrastructure finance that come about with better planning.  Likewise they need to help us understand their side of the table where pressure on local budgets means less planning and more quick turnaround projects.  

Want to Expand Arts in Sarasota?

Virginia Hoffman wrote (actually continues to write) impassioned pleas regarding support for the arts that is on par with other efforts.   In the June 16^thedition of SRQ Daily (subscribe here) she introduces the concept of the Cultural Stadium – hoping to elevate the arts among the power and money brokers in town by talking in sports metaphors.   Bingo Card from Bike Jax (dot org)

Linking arts to sports is one way to go about it, but there is another game, so to speak, where art is taking center field.  To whit:

• The Project for Public Spaces has a new effort called “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” in response to planning fatigue where the patience with endless planning runs out, but money for implementation is scarce.   Opportunistic, short term projects are now popping up all over; think pop-up festivals, food trucks, yarnbombing and tactical urbanism.
• Artspace is a POWERFUL partnership of funders and arts agencies that just gave away over $15 million in 47 cities and rural areas.  Some of the examples: in Boston, money to fund “random acts of culture” and ventures to engage artists to creatively combat urban vacancy in several cities.   
• There seems to already be quite a bit community initiated arts here already.  sARTq, launched by the HuB is a good example, and the Chalk Festival  began as a bootstrap event.  Several local artists have successfully used the crowdsourcing website Kickstarterto raise funds.   Ballet practice takes place downtown in an empty storefront.  Flashmob dances show up on Siesta Key. 

There are a couple of themes worth noting. 

• To borrow words from a Bruce Katz tweet, “The new era in (art) will be crowd sourced vs. close sourced, entrepreneurial vs. bureaucratic, networked vs. hierarchical.”  He was talking about metropolitan areas, but the same applies to the arts.
• Arts have to help solve something, fill a gap, and be related to placemaking.
• Art projects in the age of austerity, if publicly funded, will need to perform double and triple duty.
• If placemaking and the arts are not hierarchical, a new kind of leadership needs to combine the best of the established art community with these new spontaneous random acts.

In Sarasota, what are the opportunities?

Homemade wayfinding signs in Raleigh NC

• Arts and Transit – SCAT’s transit maps, bus stops and other information are pitiful.  Other cities are using information graphics, technology, and better sign posts to help patrons navigate the system.   Asheville, NC transformed its buses into art and performance spaces.

• Arts and Stormwater –Much of our public space is dominated by palm trees and high input (water and fertilizer) landscaping.  We can turn that around as other places have with installations that actually clean water before it enters the Bay.

• Arts and Health – Columbus Ohio’s Department of Public Health sponsors Columbus Art Walks in nine different neighborhoods.  Yes, the Health Department and Public Arts got together.
• Arts and Economic Development – Sarasota has tons of video production talent, but it seems scattered.  Imagine a consortium making a video like this, but instead of “Made in Brooklyn” it’s “Made in Sarasota.”  By the way, like Brooklyn’s Makerbot company, have a growing 3-D printing industry growing here.  Call me if interested because it looks like the early applications are jewelry, art and 3D printing for food.  No kidding.
• Art and Underused space - Imagine all the places in Sarasota where a dusty lot or even cracks in the sidewalk might be transformed.

Let’s cut to the chase here.  Placemaking+arts immerses people in art on a daily – even hourly – basis.  Linking arts to other passions ensure wider support, so someone who loves the idea of a healthier community will be all over arts and walking.  We know who does art - who does place?