Unplanned - A Walmart Wake-up Call

Walmart's hand at an in-town store First, Walmart showed how unprepared communities were for handling sprawl.  Now, the company is doing the same, but for infill.  On February 21, the Sarasota Herald Tribune ran an article on how Walmart is moving to in-town locations for the next wave of growth.   This is unfolding in Sarasota, where the retail giant has proposed a 24 hour supercenter on one of the last best parcels where the urban bone structure is intact.  The sub-text is really interesting, and serves as a good case study for revealing a crisis in planning.

A global shift in the economy and the nature of work - This may not seem like news, but how this translates to community design is still daunting.  Nobody describes the shift better than Michael Freedman of the California-based firm Freedman, Tung and Sasaki.   Fair warning: approaching Freedman’s work is a commitment of at least 90 minutes.  But he strings the narrative together in a way that not only explains, but also says “and here is what we do next.”   This video is great; if you don’t’ have time, there are jump-in points at minutes 23, 45 and 1:06 (or thereabouts).

In Sarasota, the job base has always been a feast/famine affair driven by retirees and the service industry.  The County is now rethinking jobs both within its strong sectors (housing, tourism) and outside the box (design and niche manufacturing).  All of these require exquisite settings – natural, built and creative.  The fact that the County approved only one of two enclosed malls last year and the city is mulling over a Walmart speaks to the utter disconnect on designing for the future of the work they want.  

Plans, codes and skill sets are stuck in time –The hyper-growth of the 1980s, 90’s and early 00’s, coupled with the massive recession that began in 2006, have left a trail of unattended needs (I am writing this after consulting with other friends who also worked in medium sized towns):

• The Sequence - It is becoming apparent that good planning is like developing a financial portfolio with four questions (planning lingo in parentheses): What do you have (asset mapping)?  What do you want (visioning)?  How do you get there (comprehensive planning)? How are you doing (implementation and feedback)?  Communities tend to jump immediately to the end of the process, which is the biggest gap in planning, in my opinion.
• The Scale - There are a lot of comprehensive plans and zoning codes, but not enough of the middle small area plans that link how the big picture and site level details work together.  This vacuum is made worse by funding cuts.  The anemic role of area planning, in my opinion, is the second biggest gap in planning, particularly for infill and sprawl repair.
• Stale Language - There are a lot of codes and plans out there splashed with 1990’s era smart growth language, but not necessarily enough to guide decisions or counteract older language that makes conventional zoning so detrimental.
• Skill Sets - A lot of skill sets out there were developed in the go-go years of master planned communities, conservation development and complete street definitions that made roads wider (ever seen new bike lanes in Florida?).  Cities are facing square peg/round hole frustration as large lot practices for things like stormwater, parking and loading docks are forced onto in-town locations.
• The Punt  - Sprawl has delayed hard discussions on where to redevelop. Determining the attributes of areas ripe for successful redevelopment and then communicating those results requires amazing skill.

The Crisis in Citizen Planning– This is where Walmart is getting really clever. Zoning codes tend to treat the residential interface with other development projects as a protection zone.  Codes describing neighborhood retail centers are replete with words such as “less intense,” compatible, and “aesthetics.”    Walmart has found an ally in outdated code language:

• Less intense – a sea of parking lot drives down the Floor Area Ratio (or FAR).  Walmart can argue they are less intense than a mixed use center.  Intensity has been defined so narrowly (a measure of density for retail) that 24 hour operations, auto orientation and lack of connections don’t register.
• Compatible – Walmart looks for neighbors who support the store, because once one household declares they can live next to a Walmart – the word compatible is drained of meaning.  
• Aesthetics – In Sarasota, Walmart is promising to paint the store beige.  Aesthetics has morphed into comparative aesthetics (it could be worse) instead of a measure of livability.

In Sarasota, an overarching plan for the neighborhood was rejected after a nasty fight over condos.   Foregoing a plan was seen as a protective move, though it only made the neighborhood more vulnerable because intent and aspirations have now been left open to interpretation by Walmart’s lawyers.  Citizen planning, like a lot of environmental planning, is stuck in a bygone, just-say-no era.  Roger Lewis wrote a timely article on zoning which is a great complement to what is happening in Sarasota.

In summary, the planning crisis is a play in (at least) three parts

• Funding for area plans linking multiple landowners, as well as public and private realms.
• Sequence and scale of planning and updates
• Citizen planning for a future by design.

Walmart tends to be the subject of a lot of exposé.  In a twist, Walmart has imposed an exposé on us: communities are unprepared to carry out better infill as part of a community portfolio.

Race to the Edge - How to do Infill

Matt Yglesias, in a September 12 Slate article, called for a “Race to the Top” for infill.   I’m working on a variation of that concept, thought it’s more like “Race to the Edge,” to pay better attention to the edges where new density meets the existing neighborhood.  (See more on my project and the August edition of Zoning Practice here).

In researching a project on neighborhood-friendly density and edges, I came across great examples from Canada.  There are a couple of interesting aspects of their approach:

• In Canada, cities come right out and call their redevelopment plans “intensification guidelines.”  They don’t sugarcoat it with “vibrant” and “thriving,” or hide the fact that density is involved.   
• However, they lead the planning effort by character areas.  This is really important and something I've heard from my U.S.-based colleagues.
• Second, they have marvelous graphicsthat show the remarkably small amount of land needed for effective corridor/intensification.  These graphics are reminiscent of the master plan for the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.
• They invest a lot of attention in tapering, massing and transitions to the neighborhoods.
• In Canada, they are paying special attention to mid-rise buildings and their role.  Toronto launched new codes, adopted in 2010, to encourage intensification along their Avenues (translated: crappy arterials) that is compatible with neighborhoods.  Here is a presentation on the planning steps. Of course Toronto gets both love (Richard Florida! Jane Jacobs!) and gruff (ugly high rises),  but they are getting it done.

Would this work here?

• First – architects and planners will have much to criticize on a formulaic approach to infill.  The back side of the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is a textbook case of “architecture-by-stepdown ratio,” and it can be visually jarring.
• Second – mid-rise in Toronto is up to 11 stories, but in smaller cities, the reality is more in the 2-4 story range.  
• Finally – I jumped into the “how to do infill” fray because it is not just about architecture.   It’s about making and sustaining a great place.   

The planning firm Brook McIlroy (www.brookmcilroy.com) has graciously given permission to use these renderings.  Check their work out.

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.