|
|
|
Livable Communities Newsletter
|
|
|
Vol. 14, No. 53
|
February 2019
|
|
|
|
Welcome to Our Winter 2020 Livable Communities Newsletter!
Ventura County Civic Alliance Executive Committee Member
Vanessa Rauschenberger reports on her thinking and research after a December visit to Camarillo by Charles L Marhon Jr., founder of the Strong Towns movement
as part of his national book tour promoting his book
, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.
Strong Towns is described as a book of "forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to
present a new vision of urban development in the United States." At the Camarillo event, Charles Marhon explained why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and challenged us each to think about the small things we can to do incrementally change them.
Vanessa said that her goal for this quarter's newsletter is to share this message with the engaged Livable Communities reader! She hopes that the articles "Why Design Matters In Times Of A Housing Crisis," and "What's Up with All Those Empty Commercial Storefronts in New Mixed-Use Developments?" will help us
"connects the dots" between design choices and our Livable Communities.
Please read and engage, and
let us know what you think by contacting us at: info@CivicAlliance.org
Thanks,
Stacy Roscoe
|
|
========================================================
Bringing the "Strong Towns" Movement to Ventura County
by Vanessa Rauschenberger
I'm a believer that the everyday design choices we make in our cities have exponential power to either transform or keep us stuck in our bad habits. When a developer proposes to build an affordable housing development in a location without access to transit, they are effectively requiring everyone who will live in it to take on the burden of car ownership. When city codes require an arterial street wide enough to accommodate 45mph near a new school, or large parking minimums around a shopping center, they are saying to residents, you will need to drive your kids to school or drive to this center. The results of these decisions have added up over the last few decades, keeping us in unsustainable growth patterns, resulting in places that are increasingly difficult to make prosperous and affordable for cities to maintain.
The old phrase here is true: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years, ago, but the next best time to plant one is today. Every week, city councils and planning commissions meet; planning staff, developers, engineers and local advocates all gather to discuss and debate the pros and cons of these decisions. From NIMBY's to YIMBY's, each local municipality has its own local cadre of passionate residents looking for ways either keep things from changing or break out of this cycle.
In December, Charles L Marhon Jr., founder of the Strong Towns movement,made a stop in Camarillo as part of his national book tour promoting his book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Strong Towns is described as a book of "forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to
present a new vision of urban development in the United States." At the Camarillo event, Charles Marhon explained why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs
,
and challenge
d us each to think about the small things we can to do incrementally change them.
If this is the first time you are hearing about Strong Towns, you should know it's not just a book. It's a MOVEMENT. Its website is filled with inspiring articles, podcasts and resources that engaged citizens can use in their communities. At the Strong Towns stop in Camarillo, he challenged us with a simple question: What is one small thing you can do now to incrementally make our towns stronger? What a relief it was to be reminded that it's the little decisions we make each week that will over time get us there. My goal this week is to share this message with the engaged Livable Communities reader! I hope the articles "Why Design Matters In Times Of A Housing Crisis," and "What's Up with All Those Empty Commercial Storefronts in New Mixed-Use Developments?" will help
"connects the dots" between design choices and our Livable Communities.
==============================================================
|
|
Can We Afford to Care About Design in a Housing Crisis?
by
Daniel Herriges
-
Originally published on StongTowns.org January 22, 2020
San Francisco taught me to be an urbanist. There are few better classrooms in America in which to learn the delight of strolling down a cozy street and turning the corner to an unexpected discovery in an alley or shop window; the freedom of having your daily needs within a short walk of home; or the excitement of stepping outside into a hyper-diverse milieu of people whose stories you'll never know and feeling part of something grand even on your loneliest days.
San Francisco also taught me to be a YIMBY
. To live there in the past decade was to watch the mournful procession (if you were lucky enough not to be part of it) of those giving up on America's most expensive city or being pushed out of it-artists, immigrants, teachers, nonprofit workers, bartenders, cooks, people of color with roots in the city several generations deep-and to want to stop the bleeding.
As a result, I've never seen these two identities-urbanist and YIMBY-as in conflict. A human-scaled, compact, walkable city is the best and most sustainable (in every sense of the word) habitat ever created for human flourishing. And this is both the case for learning and respecting the accumulated wisdom of history on how to make these places beautiful and functional, and for welcoming more of our fellow humans to share them with us and being unthreatened by that prospect.
It's been my deep surprise to learn lately that there's a subset of housing advocates who seem to believe that supporting more housing and demanding good urbanism are in conflict now.
Specifically, some people seem to have concluded that since "neighborhood character" is often a smoke-screen for any number of selfish (and even classist and racist) objections to change, that therefore, neighborhood character (without the scare quotes) itself warrants discarding as a relic of a less enlightened time. And with it, concern for a sense of place, a cohesive and enjoyable (dare I say lovable
) public realm, and design features that bring out the best in humanity.
Even luminaries of urbanism aren't immune to critique on this point. In late 2019, Jeff Speck, co-author of Suburban Nation and author of Walkable City, two of the most important books about cities yet this century, tweeted a criticism
of a new house in Brookline, MA, and the swift condemnation poured in, accusing him of being an aesthetic snob, an out-of-touch architect more concerned with the subjective beauty of a upper-middle-class enclave than with who can or can't afford to live in it. It was a grossly unfair criticism, but Twitter pile-ons are Twitter pile-ons.
It's true: design requirements
can raise the cost of building, or even rule out good projects that would otherwise happen. They can make infill extraordinarily difficult. And they can be ahistorical, arbitrary
, and, indeed, sometimes driven by snobbery rather than true understanding of what makes a place desirable.
So can we afford to, like Speck urges, care about design even in the midst of a housing crisis? Yes, and I'll go further: What's the main reason people tend to oppose urban density or infill?
If you said "parking" or "traffic," congratulations, perhaps you've been to a public meeting lately, and listened to the numbing repetition of these two themes like a Philip Glass soundtrack
by a long line of project opponents claiming their 3 minutes at the microphone.
Traffic and parking are the twin suns around which everything in the politics of urban growth revolves. Sure, there are people who are worked up about noise, or school crowding, or about negative stereotypes of renters or low-income residents. But for the most part, most of us don't really have a problem with new neighbors. It's their cars we don't like.
The car has become in many ways the primary focus of urban planning. This observation from Donald Shoup,
author of The High Cost of Free Parking, sums up the problem neatly:
Cities are limiting the density of people to limit the density of cars. Free parking has become the arbiter of urban form, and cars have replaced humans as zoning's real density concern.
It follows that if you want majority public support for a city that makes room for new people without each
proposal being a battle that requires activist mobilization, you ought to support a less car-centric city.
Cars and the Bad Party Problem
I wrote in a 2016 post called The Neighbor's Dilemma
about how car culture poisons the politics of urban growth and change. Designing at car scales, for people who get everywhere by car, ensures that the benefits of new development are broadly diffused, while the downsides (noise, traffic, crowds) are tightly concentrated. I might want new cool stores and restaurants and recreational opportunities in my city, and even understand that population growth is what makes those things possible-but why would I want them (and all the other customers and their cars) to be right near my house?
Growth in a car-dependent neighborhood is a bad party.
Every new arrival makes things a little worse for the people who were already there. Growth in a traditional, walkable neighborhood is a good party. Every new arrival makes things better and more interesting for those who were already there.
New Urbanist developer Vince Graham likes to make this observation (as paraphrased by Kevin Klinkenberg):
"When you sell privacy & exclusivity, every new home is a degradation of that asset. When you sell community, each new home enhances the asset. Most of our suburbia does very well for exclusivity and privacy."
What does the design of a house-irrespective of its location-have to do with whether it sells exclusivity and privacy, or community and connection.
.
================================================================
================================================================
|
What's Up with All Those Empty Commercial Storefronts in New Mixed-Use Developments?
by
Rachel Quednau
- Originally published on StongTowns.org on December 14, 2018
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I live, is going through a massive building phase, with new construction popping up on every corner in and around our downtown and other popular neighborhoods. If you live in any number of mid-sized cities, this is probably a familiar story. And because recent trends in urban planning have encouraged a return to mixed-use developments, those sorts of buildings dominate the new construction landscape. It has resulted in some lovely new ground-level restaurants and shops emerging in areas that previously lacked much street life.
But here's the more common picture: a cookie-cutter five story apartment building over a vacant commercial space. This image is probably also familiar to you if you live in one of those cities experiencing an urban growth spurt. One might expect this set-up to last a few months, perhaps, while the apartment units are in the process of being filled and the building manager seeks a commercial tenant. But in fact, in my city, it's not unusual to see a commercial space sitting empty for months and sometimes years. There are buildings like this near my home and, while they may be a shade better than the derelict one-story structures or vacant lots that used to occupy the area, an empty space is an empty space. At the end of the day, a vacant storefront makes the whole street feel neglected and undesirable, and it isn't fulfilling its purpose.
At first, the whole scene just didn't make sense to me. What business owner wouldn't want to move into a brand new space with freshly painted walls, new windows and a blank canvas to lay out in whatever way suited the needs of the business? Why were these storefronts sitting empty?
A Problem of Scale
New businesses blossom all the time in my city. I seem to read about a new restaurant or bar opening almost every day. So there is clearly a demand for commercial space. Why not these newly built commercial spaces then, especially when most of them are in highly attractive, busy neighborhoods?
The basic answer is, of course, that the rents are too expensive for small businesses. And one major factor contributing to this cost is, undoubtedly, the size of the new commercial spaces being built in mixed-use developments. Glancing down a historic commercial street in my neighborhood, the new mixed-used developments stick out like a sore thumb because their ground-floor commercial units are much larger than the other, older commercial spaces on the street.
If size is the problem, why not just build smaller commercial spaces to begin with, or subdivide a larger space when you realize no one wants to lease the big one?
Multiple developers and planners I spoke with in my research mentioned that today's developers may be building those commercial spaces in the hopes of attracting a chain - businesses that typically want a larger amount of space than your typical mom-and-pop clothing store or barber shop.
Others pointed out that more spaces and tenants create more work for the building owner or manager. In a private Facebook group for developers and builder, one planner and architect wrote, "Less tenants means less operating costs and less people to deal with." Another member of the group added, "The cost of separately metering utilities, fire separation protection and the greater cost of build-out are all issues."
Because many of the typical mixed-used buildings cropping up in cities like mine are being constructed by big developers with deep pockets, they can afford to let commercial spaces sit vacant rather than go through the hassle of creating units for multiple tenants.
A Mismatch in Motives
At the end of the day, though, large developers constructing large new apartment buildings with large commercial spaces on the bottom floor - all financed by large banks - is hardly a recipe for building strong, ecomomically productive towns.
These developments may be mixed-use and walkable, but they are not materially contributing to the creation of a varied, strong local economic fabric.
Yet many of our cities are increasingly mandating mixed-use construction - following the latest hot trend, instead of recognizing the heart of why mixed-use matters. (As we've shared many times here at Strong Towns, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods produce a much higher tax value per acre,
but they do little good if they sit vacant.)
Strong Towns contributor Nolan Gray wrote in January in an article titled Mixed Up Priorties for Mixed-Use Buildings:
"Having seen and experienced great streets and neighborhoods with ground-floor retail, urbanists today assume that, to build a great neighborhood, you need to have a lot of ground-floor retail. Ignoring that causation may work both ways here, they settle on the easiest solution: mandate it wherever possible. The result is the empty storefront blight that we now see in cities across the country."
Nolan points to three factors necessary for ground-floor retail to be successful: developers with experience building and managing mixed-use urban retail, an existing and successful retail corridor, and rents that are high enough to sustain the space while still being affordable to businesses.
Meeting those three criteria can be a tall order for many developments, and this is why we see so many empty commercial spaces where mixed-used construction is mandated, says Nolan. Developers "must build [ground floor commercial space] to build the associated profitable use-housing-but the costs of operating and marketing retail and the risk of signing an unprofitable lease in a bad market make keeping the space occupied a bad deal," Nolan writes.
In the end, the vacant storefronts are a bad deal for our neighborhoods though, because we end up with streets pockmarked by vacancies while small business owners who need commercial space can't afford it.
Small Scale Solutions
Luckily, this trend of empty storefronts in mixed-used buildings doesn't have to be long-term. Developers across the country are finding creative ways to return to the traditional way of building, which happened at a smaller, more incremental scale.
In a conversation last fall
with Strong Towns member Adrienne Olson who works in downtown development in Fargo, North Dakota, she highlighted the fact that, in planning a new mixed-use development in her city, her company had intentionally chosen to construct commercial spaces that were smaller than average because they noticed a need for smaller, more affordable options in their local business community.
==============================================================
|
A Special Thank You Goes to Our State of the Region Report Sponsors:
Research Sponsor -
Ventura County Community Foundation
Presenting Sponsor -
Ventura County Community College District
Domain Sponsors -
AERA
AT&T
California Lutheran University
-
Center for Economics of Social Issues
California State University Channel Islands
County of Ventura
Haas Automation Inc.
Limoneira
Montecito Bank & Trust
Supporting Sponsors -
Gold Coast Transit
The Port of Hueneme
United Staffing Associates
Ventura County Coastal Association of Realtors
VCDSA - Ventura County Deputy Sheriff's Association
Ventura County Office of Education
Ventura County P-20 Council
Contributing Sponsors -
California Lutheran University Center for Nonprofit Leadership
SESPE Consulting Inc.
Ventura County Credit Union
Ventura County Transportation Commission
Friend Sponsors -
Dyer Sheehan Group, Inc.
David Maron
Ferguson Case Orr Paterson LLP
Kate McLean
Slover Memorial Fund
Stacy and Kerry Roscoe
Terri & Mark Lisigor
United Way of Ventura County
Media Sponsor -
Pacific Coast Business Times
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
