Harvard Business Review Eschews Sprawl

"To put it simply, the suburbs have lost their sheen," writes Ania Wieckowski in the May edition of Harvard Business Review." Her article, Back to the City, suggests that "(some) companies are getting a jump on a major cultural and demographic shift away from suburban sprawl. The change is imminent, and businesses that don’t understand and plan for it may suffer in the long run."

"The change is about more than evolving tastes; it’s at least partly a reaction to real problems created by suburbs. Their damage to quality of life is well chronicled. For instance, studies in 2003 by the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion linked sprawl to rising obesity rates. (By contrast, new research in Preventive Medicine demonstrates, people living in more urban communities reap health benefits because they tend to walk more.) Car culture hurts mental health as well. Research by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and his team shows that out of a number of daily activities, commuting has the most negative effect on people’s moods. And economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer have found that commuters who live an hour away from work would need to earn 40% more money than they currently do to be as satisfied with their lives as noncommuters.

A recent report sponsored by Bank of America, the Greenbelt Alliance, and the Low Income Housing Fund examines the inefficiencies of the current “geographical mismatch between workers and jobs.” Focusing on California, it says that sprawl “reduc[es] the quality of life,” “increase[s] the attractiveness of neighboring states,” and yields “higher direct business costs and taxes to offset the side-effects of sprawl”—which include transportation, health care, and environmental costs."

The article also quotes Carol Colleta, the Executive Director with CEOs for Cities that “increasingly CEOs understand that without a vibrant central city, their region becomes less competitive. Good CEOs care about the fate of their cities, because they have to question whether that is the place where they can attract the talent they need.”

Slowly but surely the pieces are all being tied together by many formerly disparate interests that suburbia isn't as healthy or sustainable as it was once promoted. Suburbs have their place, for sure, but not to the exclusion of the rest of our developed and undeveloped areas. Natures dislikes a monoculture and the single-minded focus on suburbia as the exclusive panacea to our society's ills is thankfully being unraveled.

Are Sustainable Suburbs Possible - Yes, But It Depends on Your Definition

This blog has often railed against suburbia in favor of more urban arrangements of our communities. And while there are a growing legion of those who support this position, there are still a number of individuals who, for many and varied reasons believe that the suburbs are superior and that cities are the antithesis of their dreams. What I have come to understand is that there is a broad spectrum of opinions, experiences, and understandings when it comes to creating great communities.

The truth, as always, lies not in the margins of the conversation, but at its core. When it comes to community-building the core of the debate lies often in our definition of terms. And fundamentally it is the fact that "urban" does not universally describe only place like Manhattan or inside the loop of Chicago. In like manner, suburban does not always mean a ranch house on 1/2 acre lot with nothing around for miles to walk to. And the solution to our current unhealthy pattern of development is not for everyone to live in a apartment above a store in the downtown. In fact, our small towns can have urban centers and our cities can have suburban neighborhoods.

The term "urban" simply refers to being in a city. A city can be New York with the tall skyscrapers of Manhattan and the 2 and 3 story neighborhoods of Brooklyn or it can be a town like Davidson, NC with its simple Main Street, college campus, and surrounding neighborhoods. The notion is scaleable but it shares common characteristics. Mixed-use centers with civic spaces surrounded by walkable neighborhoods (that contains parks and playgrounds) and connected by multi-modal transportation corridors. Depending on what part of a great community you are in, this scale could transition block by block or be more elongated. This concept is best illustrated by the transect diagram made famous by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zyberk.

Within the context of the metropolitan area, Davidson, is in fact, suburban. The same can be said of Brooklyn. Neither can be truly sustainable community without access to a larger region of jobs. Like Lake Forest, IL (a classic walkable, mixed-use community to the north of Chicago) Davidson will hopefully be soon linked to the largest job center in the region - downtown Charlotte - via a commuter train. Yet there will still be those who must commute by car to jobs that are outside the core. But even within the city of Charlotte, a majority of the jobs are currently inaccessible except by car - a fact that is changing with a rapidly emerging transit, bicycle, and pedestrian network. But once you arrive into either community - Davidson or Brooklyn - you have an immediate sense of its urbanism within its context.

By contrast, suburbia offers no such civic amenities neither within its borders nor in its connections to the outside world. 100% of the embodied value of most suburbs today lies behind the front door. They lack any urban amenities - civic spaces and buildings, multi-modal corridors, walkable, mixed-use activity centers, etc.

Most of us who espouse the ideas of smart growth, sustainable communities, and new urbanism (all of which largely share the same set of core principles - making them different flag over the same nation, so to speak) are not anti-growth, anti-car, anti-freedom of choice, raging socialists (or communists, or humanists, or pagans for that matter). Sure, there are folks out there who are in fact opposed to cars and think that we should all live in high-rise apartments under the direction of a strong central government, but they are some of the individuals that I mentioned are in the margins and do not represent the core. In fact, most new urbanist (and old urbanist) planners and designers have helped to create places that are diverse, well-connected, and mixed-use with little government intervention and free-market financing. In Charlotte, NC this includes first ring suburbs of Myers Park and Dilworth (the image below) and newer neighborhoods and centers like Birkdale Village and the Village of Baxter. In St. Louis, this includes most every older neighborhood in the City and newer neighborhoods like the New Town at St. Charles.

Does living in one of these places mean that you no longer need a car and that you can live a carbon-free lifestyle (if that is your desire)? Perhaps, but it's your choice. These places give people choices. They are filled with car drivers and bus riders, families with children and single-person households, avid gardeners and lawn mowers, efficiency apartments and detached houses with yards, driveways and alleys, trees and pavers, Democrats and Republicans, Priuses and Ford F-150 Trucks.

The debate about the future of our communities and our future quality of life should be centered around our ability to make choices not our subjugation to a one-size-fit-all approach of modern suburban development. This includes choices for the developers who are the ones who create most of what is built as well as the tenants in the office buildings and the homebuyers who will be the daily users of that community. Great cities can have vibrant, walkable, and mixed-use suburbs that are connected by multi-modal transportation networks.

To paraphrase Vince Graham, a new urbanist land developer, most suburbs simply sell privacy and exclusivity, making each incremental addition a degradation of the original promise. Cities, and by extension all urban places (towns and villages included), add value to the greater community with each new home, civic space, street, or neighborhood center. Value is shared in the sense that all boats rise with good urbanism.

To close, as we look forward to a new year, let it be one in which communities across the country make development decisions that provide the greatest return not only for the residents of today but for our children, our grandchildren, and future generations.

The End of Greenfield Sprawl One Parking Lot at a Time

The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently picked up on a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that featured the orange giant, Home Depot, and their effort to make better use of their property. Home Depot, as many people know, is one of the nation's largest home improvement warehouse with stores approximately 130,000 square feet on lots that average 12-14 acres, most of which are underutilized parking lots. It turns out that Home Depot officials are looking at these grayfields - cleared, graded, and paved areas - as opportunities for new revenue. As it was reported,

“A number of stores have barren asphalt, and it’s not in anyone’s best interest to leave it sitting there,” said Mike LaFerle, Home Depot’s vice president of real estate.

So the Atlanta-based chain has a new strategy: Sell chunks of its parking lots to fast food chains, pet stores or auto parts outlets.

Home Depot has identified marketable portions of lots at hundreds of stores — including about 25 of Georgia’s 90 stores, according to a list the company handed out to potential buyers and brokers at a recent meeting of the International Council of Shopping Centers in Atlanta.

With the diminishing desire to return to the over-leveraged, land-consumptive period (pre-2008) that was typified by massive retail expansion of national brands both big and small, Home Depot's real estate office is now coming to a new level of awareness. All of these parking lots, often built to excessive local zoning standards, even by shopping center industry standards are now primed to receive the next wave of growth. To do this will take two key ingredients.

First, local governments need to radically reduce their parking requirements. Far too often I open a zoning ordinance that requires parking spaces at a rate of 5 cars or more for every 1000 square feet of retail space. And for shopping centers, these ordinances often require that every store in a center be able to comply independently of each other with no permission for shared parking arrangements. The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) has regularly surveyed their members and found that the actual need for many of these so-called "power centers" is actually between 4 and 4.5 parking spaces per 1000 square feet of retail space - nearly 20% less than many local government requirements.

In the face of this evidence, why do many local governments still cling to excessive standards? The answer is likely just simple apathy. Many zoning ordinances are based on national model codes or whatever the next town over just adopted. And unfortunately, too many of these standards are never researched properly. So not only are many communities requiring the unnecessary installation of parking spaces, they are complicit with the environmental degradation that these parking spaces bring. Increased heat island effect, increased storm water runoff and not to mention the deforestation required to mass grade accessible parking spaces.

But even if local governments all wake up tomorrow and lower these artificially high standards, or perhaps even did away with all parking standards altogether and let the market decide what they need, we would still have another hurdle. These parking areas are still private property and are often encumbered with legal easements that preclude their use for anything other than unused black asphalt. As someone who has been advocating for redevelopment of these grayfields for more than a decade, it is heartening to see a retailer waking up and seeing these areas are potential redevelopment assets.

In fact, I suspect that if we were to add up all of the currently underutilized properties in each of our communities that we may have little need to develop commercial property in the greenfields. When we add up all of the excess parking lots with the now-closed malls, big box stores, and auto dealerships, the amount of potentially available property is staggering. (Hint to any graduate students in need of a thesis project - we need a good GIS inventory!)

Now some will argue that the continued parcelization of these sites for additional auto-oriented stores still is a step a backward. Perhaps. But isn't it a step forward for these large landowners to consider that maybe, just maybe, that there is a better use for their property. Even if it is simply a better economic return, that will help both the property owner as well as the local government. And once they get beyond the hurdle of making that property available, it is incumbent upon the local government and our DOTs to do a better job at creating more walkable, urban corridors. Because unless the characteristics of the fronting thoroughfare are radically changed, don't expect the development on the private side to be much different.

Without a doubt, property owners are looking these days on how to better maximize returns on their investments. It's too early to tell whether this will represent a sea change or simply an isolated experiment but every owner would be neglilgent if they didn't consider it. The results could benefit the financial bottom line and the environmental bottom line as well.

Who is Going to Buy Your House?

Many of us have long questioned whether the exponential growth in the suburban single family lot is, in fact, socially sustainable. Beyond the environmental and economic challenges that many suburban areas pose, is there enough market in the future to ensure their long-term viability?

Harrison Marshall, a colleague and bulk emailer (reformed) of planning news sent around a link about two years ago (before the crash) to an article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Winter 2008, entitled Who’s Going to Buy Your House? Facing the Consequences of the Generational Housing Bubble. Being a student of both policy policy and urban design I was in intrigued as to the implications of this aging trend on growth and development in our urban areas.

They posited that the coming "generation housing bubble" caused by the graying of the 78 million baby boomers will result in a massive sell-off of homes to younger generations that aren't large or wealthy enough to absorb the supply.

And now, more than a year after the house of cards tumbled, I re-read this article to see if it again held water. In fact, it seems more timely than ever.

Newly estimated data reported in this article show that roughly 2% of people of all ages younger than 70 sell homes each year, but the selling rate climbs far higher after age 75. Meanwhile, the percent buying homes peaks at a much younger age, 30 to 34 (3.6%), before declining steadily into older ages.

After three decades of relative stability, the ratio of seniors to working age adults nationwide will increase by a total of 67% in the next two decades (2010 to 2030). After 2010 the leading edge of the 78 million strong boomer population will pass age 65 and growth among the elderly population will substantially exceed that of younger adults, an unprecedented social and economic development that is expected to impact every state in the U.S.

I recently participated in a panel presentation on retrofitting suburbia at the North Carolina Planning Conference with Mitchell Silver, the Planning Director for the City of Raleigh, NC and Kathryn Lawler, the Chief of Staff for the Atlanta Regional Commission. Mr. Silver outlined an analysis of the low density suburban growth patterns in Raleigh that have been largely driven by non-Hispanic white, middle and upper income families. A fact that recently forced a dramatic changeover in their local school board when the previous board elected to continue the busing policy that precludes a true neighborhood school model. Ms. Lawler then gave an eye-opening presentation on aging trends. Specifically she noted that the senior population (defined as those over 55) is expected to grow from 20% of the current population (2000 census) to nearly 1 in every 3 people by 2030 in states like North Carolina and Georgia. 1 in every 3! Of course, the graying of our population is only one of at least two other key demographic trends that will have significant impacts on how we grow our communities.

The next issue is our current fertility rate. It is widely accepted that 2.11 births/woman is the needed replacement rate to ensure a stable population. According to the US Census Bureau-National Center for Health Statistics the fertility rate of our white and black populations hovers in the 2.06 births/woman range. Only when you include the current Hispanic fertility rate of almost 3 births/woman does our current population growth curve approach the replacement rate. In 2006, it was estimated at 2.10 births/woman. Non-hispanic whites, currently 75% of the population, are expected to be in significant decline by 2030 because of declining birth rates while Black populations are expected to double its present size in the same period. Source: US Census Bureau National Projections.

So how does our country keep growing? Very simply - immigration. Immigration accounts for nearly a third of our current population. Not surprisingly, the largest immigrant group is Hispanics who have grown from 12.5% of the population in 2000 to almost 15% in 2006. In 2030, Hispanics are estimated to comprise nearly 1 in 5 Americans, more so in many counties particularly in the southeast and the west where they are expected to comprise 50% or more of the population. From 2000 - 2006, Hispanic growth accounted for 50.4% of the total population increase! Source: Hispanic Population Projections, US Census Bureau.

What do these changes have in store for American communities. There are a number of potential impacts that will be explored in subsequent posts but the fact remains that in 2030 the face of the average American will be much different from what it is today. These changes are likely to have very significant impacts on a myriad of issues include growth patterns in our communities, our social service network, and our education system.

The baby boom generation, long the driver of housing and other community growth patterns will be slowly replaced with new groups whose values will likely be different. The non-Hispanic white majority is being rapidly replaced by a more diverse face that may or may not accept the suburban ideal. Will the new immigrant family endure long commutes for a large house on a large lot. If history is any precedent, the numbers point to an even greater sell-off of the suburbs in the years to come.

Sprawl is Still Bad, Regardless of the Measure

The National Academy of Sciences released a report this month entitled Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions -- Special Report 298. A summary of the report can be downloaded from the Transportation Research Board.

Interestingly, this article was reported by Technology Review, under the title Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl.

They report that "urban planners hoping to help mitigate CO2 emissions by increasing housing density would do better to focus on fuel-efficiency improvements to vehicles, investments in renewable energy, and cap and trade legislation now being voted on in Congress, according to the study, released Tuesday. It concludes that increasing population density in metropolitan areas would yield insignificant CO2 reductions."

They go on to further report that "even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050."

So should we go ahead and throw in the towel? Has all this advocacy for improving our built environment been for naught? Absolutely not. In fact, the evidence to change our built environment and offer more urban solutions has never been more necessary.

The two principal recommendations of the report were that:

1. Policies that support more compact, mixed-use development and reinforce its ability to reduce VMT, energy use, and CO2 emissions should be encouraged.
2. More carefully designed studies of the effects of land use patterns and the form and location of more compact, mixed-use development on VMT, energy use, and CO2 emissions are needed to implement compact development more effectively.

As if reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the only reason to encourage more compact, mixed-use development. And, in fact, the report notes that there are plenty of other excellent reasons to change our development patterns.

Changes in development patterns entail other benefits and costs that have not been quantified in this study.
On the benefit side, more compact, mixed-use development should reduce some infrastructure costs, increase the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of public transit, and expand housing choices where compact developments are undersupplied. Other benefits include less conversion of agricultural and other environmentally fragile areas and greater opportunities for physical activity by facilitating the use of non-motorized modes of travel, such as walking and bicycling.

And never mind the fact that the changing demographics over the past 40 years are radically changing the face of housing. Lot sizes have been in decline for decades based largely on market preferences. But if compact communities won't yield the biggest gain in GHG reductions should we just allow sprawl to perpetuate? No.

If we have learned anything from this recession it's that suburban development and its necessary dependence on leveraged debt is economically volatile at best. Suburban development patterns have also been shown to increase environmental degradation of our water supplies and our forests. The promise of the big house in the suburbs increases energy needs because of excessively high heated (and cooled) floor are per person and reduces family time due to commuting. Surburbia has shown to underperform in many ways over the last couple of decades and GHGs are only but one indicator of many.

The reason for urbanism is more than just reducing GHGs. It is because good urbanism is more resilient to changes in our future. Good urbanism provides choices in housing, in transportation, and in shopping. Sprawl limits choices. And the proposed solutions highlighted by Technology Review are expensive and untested. Urbanism, on the other hand, has a substantial track record for being adaptable. Choice is good.

Shrinking Cities: What can we learn from Detroit?

The post below is written by Peter Zeiler who serves as the Transit Station Area Development Coordinator in the Neighborhood & Business Services for the City of Charlotte. He can be reached at pzeiler@CharlotteNC.gov.

Back up in Detroit I spent a lot of time and energy focused around the Shrinking Cities project and discussing the issue with local and global policy makers.

One of the key points missed in planning for a shrinking city is property ownership & control and the costs to actually a policy of shrinking. Disinvestment is not linear or block by block. A city managing decline must rationalize the chaotic decay in order to effect any meaningful change other than the natural entropy – which as we have seen is not a viable model.

The costs to return large tracts of patchwork land in neighborhoods back to natural or agricultural (or even industrial) uses is staggering.

As an example, a project I worked on in Detroit over a seven year period was to basically apply the coup de grace to a dead neighborhood. Out of 1,600 homes in 1940 in the target neighborhood, only about 400 were still standing. 100 of those were vacant, the other 300 were about half owner occupied, 85% were sub-code and the households were largely impoverished. Nearly 700 of the vacant parcels were already owned by the City through tax foreclosure.

The neighborhood was surrounded by industrial uses in a classic pre-zoning land use pattern. The goal was to remove the vestiges of the trapped neighborhood, move the residents to other neighborhoods that had a chance to survive to help stabilize them and then backfill the site. The site would become an industrial / office park with excellent freeway access and tax free status for 15 years through a program known as Renaissance Zones (businesses would be exempt from all non-bonded property tax, utility taxes and all local and state business taxes- and we would sell them the newly cleared land with significant writedowns).

Shorty story – it failed. Miserably.

The cost to relocate households averaged about $150,000 - $200,000 per household despite the fact that their homes were valued generally at less than $30,000. Following state and federal guidelines for eminent domain added significant (and wholly justifiable and ethically correct) expenditures. Then came the task of tracking down and condemning vacant 40’ x 90’ residential lots – at an average expense of $35,000 per parcel.

Once the majority of the site was acquired the physical work needed to be engaged. Because we were demolishing a significant number of structures, the entire site needed to undergo a full EPA analysis – meaning house by house investigation for contaminants which would be part of an overall environmental program. No just bulldozing the home, you had to check each and every one and – for example - mitigate ACMs like linoleum mastics by hand. $3,000 per unit demos skyrocketed to upwards of $60,000 per in some cases. There were significant costs to relocate water, sewer, gas and electrical infrastructure that ran through the site and connected to other neighborhoods. Infrastructure is a network, not a system of nodes that can be switched off arbitrarily and thus creates reengineering and rerouting challenges. Then the vacant land and abandoned streets had to be remediated (lead, arsenic etc in soils, PCB plumes from neighboring uses) and grubbed.

In short nearly $120 million was used to create a 50 acre industrial park - without roads. Recall the Empowerment Zone program of the Clinton era that was to spark urban redevelopment was criticized as squandering tax payer dollars by granting $100 million to each of six cities. The entirety of the Detroit Title IX money could have been consumed and still not been enough for the 50 acres of the site.

The result of all this is a 200,000 square foot JIT (just in time) warehouse facility that employs 60. Even with generous land write-downs and nearly full tax exemption for 15 years, the site did not attract users. There are simply no jobs left in southeast Detroit and no reason to move jobs there. Now if that is the cost for 50 acres, the math for even 10% of the 138 square miles of Detroit would be staggering.

This isn’t to say that the goal is not worthy or that it can’t be done. Flint, MI and Youngstown, OH have moved towards managing decay but they are timid steps still. The concept is viable and no longer groundbreaking in a policy context. The next step that needs to be taken to advance the policy of managed decline is a true accounting of its costs and a national program to address it.

I have a hunch that when people see the cost of managed decline and its non-existent ROI, the costs of regeneration will seem like chicken feed in comparison. If we are gun-shy to spend $100 million in ten years in Detroit for regeneration, how gun-shy will we be for the billions to create forests?

The time has come to move beyond the idea. If urbanists and environmentalists want to move the managed decline argument forward, it’s time to start hanging a price tag on it. It may be that the most compelling argument for sprawl containment and smart growth is the exponentially higher cost of returning developed land back to nature for which we are now beginning to have an understanding of the full and quantifiable costs.

Food for thought.

Cites and the Myth of Suburbia

Something interesting happened this week. The US Census Bureau released their latest municipal population estimates and it provided some very interesting trends and some very misleading data. New York City and Los Angeles both increased in population and remain or nation's largest cities. Recent immigration is fueling most of the growth in those urban areas as they continue to swell with minority populations.

What made the release most interesting though is how the media reacted to the fastest growing list. According to the Christian Science Monitor "Texas hosts four of the top 10 cities, including Round Rock – which was No. 2 – Killeen (9), Fort Worth (10), and McKinney (5).The others include Raleigh (8) and Cary (3) in North Carolina; Roseville (6) and Irvine (7) in California; and Gilbert (4), in Arizona." Christian Science Monitor 7/1/09

Most of the media swooned over these growing cities with their "good public schools, partnerships between businesses and universities, entrepreneurship, low crime rates, and cultural outlets" but little was said of how this growth actually occurred. In fact, the real truth is that many of these cities are not really cities at all, but are in fact suburban communities that share two key characteristics. They are located in job-rich metropolitan regions (Austin, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill-Cary, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Phoenix) and are located in states that have progressive annexation laws that permit established municipalities to absorb their suburban fringes. Don't be fooled into thinking that these areas are recession-proof. The growth that the Census Bureau announced for the year over year was based largely upon growth in these suburban areas that had been accumulating for five to ten years. in North Carolina, suburbs must meet certain density thresholds before they may be annexed by the municipality. That means that the suburban growth that was ground to a halt when the bubble burst in 2008 will likely slow growth in these areas over the next five period.

This is not to take anything away from my own capitol city, Raleigh, North Carolina. Their downtown is slowly transitioning from a sleepy center dominated by low-rise, sprawling government office buildings to a mixed-use center with dare I say, a night life. And Cary, long a community of pristine suburban office parks and golf course neighborhoods is embracing an urban future with increasing density and a burgeoning downtown area.

The term "city" broadly refers to all of those incorporated jurisdictions that provide urban services to its residents. Some have commerce and culture, while others are simply a bedroom. The new economy is already determining the next winners and losers. Winners will be communities that are mixed-use and flexible, able to attract jobs and people, and have a coherent vision of long-term sustainability. The losers will be the ones wound so tight with restrictive covenants, age-restrictions, and long-term lease stipulations that they will be unable to retrofit for the future. Cities large and small will be doubly challenged with being efficient providers of urban services as well as centers for civic culture. Will the suburbs be able to meet this challenge or will they wither on the vine?

How do we Re-Center our Suburbs?

The last twenty to thirty years have left many of our suburbs as vast sprawling single-use residential subdivisions surrounded by vast sprawling single-use commercial strips with little to seam the two together. This pattern has been well-documented and is now the location of foreclosures and dark storefronts. Why? There are of course many reasons for this, some of which are complex (over-leveraging of debt instruments) and some are rather simple (oversupply of homes and retail not supported by actual population growth).

Regardless, it appears that the communities that have fared the best are those with a true civic heart and a viable center of the community. For most communities, this is the Main Street, their downtown. Just why is having a downtown so important? Very simply, it gives a community its heart and soul. It binds people together socially and creates a visual characteristic that distinguishes one address from the other.

Our practice has allowed us to work with a number of these suburban communities seeking to physically define their geography with the creation of a Main Street. This work has ranged from Germantown, TN where we assisted this suburban Memphis community of 37,000 in redefining 800 acres of largely single-story strip shopping centers into a multi-story, mixed-use environments to Trinity, NC where we recently assisted them in implementing a vision of a true village center for this nearly 200 year old settlement.

In Germantown, they realized that the annexation-based greenfield growth that fueled their tax revenues through the 70's and 80's was slowing quickly. As a result, they began to refocus their economic development efforts on the redevelopment of previously under-performing sites. The resultant plan will be guided over the next 40 years by a form-based code and a public-private partnership program.

The economic analysis of the potential redevelopment told the tale. It is estimated that the current tax proceeds for the area is approximately $1,760,000. However, with mixed-use infill and redevelopment as contemplated by the plan, the City can conservatively expect tax proceeds in 2007 dollars more than double this value. So, in fostering an environment where mixed-use was permitted and encouraged (it was previously forbidden) Germantown now has the opportunity to create a Main Street where previously there was none and yield a substantial return on investment. Sounds like a win-win. For more information go to http://www.germantown-tn.gov/SmartGrowth.html

In Trinity, NC they face a different challenge. Trinity was first established as a community in the 19th century when Trinity College occupied a plot of land at the center of this small agricultural community in the Greensboro-High Point region. Unfortunately, Trinity College was moved before the turn of the 20th century to Durham and became Duke University. Trinity was on the precipice of forming a downtown around the college and the rail line just to the north to serve this growing area but found itself instead returning to its agricultural roots with little occurring until the last ten years. The community was re-incorporated in 1997 and moved quickly to plan their growth. Having adopted their first land use plan and planned significant investments in a community-wide public sewer system, the town leader's sought ways on how to best manage these key investments.

In May, 2009, the community organized a public design charrette and developed a coherent vision for their historic core. Most importantly, they planned a vision of a village center anchored by a village green on which they can program community-wide events and activities. Located at the doorstep of the true community activity center, the high school, this village green is envisioned to draw from the historic remnants of Trinity College (located adjacent to this site) while establishing a heart and soul for this "placeless" community. In addition, the plan identified the opportunity of redeveloping five key parcels directly to the north to create a small mixed-use neighborhood center that will finally give Trinity the Main Street they have longed for. For more information go to trinity-nc.blogspot.com.

How will the next 50 years be different?

Interesting question. Perhaps the bigger question is why the next 50 years must be different. To do so we must have an understanding of the failure of our built (and natural) environment since the end of World War II. I don't need to rehash the well documented impacts that the explosion of suburbia has had on the global economy. To find the best resource on that, check out Suburban Nation, by Andres Duany, Lizz Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. More importantly, just open the paper.

The most tenuous parts of our economy were based on the suburbs. The auto-industry failed because it over-leveraged itself into gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles sold to people with average commuted in excess of 20 miles each way. Foreclosures are highest in the suburbs because families "drove until they qualified" for a large house or builders/developers constructed subdivisions for whole populations that never arrived (I'll need to cover that more in the myth of popular demographics). Banks and large financial institutions failed because they either bundled highly leveraged mortgages for those people who couldn't afford the home in the first place (mortgage backed securities) and then insured their profitability as credit default swaps. And then someone tugged at the loose string of our economic sweater and it all unraveled.

Perhaps if there is one lesson that we have learned it's that the suburbs are predicated upon an often untenable dream - one that is mired in debt, future costs, monthly payments and IOUs. And I'm not just referring to the average household. And this debt is not always in the form or a financial instrument. Often times our built environment is built on premise that a future generation will pay for what we purchased. Drained wetlands, drought-starved rivers, lost farmlands, dependence on foreign oil (if we still use oil in 50 years) - these are the costs that future generations will be saddled with if we don't continue to change our fundamental approach to growth.

Smart growth, new urbanism, compact communities, sustainable cities - these are all buzzwords that boil down to the need to think strategically and systemically. Yes, growth is indeed good. And to borrow as phrase from Charlotte, NC Mayor Pat McCrory - "if you are not growing (as a city), you are dying." This site is therefore intended to explore the ways in which our communities can grow more sustainably - economically, environmentally, and socially - into the next 50 years. We'll find some lessons and best practices in the past and the present but mostly we'll be inventing a new wheel, a new way of growing our cities and towns. As a city planning practitioner, I'm excited about the possibilities. The moonshot of our generation will not be the compact, florescent light bulb. I believe it will be the compact, efficient community that's paid for by this generation and left to the next as a debt-free inheritance.