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| | Steve Clagett |
People are fed up with sprawl, looking for the way out, and seeking leaders. Centers-based development that serves transit and pedestrians, provides the public realm, and coherently organizes neighborhoods is that way forward. But many feel, as in New England’s Bert and Ernie joke: “You can’t get there from here.” And they’re right, if “here” refers to the standard planning regimen Hoover recommended in the 1920s that is still widely used today.
Inadequate tools lead to fuzzy and uninspiring goals. To build exciting centers Washington cities and counties must:
–Fill in Growth-Management-Act-inspired (GMA) visions of wonderful components with a structural ideal of how these components interrelate to create coherence out of sprawl;
–Understand clearly that new “public development partner” tools must supplement old-style regulation; and
–Assign responsibilities for wielding those tools.
Know what you are doing. Face it, this business of replacing auto-dominated patterns is new stuff. Too many of us are acting as if we know what we’re doing when we don’t. In the comprehensive planning of the mid-nineties required by the GMA, we painted wonderful pictures of “urban centers” and “villages.” Now, we are planning for these centers and locating them in subareas, but something is wrong. We have not done here what Fort Collins, Colorado did. We have not created learning communities of public officials and interested citizens to fully understand, in the abstract, how these vision components, including centers, interrelate, by defining their structure.
I was led to Fort Collins when I saw the graphic included with a draft of this article. This idealized depiction of the spatial relationships of a centers-based neighborhood departs from the usual new community greenfield designs. Neighbors can see enough of their suburban community in the Fort Collins concept model so that they can use it to formulate local plans that correct sprawl shortcomings. Through this uncommon preliminary step, they have been given a structure from which to base their planning. If Washington communities also took the time to study and agree among themselves on such “perfect world” constructs, participants in subsequent sub-area planning wherein principles were applied, from a common base, be more strongly engaged, and be empowered to build better communities.
Know how to do it. The old planner toolkit must grow. “Plan, regulate, and wait,” the passive accretion of projects in a special zone, will not attract required top-notch key developers nor yield the tightly integrated designs that mixed use transit and pedestrian friendly community centers require. Whereas the old approach deliberately kept private developers at arm’s length, the best new efforts involve cities partnering with single developers or groups of developers to master plan special places in their entirety. Cities negotiate with those partners to ensure the vision will be realized, then memorialize public and private roles in binding development agreements: “deals.”
Some planners have embraced this more robust toolkit with great results. For instance, in planning its award-winning East Sumner, WA, Daffodil traditional neighborhood design development, Sumner saw its new mixed-use code take on the nature of a development agreement. The city worked closely with a willing developer, Boston Harbor Properties, to reality test the new code as it was first applied to the firm’s project. The code and development partnership led to twelve code amendment improvements in the first year, resulting in a better code that will continue to produce new neighborhoods like Daffodil and serve as a great model for new development elsewhere in the state. Sumner is also a good example of knowing where you’re going. The City conducts a two-day “City University” every other year that reminds its residents of the vision they had adopted and their progress in achieving it.
Mill Creek’s planning department also augmented its toolkit. The city wanted to site a new town center north of the shopping centers and highway junction that served as its default downtown. After traditional visioning, a charrette, and concept planning with the firm Makers, the planning department put out a request for proposals to select key developers. Once committed to a more robust partnering regimen, the city found that the next steps naturally presented themselves. Last year, the city bought the new town center site from the key developers under a sell back agreement. That purchase will allow the developers to acquire additional land that will link the old town center to the new one.
Unfortunately, old notions of planning, coupled with a state culture against public-private development partnering, are holding some communities and many in the planning profession back from playing these new roles. Public-private deal making raised eyebrows in the late 1980s and still gets a black eye today when it involves controversial projects such as stadiums. However, new development patterns require private sector partners to be market pioneers and those private partners need handholding. If communities want new designs that tap unexplored markets, they must work closely with private partners and that means deals.
The Urban Land Institute’s 1990 book Deal Making debated whether problems would arise if government got involved in projects that it also had to regulate. The 1990s largely proved those “two hat” concerns unwarranted. No significant problems have arisen where government has assumed the two roles. Nonetheless, many planners are leery of taking a project orientation to center dev-elopment. Because of the state’s legal history, many Washington State planners exhibit a particular disinclination.
Until about ten years ago, Washington courts’ strict legal interpretation of the state’s constitutional prohibition against the lending of public credit limited joint public and private endeavors. (That interpretation may help to explain why Washington is
one of only a few states in the country without a working tax-increment-financing program.) However, knowledgeable legal friends inform me that newer court holdings have rendered the culture, not the law, the prime deterrent to beneficial public-
private partnerships.
The “what,” “how,” and “who” of growing smart within Washington’s new GMA boundaries needs active discussion in the planning profession. We don’t need small plans that fail to stir the blood of either citizens or planners. Instead, we need bigger plans and public officials wielding tools to realize them — tools that orchestrate community and development partners. Planners can augment, they can flex, and they can team with complementary professions such as economic development professionals, lawyers, and developers. What they must not do is claim sole traditional dominion over the new landscape without new tools and relationships. |
Steve Clagett has been a planner for Maracay, Venezuela; Martha’s Vineyard, MA; and King/Snohomish Counties, WA. He founded and served as Executive Director for Common Ground, a non-profit low-income housing development organization serving Washington State; and wrote a chapter on developing an urban center that the Puget Sound Regional Council turned into a book. Currently, he is the Centers Project Director for the Economic Development Council of Snohomish County. He can be reached by phone at 206-795-9475, or by e-mail at clagett@attbi.com. |
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