This is the second article in a three-part series introducing the idea that it’s worth the effort to expand opportunities for middle-class families to live in walkable, human-scale communities.
The man you see in the photo above is a developer named Joe Alfandre. When working as an urban planner in Baltimore County, two colleagues and I spent an afternoon with Alfandre driving around parts of the municipality. Our task was to show him various “opportunity sites,” on which a yet-to-be-identified developer might build mix-use, human-scale development. Those plans never materialized for reasons having nothing to do with Alfandre. I mention this outing because it allowed me to spend time with an innovative, community-minded individual who is deeply respected by all familiar with his work.
In 1987, Alfandre became the first developer in the country to pursue a large, mixed-use, human-scale project of the sort that the federal government had essentially banned in the 1930s. In doing this, he built upon a vision conceived in the late 1970s by two young married couples. One couple had trained as architects and later as urban designers. The other pair were developers, one with a Harvard MBA and the other a child psychologist.
The developer duo had spent time together in Europe and shared a passion for walkable communities and design. Through the grapevine, they’d heard about the urban designers’ emerging interests and expertise in human-scale communities. The four of them collaborated on creating a new resort town on the Florida coast. Together, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Andres Duany, Robert Davis, and Daryl Rose Davis developed that aforementioned vision. It says, in effect, that as a society, we’re far better off building places that can accommodate the automobile, but ultimately prioritize people traveling on foot.
Joe Alfandre took the next critical step in the late 1980s by teaming up with Plater-Zyberk and Duany. Together, they showed that the principles that worked well for a resort community applied equally to mainstream American life. Almost forty years later, his 350-acre project known as the Kentlands, has stood the test of time. Today, it serves as the backbone of a municipality in which quality of life and economic development go hand in hand. The municipality in which Kentlands sits has long since developed policies, regulations, and design expertise that serve as best practices for other municipalities.
There is a pressing need today to identify, cultivate, and empower developer talent that can produce quality human-scale development. Market demand suggests it can take place on a much wider scale than we currently see across the country. To meet this demand, there are specific actions communities can take over and above the work currently being done across the country to promote walkable communities. Before speaking to this, it’s helpful to consider what has and has not changed in the past two decades.
Surveys consistently show that a majority of Americans would prefer living in affordable, well-designed, walkable communities if they were available to them. But they’re not. Much of the middle class does not consider urban America viable because of expense in some neighborhoods and dysfunction in many more. And the kinds of places developers have been building since the end of World War Two pose their own challenges, which is what I’d like to focus on here.
Just as U.S. federal policy precipitated the decline of urban neighborhoods, so too did it fuel the rise of suburbia. In the late 1930s, the federal government put in place standards that had the net effect of mandating urban sprawl. Two dynamics shaped these standards. One was the racism that gave birth to the single-family zone in 1915. The other was the prevailing view among urban planners in the 1920s that auto-dependency was preferable to building communities that were pedestrian-oriented yet still capable of accommodating cars, as was done in the early 1900s.
Most of us grew up in places built with the expectation that every trip, irrespective of distance, would be made using a car. Conventional suburban zoning ordinances operate under the premise that various uses, such as a bakery, office, restaurant, or residence, must be physically separated from one another. Extensive buffering requirements are a substitute for design standards, and each non-residential building has its obligatory parking lot. The net effect is to increase the distance between any two points in a community. Want a half gallon of milk? Go get your car keys.
Relatively few suburban municipalities across the country have taken steps to lessen auto dependency. There are exceptions, however. Tigard, Oregon, for example, is redeveloping a troubled, 500-acre swath of suburbia using new human-scale regulations they call the Lean Code. Dublin, Ohio, built a small, downtown core called Bridge Park, comprising 14 blocks of buildings ranging from four to six stories in height. It sits across a river from a historic downtown core to which it is connected by a beautiful pedestrian bridge. Gaithersburg, Maryland has been consistently building human-scale development since the municipality formally rejected expanding auto-dependency over twenty-five years ago. One of their recently completed project is called Downtown Crown. It has many features found in the classic American town including a main street, and a mixture of housing types nearby such as single-family homes, townhomes, and apartments.
Despite America having positive examples of municipal governance, design, and development, they too exist in a broader context. In this case, it’s a country in which the rule of perpetual urban sprawl pervades.
Over twenty years ago, I wanted to understand why the rule existed. Why was urban sprawl the law of the land? This question prompted me to go back to school to study urban planning. My thesis answered two related questions. First, what barriers do developers face when attempting to build mixed-use, human-scale development? Second, were there municipalities in the U.S. that were successful at removing the barriers and consistently getting walkable, mixed-use development built?
Beforehand, in the mid to late 1990s, discussions about urban sprawl frequently appeared in the press. A new term called “smart growth” entered the planning lexicon. Maryland passed “smart growth” legislation to combat urban sprawl. The state partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency to create the “smart growth network” which brought together over forty national organizations, including the American Planning Association, Urban Land Institute, and the National League of Cities. The future seemed bright.
Aware of these developments, I was hopeful about putting the key lessons from my thesis into practice. I had learned there were both regulatory and financial barriers for well-intentioned developers. I also knew residents routinely opposed projects when planners spoke in terms of higher density instead of focusing on good design. Yet out of all the municipalities that I researched across the country, only Gaithersburg, MD was overcoming these barriers and consistently getting human-scale development built. In other words, they were cultivating an environment in which talented developers could thrive and learn from one another. Not coincidentally, this is the very same municipality which Joe Alfandre had built the Kentlands.
At the time, I believed that replicating success in another municipality was a matter of adopting and improving upon best practices established elsewhere. I still believe this, but the reality of working in municipal planning offices has taught me it’s easier said than done. Urban planners routinely visited Gaithersburg to look at their development. Yet most of the jurisdictions these planners came from never took the steps afterward to shift development patterns as had happened in Gaithersburg.
After grad school, Baltimore County (MD) hired me as a legislative planner because of my thesis’s focus on regulatory reform of the sort Maryland was encouraging. One of my primary responsibilities was to write new zoning regulations to promote creating “walkable neighborhoods.” At the outset, it seemed the ideal job, but sometimes what sounds too good to be true is too good to be true.
Long story short, the political and cultural realities within Baltimore County were out of sync with credibly pursuing human-scale development. The county council did pass planning legislation derived from my thesis, but both the process and result were, objectively speaking, charades. Two decades later, I calculated the average walk score (i.e., a measurement of walkability) for 50 new houses on the market in Baltimore County. That average score was 18 out of a possible 100 points, which is in the bottom end of the car-dependent range. To put this score into perspective, homes in the neighborhood in which we raised our children have walk scores in the upper 80s, which is virtually a walker’s paradise.
| Note: I did the same calculation for new homes in the Canadian municipality in which I worked as a planner for four months between my first and second year of graduate school. That average score was 8, in keeping with auto-dependent municipal planning policies across Canada. Despite the country’s positive reputation in the minds of many, planning policies and regulations are, more often than not, poorly conceived. Outcomes in terms of quality of development frequently lag American counterparts. I write more about this in a separate article titled Climate Rhetoric versus Reality. |
You find a certain amount of inertia and apathy in many municipal planning offices. Local politics can be an unsavory game whose rules are shaped by developers wedded to conventional suburban development or environmentally destructive high-rise development. Leadership within municipal planning departments often plays along to get along, and the status quo prevails year after year.
I know a few knowledgeable, committed planning directors. But I’ve also worked in large planning departments whose directors had little formal background in planning, and they largely catered to the narrow self-interests of developers and the municipal politicians whose campaigns they partially funded. Baltimore County developer Jack Luetkemeyer Jr., for example, donated over $1.3 million to municipal politicians in little more than a decade. Poor planning decisions in Baltimore County and elsewhere have been linked to monied influence. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Raleigh, NC, Columbus, OH, or Los Angeles, CA. Developers make campaign contributions expecting they get something in return. And relatively few of these developers have any interest in human-scale development.
In a key respect, little has changed since my last day of work in a municipal planning office over twenty years ago. I’m referring to results for new homes on realtor.com. Searching in metro areas in the North, South, Midwest, and West produces page after page of suburban-style, single-family homes with the obligatory attached two-car garage.
Saying this, I’m not dismissing the accomplishments Americans are making in communities across the country. I’ve previously cited examples of urban neighborhoods that have been revitalized and a handful of municipalities with suburban origins that are now serving as exceptions to the rule of perpetual urban sprawl. We can also find smaller revitalized cities and towns such as Hamilton, OH, Chattanooga, TN, St. Albans, VT, Dubuque, Iowa, and Greenville, SC. But again, these smaller urban areas exist in a nation where many more are struggling.
National organizations in the Smart Growth Network are aware that, over the past 25 years, gains made producing new walkable communities are relatively modest. The country continues to lose significant amounts of farmland, and the density of urbanized areas remains roughly half of what it was in 1950. For years, these organizations have sought to raise awareness regarding the benefits of walkable communities and “cultivate strategies to address barriers and advance opportunities for smart growth.” The question is whether the next 25 years will resemble the previous 25, mindful that only 7% of America is living in an urban environment that has a walk score of 80 or above.
But do we need to wait another 25 years for an answer? We don’t. By examining a municipal government’s policies and its people, one can assess the ability to foster human-scale development in the present or predict its likelihood to emerge in the future.
For a suburban municipality to consistently build quality, human-scale development four specific achievements must be realized, namely critical mass, strategic vision, clarity of entitlement, and design competence. I describe what’s behind each in an article titled Four Achievements Required to Break the Rule of Perpetual Urban Sprawl. For our purposes here, all we need to understand is that where these conditions exist in a suburban municipality, the projects delivered will consistently produce high walk scores. In municipalities where they don’t exist, urban sprawl will prevail.
With a solid understanding of what each of the four achievements entails, it’s possible to assess any, and every suburban municipalities across the country. A handful will be good to go. Many more will not, but in these cases, assessments would identify the potential for change as well as the barriers. Understanding and developing strategies to overcome these barriers and adopt best practices is the key to a more walkable future. Municipal assessments of this sort would complement the work that national organizations currently do, such as technical assistance, pilot projects, the analysis of legislation targeting poverty reduction, and more.
Conducting assessments and making them publicly available via a national directory would provide benefits to a democratic society where, again, over half the population has expressed a preference to live in a more walkable community than they do today.
I’ll describe the structure of the assessment and the benefits they provide in a future article. For our purposes here, know that municipal assessments would enable residents, community leaders, and people interested in running for elected office to better understand where things stand at present.
In conducting assessments, national organizations would collaborate with local communities across the country. The shared aim is to construct a clearer picture of where the nation stands regarding the reality and promise of building at the human scale.
There is a strong rationale behind conducting such assessments given the environmental, economic, social, and health-related benefits human-scale development delivers. Conducting municipal assessments is about accountability. I suspect that relatively few people relish the idea of another 25 years passing with relatively little progress in the grand scheme of things.
What’s being proposed here represents a tremendous amount of sustained work, but the stakes are high. The social, environmental, economic, and health-related costs of both auto dependency and high-rise development are significant. Given the times we live in, there is a solid case for curtailing these practices. Instead, we design and build communities around people. Future generations will thank us.
