Community Reputation: Actions speak

“Don’t dance, drink, smoke or chew, or go with girls who do.”

If you grew up in the south, it’s a good bet you’ve heard this one before. In short, reputation is a precious thing. You may show up in church in your Sunday best but, if your actions every other day paint a different picture then, well, that’s the impression that sticks.

Actions, especially over time, speak the loudest.

I’ve always found this reality fascinating in the aggregate. That is, what happens when all these people of countless reputations start living together, making the day-in-day-out decisions that add up to community? Reputation then transcends the actions of any one individual and comes to reflect collective actions, which no one person controls.

Get Your Offices into a Walkable Town Center!

Leveraging your Town Center for Economic Development

So far, this series has taken on three of the essential components of a healthy walkable town center: hotels, retail and multi-family residential. But, traditionally, our town centers were not simply a collection of residences and shops. They formed the commercial and civic centers of our towns and cities — an economic development engine that attracted the industries that gave all those homes and shops a reason (and means) for existing in the first place. Of course — and you know the story — as we moved into the suburbs in the post WWII era, we placed our offices into “office parks” in our campaign to separate the activities of our daily lives and reconnect them through compulsory car trips.

Fair Trade Placemaking: Are you being compensated for your choices?

Over a decade ago Andrés Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost.

Tony Nelessen, the inventor of the Visual Preference Survey, confirmed this lesson a few years later when he came to my town and conducted one. 

Get your Multi-Family into a Walkable Town Center!

Residences:  An Obvious Ingredient
One obvious yet undervalued ingredient of an effective mixed-use town center is the residential component. To emphasize its importance, I would go as far as to say that it is actually the substrate on which a healthy mixed-use environment is based. In a healthy, balanced region, with the exception of noxious uses, no land uses are set aside as a single use and all are integrated into a walkable neighborhood.

Get Your Shops into a Walkable Town Center!

Shops: Everybody Wants ‘Em
Last week we started this series off with Hotels, a sometimes overlooked, value-adding addition to a walkable town center. This week we are looking at one of the essential ingredients of a town center: the retail shops. The retail component of a town center is the most visible component, often defining the character and pedigree of a place. It is also the biggest generator of traffic, an attractor of street life and pedestrian activity, and value-adding convenience for neighboring office workers and residents. But where it gets into trouble is the fact that successful retail spells m-o-n-e-y. It makes bucks for the developers and operators, it is often a key line item on municipal tax roles, and it can bring great value to surrounding neighborhoods. But the problem is that while everybody wants ’em, there is only so much to go around.

Get Your Hotels into a Walkable Town Center!

Series Overview
While walkable mixed use town centers may not be the *easy* choice for the asphalt guy, the engineer, or even the developer who has to attract tenants to an environment they may not be as used to… they are certainly becoming best practices for sustainable community development. More importantly, they are quickly becoming a market favorite and a valuable amenity to their adjacent (and integrated) residential neighborhoods. Too often, however, municipalities and developers choose only to commit to this model halfway, viewing it as a niche market with limited potential where quaint mom and pops struggle away (you know, that one-off new urbanist development at the edge of town), while the “real stuff” happens in large conventional single-use centers down the street.

This lack of commitment allows many of the essential ingredients of a successful walkable town center to get sucked into car-focused single-use centers (the easy place to put them) so that everyone can make excuses as to why the poor mixed use village struggles and we still have to do the conventional stuff until oil hits $10 a gallon.

Return on No Investment

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ’em down for your consideration.

Over the weekend, I had a Twitter exchange with Mitchell Silver and Steve Mouzon about a PlaceMakers concept that I’m feeling the need to explain in more detail.

Return on No Investment – my new friend, RONI – is the whole idea of leveraging assets and connections that are already in place, while investing a little more time and energy, to create a significant return. It’s a simple concept that PlaceMakers has championed since lean times made for more careful spending practices in city planning circles.

Snagging Gen-Y: Do Facebook ads work in public engagement?

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ’em down for your consideration.

For those looking to expand public engagement and collaborative process at the community level, this week presents a curious convergence of news and ideas. Setting the stage was CNU20’s “Charrettes and the Next Generation of Public Involvement,” an afternoon breakout session exploring a fairly provocative (for New Urbanists) question: In this era of limited resources, is the traditional charrette still a viable model of engagement and collaborative design and, if not, can it be retooled for relevance?

Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century

Just after the close of World War II, the last Great Migration in the United States — the move from the city to the new suburbs — began to emerge, fueled by new roads, low congestion, and modest energy costs. It was a new beginning, a chance to shake off the past, and it came complete with the promise of more privacy, more safety, greater proximity to nature, and easier financing.

Not surprisingly, Americans bought in.

After that, it didn’t take long for the preferred retailers to do likewise, abandoning the city and following their customers to the suburbs. The suburban single family home on a large lot became synonymous with the American Dream.

Designing Regional Urban Retail Centers: Lessons from the Mall and Beyond

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ’em down for your consideration.

As many of us are actively trying to reform car-focused retail into dynamic mixed-use, walkable urban centers, we are quick to point at the mall as the poster child for everything we are trying to reform. But as the heyday of last-century’s drive-to mall fades into the past, there are many things that the mall excelled at.

Retail on My Mind

Seems I’ve got retail on my mind. It all started in December, with Bob Gibb’s Placemaking@Work webinar, whose tweetchat sparked a Neighbourhood Retail BlogOff led by Steve Mouzon. Then last week Victor Dover’s PM@W webinar followed up with ideas about tactical retail, where he talked about the next version of mixed use being smaller, quicker, and more organic.

‘Show Me the Money!’ New bumper sticker for the New Normal?

There hasn’t been a New Urbanist Council gathering for a while. Which is why a lot of pent-up anxiety — and hope — found release in Council sessions in Montgomery, Alabama, October 14-16.

These regionally organized Councils are intended to grapple with topics that should be on the table for annual Congress for the New Urbanism meetings but require give-and-take from a smaller group to better focus issues. So some 50 or so folks came to Montgomery to critique recent ideas and projects and to wrestle with propositions to position New Urbanism for the New Normal.

Popsicles and the Importance of Simplicity

Back in June, I wrote a piece about how, compared to sprawl, smart growth produces places better suited to raising children. The overall takeaway was simple: When kids are able to navigate the world around them, manage conflicts, make decisions, screw up and recover, they’re better off for it. And place is a big contributor to that. Attracting families to life in the city can be a difficult endeavor. But given the stakes, it’s a critical one.

Over the course of the post, I touched on a lot of different things. Vancouver, and the challenges they faced with their own smart growth efforts. Buying happiness, helicopter parenting and fragile, teacup children. The value of independence, and the need to align political and market forces to make things happen. And, oh yeah. Popsicles.

Which idea do you think actually went somewhere?

Six Years Later: Katrina Cottages take hold

August 11 will be a landmark day in the South Mississippi communities still recovering from the 2005 mega-storm, Hurricane Katrina. And it’s about time.

On that day next week, 18 days shy of the sixth anniversary of the storm, the development team behind the Cottages at Oak Park in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, will host a ribbon cutting for 29 rental units that represent the latest evolution of an idea born in the Mississippi Renewal Forum following the storm.

Smart Growth = Smart Parenting

Put the village on hold. For the time being, it’s gonna take a parent, a councilman and a developer to raise a child.

Flashback 2003: Attending the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in New Orleans, I caught the keynote from a planning official for Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, under normal circumstances, I don’t suppose I’d remember much of what he said but, at the time, my daughter was just over three years old and something he used as the overall framing for his making Smart Growth work presentation really resonated with me.

“If it works for kids,” he said, “it works for everyone.”

Gettin’ Paid: Placemaking and the Importance of Compensation

Over a decade ago Andres Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost.

Tony Nelessen, the inventor of the Visual Preference Survey, confirmed this lesson a few years later when he came to my town and conducted one. 

Everything is Multiplied: Social media as tool, threat and total waste of time

So I’m checking out the debut of the Onion News Network and two things occurred to me:

First, sadly for the Onion writers, cable news is inoculated against parody. What passes for news and analysis on most cable shows satirizes itself. Hence Jon Stewart’s brilliant strategy of curating and juxtaposing actual news clips for The Daily Show. Stewart is almost single-handedly reintroducing irony in the post-ironic era.

New Urban Development: Too risky, too costly. Not.

I just heard from a colleague who had a developer tell him something along the lines of: “New Urbanism is too risky and too expensive because, you know, Kentlands failed.” That’s not an uncommon belief. What is uncommon, however, for anyone on the receiving end of such broad brush generalizations, is an easy response that fleshes out the finer, and truer, details. So here’s mine:

Unplug! Accommodating Our Need to Escape Each Other

Sense of community. It’s been a rallying cry of New Urbanists since the beginning and for good reason. For years leading up to the birth of the neo-traditionalists, it didn’t take much effort to realize that our surroundings had changed—a lot—and not for the better.

Our neighborhoods—subdivisions, really—were isolating us from each other and from the things we needed to get done. Despite the ample comforts we’d developed to help mitigate the separation, that’s simply not a good recipe for human productivity, much less fulfillment.

There was a hole to be filled, and the distinctly market-based New Urbanists stepped in to fill it.

Branded! Municipal Identity and the Selling of Cities

What does America’s oldest city have in common with one of its youngest? They’re both concerned with branding.

St. Augustine, Florida, kicked off their branding initiative in 1715 by petitioning the King of Spain for a coat of arms. Upon his receipt, the King assumedly delegated the request to his creative services department who, in turn, set out to define the message and visually articulate the city’s identity.

New Urbanist Cohousing: Another Arrow in Developers’ Quivers?

CNU 17, DENVER, CO – New Urbanists attending the 17^th annual Congress of New Urbanism gathering in Denver will spend the next four days talking about alls sorts of overlapping , interconnected challenges: The uncertain economy, the implications of climate change, the impact of an aging society on land use planning, to name a few. About an hour away in Boulder are intriguing examples of how designers, developers, and a forward-thinking housing authority might tackle some of those issues.

The Holiday community on Broadway, about 10 minutes from Boulder’s downtown, is a ten-year-old New Urbanist development built on an old drive-in movie site. The local housing authority, Boulder Housing Partners, acquired the property in 1997, and invited five local developers to provide 300-plus units, 40 percent of which had to hit affordability benchmarks.

The Holiday community's co-housing units.

The general plan – retail and offices fronting Broadway, live-works, town houses, duplexes, and single family units of different scales deeper within the project – would be familiar to most New Urbanists. What sets it apart are two embedded cohousing neighborhoods – Wild Sage, a 34-unit multi-generational neighborhood, and Silver Sage Village, a 16-unit elder cohousing cluster.

Cohousing is an imported-from-Denmark approach to community building that reverses the usual relationship between resident and developer by encouraging the formation of a virtual neighborhood of people who work out how they intend to live with one another before they move in, or even choose the setting in which they’ll live. They maintain separate living units but share maintenance chores and a  common house where they dine together at least a couple times a week. It’s part commune, part condo, all community. For a more complete explanation and list of cohousing communities in the US, go here.

Before the economy went into the dumps, cohousing was attracting more and more interest, particularly elder cohousing, which seems a far more attractive way to age in place than in a car-centric suburb.  Last month, USA TODAY’s Haya el Nasser profiled life at Silver Sage. And the movement is still big enough to stage its own national get-together, June 24-28, in Seattle.

That appeal to community makes cohousing a natural ally, a potential nesting component, in New Urbanist projects all over the country.  Jim Leach, president of Wonderland Development Company credits the fast start of the whole Holiday project to the enthusiasm Wild Sage’s residents brought to the project.  And demand for units in Silver Sage Village boosted market-rate prices over the $500,000 mark for some units.

Is this something developers, who could use all the jump starts they can find in the current environment, should be paying more attention to?

Certainly Jim Leach and architect Bryan Bowen, who designed the two Holiday cohousing clusters, think so. 

— Ben Brown

Now What? CNU 17 Addresses the New Era Economy

The irony is unavoidable. Interest in Smart Growth and New Urbanist topics has never been higher. Check out this May 2 column in the Washington Post; or David Brooks’ opinion piece in the New York Times from May 4. Yet the economic downturn has sucked the energy out of innovative projects in both private and public sectors. Lots of will, less way. At least for the moment.

And this is the moment in which the 17^th national gathering of the Congress for the New Urbanism takes place. CNU 17 begins June 10 in Denver. Early registration ends today.

Before the bottom dropped out of the economy, CNU attendees were expected to be talking a lot about greening the movement. Now, the hot topics will be about adapting to new realities.

While the downturn may seem like a reason to skip this year’s gathering, it may be the best reason for scraping together the resources to get to Denver. If ever there was a time to share great ideas, this is that time.

Already the energy is producing cool stuff, particularly the award-winning video that makes the convincing argument that cul de sacs spell the end of civilization as we know it. Here it is:

We’ll see you there. If you have time, check out the discussion I’m moderating at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 13. It’s an invitation to  “Embrace the Convergence” between the goals of creating compact, walkable comunnities and strategies for addressing public health, environmental, and demographic challenges. On the panel: EPA’s Tim Torma, the CDC’s Dee Merriam, and former AARP staffer Michael O’Neal.

– Ben Brown

“Best Practices Guide” Debuts to Glowing Reviews

4th Edition of New Urban News Book Just Issued

Here’s what got our attention: Miami architect/author/New Urbanist provocateur Steve Mouzon says the 2009 “Best Practices Guide” from the New Urban News “just might be the most useful single book on the New Urbanism I have ever seen.” (Read Steve’s complete review here). That’s hefty praise coming from Mouzon, who is famously cranky about architectural details and planning practices.

The latest edition of the "New Urbanism Best Practices Guide" reflects the movement's ever increasing, and ever-improving, body of knowledge.

The book, by NUN editors Robert Steuteville and Philip Langdon and “special contributors,” runs more than 400 pages and utilizes some 800 illustrations and tables. Which bolsters the claim that this is indeed “the definitive reference on new urban ideas, practices, and projects.”

Among the new chapters are ones on architectural styles and building types, land development, parking, and health and aging. And the editors have revised and updated chapters that have to do with revitalizing cities and towns, retail, the workplace, civic spaces, marketing, finance, transit, and affordability.

The price: $129, plus shipping and handling; $99, plus shipping and handling for New Urban New subscribers and members of CNU. Student price is $79, plus shipping and handling. Download the order form from the NUN website.

– Ben Brown 

Gluttony and Glut: Finding the New Normal

An evening cross section of Atlanta's Atlantic Station.

How serious is the implosion of the once-booming urban condo market? And what does the downturn say about the prospects for housing in urban centers?

A piece in the business section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution seems to say it all. Desperate to unload some units in “a stagnant market,” says the sub-headline, an Atlantic Station  developer will auction off some 40 units, with bids starting at 56 percent off list price. A similar story about the stalled condo market in Chicago appeared in a Feb. 3 New York Times story.

Well, welcome to the New, New Normal. Just don’t read too much into implications for the future of multi-family housing in these places.

To be sure, fire sales aren’t great news for developers caught in the current pinch, or for investors, including condo owners who bought into a project at the old list price. But it seems to us that the only environment in which this sort of mark down is seen as a disaster is one in which folks deny the realities of the real estate marketplace. It’s not a marketplace unless prices go up and down depending upon what buyers are willing to pay, right?

For what we now recognize as an unsustainable period of speculator insanity, prices of detached single-family homes and condos soared, particularly in desirable cities and desirable climates. The period lasted long enough for a lot of folks – buyers, builders, developers, and real estate brokers, to name just a few – to believe the aberration was the New Normal. For a look at how a misguided sense of entitlement played out in the lives of real people on Florida’s southwest coast, check out George Packer’s story in the Feb. 9/16 New Yorker – it’s called “Ponzi State,” and for good reason – and then take a look at his video. And for a west coast take, watch this video from the Associated Press.

The remnants of that sense of entitlement persist in many of the conversations about “stabilizing” home values by artificially propping up prices in a market still seeking a bottom. New Urbanist developer Vince Graham explained how it’s time for a get-real approach to home values in one of our previous posts.

But it’s just as dangerous to assume an opposite marketplace trend, that advocates for downtown mixed-use development got it all wrong.  The current shakeout is not about whether or not there’s a market for condos and rental apartment options in downtowns; it’s about the nature of that market, particularly about how diverse the housing choices have to be and how well integrated is the planning for truly mixed use opportunities.

One of the best overviews of demographic and marketplace trends is the 2008 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. And for a glimpse at how Americans rank places they’d like to move to – including places like Atlanta and Tampa that have experienced the greatest housing market downturns – see this recent survey from Pew Research. 

– Ben Brown

Report from the Real Estate Front Lines

Vince Graham, the New Urbanist developer of the award-winning I’On TND in the Charleston metro area, has a “get real” message for home owners and realtors. Like other established New Urbanist properties, I’On has weathered the current housing slowdown better than conventional suburban projects nearby. Yet owners determined to sell their homes in I’On have had to face the reality that the era of double-digit annual appreciation is over. In fact, recent sales even in I’On have been at prices closer to those of four years ago, as opposed to the record levels of 2006. “Let’s face it,” says Vince, “2006 was an anomaly. Forget about it. A good pricing rule of thumb this year is to consider what homes were selling for at the end of 2004.”

Other experts have echoed Vince’s analysis. Measured over decades, home values nationally have appreciated at annual averages close to the average inflation rate — roughly three percent per year. Which suggests that average home prices nationally, after teasing investors for years at unsustainable appreciation levels, still have room to fall.

– Ben Brown