Des Moines Business Record
09-03-06
Painting a pretty picture
By Sarah Bzdega
sarahbzdega@bpcdm.com
Front porches extending to wide sidewalks shaded by tall trees. A main street
within walking distance teeming with small shops. Green spaces surrounded by
ponds and trails. These pictures seem to signal a return to the idyllic
neighborhood people nostalgically remember from childhood or embrace from
stories told by older generations.
Ankeny's Prairie Trail development is one of several projects in Greater Des
Moines latching on to "new urbanist" or "smart growth" principles as a way to
attract people longing for the old days. They offer planned communities as an
alternative to suburbia and an opportunity to create a neighborhood based on
residents' values.
But although people are becoming more interested in these communities around
Des Moines, some experts stress that they are only an alternative, rather than a
solution, to Des Moines' ever-sprawling developments. In addition, issues with
size, people's behavior and fast-paced growth may outweigh some of the
benefits. Community planners, city officials and residents might have to lower the
expectations they have placed on the future of these neighborhoods.
Benefits of smart growth
Recognizing an increasing interest in smart growth communities, developers
have been willing to invest more time and resources needed to plan a community
from beginning to end.
"It's a model that Des Moines has not really seen in its marketplace," said Dennis
Reynolds, Ladco Development Inc.'s development designer and lead designer of
the Village of Ponderosa, a 95-acre smart growth community. "The fact that
neighborhoods like Beaverdale are so desirable is a good indication that people
really want this kind of walkable development."
"Many people chose the Ankeny lifestyle because they want to be active and
socially connected," said Ankeny City Manager Carl Metzger. "This Ankeny
attribute was confirmed during the Prairie Trail visioning process and in the 2005
citizen survey. In the survey, 78 percent of respondents rated Ankeny's sense of
community as good or excellent."
The smart growth and new urbanism movements arose during the late 20th
century as reactions to the suburban communities that sprung up after veterans
returned from World War II. Suburbs were designed with the car in mind, and
developers built cul-de-sacs feeding into a few main roads that led to commercial
and industrial development farther away. Smart growth and new urbanism, on
the other hand, promote designs that rely less on car travel, encourage social
interaction within a community and have small commercial development within
walking distance of residences.
Smart growth essentially means "better-planned growth"; it attempts to fill in
undeveloped or abandoned spaces within existing suburbs or urban areas with
higher-density development, such as multifamily housing and professional offices
above retail. Some of its other components include preserving environmentally
sensitive areas, revitalizing historic downtowns and residential neighborhoods,
and giving people the option of walking, biking or taking public transportation.
"Part of it is an expanded way of thinking about what you're doing as opposed to
just looking at developing this piece of property," said Neil Hamilton, director of
the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University, who helped host a conservation
design workshop at Drake last May. "You have a broader set of what the whole
neighborhood is going to look like."
In addition, Hamilton said, you can take into account certain values and how they
connect to a person's lifestyle, such as understanding the importance of physical
exercise and promoting it with trail systems.
Supporters also see this kind of community as having a longer lifespan than
typical suburban subdivisions.
"We need to have choices and build things that our grandchildren are proud of,"
said LaVon Griffieon, co-founder of 1,000 Friends of Iowa. "Our grandparents did
it for us; they built communities with beautiful buildings downtown. They built
buildings to last for us and we're building Blockbuster videos that may have a 20year shelf life."
New urbanists are smart growth proponents who call for a return to pre-World
War II town planning, often using the model of a town center surrounded by
close-knit neighborhoods. Started by Andres Duany and his wife, Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk, the first new urbanist development was a Florida resort town
called Seaside (the setting of "The Truman Show") and since then the concept
has expanded to other communities, mainly on the coasts.
Instead of cul-de-sacs, new urbanists advocate a grid pattern for an easier flow
of traffic with narrower streets, garages set in back alleyways, front porches to
encourage interaction and diversity in housing.
"Everything is scaled so that it's comfortable to walk around the streets and
comfortable to interact with neighbors sitting on porches," said Michael Martin,
an associate professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University's
College of Design.
Those who believe in smart growth and new urbanism see a huge benefit to this
kind of design.
Mixed-use development, for example, conserves land and other valuable
resources by putting all the resources into one area rather than zoning land into
commercial, residential and industrial sections.
"It doesn't make sense to build streets and facilities you use 10 hours a day and
a whole other set of other facilities for where people actually live," Hamilton said.
"Having people live where they work and shop where they live are the
underpinning ideas of new urbanism."
Reynolds said that studies show that using one parking lot for multiple activities
can reduce parking lot space by 25 percent, which not only means less
pavement but also reduces heat emissions and runoff.
Keith Summerville, an assistant professor of environmental science and policy at
Drake University and member of Des Moines' Urban Conservation Committee,
also sees it as a benefit because it brings more green space into a community.
One of the advantages is looking at back yards not as individual units, he said,
but as a continuous entity that can serve everyone, which creates an
environment attractive to wildlife.
Also smart growth and new urbanist planners often use natural ways to solve
problems through conservation design, such as managing stormwater runoff in
residential neighborhoods with bioswales, a subsurface and plant life filtration
system that collects groundwater, instead of sewers.
"If you think of it in an artistic sense," said Summerville, "it's softening the edges
by bringing in natural ecosystems into areas traditionally where you used
engineering to solve problems."
These natural systems are further supported by walkways that allow people to
access several parks without driving. The Village of Ponderosa will have seven
miles of walkways within the 95-acre development, said Reynolds, which is a lot
for a development its size.
Issues with design in practice
The ideals of smart growth and new urbanist communities might appeal to a
growing number of people, but the real-world implementations of those ideals
might not live up to all their expectations.
In promoting an alternative to suburban sprawl, said Martin, some new urbanists
are quick to disregard that many people are still interested in suburban
communities.
As an example, Martin says that Somerset Village, a new urbanist type of
community, and Northridge Heights, a suburban development, started next to
each other in Ames. Northridge offered bigger lots, cul-de-sacs, easier parking
and an open bike path system behind the houses, while Somerset offered
multifamily housing or smaller single-family lots.
"A lot of people looked at the same price for a house in the two places and
[Northridge] looked like a better deal," Martin said. "It's what we're used to."
"[Smart growth developments] can give people options," Hamilton said. "There
are opportunities to use new-urbanist-type approaches downtown as well as
build suburbs with the idea that people have choices."
Part of the attraction of suburban developments, says Martin, is the safety cul-desacs provide for children. New urbanists see streets as social spaces, he says,
but parents are not going to let their children run free out there. One solution for
new urbanists would be to stress the importance of alleyways as being a social
space and not just a location to park the car and leave the trash, said Martin.
The people that tend to be interested in smart growth communities are often
Baby Boomers and young couples who are seeking more convenient, friendlier
neighborhoods.
Size may also be a factor in determining how effective a smart growth community
will be.
"Part of it is when you plan large swaths of land, you can have all the best
intentions," said Martin, "then people make different choices. They're hard to plan
with any real knowledge of what will happen with people. I don't have a lot of faith
with 1,000-acre plans. I'm more interested in local-scale neighborhoods because
they're easier to understand and more predictive of how people will live day to
day."
Martin said if given an area the size of Prairie Trail, he would create multiple
communities, so that they are easier to walk around and tighter-knit than one
large neighborhood. He believes in new urbanist founder Duany's dictum that the
ideal neighborhood is approximately 160 acres with a distinct center that is no
more than a five-minute walk from a clearly defined edge. He believes that cities
should grow by adding one neighborhood of this size at a time.
Size was a big consideration for the Village of Ponderosa.
"We've tried to concentrate a diversity of activities within walkable distances,
approximately 1,000 feet," Reynolds said, "so you can walk to the grocery store
or bakery, walk to work, walk from the office to do some banking or another
employment. The concentration of activity allows it to be effective."
Still, says Martin, it's hard to predict people's actions within planned communities
no matter the size. Although new urbanist houses have front porches to
encourage interaction, he says, "they're probably in the basement in the air
conditioning playing video games." In addition, in some of these communities,
such as a Sacramento suburb, people continued to work outside the community
and as a result they still became bedroom communities.
In addition to size, population density is also important to sustaining a vibrant
town center, says Martin, and in the past, commercial development has been
hard to sustain. A community the size of Somerset, for example, struggled to
keep commercial enterprises, he said, in part because the neighborhoods are still
being developed after 10 years. A café has done well, he said, because people
from outside the community also patronize it.
Reynolds is relying on a high density of people in the community to support
business as well as visitors who shop at Jordan Creek Town Center or live
around the West Glen area. He also said his company is being selective in what
businesses they bring in. "We are seeking out tenants that help support and
reinforce each other," he said.
Wait and see
People like Griffieon and Summerville also believe though planned growth is
better than suburban sprawl, it doesn't replace having no development.
"There are ways to make development more sustainable in an ecological sense,"
Summerville said, "but it is not a replacement for having large protected areas."
Griffieon, who lives on a farm north of Ankeny, urges planners to develop only
when necessary. "[Prairie Trail] would be smart growth if it was truly necessary
development," she said, "but Ankeny has about 1,000 houses sitting for sale."
In addition, Griffieon notices that some developers are calling their communities
"smart growth" because they have one or two of the smart growth components,
but are ignoring some of the other 11 principles, along with developing on
farmland instead of in undeveloped space within a city. She also has noticed that
smart growth communities have not set an example for other development and
slowed outward development, using Prairie Crossing in Illinois as an example.
Experts, however, are still waiting to see the full effects of smart growth and new
urbanist communities because many are less than a decade old or are still being
built.
Hamilton sees these planned developments as an evolution, not an end.
"We're trying to think more creatively about how to use zoning and planning tools
to achieve certain objectives," he said.
One option is to look at Oregon, which has a "progressive land-use policy,"
Martin said, and consider ideas such as drawing a circle around the city and
deciding not to develop past that line until the inside of the city is fully developed.
Martin also stresses that people should wait and see how these planned
communities fully develop. It takes a while, he said, for the trees to grow over the
streets and the land to be fully developed to the point where it may be able to
sustain more commercial growth.
"We have to give it time," said Martin. "We can't be too quick to judge."