Sprawl retrofit

According to the book Reshaping Metropolitan America, about half of all nonresidential structures in the US will be “ripe for redevelopment” in 2030. Many of these are commercial strip retail buildings with large parking lots or dated office buildings on suburban sites, according to an article in the current issue of Better! Cities & Towns. The annual report Emerging Trends in Real Estate notes that many suburban retail and office properties across the US are languishing in value and may not be worth refurbishing. All in all, 50 billion square feet of commercial space in the US will need redeveloping by 2030, says Reshaping Metropolitan America author Arthur C. Nelson. One of the challenges to redeveloping such sites, however, is that they are often located on commercial strip corridors that are not appealing for mixed-use development. That challenge could be addressed by “complete streets” projects on major thoroughfares that need to be rebuilt anyway, setting the stage for redevelopment.

Prior to the crash, New Urban Builders specialized in nicely designed and constructed production housing in a traditional neighborhood development (TND) format. The firm was about to embark on a 1,500-unit new town — but now this 4-acre infill development called Park Forest in Chico, California, seems like a better increment. The project is adjacent to a nature center and Bidwell Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the US. The single new street meanders around existing live oaks. The project is about two miles from downtown in a part of town that was developed in the latter half of the 20th Century. It has a Walk Score of 48. But it does have potential for densification and mixed-use, which would make it more of a complete community. See the entire report in the current issue of Better! Cities & Towns.

Metro Centre at Owings Mills, Maryland, is a mixed-use, transit-oriented development (TOD) that will support more than 1.2 million square feet of commercial office space and 1,700 residential units.

More than 13 percent of the US population is over 65, and by 2030, that figure will be 20 percent, according to this real estate trends article. That means that the US today has about 42 million senior citizens, and that figure will rise by 25 million by 2030. Many of those Baby Boomers plan to age in place, and many others will move to smaller houses or multifamily buildings. It's unlikely that Boomers will be moving to retirement communities in large numbers. “The primary reason is they want to be near friends and family,” Nancy Thompson, spokeswoman for the AARP, told the reporter. “The image that people move when they retire to Florida and Arizona are inaccurate. Some people do that, but for the most part, Baby Boomers will turn the suburbs gray.” Boomers are into fitness. They like to walk, ride bicycles, have easy access to parks, and many will seek mixed-use places. The nation will need more active living, and more complete, communities to accommodate this massive demographic shift. That probably means a Walk Score of at least 70, in a safe neighborhood, ideally with access to transit. We can produce these neighborhoods by repopulating cities and towns that have emptied out, transforming suburban areas, and making new development more sustainable.

The City of Lancaster, California, converted a drab, automobile-oriented arterial at the heart of downtown into a lively, pedestrian-friendly place.

Arterial streets, typically multilane thoroughfares designed to speed cars from one destination to another, are often hazardous to people on foot.

The first building of Downtown Columbia, Maryland, is expected to be under construction in early 2013 — the first step toward realizing the dream of the late developer James Rouse of creating mixed-use town center for the 1960s new town. That vision was thwarted by single-use zoning. The town center currently consists of a massive mall surrounded by parking and a ring road — all scaled to accelerated automobile traffic. Transforming this to a walkable place will amount to “sprawl repair” on a very large scale, according to a story in the December issue of Better! Cities & Towns. The building takes up an entire block, but will be visually separated into two halves, one with ground-floor retail facing the mall. In between the building and the ring road will be a public promenade with a playground.

The lake-belt city, having lost more than half its population since the middle of the last century, seeks to make development easier and better.

The lake-belt city of Buffalo, which has magnificent architectural heritage but has lost more than half of its population, is in the process of clearing away six decades of zoning bureacracy to move to a more sustainable and streamlined Green Code, expected to be up for adoption in 2013. Better! Cities & Towns explains this project in detail in the December 2012 issue. The city took a “tabula rasa” approach to the zoning, rewriting it from scratch. The Byzantine layers of the current code are based on old planning ideology, city planner Chris Hawley explains. Concepts like form-based codes, the Transect, the current thinking on parking regulations, and ideas dealing with sustainability are relatively new. “You can’t turn a typewriter into an iPhone,” he says of the city’s 1953 zoning ordinance, advising: “If it is broken, don’t fix it, throw it away.” Click on headline for more images.

The Charter-award-winning project is designed to transform a mall and realize the dream of late James Rouse.