The Missing Middle

Every seat was taken at The Studio in the Hult Center for Daniel Parolek's presentation on Tuesday, April 11, 2017

A packed house was on hand at the The Hult Center in Eugene last week for the 2017 AIA-SWO Design Excellence Series lecture by Daniel Parolek, AIA. Daniel is a principal of Opticos Design, a firm with a passion for vibrant, sustainable, walkable urban places. The Design Excellence committee invited Daniel to speak here to address the growing need for a diversity of affordable housing types that bridge the gap between single-family residences and large multifamily housing complexes. Daniel coined the term “missing middle housing” in 2010 to advocate for a paradigm shift in the way homes are designed, located, regulated, and developed to help fill this gap. 

 

It’s with good reason the catchphrase “missing middle” is the flavor du jour in urban planning circles. It refers to a range of multi-unit or clustered housing types compatible in scale with single-family homes that help meet a demand for walkable urban living. As Daniel explained, well-designed missing middle buildings greatly diversify the choices available for households of different age, size, and income. This diversity of choices is much needed in cities like Eugene, where our population growth threatens to widen a disparity between the supply of and demand for affordable housing. 

 

Daniel pointed to the mismatch between what the housing market wants and what it provides. Part of this is due to dramatic shifts in household demographics. 30% of households today are single-person. 35% are renters and not property owners. Analysts say by the year 2025, 75% to 85% of households will be childless. Nationwide, 7,000 people turn 65 every day. And yet, the housing industry is geared toward the production of large homes on suburban lots owned and occupied by single families on the one hand, or high-density multifamily housing in large developments on the other. These tendencies ignore the growing segment of our society who are not looking at those ends of the spectrum to fill their housing needs. 

 

Missing Middle housing types (click image to enlarge)

 

Missing middle housing is a response to our changing demographics, population growth, and the lack of diverse housing options. Missing middle housing types—which include side-by-side and stacked duplexes, bungalow courts, carriage houses, fourplexes, townhouses, courtyard apartments, and other types—provide a range of choices, a range that is too often absent in many markets. 

 

The physical appearance of missing middle housing belies the density possible; higher densities do not necessarily translate to bigger buildings. Keeping the individual units small is the secret; 600 to 700 square feet apiece is often enough. Side-by-side duplexes can achieve a density of 12-19 dwelling units per acre; townhouses, up to 29 units per acre. As many as 50 DU/acre are possible with courtyard apartment configurations. Densities of 16 DU/acre or more are sufficient to support a nearby main street with locally-focused businesses and public transportation. 

 

In a nutshell, the characteristics of missing middle housing include the following:

• Walkable context (people want proximity to services and amenities)
• Lowered perceived density (missing middle types don’t look like dense buildings)
• Small footprint buildings (compatible with the scale of neighboring single-family homes
• Small, efficient units (smaller units keep costs down)
• Fewer off-street parking spaces (no more than one per unit)
• Affordability by design (simple construction)

 

As Daniel put it “what millennials want, baby boomers need.” For the younger generation, particularly those who delay having children, a walkable lifestyle, close-in to the amenities of stimulating urban centers, is attractive. Significantly, a smaller percentage of millennials than previous generations own cars; those that do not gravitate to areas offering multimodal transportation options. Baby boomers likewise wish to stay active and engaged, but without the need for the large suburban homes they raised their families in. They’re downsizing and seeking a convenient, easy lifestyle in retirement. Missing middle housing can fit the bill for both groups.

 

Daniel says exclusionary zoning bylaws too often present barriers to the development of appropriate and desirable housing options. In his view, cities need to remove these barriers to give missing middle developments a chance. Some of these barriers include regulations that cater to the automobile (i.e. demanding more parking spaces than practically necessary), unnecessarily segregate uses, or inadvertently foster overly large, overly expensive units. Rather than codes that encourage maximization of developable space by means of uncoordinated parameters, Daniel is a champion for form-based codes that foster predictable results. Form-based codes dictate the urban form, scale, and configuration of buildings to ensure design compatibility and thus the assent of longtime neighbors. 

 

Daniel believes another key to acceptance of missing middle housing is to remove the baggage that comes along with talking about non-single-family housing choices in communities. He avoids using the terms “density” and “multifamily,” choosing instead to explain to skeptical neighbors why a proposed project will make their community a better place and how it will benefit them individually. Often, this discussion will point out how increased density can help a valued commercial node thrive or support expansion of mobility options. 

 

An example of missing middle housing: The Arcadia Community project in Eugene, designed by studio-e architecture and now under construction (rendering by Hopper Illustration) 

 

Some critics, including neighborhood advocate Paul Conte here in Eugene, contend examples of missing middle dwellings are often too small, too expensive, fail to provide adequate off-street parking, or are by economic necessity part of large greenfield developments distant from the urban center (Crescent Village being a case in point). In their view, the introduction of missing middle housing types in healthy, established neighborhoods can only work if it is the outcome of a community-driven process that dives deeply into issues of structural form, market demand, affordability, and traffic impact. Absent such a process, the inevitable results are resistance to change. 

 

Affordability is certainly a huge issue and a deterrent to the construction of missing middle developments. Housing costs in Eugene during just the past five years have increased by 45%. Household incomes have not kept pace, growing only 16% on average over the same period. Clearly, if a city is to remain a sustainable community it must have an inventory of “workforce housing” targeting households ranging between 60% and 100% of the Area Median Income (AMI). The problem may not be so much a matter of missing middle housing types as it is missing middle economics. Do the attractive housing forms Daniel included in his presentation always pencil out? His answer would be there is no reason why they cannot. He contends affordability is really a matter of design, one that shouldn’t have to rely upon subsidies. 

 

A bungalow court (photo from the Missing Middle website)

 

Is truly viable missing middle housing simply a fantasy? I for one don’t want to discount the possibility that such a unicorn is a reality. It isn’t necessary to introduce all the missing middle housing types in and about a given neighborhood. For example, what’s wrong with only inserting alley-way carriage houses in Eugene’s south and west university districts, targeting occupancy by individual college students? I may be naïve but I’d prefer to see distributed, small-scale examples of missing middle housing rather than block-busting student housing mega-developments that radically alter the morphology of neighborhoods historically comprised of single-family houses. MMH elsewhere in Eugene would obviously cater to other market segments as well. 

 

Architects (and planners) have a propensity for latching onto the latest fad, cult, or silver bullet. That said, the missing middle concept has legs. This isn’t a fad. The market is waiting. Done right, missing middle housing can help provide a critical mass for supporting complete, diverse, and walkable neighborhoods, while reducing pressure on the urban periphery. I think the recipe for success demands creative, inspired design, but that may also be the reason why it is elusive: the making of good, deferential architecture that respects its context hasn’t always been our profession’s strong suit. Regardless, it’s clear our housing stock needs diversification. In Daniel’s words, “it’s time to rethink and evolve, reinvent and renew.” 

 

*    *    *    *    *    *

 

Daniel Parolek’s lecture to a full house was due to the efforts and support of the following impressive roster of co-presenters and sponsors: 

• 1000 Friends of Oregon
• AARP Oregon
• AIA Southwestern Oregon
• American Planning Association – Oregon Chapter
• Architects Building Community
• Better Eugene-Springfield Transit
• Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce
• Eugene Association of Realtors
• League of Women Voters of Lane County
• Springfield Chamber of Commerce
• The University of Oregon Transportation and Livability Student Group (LiveMove)
• University of Oregon School of Architecture & Allied Arts
• Walkable Eugene Citizen Advisory Network

AIA-SWO’s Design Excellence Committee certainly deserves singling out for yet another noteworthy installment of its Making Great Cities series of lectures. As with every previous presentation, the committee has contributed to a timely, meaningful, and defining dialogue about how to improve our built environment. Daniel Parolek’s visit to Eugene (and likewise to another sold-out audience in Bend) has undoubtedly spurred a conversation that will continue for years to come. 

Daniel Parolek, AIA



Following up the next day on Daniel’s lecture, AARP Oregon hosted a forum on the future of housing at the Sprout! Market Hall in Springfield. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend but I did hear there was consensus around using missing middle housing in our community to improve housing diversity and affordability. I’m hopeful we’ll soon see an increasing number of exemplary missing middle developments, easing our housing crunch by providing reasonably priced homes of varied types for our rapidly changing population and demographics.  
 

Abundant Access: Public Transit as an Instrument of Freedom

 

Jarrett Walker, PhD

The AIA-SWO Design Excellence committee initiated the Making Great Cities series of lectures in 2013 with the goal of creating a community forum for discussions about the built environment. The committee’s hope was to provide timely, meaningful, and defining dialogue about how to improve our built environment. Every lecture since then has met that goal and more. The growing list of luminaries who have spoken reads like a who’s who of today’s best thinkers about how to improve our cities: Maurice Cox, Carol Coletta, Joe Minicozzi, Jeff Speck, and Fred Kent all delivered thought-provoking and persuasive presentations, directly applicable to the future of Eugene-Springfield. 

Add Jarrett Walker to this outstanding list of speakers. Jarrett, president of Jarrett Walker + Associates, is one of the most innovative planners and advocates for public transit in North America today. For over 20 years, he has assisted governments improve and explain their public transit services by leading the design or redesign of transit networks, helping choose the right transit tools for each situation, analyzing transit data and integrating it with local goals, facilitating innovative public outreach processes that engage and empower the public, and helping explain transit principles and the real choices they imply for communities and their leaders. 

Jarrett’s principal message to the audience that packed the Downtown Athletic Club’s ballroom(1) was that planners and politicians too often allow distractions to dominate transit debates rather than focusing upon public transit’s core power, which is to give people freedom and opportunity as a city grows denser. For him, the challenge for public transit today isn’t just having good ideas but also being able to explain them plainly in a way people can understand. The problem is many of us are easily seduced by distractions, the two biggest of which are 1) technology, and 2) the fact that the transit conversation in North America too often is binary in its thinking. 

The issue with technology is that it cannot change the underlying geometry of the transit conundrum. Improvements in technology often only induce greater demand rather than alleviating it, meaning if something becomes easier and more convenient, people will use it more. That’s why the appeal of driverless cars or rideshare services (such as Lyft or Uber) is problematic. Replacing big vehicles with little ones only means more vehicle trips, with all the attendant congestion and environmental impacts. More cars take up more room per passenger than buses or trains. This may be fine in low-density and rural areas, where there’s lots of space per individual. But a city has relatively little space per person, so the efficient use of space is the core problem of urban transportation. Increasing vehicle miles traveled by cars means you take up more space to move the same number of people. Additionally, the sprawl induced by private transportation has not led to congestion relief, but exacerbated it tremendously due to the increasing need to travel for more and more basic functions that previously required less or no travel. 

Space (or lack thereof) to accommodate transportation is the problem. (Image from Jarrett Walker’s blog Human Transit). 

Jarrett explained how the geometry of transit requires communities to make a series of hard choices that at first appear to be oppositional or binary. Examples of these choices include the following: 

• Ridership or Coverage? Should transit agencies maximize their ridership by abandoning service to low-ridership areas, or should they spread out service so that everyone has some service, despite the predictably low ridership that results? 
• Connections or Complexity? Should agencies design transit networks in which people won’t have to transfer; if the answer is yes the result is a network with high complexity and low frequency. 
• Peak-first or all-day? Should the peak commuter be the primary focus of a transit network or should a transit agency seek to build an all-day network of services that encourages reliance on transit at all hours, while still meeting peak capacity needs? 

These choices may seem binary but they’re really a function of the position upon a spectrum; the opposing terms simply define the extremes. For example, we don’t have to choose between ridership or coverage, but we do have to choose a point on the spectrum between them, and be willing to accept the fact that, as on any spectrum, moving toward one extreme means we have to move away from the other. 

Rather than allowing ourselves to be distracted by the allure of new technologies or engaging in politically polarizing discussions about priorities, Jarrett believes a community’s focus should be upon understanding transit options and how they relate to the things it cares about. The challenge for public transit agencies today is not just having good ideas but being able to explain them. Ultimately, decisions regarding how these agencies provide their services should be based upon a community’s peculiar values, its understanding of its unique needs, and what a transit plan does to meet those needs. 

An isochrone map of Portland showing the area you can get to within a fixed amount of time on some combination of transit and walking. Blue is 15 minutes’ travel time, green is 30 minutes, and pink is 45 minutes. These calculations include waiting time and therefore accurately convey the impact of frequency. Jarrett used this map to illustrate his presentation. 

A true constant in transit discussions is a universal desire for abundant access. Absence of access sets up walls around your life. Some of these walls may be a function of time. Where can I be soon? How much of the city and its resources are conveniently available to me? Abundant access provides as many choices and opportunities as possible, breaking down those walls. Abundance of access is literally a quantification of freedom. It is a measure for opportunity of all kinds. Jarrett believes our discussions about transit should focus on this aspect because it emphasizes personal responsibility by framing choice about questions of where you are free to go, when you wish to. 

Reemphasizing his most salient point, Jarrett clarified how abundant access is dependent upon the geometry of public transit. Speed is good, but it is meaningless if service is infrequent. Picture a gate at the end of a private driveway opening only every half-hour. It doesn’t matter if the owner’s car is a powerful and speedy Corvette; he or she will only arrive at his or her destination as quickly as the gate allows. Instead of focusing on speed, frequency may be the key to optimizing service. Likewise, ample connections between many simple-to-understand routes may be more effective than the direct lines between destinations in a network of greater complexity. 

Jarrett thinks the goal should be to link the notion of transit in peoples’ minds with freedom to move. The traits of the most successful systems consist of intense service focused on places of high density, good walkability, and straight paths that transit can follow. This is why transit does best in dense, walkable cities and is also most indispensable there. The ingredients of a successful ridership (or “freedom”) recipe are frequency of service, favorable development patterns (density, walkability, linearity), reasonable speed and reliability, and a connected network. A good system is one that “confers useful liberty,” a quality people of all political stripes can happily support. 

Jarrett believes communities must avoid facile thinking about transit ridership, such as labeling patrons either as “choice riders” or “dependent or captive riders.” Such thinking only exacerbates prejudices and frustrates constructive discussions about a shared set of values. 

Characterizing the decisions as value choices for a community is the best means to ensure transit-friendly development occurs and is embraced. It does come down to choices, but again these choices become a function of a community’s peculiar needs and values. Jarrett rhetorically asked “What would my transit system look like if ridership (and cost recovery) were its only goal?” He noted how top-performing services are usually either commuter express routes that run only when they’re crowded or a network of all-day high-frequency services covering areas of medium to high density. Systems emphasizing ridership would run little or no all-day service to low-density suburbs, because ridership on that product is predictably low. Conversely, coverage goals, often expressed by a policy like “90% of the population shall be within walking distance of service” require a system to be spread out over large areas despite low ridership. As Jarrett pointed out, there’s nothing wrong with either goal, but the public must understand they are competing goals and cannot be achieved in equal measure without tradeoffs.

As with all planning, there is a fundamental unpredictability about the future. Transit ridership is based on predictions; not only that, these predictions typically assume everybody grows up to act just like their parents, which may or may not prove to be the case. Regardless, Jarrett is convinced planning for and providing a good transit solution is a win-win formula, however it is achieved. A good solution, embraced by the community it serves, stimulates positive feedback loops of a desirable kind. A well-used system shapes appropriate development patterns, which in turn demands and helps pay for further system enhancements. Ultimately, the outcome favors a future in which public transit becomes valued and indispensable, which is good both locally and globally.

*    *    *    *    *    * 

Congratulations to AIA-SWO’s Design Excellence Committee for keeping the bar high and featuring yet another great speaker in Jarrett Walker for its Making Great Cities series of lectures. And big thanks too to the following organizations for helping make the evening’s presentation a reality: 

• AARP Oregon 
• American Institute of Architects Southwestern Oregon (AIA-SWO) 
• Architects Building Community (ABC) 
• Better Eugene-Springfield Transit (BEST) 
• Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce 
• Land, Air, Water (at University of Oregon) 
• League of Women Voters of Lane County 
• LiveMove (at University of Oregon) 
• Springfield Chamber of Commerce 
• Walkable Eugene Citizens Advisory Network (WE CAN)

(1)    Jarrett noted the tremendous turnout for his lecture here. By his calculation, comparable attendance for his lecture in Houston would be 4,000 people or 10,000 people in New York. He attributed the large audience to our community’s keen interest in Lane Transit District’s evolving public transit system and what it augurs for the future of Eugene-Springfield.

Placemaking – Making it Happen

Saturday Market (Photo via Wikimedia licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

 

The AIA-Southwestern Oregon Design Excellence Committee continues to produce outstanding talks for its series of Making Great Cities events. The 2016 edition was no exception as a packed house at the Hult Center Studio gathered last Wednesday to hear from Fred Kent on the subject of placemaking, and how relying upon the input of community members is necessary to create well-used and loved public spaces. 

 

Fred is the president and founder of Project for Public Spaces (PPS), a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. The PPS approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation, and serve common needs. Fred founded PPS in 1975 to expand on the work of William Whyte, author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Since then, PPS has completed projects in more than 3000 communities in 43 countries and all 50 U.S. states. 

 

It was clear Fred took the time to explore some of Eugene before his presentation. He said he believes Eugene is “close to an enormous opportunity” and that now is a “wonderfully transformative time” for the city. Given this may be true—and I agree that it is—we certainly should capitalize upon and avoid squandering this opening. The next few years may determine whether Eugene will develop truly effective public spaces or continue to suffer without enough of them because we failed to come together to make it happen.  

 

We immediately recognize a great public place when we see it. Fred characterized great ones as places that breed affection. They attract people, who in turn attract even more people, further enlivening the place. They each have their own distinct identity. They make people feel welcome and comfortable. Most significantly, the community of which they are a part had a hand in creating them. After all, the members of the community are best equipped to understand what they want and need from the spaces they share. Successful public places instill a sense of pride and ownership in those who live and work in the areas surrounding them. 

 

A ubiquitous impediment to creating great community places is our tendency toward addressing problems in less than holistic ways. Urban design problems and the means to solve them are often tackled independently by disciplines all too dedicated to their areas of specific expertise. As Fred said, “each discipline has become its own audience,” its discourse conducted within an ideologically disconnected echo chamber. For example, much of our public realm has become defined by the needs of and dedicated to motor vehicles, thanks to the diligence and laser-focus of municipal traffic engineers. Efficient flow of traffic is what’s important to them. The problem for Eugene is this blindered view of the world has meant many of our streets are terrible places for human beings; “a disgrace,” Fred called them. Streets should be used for going to places rather than merely through them, he says. 

 

Fred picked on traffic engineers because the consequences of their decisions are especially impactful upon our cities, but too many bureaucrats (and also architects) with the power to shape our public spaces are likewise afflicted by the silo mentality. Eugene has few benches to sit on as we’re too afraid of who will use them and law enforcement wants to discourage loitering. We lack the kinds of multiuse buildings that activate sidewalks because our land use regulations have prohibited or failed to mandate them in many instances; and so forth. 

 

So, how do we get everyone to crawl out of their comfortable silos and collectively think about how to make Eugene’s public spaces vibrant and attractive? How do we shift the mindset and culture toward those that foster the creation of the kinds of places we’ll all be proud of and want to use again and again? Fred’s answer to these questions is to converge on the notion of place, because when you focus on place, you do everything differently. 

 

Fred identified 11 key principles useful to transforming public spaces into vibrant community places. These principles are: 

1. The community is the expert
2. Create a place, not a design
3. Look for partners
4. You can see a lot just by observing
5. Have a vision
6. Lighter, quicker, cheaper
7. Triangulate
8. They always say “it can’t be done”
9. Form supports function
10. Money is not the issue
11. You are never finished

Each of these principles is succinctly explained on the PPS website. Of these, looking to the community for expertise, creating a place rather than a design, and starting lighter, quicker, and cheaper stand out for me. Resources are always limited, so top-down (as opposed to community-led) and expensive solutions are often neither possible nor desirable. Simpler, bottom-up, low-cost processes may be equally or more effective means for achieving the kinds of public places we yearn for. Managed properly, simple processes don’t result in impoverished solutions but instead embrace the real complexity of vital and vibrant spaces and the manner by which they support both programmed and spontaneous social gatherings. Making things happen with lighter, quicker, and cheaper means entails at once both less risk in terms of capital outlay and more risk-taking by a community members emboldened by a vision of their own making for what a successful, active, public place can be. 

Fred went on to describe PPS’s placemaking process and its tools. One of these is the “Power of 10.” This concept is used to facilitate placemaking at multiple city scales. Having a range of reasons to be in a place—such as reading a book, people-watching, listening to music, eating food, meeting others—makes it a place. Some of the activities that regularly occur there will set it apart as unique and particular, reflecting the culture and identity of the surrounding community. When the range of reasons to be there numbers ten or more, the place thrives. 

During the placemaking process, participants not only start at the small scale by identifying the 10+ things to do, they also locate ten or more places within what can become a destination: corners, edges, centers, and other subspaces that layer a variety of activities upon one another. No single type of use or user dominates the space. The synergistic and incremental outcome is a set of workable ideas the community can implement (perhaps with a minimum of means). Ultimately, a city with ten or more great destinations is on its way to becoming a more resilient setting for urban life at its best. 

Fred presented numerous images of successful, enthusiastically embraced public places. All of these featured cheery people bathed in obliging sunshine. What? You say it rains in Eugene and people tend to shun outdoor spaces when it does? “Weather is a perception,” Fred says, meaning our rain is an impediment to enjoying a good public place only if we allow it to be. If anything, a vital and vibrant space shines through even when the sun cannot. 

While creating effective public places is often difficult, Eugene definitely has all the ingredients necessary to develop its fair share of them. We have an engaged citizenry, neighborhoods with distinct and emergent characteristics, and, as Fred pointed out, we simply need to adopt the necessary mindset and focus first and foremost on the notion of place. I’m enthused by the opportunities in front of us, and I’m hopeful we’ll seize the brass ring by coming together to create the lively, inclusive, and attractive places our city deserves.

*     *     *     *     *

Kudos to the Design Excellence Committee for putting together such a great event. And big thanks to Dustrud Architecture, The National Association of Realtors, The American Planning Association, Lease Crutcher Lewis, the City of Eugene, and Patricia Thomas for supporting the Making Great Cities speaker series with their sponsorship contributions.

The 2016 Making Great Cities Program

Fred Kent

 

The AIA-SWO Design Excellence Committee invites everyone with an interest in fostering vibrant downtown development to this year’s installment of the Making Great Cities lecture series. The 2016 edition will feature Fred Kent, a leading authority on revitalizing city spaces and one of the foremost thinkers in livability, smart growth, and the future of the city. The event will take place on Wednesday, May 25 at The Studio in the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene. 

 

Fred is the founder and President of Project for Public Spaces (PPS). The organization is the central hub of the global place-making movement, connecting people to ideas, expertise, and partners who share a passion for creating vital places. 

 

Fred is known throughout the world as a dynamic speaker and prolific ideas man. Traveling over 150,000 miles each year, Fred offers technical assistance to communities and gives major talks across North America and internationally. Each year, he and the PPS staff give presentations or train more than 10,000 people in place-making techniques. 

 

Since 1975, Fred has worked on hundreds of projects, including Bryant Park, Rockefeller Center, and Times Square in New York City; Discovery Green in Houston, TX; Campus Martius in Detroit, MI; Main Street in Littleton, NH; Granville Island in Vancouver, BC, Canada; and a city-wide place-making campaign in Chicago, IL. 

 

Fred has spoken to audiences around the world, including the Urban Redevelopment Agency and the National Parks Board in Singapore, representatives from the City of Hong Kong, the Ministry of Environment in Norway, the leading Dutch transportation organization in the Netherlands, Greenspace in Scotland, numerous transportation professionals from US State DOTs, and thousands of community and neighborhood groups across the U.S. 

 

I first became aware of Fred Kent in 2009, when he engaged in the infamous “smackdown” with Frank Gehry at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Challenged by Fred to explain why “iconic” buildings often fell short when it came to creating pleasant urban places, Gehry “waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, much as Louis XIV might have used to wave away some offending underling” as national correspondent for The Atlantic James Fallows later recounted. The comments that followed on Fallow’s blog stirred a heated debate that continues today between proponents of provocative form-making and those who advocate first and foremost for congenial urban spaces. 

 

I’ve no doubt Fred’s presentation will be engaging and prompt a lively discussion. I expect him to persuasively emphasize the importance of designing as if people mattered. From all accounts Fred is nothing if not a zealous advocate for public spaces that build stronger communities. I’ll be there to see him and hope you will be there too.

 

What: The 2016 Making Great Cities Program featuring Fred Kent of the Project for Public Spaces

 

When: Wednesday, May 25, 2016

• 5:30pm: Reception
• 6:00pm: Presentation

 

Where: The Studio at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts, Eugene

 

Cost:  Free to everyone; $10 for professional CEU credit

 

Sponsorship: The AIA-SWO Design Excellence Committee needs partners to help sponsor Fred’s visit. The committee depend upon the generosity of our community and businesses to support its Design Excellence series of prominent speakers. This program informs and educates the community on topics covering the built and designed environments. Any support you are willing to provide will help the committee cover the costs for the speaker and his travel expenses. In return, you’ll be included in the event’s marketing material, as well as other sponsorship acknowledgment options. Contact Katie Hall for more information.

 

A big thank you to Dustrud Architecture and the National Association of Realtors for their contributions in support of this event.

Making Great Cities: The Dollars and $ense of Downtown Development

 

A large and diverse audience packed the Downtown Athletic Club’s Conference Center last Thursday evening for the third of the Making Great Cities series of community-wide forums about design excellence at the building, urban, and metro scales. Like the others in attendance, I was there to hear what proved to be a provocative and persuasive presentation by Joe Minicozzi, AICP about the simple math of smart urban growth. 

 

Joe is the principal of Urban3, a consulting company created by Asheville, North Carolina real estate developer, Public Interest Projects. Joe was born and raised in Rome, New York. During his youth, he witnessed the “sacking of Rome,” the systematic destruction of what was the coherent urban fabric of his hometown in favor of the kind of block-busting, car-oriented development characteristic of the time. Partly in response, he chose to study architecture at the University of Miami, where he was greatly influenced by the pioneering New Urbanists Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Joe later attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design before settling in Asheville, North Carolina, where his wife is from. Prior to creating Urban3, he served as the Executive Director for the Asheville Downtown Association. 

 

Joe described how Asheville, a city smaller and more impoverished than Eugene at the time, largely escaped the ravages of post-WWII urban renewal. For this reason, it retained a significant stock of older buildings downtown that had fallen into disuse and lay fallow for many years. Public Interest Projects (founded in 1990 by the late Julian Price) took a pioneering approach by renovating numerous properties, guided by the belief that downtown development could be both the greenest form of growth and good business. The success of PIP’s projects is a testament to the validity of the developer’s core principles, ones shaped and guided in recent years by Joe and his colleagues at Urban3. In no small part due to PIP’s efforts, the city now enjoys such accolades as being named as one of the “10 Most Beautiful Places in America” and one of the “Top Seven Places to Live in the U.S.” 

 

So, what is the key to Asheville’s success? Certainly, favorable historic circumstances and Asheville’s inherent charms played a part. It was Urban3’s analysis, however, that provided concrete evidence dense downtown development is more productive and returns a greater investment to the community than sprawl. There are many advocates for fostering smart, sustainable urban centers; what sets Urban3 apart is its use of geo-spatial tools to represent economic productivity and the economic potency of urbanism. 

 

Joe argued during his talk that per acre, dense, highly valued downtowns generate much more public wealth than low-density subdivisions or massive malls by the highway. He pointed out how low-density development isn’t just a poor way to generate property tax revenue, it’s also extremely expensive to maintain. By comparison, dense downtowns cost considerably less to maintain in public services and infrastructure. 

 

Cities can generate wealth not by raising taxes, but by better exploiting the economics of land use. Joe offered a simple analogy: When shopping for a new vehicle, we often evaluate its fuel economy. We look at miles-per-gallon, not miles-per-tank, because tanks come in all different sizes. Joe says we should look at buildings in exactly the same way. An illustrative comparison is the tax revenue per acre generated by a sprawling Walmart Supercenter versus that of even a modest multistory downtown mixed-use development: the downtown project returns a much higher level of tax revenue per unit area in return for the services it draws upon. 

 

The larger a tract of land, the more expensive it becomes to provide services to it, especially when those large parcels sit on the periphery of the community. Our current tax structure rewards buildings that fall apart and results in too much of our land being over-serviced and under-developed. We need to cultivate wealth in our communities, which the present and prevailing models for development largely work against. Simply put, density delivers more bang for the buck. 

 

Drawing upon another analogy, Joe cited Moneyball, the analytical, evidence-based approach employed by baseball’s Oakland Athletics. The team utilized rigorous statistical analysis to determine that on-base and slugging percentage were better indicators of offensive success than batting average, runs-batted-in, or stolen bases. Similarly, Urban3 evaluates a potential development from the perspective of its per unit productivity as opposed to its overall cost. There’s a greater return to cities if landowners are required to pay in proportion to the value of public goods and services they receive (like a public services user fee) rather than in proportion to their own investment. This is evidence-based thinking. Examples such as Asheville prove such a perspective encourages more construction, improvement, and maintenance of buildings. A welcome dividend is greater employment and economic vitality. 

 

Joe Minicozzi, AICP

 

Joe’s presentation was chock-full of information, engaging, brisk, and entertaining throughout. He quoted such luminaries as Jane Jacobs, Ian McHarg, Michael Bloomberg, and Charles Montgomery to convincingly drive home his point. In rapid-fire fashion and coupled with illustrative charts and graphics, he explained the value of using geo-spatial tools to represent economic productivity and the economic potency of urbanism. I struggled to keep up, reflexively oscillating between affirmative nodding and furious scribbling on my notepad. Forty-five short minutes elapsed and his riveting message was over. I thought his speech was brilliant.

 

And yet here I am, mere days removed from Joe’s presentation, scratching my head. His basic premise—that dense downtown development is the golden goose of urban economics—is so logical it appears self-evident. So too is his point that “form follows finance.” The numbers don’t lie. Regardless, I can’t recall if he actually described how cities are supposed to implement his ideas and methodology. Given how coherent and commonsense his ideas are, why haven’t they already taken root everywhere? How do we overcome the intransigence of those who favor and/or profit from the status quo? What is the blueprint? 

 

I’m sure I’m simply naïve. This isn’t baseball. The problem has many more layers of complexity and cannot be modeled after a game (even if Elizabeth J. Magie Phillips modeled the board game that would become Monopoly upon the Georgist principle that economic value derived from common opportunities and resources should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people own the value they create). The controversy surrounding Eugene’s Multiple-Unit Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE) is a case in point. The MUPTE program offers a property tax exemption on the new structure or incremental change in the property value of the building that comprises the project for a maximum of 10 years. Advocates argue MUPTE encourages dense development that otherwise would not occur (ultimately resulting in enhanced property tax revenue once the exemption expires). Opponents claim developers do not require the subsidies. Using tax policy to shape urban form is obviously fraught with political challenges. 

 

What’s obvious to Joe and those of us who understand the desirability of vibrant, dense urban centers may not be so clear to those who adhere to a different set of values. Development patterns that evolved over much of the past century will be difficult to undo. The suburban lifestyle, fostered by decades of pleasant imagery and appeals to independent American sensibilities, remains desirable to many but is also sustained by the current economics of real estate. The fact it is also ultimately unsustainable (in both the environmental and fiscal senses) is what many civic leaders fail to understand. 

 

Perhaps the key is to reveal to everyone the clarity of what is hiding in plain sight. Money is a measure everyone understands. If governments overhaul their tax codes such that the inherent value of the land and commonly shared infrastructure is taxed rather the buildings that take advantage of them, the disparity between the value of the land and the tax revenue it generates per acre will be ameliorated. Maybe Joe was simply driving home the point that data is our guide, that all we need to do is the math, trust the numbers, and thereby understand the physical form of cash flow. Who knew tax-literacy could be a key to achieving design excellence? 

 

*    *    *    *    *    * 

 

Kudos to the members of AIA-SWO’s Design Excellence Committee for bringing in Joe Minicozzi as the 2015 Making Great Cities speaker. The committee definitely “hit it out of the ballpark” with Joe (there’s another baseball idiom). And big thanks to the sponsors for this year’s program—The Barn Light, the City of Eugene, Downtown Eugene Inc., Dustrud Architecture, the Eugene Association of Realtors, Mindbox, PIVOT Architecture, and Rowell Brokaw Architects—for supporting this excellent installment of the Making Great Cities series. The bar has been set very high for all future presentations. I’m looking forward to them.