Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
2011 UPDATE
RETROFITTING SUBURBIA IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
IMPACTS OF THE GREAT RECESSION
THE PUBLIC SECTOR TAKES THE LEAD
RE-INHABITATION: ADAPTIVE REUSE OF EXISTING STRUCTURES FOR MORE ...
REDEVELOPMENT: REPLACING EXISTING STRUCTURES AND/OR BUILDING ON PARKING LOTS
REGREENING: REVITALIZATION OF NATURAL SYSTEMS ON PREVIOUSLY DEVELOPED LAND
LOOKING AROUND AND AHEAD
Preface
Introduction
URBAN VERSUS SUBURBAN FORM
WHY RETROFITS? WHY NOW?
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Acknowledgments
PART ONE - THE ARGUMENT
Chapter 1 - Instant Architecture, Instant Cities, and Incremental Metropolitanism
INSTANT CITIES AND SUBURBAN RETROFITS
INSTANT ARCHITECTURE, INSTANT PUBLIC SPACE
INCREMENTAL METROPOLITANISM
HOW SUSTAINABLE? HOW URBAN?
PART TWO - THE EXAMPLES
Chapter 2 - Retrofitting Garden Apartments and Residential Subdivisions to ...
NEVER HOMOGENOUS? THE NEW SUBURBAN HISTORY
DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES
RETROFITTING POLICY
RETROFITTING RESIDENTIAL SUBDIVISIONS
REINTEGRATING GARDEN APARTMENT BUFFER SITES
TOMORROW’S SUBURBANITES
Chapter 3 - Residential Case Study: Changes to“Levittown”
DEMOGRAPHIC DIVERSITY IN LEVITTOWN, WILLINGBORO, AND PARK FOREST
FAILURE AND REDEVELOPMENT OF RETAIL PROPERTIES
RESISTANCE TO CHANGE IN RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS
DIVERSIFYING HOUSING CHOICES
PATHS TOWARD FURTHER CHANGE
Chapter 4 - Retrofitting Social Life Along Commercial Strips
THIRD PLACES IN SUBURBIA?
HISTORY OF THE STRIP AND ITS BUILDING TYPES
ADAPTIVE REUSE OF BIG BOXES AND STRIP MALLS FOR COMMUNITY-SERVING ACTIVITIES
RETROFITTING SHOPPING CENTERS: THE MIDDLE SCALE
RETROFITTING THE CORRIDORS THEMSELVES: DESIGNING FOR MOBILITY OR ACCESS OR BOTH
RETROFITTING THE URBAN STRUCTURE OF COMMERCIAL STRIPS
Chapter 5 - Strips Case Study: Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod, Massachusetts
SITE HISTORY
FROM STRIP TO DOWNTOWN: MASHPEE’S THIRD PLACE
Chapter 6 - From Regional Malls to New Downtowns Through Mixed-Use and Public Space
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBLIC SPACE
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MALLS
DEAD AND DYING MALLS
CHANGING USES TO MEET LOCAL NEEDS
FROM ENCLOSED MALLS TO NEW DOWNTOWNS
INFILLING AROUND A LIVE MALL
THE ROLE AND FORM OF MIXED-USE AND PUBLIC SPACE IN RETROFITTED MALLS
Chapter 7 - Mall Case Study: Cottonwood, Holladay, Utah
REPOSITIONING MALL PROPERTIES
MARKET STUDY AND MINI-CHARRETTE
CHARRETTE
BENEFITS OF THE CHARRETTE
Chapter 8
“GREENING”: FINDING THE FUNDING FOR SUSTAINABLE URBANISM
FROM BUNKERS TO STREETSCAPES: PUBLIC SPACE
NEW USES/NEW USERS
Chapter 9 - Edge-City Infill: Improving Walkability and Interconnectivity
REDIRECTING EDGE CITIES
THE EVOLUTION OF EDGE AND EDGELESS CITIES
INFILLING EDGE CITIES
EDGE-CITY RETROFITS ACROSS MULTIPLE PARCELS
THE FUTURE OF EDGE CITIES
Chapter 10 - Edge City Case Study: Downtown Kendall/ Dadeland, Miami-Dade ...
REGULATING AN URBANIZING FRAMEWORK
DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS: REAPING THE BENEFITS OF INTERCONNECTIVITY
Chapter 11 - Suburban Office and Industrial Park Retrofits to Recruit the ...
SUBURBAN INDUSTRIAL PARKS, OFFICE PARKS, AND CORPORATE CAMPUSES
NONCONCENTRIC PATTERNS OF COMMUTING
RECRUITING THE CREATIVE CLASS
RETROFITTING SUBURBAN WORKPLACES
RETROFITTING INDUSTRIAL PARKS
Chapter 12 - Office Park Case Study: University Town Center, Prince George’s ...
TRANSIT PROVIDES OPPORTUNITY FOR INFILLING WITH MIXED USE
DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS: APPEAL TO THE CREATIVE CLASS?
Epilogue
ENDNOTES
IMAGE CREDITS
INDEX
COLOR PORTFOLIO
FOREWORD
By Richard Florida
Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times.
Suburbia isn’t as suburban as it used to be. In fact, the lines between urban and suburban are blurring. No longer dominated by households with kids, our suburbs are where the majority of America’s new immigrants and elderly can be found. They’re also home to lots and lots of singles—young singles, never-been marrieds, and, well, re-singleds, as well as energetic empty-nesters.
Suburban populations are diverse and interested in multitasking; suburban economies from Silicon Valley to Research Triangle are centers of innovation. But the physical environment of suburbia has not caught up with the new realities of suburban life. Too many people continue to work in soulless industrial parks and strip malls surrounded by acres of parking. And too often zoning codes, transportation investments, and lending practices have continued to perpetuate out of date, disconnected development patterns. Suburbia accounts for a large and growing share of the nation’s economic output but also to its biggest carbon footprints, its highest obesity rates, and the most automobile fatalities.
Sure our suburbs need some upgrading and beautification, more parks and green space, but the real key to suburban renewal lies in two key, related factors—walkability and density. As Jane Jacobs and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas have shown, the clustering of people and economic activity is the basic engine of economic life—for cities, suburbs, and nations alike. When interesting people rub against each other, they spark new ideas; the clustering of economic assets and activities accelerates the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises and dramatically increases overall productivity.
As my own research has shown, metros with walkable suburbs have greater economic output and higher incomes, higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the creative class, higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech industries and employees, higher housing prices, and higher levels of happiness. As our suburbs become more clustered, they’ll become more economically energetic—with benefits for us all.
While not all of suburbia will have the growth to support greater density and walkability, the examples in this book show how real workable strategies are being implemented at many scales—from making over abandoned big box stores into senior centers and schools and libraries to cutting new streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses. Whole commercial corridors are being retrofitted into integrated communities and real neighborhoods, as you will see. True, most of these retrofits have a ways to go before they can generate the organic authenticity of older cities that have grown up over long spans of time, but they too are a work-in-progress and an important one at that, as they build community and lay the groundwork for still further development. Writ large and multiplied across hundreds of metros, they are remaking the way Americans live and laying the groundwork for future economic prosperity.
Nationally, retrofitting suburbs has the potential to drive economic recovery while benefitting the environment. Can retrofits also raise critical thinking about consumption patterns and community values at the local scale? On the footprint of a demolished mall surrounded by a new urbanist residential neighborhood built on the mall’s former parking lots, James Milicevic’s M.Arch thesis at Georgia Tech envisions a public space for exploring social justice issues ignored by a public realm devoted to shopping. He juxtaposes community gardens tended by laid-off workers, their live-work facilities, a community time bank for bartering services by the hour, a water tank, and a media forum for political discussion. Credit: Drawings by James Milicevic, 2010, courtesy of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Historically, America’s economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns, new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was forged by our transition from an agricultural economy to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. The drive to retrofit our suburbs today, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities—and, most important to create the density required for innovation and productivity growth—may provide our own troubled era with the fix that it so desperately needs, while providing future generations with a more resilient and productive setting.
Hats off to Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. Their work is helping us chart a way to better suburbs, better communities, and a better, more fulfilling way of life. Wielding careful research, eyeopening before-and-after case studies, and a panoply of urban design solutions, Retrofitting Suburbia presents a highly convincing argument for both the desirability and the feasibility of redeveloping failed suburban properties into more sustainable places. A must-read for individuals involved in real estate design and development, this extremely timely book’s vision of suburban change has important implications for our national financial future; it should be studied by decision makers at every level.
RICHARD FLORIDA is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of The Rise of the Creative Class and the recently published book The Great Reset.
2011 UPDATE
RETROFITTING SUBURBIA IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
The question of what to do with dead malls, dying strips, and other underperforming suburban property types continues to grow in importance. The Great Recession has given new urgency to the work documented in these pages, while also raising questions as to what the long-term effects will be on development patterns. By making the immediate problem of proliferating vacant buildings so visible, the recession has given added momentum to the imperatives that were already driving the retrofitting of auto-oriented suburban property types into more sustainable places. These include climate change, dependence on foreign oil, shifting demographics and an aging population, public health concerns, and affordability. The ability of suburban retrofits to simultaneously address these overarching challenges, while reviving local communities and making them more livable, has raised tremendous interest in the subject, precipitating this paperback edition and the opportunity for us to provide an update on three principal retrofitting strategies:
• Re-inhabitation. The adaptive reuse of existing structures for more community-serving purposes, often as “third places” for social interaction.
• Redevelopment. Replacing existing structures and/or building on existing parking lots, generally with a compact, walkable, connected mix of uses and public spaces that supports a less auto-dependent and more socially engaged lifestyle.
• Regreening. Demolition of existing structures and revitalization of land, as either parks, community gardens, or reconstructed wetlands. Regreening is sometimes a phasing strategy for eventual partial redevelopment.
We have found these three strategies, and the tactics used to implement them, very useful for introducing audiences to retrofitting. Each addresses different opportunities, and together they provide communities with a useful range of approaches to what to do with underperforming properties. They also provide further impetus for the continued project of targeted retrofitting at the metropolitan scale, towards what we describe as “incremental metropolitanism.”
Retrofitting suburbia was an emerging field of practice when the original hardback edition was published in early 2009. Since then it has grown rapidly. We are continuously learning—daily it seems—of the design and construction of new retrofitting projects, the drafting of new policies, the launching of design competitions, and the publication of new books, articles, and blogposts that expand on the themes and techniques we first collected and explored in this book.
Just a short time later, much has changed. First, and not surprisingly, we are seeing many more re-inhabitation and regreening proposals. The difficulty of obtaining credit has slowed completion of real estate projects everywhere, including large redevelopments, such as Belmar, Downtown Kendall/Dadeland, and Mashpee Commons. Investors with deep pockets are taking advantage of reduced values to buy up distressed properties, but with little expectation of immediate redevelopment. Many markets are likely to see only smaller, more incremental retrofitting. However, there has also been an increase in proposals for extremely large and ambitious redevelopments, especially in the Washington DC area, where local planning agencies have been proactive rather than reactive towards retrofitting. This is indicative of a second trend: the massive shift from retrofitting primarily directed by the private sector to retrofitting led by the public sector. Finally, and of great excitement to us, is an improved general understanding of the dynamic processes of transformation at work in suburbia. Scholars, pundits, and policy makers alike have awoken to the necessity of discarding outmoded frameworks for describing and analyzing the role of suburbs and suburban form in contemporary urbanism and culture. Some have even suggested that it is time to retire the term “suburbia” altogether and focus more on the multi-centered dynamics of today’s metros. While we still find the term useful, we are heartened by the recognition that there is no singular reading of the suburbs and, instead, there are many fascinating and challenging variations in the suburban experience. We are optimistic that all of these trends bode well for further appreciation and exploration of suburban retrofitting’s tremendous potential for positive change.
URBAN DESIGN TACTICS FOR RETROFITTING
• Reuse the box. Adaptive reuse of vacant commercial buildings for new, often community-serving uses, such as libraries or medical clinics, is both socially desirable and reduces waste.
• Provide environmental repair. Retrofits sometimes provide the opportunity to reconstruct wetlands and creeks, components in the metropolitan watershed that were erased or diminished by the suburban development pattern.
• Revise zoning codes and public works standards. Make it easier to build compact, mixed-use developments with complete streets, and make it harder to build single-use, auto-dependent places.
• Improve connectivity for drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Build interconnected street networks to increase walkability and public safety, while distributing traffic and reducing overall vehicle miles traveled.
• Consider future connectivity and adaptability. If desired street connections cannot be achieved when the retrofit is originally designed and constructed, because of NIMBY concerns or other barriers, provide easements for future linkages. If desired densities and parking decks cannot be justified yet, design parking lots as future building sites, with utilities placed in the future streets at the outset.
• Use appropriate street types and real sidewalks. The 2010 ITE manual on walkable urban thoroughfares provides recommended design guidelines for a broad range of context-sensitive street types.
• Keep block size walkable. Without careful modulation, the hybridization of suburban building types and parking into urban blocks and streets can lead to oversized blocks and monotonous building fronts.
• Use shallow liner buildings. Wrappers can be employed around reused box buildings and liners can screen surface parking lots to provide a more continuous streetscape.
• Diversify housing choice and price. The future success of suburbs will hinge on their ability to respond to changing demographics; provide more housing choices.
• Add new units to existing subdivisions. Infilling residential neighborhoods with accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can provide affordable housing choices for singles and seniors, and increase residential density without dramatically altering the morphological pattern.
• Invest in quality architecture. The most successful and sustainable retrofits will be beautiful, durable, culturally significant, and built to meet high standards of environmental performance both in the public spaces and the buildings.
Some of the newest innovations in suburban retrofitting that we are most enthusiastic about are:
• Movements to support biking as well as bike sharing and car sharing
• Interest in suburban agriculture both in private yards and collective specialized farms
• “Greyfield” property audits, sometimes including inventorying existing assets’ potential contributions to district energy, waste, and water systems
• Reinvigorated discourse about public space and ecology in suburbs
• Lifelong Communities and other efforts to better accommodate older suburbanites
• Temporary, but high impact, re-inhabitations like pop-up cities, Park(ing) Day, and Build A Better Block
• The Red Fields to Green Fields initiative
• The Federal HUD-DOT-EPA Partnership for Sustainable Communities
We hope that you, our readers, will be inspired to constructively engage in the effort to respond to the “crisis of imagination” in suburban form and to take an active part in shaping what we continue to believe will be THE big design and development project for this century: creatively retrofitting—though re-inhabitation, redevelopment, and regreening—both the products and the mechanisms of sprawl. Of additional urgent importance is the necessity to address the global reproduction of variants on suburbanization at the urbanizing periphery of cities in China, India, elsewhere in Asia, the Middle East, South America, and even Africa; this topic, while beyond the scope of this volume, is a constant presence in our thinking.
IMPACTS OF THE GREAT RECESSION
The harsh economic impacts of the Great Recession have laid bare the weaknesses and tragic lack of resiliency in conventional suburban developments. The recession has also adversely affected many intown condominium values, but this is characteristic of previous real estate downturns. The widespread high rates of foreclosure in residential subdivisions is a new phenomenon, for which many seemed wholly unprepared. Stories of homeless families living in cars and rundown strip motels in the suburbs put faces to Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr’s Brookings Institution report showing that poverty in suburbs grew at rates nearly five times faster than in central cities between 2000 and 2008. They also point to the dire lack of short-term shelters, public housing, and social services in these communities.
The impact of the Great Recession on the landscape is immediately apparent in both “zombie subdivisions”—projects halted in the middle of construction—and recently built subdivisions ravaged by high rates of foreclosure, especially in the formerly booming sunbelt. Will places like this outside Charlotte Harbor, Florida, ever be completed in a tight credit market? Can they be redeveloped, or are they better candidates for regreening?
The predicament of the suburban poor, and everyone else, is further exacerbated by inadequate affordable transportation choices. Higher gas prices have wiped out the savings associated with the “drive ‘til you qualify” model of affordable housing, straining both household and municipal budgets, compounding the foreclosure crisis and slashing home values on the metropolitan fringes. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology is an important new online tool for vividly demonstrating the largely unexamined variations in how household location within a metro area contributes to household transportation costs, from 14 percent of income in walkable neighborhoods to over 30 percent in areas of high automobile dependence. In 2008, economist David Stiff found that the longer the commute, the steeper the drop in home resale prices.
Similarly, “zombie subdivisions” reveal the susceptibility of suburban monocultures to rapid collapse. Local economies that were based almost entirely on construction and development at bubble prices have been devastated. And those that placed their bets on single use development patterns and uniform lot sizes have not been able to adapt to a downsizing market.
This is not to say that suburban retrofits have survived the recession unscathed. Ask anyone involved with General Growth Properties, the second largest mall owner in the country when we profiled their redevelopment plans for the Cottonwood Mall (Chapter 7). Overleveraged by $29.5 billion for ambitious retrofit plans for dozens of properties, the evaporation of credit for refinancing led them to declare bankruptcy in April 2009 in the largest commercial real estate collapse in U.S. history.
What should we expect once real estate inventories contract and banks begin lending again? Has the recession permanently halted sprawl? Early results from the 2010 Census indicate that suburban growth slowed in over half of the nation’s 52 metropolitan areas with populations over 1 million. In addition, the difference in the growth rate between suburbs and cities narrowed significantly in the second half of the decade. We believe there will still be plenty of low-density, auto-dependent, single-use developments, proposed by those eager to return to “business as usual.” In the short term, these may have an affordable advantage. However, a wide range of market indicators and policy directions encourage us to be cautiously optimistic that infill development and suburban retrofitting will increasingly lead the real estate industry. For example:
• Many municipalities are overhauling their zoning codes or adding overlay districts in support of smart growth and new urbanist principles that favor retrofitting.
• After decades of increases, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that median square footage of new single-family houses dropped from 2,277 in 2007 to 2,135 in 2009.
• Recognition is growing of the need for compact living options, including rentals, to complement existing detached houses as one-person households (28%) surpass households of married couples with children (21 %).
• Immigration to the gateway suburbs—near Miami, in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, California, Texas, and elsewhere—is bringing new families and is also transforming the social and economic fabric of these communities.
• A 2008 Pew Research Center Survey found that suburbanites have the highest levels of community satisfaction but that more Americans would prefer to live in small towns. Retrofits that reintroduce the neighborhood attributes of small towns within suburbia will have broad appeal.
• There has been a tremendous surge of interest in the techniques of retrofitting by architects, developers, and planners, as evidenced by the number of workshops, conference sessions, new publications, and landbanking efforts underway.
• Several prominent mall developers have become mall re-developers and industry trade magazine Retail Traffic now refers to the addition of mixed-use to a mall as “modernizing.”
• Metro Chicago’s first headline-worthy real estate loan since the banking crisis began went towards a retrofit of a dead mall: Bank of America’s August 2010 $100 million loan for the redevelopment of Randhurst Mall.
In northern Virginia the upzoning of nodes along the Columbia Pike corridor to support streetcar service has progressed so well since 2007 that Arlington County is already planning extensions. Credit: Courtesy of Arlington County with town planning by Dover Kohl & Partners/ Ferrell Madden Lewis.
THE PUBLIC SECTOR TAKES THE LEAD
Despite the recession and the battered condition of the private sector, the momentum for retrofitting has grown, driven almost entirely by the public sector. The lull in building and permitting activity has allowed local planning departments to shift from a reactive posture towards deliberate planning to direct more sustainable change. Mixed-use rezonings and streetscape improvements for walkability have become common, and we can expect to see incremental changes along numerous suburban corridors as the economy recovers. At the state level, policy makers are facilitating retrofitting, most notably through California Senate Bill 375. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency are pursuing unprecedented coordination in forming the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. Collective funds for regional planning and transit improvements challenge existing urban and suburban communities to collaborate on integrating housing, transportation, and environmental systems in accordance with six principles of livability. This initiative is directly funding retrofitting, while helping to overcome the disciplinary silos that unintentionally structured the specialized separation of uses and facilities in suburbia in the first place.
Despite opening in July 2010, Peninsula Town Center in Hampton, Virginia, a retrofit of a dead mall (p.191), reported occupancy over 90 percent. Brian O’Looney, of Torti Gallas & Partners, credits the housing: “Peninsula’s rental buildings leased up faster than almost all others we have worked on... they offer authentic integration into a vibrant, urbane mixed-use environment.” Credit: Courtesy of Steiner + Associates.
The interest in retrofitting suburbia by the public health sector is also a relatively new and very welcome catalyst for change. Work documenting the profound negative human health impacts of driving, sedentary lifestyles, and other factors is contributing to a growing body of evidence confirming the benefits of designing places that promote physical activity, which are more socially engaging, as well as less polluting. The public health community recognizes that the primary health threats of the twenty-first century are chronic diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, asthma, and depression that can be moderated by the way we design our built environment. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s healthy places web page is a rich resource of research links and information on Health Impact Assessments, a useful new tool to demonstrate the health benefits of retrofitting.
New variations of public-private partnerships have emerged to assist with the perpetual challenge of funding retrofitting. Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) have proven particularly effective in Atlanta to fund planning and provide matching funds for major transportation improvements that enhance livability and property values. The Buckhead CID’s phase one retrofit of 1.5 miles of the city’s signature street from a commercial strip corridor into Peachtree Boulevard succeeded in attracting high-quality redevelopment while greatly improving walkability, bikability, and street life. Financed by commercial property owners agreeing to self-tax, the 13 CIDs in Atlanta are powerful quasi-public partners for implementing LCI plans (pages 76–77). Developer Donald Monti of Renaissance Downtowns similarly blurs the conventional lines between public and private in his partnerships with small suburban cities, such as Bristol, Connecticut, and Glen Cove, New York. He offers to provide masterplanning services for downtown revitalization in exchange for development rights to city-owned property within the plan boundaries. Other downtown property owners are also invited into the arrangement. For cities with more underused land than staff or cash, this can be very attractive.
RE-INHABITATION: ADAPTIVE REUSE OF EXISTING STRUCTURES FOR MORE COMMUNITY-SERVING PURPOSES
The first tactical move we promote in the retrofitting arsenal is to “reuse the box.” Not only does adaptive reuse make sense in the framework of green building design, but it is also a winning approach in economically stretched times, either as a stop-gap measure to keep spaces leased or as a way to diversify activities in maturing suburban communities that were already oversupplied with commercial development.
As vacancies increase in malls, strip centers, and big box stores—a trend in place for some time but accelerated by the recession—a range of new, highly creative re-inhabitation projects have occurred. For example, a portion of Crestwood Court, a mall in St. Louis, Missouri, has become ArtSpace, where theater groups, dance troupes, artist studios and a children’s museum are leasing vacated stores. While the mall’s owner plans a major redevelopment in the future, ArtSpace is keeping it alive in the present. In Ohio, the Cleveland Galleria mall is converting the glazed atrium into an urban greenhouse for organic produce, part of an innovative plan to incorporate farmers’ stalls, health food stores, and vegetarian restaurants into the Gardens Under Glass Resource Center. Other retail centers have welcomed community colleges and vocational programs into their vacant spaces.
Older adults have been well served by the growing number of big box and mall re-inhabitations that increase access to healthcare and medical services.
The Children’s Illustrated Art Museum is one of many arts groups enticed to occupy vacant retail stores as part of ArtSpace, a re-inhabitation initiative at the Crestwood Court mall in St. Louis, Missouri.
While the legalization of accessory dwelling units has taken root in some areas, there are many other regions that could benefit from the incremental changes rezoning would allow. This winning proposal from the 2010 Build a Better Burb ideas design competition illustrates phased introduction of a series of backyard cottages to iconic Levittown on Long Island. Credit: Renderings by Meri Tepper, 2010, courtesy of the Long Island Index.
A former grocery store in Savannah, Georgia, was re-inhabited by a women’s medical center, even making use of the high voltage from the freezer section to power the MRI machines. Numerous fitness and wellness centers have opened in other former retail buildings. Smaller “minute-clinics” are popping up in shopping centers around the country, while the entire second floor of the Hundred Oaks Mall in Nashville, Tennessee, has been re-inhabited by the University of Vanderbilt’s Medical Center.
Another tactic of retrofitting through re-inhabitation is to allow individual property owners to incrementally add new dwelling units to existing subdivisions. In November 2009, the city of Seattle expanded its existing backyard cottage ordinance beyond the pilot program (Chapter 2) to all single-family zoned lots that are at least 4,000 square feet. More than two dozen other municipalities in Washington state have passed similar ADU ordinances, as have many in Oregon. And, unlike the recent trend of Mc-Mansioning in older subdivisions, permitting ADUs is undeniably more suited to the times; environmental awareness and economic and demographic trends alike support downsized dwellings.
The incremental nature of change through re-inhabitation may lead to seemingly more authentic places in the long run, but they are less likely to catalyze larger redevelopment plans. This is the case in Willingboro, New Jersey (Chapters 2 and 6). The vacant Sears store (Figure 6–10) has finally been re-inhabited, into an office building. The primary tenant is the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services; the building also contains a shared and virtual office facility, ideal for small businesses and start-ups seeking low overhead. However, the retrofitting of Willingboro Town Center illustrates how difficult and slow the process can be. The urban design results can only be described as “hybrid”: boxes are successfully reused, but not to make walkable blocks or real streets. Less dramatic and photogenic than higherprofile examples like Belmar (Chapter 8), it nevertheless illustrates tactics for communities that wish to reuse and revive abandoned commercial properties.
REDEVELOPMENT: REPLACING EXISTING STRUCTURES AND/OR BUILDING ON PARKING LOTS
The uneven impact of the Great Recession has led to contrasting trends in redevelopment. We found announcements of 20 mixed-use mall redevelopments between 2008 and 2010, approvals for several ambitious new edge city infill/redevelopments as well as numerous projects put on hold. The stalling out of large “instant urbanism” redevelopment projects is leading some developers to shift their focus to infill projects that are smaller and easier to finance. One area of opportunity is the vacant parcels and surface parking lots of older suburban downtowns, especially those with new or preexisting commuter rail stations, as in new multi-unit housing over retail projects in Plano and Garland, Texas, outside Dallas.
“Greyfield audits” are an important new tool for encouraging infill redevelopment. The Regional Plan Association (RPA) produced a great example for the nonprofit Long Island Index. It is a GIS map of 8,300 acres of vacant land, unprotected open space, and surface parking lots within a half mile radius of 156 village downtowns and rail stations. Equivalent to the land area of Manhattan south of 50th Street, this acreage-of-opportunity is only 1.1 percent of the overall land area of Long Island. The RPA found that if all the available remaining greenfields on Long Island were subdivided for detached houses, 90,000 could be built. In contrast, this same number of units could be built on less than half of the 8,300 infill acres, configured as townhouses and apartments. While the idea of “living above the store” remains controversial to some suburbanites, marketing surveys and demographic change indicate that significant demand exists, especially in the regions least hit by the housing bust. There is ample evidence, as well, that long-held biases against the decision to rent, regardless of income, melt away when faced with hard questions about tying wealth up in one asset, price-to-rent ratios, and underwater mortgages. Meanwhile, on Long Island, suburban megaprojects like the Long Island Lighthouse proposed for the Nassau Hub edge city (Chapter 9) are bogged down with NIMBY opposition, fueled by intensified fears of property value losses.
However, other regions are moving ahead with ambitious, large-scale plans triggered by transit. In Northern California, the eco-retrofit of a 175-acre light industrial business park into Sonoma Mountain Village has been endorsed as the first North American development in Bioregional’s uber-high-standard One Planet Communities. Tysons Corner, outside Washington DC, is planning to shake off its reputation as the poster child for edge cities. Like so many retrofits in the area (see Figures on these pages and Figure 9–1), the plan responds to redevelopment opportunities posed by the construction of new Metrorail stations. In an impressive act of political will, the four stations are to be threaded through the urban agglomeration that is Tysons—instead of remaining in the adjacent highway right-of-way. The primary goal is to redress the severe jobs/housing imbalance—120, 000 jobs and only about 17,000 residents—by adding multi-unit housing and supporting uses to make viable neighborhoods, thus allowing Tysons to grow up and become a significant contributor to the ongoing “incremental metropolitanism” of Washington DC and its suburbs.
In the largest suburban retrofit, 1,700 acres in Tysons Corner, Virginia, will evolve from 46 million square feet of single-use development and 40 million square feet of parking into America’s seventh largest downtown, with 160 million square feet of mixed-use, walkable, transit connected urbanism with a green network of 160 acres of parks, restoring two streams. Ninety-five percent of all growth will be focused within a 3-minute walk of four new Metrorail stops and three planned circulator routes. Credit: Courtesy of PB’s PlaceMaking Group.
Chapter 12 is a case study of another DC retrofit triggered by Metrorail, University Town Center, where new streets and a plaza framed by residential and retail buildings, all above parking decks, have been built to infill a smallish office park. Since 2008, the number of new redevelopment proposals around the nearby Prince George’s Center station compelled us to redraw the figure-field diagram of projected morphology in 2020. While the completion of Phase I of University Town Center is stalled because of difficulties obtaining financing, and the high-end condos have not sold well (Figure 12-11), the owners are planning Phase II, actively seeking a federal government agency as a major tenant. Meanwhile the neighboring parcels are poised to morph into an eclectic suburban node for the creative class. To the west, the 566 units of Belcrest Plaza, contained in 1960s garden apartment buildings, will be redeveloped by Percontee Inc. into 2,675 units plus office, retail, and a new public library and recreation center. In the type of bold play that is rare these days, Percontee proposes a 33-story tower at the corner of Belcrest Road and Toledo Terrace. The remainder of the perimeter-block buildings will be 4 to 17 stories tall. Approval for the first 700 units has been granted. Also angling to respond to the steady demand for rental housing, the owner of the two Y-shaped apartment towers to the north of Belcrest Plaza, who happens to be the brother of the owner of University Town Center, also plans to add new units—400 in a first phase.
Over the next decades in Tysons Corner, development will increase by over threefold to provide for 200,000 jobs and 100,000 residents, with 20 percent of housing to be affordable. Before and after massing diagrams of one of the new Metrorail station areas illustrate the transformative potential of the plan. Credit: Courtesy of PB’s PlaceMaking Group.
In response to the success of University Town Center and the other initiatives, the owner of the mall-in-the-middle, the Mall at Prince Georges, is planning a retrofit of its own. Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) has had success in introducing educational facilities into other malls, including at its retrofit of the Echelon Mall in southern New Jersey into Voorhees Town Center. Part of the mall was demolished (“right-sized”) and a new boulevard was constructed, connecting the mall entrance to the surrounding arterial road. A major new tenant along the boulevard is the Rizzieri Aveda School for Beauty, whose students are ideal customers for the surviving portions of the mall. Can they reproduce the synergistic, pedestrian-friendly magic at the Mall at Prince Georges? In its efforts, PREIT is actively seeking to coordinate with the developers of neighboring Belcrest Plaza to reshape the roads and streetscapes, an attitude that differs vastly from the litigious defensiveness of many mall owners in the first generation of retrofits.
The public sector has also been active; current transportation plans call for improvements to crosswalks and sidewalks at the dangerous intersection of East-West Highway and Belcrest Road, new bikes lanes, “complete streets,” and improved connections to surrounding neighborhoods, to connect retrofits to each other and to surrounding neighborhoods. All of these improvements promise to redress the barriers and buffers to connectivity and walkability we observe in Chapter 12.
Revised 2020 figure-field diagram (projected) for University Town Center in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Despite the recession, several additional retrofitting projects have been proposed since our original case study, necessitating this revision (compare to Figure 12-9). Access to the DC Metrorail and a strong market for rental apartments are providing momentum for high-density redevelopment.
Much as Prince George’s Center has grown from infill to include redevelopment, the neighborhood of Northgate in north Seattle has successfully combined redevelopment, re-inhabitation and regreening approaches into a newly walkable mix of uses. This transit-oriented retrofit of multiple properties arrayed around the community’s de facto center, the Northgate Mall, has been led by the public sector. The mall—opened in 1950 as an open-air suburban shopping center—was the first to be designed with the narrow concourse that became a standard of the type. A proposal to expand the mall in the 1990s met stiff opposition from environmentalists, who wished to daylight a creek channeled through a 60-inch diameter storm pipe beneath the south parking lot. A negotiated agreement was finally reached whereby the mall could add space in exchange for a commitment to “use natural drainage methods, sustainable design and green building techniques and the city’s new plans for Northgate area pedestrian circulation and open space.” These priority items signaled a recognition that auto-oriented patterns were not serving all of the neighborhood’s residents, especially the very young and the old.
Through the deal, the city was able to purchase 2.7 acres in the south parking lot to provide for open space and a natural drainage solution for 680 acres of surface runoff. The acreage around the city-funded Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel was redeveloped into Thornton Place, an intriguing mixed-use development hybrid, built to LEED for Neighborhood Development standards. The project comprises nine buildings containing 530 dwelling units in apartments, townhouses, and a senior-living building, 50,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, a 14-screen theater, and two stories of belowground shared parking.
The adjacent quadrant of former mall parking has been re-inhabited as a commuter bus center, and will eventually be a light rail terminus with mixed-use TOD around it. The former park-n-ride lot to the north of the mall is being regreened into Hubbard Homestead Park, a welcome amenity for its neighbors, many of whom are older residents and part of the “gray tsunami” driving suburban retrofitting plans in many parts of the country (such as the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Lifelong Communities framework). Other components of the community’s ongoing transformation are 507 Northgate (163 apartments, 30 percent affordable, on the former site of a gas station), and the Northgate Library and Community Center (built around a small park on the former site of Goodyear Tire). Thus, acres of auto-oriented surface parking lots, a gas station, and a tire store have become interconnected components of a newly walkable and bikable, regreened, transit-served regional center, a resurgent node in metro Seattle, anchored by a thriving mall.
Retrofits around the Northgate Mall, north Seattle, include a transit center, new parks, a community center and library, streetscape improvements, and hundreds of new apartments in mixed-use redevelopments of parking lots and vacant commercial property. At least $41 million in public funding was allocated, along with tax exemptions to subsidize inclusionary affordable housing.
“Before” and “after” views of the Northgate Mall south parking lot, redeveloped as Thornton Place by Lorig Associates and Stellar Holdings, to a master plan by Mithun. The bioswale/park, daylighting and biofiltering the headwaters of Thornton Creek, was realized by SvR Design Company with Seattle Public Utilities. Credit: Courtesy of Sky-Pix Aerial Photography.
REGREENING: REVITALIZATION OF NATURAL SYSTEMS ON PREVIOUSLY DEVELOPED LAND
Densification is not always the best retrofitting solution, and regreening provides means to establish parks, habitat reserves, food production, and better ways to treat water—like the Thornton Creek bioswale. In the final design, the underground pipe remains but parking lot runoff is diverted to the unusually deep bioswale (up to 12 inches) where the water is partially cleansed by tall and attractive sedges, reeds and rushes. Many retrofitting projects could be greatly improved by the carefully designed integration of similar “light imprint” and “low impact” landscape-engineered solutions for managing stormwater, such as pervious paving, bioswales integrated with sidewalks and curbs, continuous planting strips, rain gardens, green roofs, or reconstructed wetlands, as at Phalen Village (Chapter 4) and Picayune Strand in the Everglades, where 250 miles of asphalt have been removed from America’s largest—and failed—subdivision, to provide better habitat for endangered Florida panthers.
The tactics for implementing regreening continue to evolve, as the potential upside of the investments becomes ever clearer: the global benefits of cleaner air, water and moderated temperatures; the ecological benefits of reduced runoff from onsite stormwater treatment; the economic benefits of reduced inventories of commercial real estate; the real estate premiums and social benefits of close proximity to small parks, landscaped civic space, and community gardens for people of all ages; and the public health benefits of access to recreational physical activity, options for daily transit by foot and bike, and healthy, locally grown food.
“Building C-Burbia,” another winning proposal from the 2010 Build a Better Burb ideas design competition, proposes a design policy to address climate change by retrofitting sprawl with carbon sink landscapes, opportunistically planted in highway verges, arterial medians, and subdivision sidewalks, as well as in “ecological easements” on private property. Bike lanes can be paved with permeable grass-crete to both sequester carbon and reduce stormwater runoff, as can land-banked vacant lots. Credit: Renderings by Denise Hoffman Brandt, Alexa Helsell, and Bronwyn Gropp, 2010, courtesy of the Long Island Index.
Many of these benefits are manifesting in the growing suburban farming movement, as chronicled by Fritz Haeg in the book Edible Estates. Homeowners are transforming their yards into vegetable gardens and keeping hens for fresh eggs, although sometimes they need to redraft subdivision CC&Rs for permission to do so. The homeowners’ associations of a few older subdivisions with financial problems are beginning to rethink their amenity packages, considering alternative uses for lushly landscaped open spaces that suck up expensive water. As Andres Duany has quipped, “agriculture is the new golf.” Town center retrofits regularly sponsor farmers’ markets. And there is more than just produce and livestock to grow; solar panel “farms” are sprouting on the roofs of commercial properties throughout California.
Regreening ideas are heavily featured in the over 200 entries to the Build a Better Burb ideas design competition, sponsored by the Long Island Index and organized by June Williamson. Designers were asked to imagine bold new uses for the 8,300 available acres of underperforming asphalt in existing suburban downtowns. Along with an array of provocative proposals for densification and infill, the winning entries included ideas about transferring development to preserve the island’s aquifers, methods for planting extensive carbon sinks along roadways and on vacant lots to help fight global warming, an inventive scheme for relocating low-density office parks to infill downtowns and replacing them with organic farms, and novel “bottom-up” ways to seed and finance small new open spaces into neighborhoods.
LOOKING AROUND AND AHEAD
As the examples described above and throughout the book illustrate, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to retrofitting. The larger conditions within which each retrofit is situated are always unique, even if the most distinctive characteristics of the site were stripped away in the course of its development. The best retrofits (re)establish a vital connection to the existing place, whether by providing affordable space for local community activities, by connecting a new, mixed-use neighborhood to existing street networks, or by revitalizing the ecology in areas that should never have been built on in the first place. In other words, by re-inhabiting, redeveloping, or regreening (or doing these in combination), the best retrofits replace the generic with the particular. However, there are two scales at which we would still like to see further improvement in that particularization: the design of the buildings themselves as well as the streetscapes, bikeways, and landscapes, and metropolitan-wide planning. Periods of slowed development, like this one, are particularly good times for metropolitan areas to strategically target what kind of retrofitting they would like to see where, and to prioritize public investments accordingly. Be wary of broad-brush upzoning or reliance on mixed-use formulas that depend exclusively on retail or office space; retrofits could potentially accommodate a great range of clean, productive work spaces in a variety of urban building forms. We recommend conducting a greyfield audit. For starters, ask, which defunct properties are occupying sensitive habitats that there is now an opportunity to repair and reconnect? Conversely, which are well served by transit and make sense to be targeted for densification with mixed-use housing or employment centers? Identify areas where small-scale entre-preneurial and immigrant businesses are making use of affordable rents and serving local communities. What additional re-inhabitations or corridor improvements might improve livability without spurring displacement through gentrification?