New Urbanism in Texas
Part of the current controversy over tax increment financing in San Antonio has to do with a type of development called New Urbanism. The San Antonio’s master plan and unified development code aim to encourage New Urbanist development, and Mayor Ed Garza regards such projects as desirable enough to merit public incentives, including tax increment financing, to help developers pay for public infrastructure. Continued…
New Urbanism a shift from earlier codes
By Mike Greenberg San Antonio Express-News 05/18/2003
What does New Urbanism look like, and what makes it so special?
In Texas, the best place to start learning about the New Urbanism is in the middle of the Old Suburbanism.
The town of Addison is one of the smaller patches in the seemingly endless quilt of gray suburbs that sprawls north of Dallas. It’s a land of wide-open asphalt spaces pocked with strip malls and spotted with office buildings, from whose presence one might surmise the existence of living human beings.
None are visible. The only movement is the ghostly whoosh of cars and SUVs, their tinted windows rolled up.
A short distance west of the Dallas North Tollway, a right turn will land you suddenly in what appears to be the compact center of a prosperous old town in northern Europe.
Apartment and office buildings of brick and stucco line the narrow streets and wide, tree-shaded sidewalks.
On the shady side of a broad esplanade, restaurants spill out from the street-level storefronts to colonize the red-brick sidewalk with clusters of umbrella tables.
On the sunny side, customers pop in and out of the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the mailing service.
A trio of workers from a graphics company strolls from their office building to have lunch around a table in the esplanade across the way. Around the corner, apartment dwellers walk their dogs in a thickly wooded little park bordered by low stone walls. Outside a corner sub shop, a man sits on a bench and chats on his cell phone while a woman gazes out from her apartment balcony above him.
This is Addison Circle, the 9-year-old poster child of New Urbanism in Texas. More accurately, this is three-quarters of Addison Circle.
With Phase IV yet to be built on what is now an empty field, Addison Circle comprises 1,330 apartments and condominiums, 340,000 square feet of office space and 75,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, all within a compact and very pleasant dozen or so blocks.
The developer is Post Properties, which also built the urban apartment blocks of the Uptown neighborhood near downtown Dallas and redeveloped downtown Houston’s historic Rice Hotel as an apartment building with street-level shops and restaurants. Addison Circle was designed by the Dallas office of RTKL Associates, an international architecture and planning firm.
Addison Circle exhibits several of the key features of the New Urbanism: The whole development is easily walkable. Buildings are close to the street, defining sidewalks and parks as usable civic spaces. Streets are narrow and form distinct city blocks. Most parking is hidden from view. Residential and commercial uses coexist next to and on top of each other.
The New Urbanism emerged in the 1980s as a reaction against the planning codes and practices of the previous several decades. There’s no single term for those codes and practices, but we’ll call them the Standard Model. The Standard Model was based on one simple technical idea and one simple social ideal.
The technical idea was that town planning was an engineering exercise — making sure the sewers ran downhill, the rainwater drained to the nearest river and the houses could be served by power and water utilities.
After World War II, new development at city fringes was shaped most pervasively by traffic engineers, whose primary goal was to accommodate increasing numbers of automobiles on ever-wider roadways.
The social ideal was that town planning should exhibit strict order — a place for everything and everything in its place. Land use zoning, which earlier had aimed only to keep noisy, smelly or dangerous industrial activities away from homes and offices, now aimed to separate everything from everything else.
Stores, offices, institutions, apartments, and the various types and sizes of single-family houses were all quarantined from each other in distinct zoning districts.
One result of the combination of traffic engineering and strict zoning was that nearly all destinations were reachable, practically speaking, only by car, which meant that parking lots had to get bigger, which pushed destinations even farther apart while creating more drainage problems and destroying more trees, which induced disaffected suburbanites to look for greener pastures farther out in the exurban fringe, which meant more cars driving longer distances, which …
“Stop!” said the New Urbanists, a loose assortment of architects, environmentalists, public officials, developers and neighborhood leaders who were dissatisfied, for various reasons, with the Standard Model.
The movement and its name solidified in 1993 with the formation of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an educational and advocacy organization.
A two-page document called the Charter of the New Urbanism states the movement’s general principles. (On the Web, go to www.cnu.org)
The Charter opposes “the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage.”
It takes a stand for “the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.”
The first New Urbanist project was Seaside, Fla., an upscale beach resort town designed by Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
But projects presented at CNU conferences include community-based redevelopment in low-income urban neighborhoods, conversions of abandoned shopping malls to mixed-use neighborhood centers, master plans to help rural towns preserve their historic character while accommodating growth, and urban and suburban infill projects.
New Urbanist thinking can be seen in high-density mixed-use development around transit stops, such as the Mockingbird Station district on the Dallas light-rail line, and in low-density subdivisions of mostly single-family detached houses, such as Plum Creek in Kyle. Some New Urbanist plans even include big-box retailers.
New Urbanism also began influencing municipal development codes around the country in the 1990s, as cities sought to limit sprawl, encourage inner-city redevelopment and establish a sense of community in their suburban fringes.
New Urbanist ideas infiltrated San Antonio’s 1997 master plan and 2001 updated development code by a direct line of descent from Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the movement’s leading theoreticians and practitioners.
Real estate developer and broker Ed Cross, a key member of the committee that drafted the master plan, took a seminar that Duany led at Harvard.
Whether the density is high or low, infrastructure costs generally make New Urbanist projects more costly than their Standard Model counterparts.
What makes Addison Circle work as a pedestrian environment, for example, is that most of the parking is concentrated in multilevel garages tucked behind the apartment buildings. The cost of building those garages is one of the reasons Addison Circle is fairly expensive, with apartment rentals ranging from $600 to $3,500 a month.
There are other reasons, as well — the extensive landscaping along sidewalks and in intimate courtyards, the public art, the richly detailed building facades, the numerous benches and attractive light posts along the sidewalks, the fine materials throughout.
Less visible are costs related to cash flow. In the early years, apartment rentals had to subsidize the retail and restaurant space.
But the price premium that New Urbanist projects command have made them increasingly popular with developers.
In Texas, the Dallas and Austin areas have been most fertile for New Urbanist projects, though one was recently announced for Port Aransas.
But many plans for New Urbanist projects never bear fruit, or lose their New Urbanist characteristics before construction begins.
In San Antonio, early designs for redevelopment of the Springview public housing site showed New Urbanist influences, but the completed project is largely indistinguishable from the Standard Model.
On the other hand, the approved master plan for redevelopment of the Victoria Courts public housing site is a fully New Urbanist mix of apartments, town houses, detached houses and civic spaces, with a bit of street-level retail space.
The HOPE VI program of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is partially funding the Victoria Courts redevelopment, now strongly prefers New Urbanist plans for their long-term value and their ability to attract a mix of incomes.
Plans for North Rim Village and the Village of Westpointe would bring varying degrees of New Urbanist town planning to the outer suburban fringe — if the current TIF tiff tilts in their favor.