Comprehensive Planning Session

Interesting presentation by Gianni Longo, of ACP Visioning & Planning, and staff and consultants in other cities going through the comp plan process. My notes from the session. #CNU17

New Urbanism 202: Comprehensive New Urbanism for Comprehensive Plans

Gianni Longo, ACP Visioning & Planning

Comprehensive Plans in the Age of New Urbanism
6/11/09

Forces at Work:
Making the Invisible Visible
What the Public Wants

In Practice:
Nashville/Tahachapi/Glendale

The Convergence: New Urbanism, Smart Growth, and Sustainable Development movements. Trend now is from a focus on land use to a focus on transportation.

The interrelatedness of the challenge is what defines the mission statement of CNU: Comp Plan should be the New Urbanist tool of choice.

Plans from turn of century – like Chicago Plan – were very rich. Thinking comprehensively is more difficult now, due to regulations of past twenty years.

His philosophy: Land use is not the same as form and aharacter. The public becomes our advocate; a FLUM doesn’t tell us who we are, or the subtleties of conditions in our region. Elected officials told us: Tell us how policies should be tied to place.

A comp plan should yield policies that are very place specific. Needs to tell about character of the community in the place, not a FLUM. How? Focus on form and design is the same as focus on character.

(I hate the opaque term “form-based code.” No one but planners gets it. He’s suggesting a good alternative: “Character-based code.” or “Place-based policies.” “Growth opportunity areas.” Those most prime for a redevelopment effort. They can transform what’s around them.

Without the right code, the best ideas are unable to be implemented. The identification of neighborhoods and districts really brings clarity to the comprehensive planning process, and core transit corridors.

The transect is a tool both rigorous and flexible; it’s an equally powerful tool to look at old European cities and new American towns.

Transportation bones and infrastructure is what creates a great city. Public investment in transportation, linked with the private investment in buildings, and civic investment in public builidns, is what creates great places and great communities. The only place we can create great cities is in the public realm.

Move away from land use designations! Focus on character, the public realm and the transportation bones, not zoning.

Abigail Thorne-Lyman, Principal, Strategic Economics

There’s a growing demand for Transit-oriented Development. We really need to understand how to start providing affordable housing near transit, so TOD’s are available for all economic classes.

Employment areas are usually the least understtod areas in a comp plan. There’s pressure to convert employment lands to other uses. Should it really be converted to mixed-use new infill? It’s important to fully understand how these parcels contribute to economic vitality, before you convert them - whether industrial or office parks. You don’t want areas to lose jobs. Sometimes, it’s important to preserve industrial uses, where they are at times. But give workers good transit links to those areas.
Driving Industries – Those that drive regional economy, bringing in dollars from outside your region
Household-Serving Industries – selling directly to residents
Business-Serving Industries
A built-out community has a different kind of pressure to redo industrial lands and employment lands than a developing community.

In a transit-rich environment, you can cut household expenses in half, compared to an auto-dependent suburb. When price of gas jumped, household costs of transportation jumped above 20%. So by investing in transit, well designed to link the right areas, you are helping lower-income residents keep their cost of living down.

There’s no single formula for how to do TOD. Denver is adding new transit infrastructure at a very rapid pace. But the city couldn’t keep pace with station-area plans. But planning for neighborhood types by character gave developers guidelines, before the city could complete SAP’s for each neighborhood.

Understand where your workers are living! Strategic economics: “It’s more complicated than you think.”

Good land-use policy, based on very sound data and research, is needed to effectively support economic development. Are regs enabling the kind of intensive infill that’s wanted.

Gianni Longo:

The other force we all deal with is what the public wants! The public involvement portion of any plan, in our minds, becomes the most important. In the very complex analysis we do, the central question is how do we prove and ficilitate and provide the tools so that the public can make informed decisions?

CNU, in the preamble to charter and charrette forms that we do, CNU stresses “the art of building and the making of community.” What’s often misunderstood about the public involvement in the planning process is that planners assume we have to lower the bar, because the community is not getting it. That’s wrong. We should never drop the bar; we have to bring the public into the level of discourse we believe is necessary.

Key questions: What does the public really want? How do we facilitate the integration of the intuitive and informed, in the making of a comprehensive plan?

Every plan is built on values. The critical question is, whose values? White male power structure, in a smoke-filled room?

(Read The Power Broker, Robert Caro)

Longo led Imagine New York, right after 9/11 -- a people-led process, the antithesis of “planners know best” a la Robert Moses.

Visual tools are VERY important to help the public and policy makers to understand comprehensive planning choices. But we need a framework to use them, to translate the public process into a policy that results in the right outcomes.

The public process: Generative and Analytical. The final part is the Deliverative part; you really need to get the community to endorse the vision, and give their permission to create a plan. Than is the key: The plans that don’t have the permission, you get the NIMBY’s, you get all the factors that are very negative. The NIMBYs are a strange perversion of the public process. They’re expressing themselves, but in a very narrow way. It’s much easier to attack city hall and to attack the consultant, than to help build the positive vision. How do you overcome this?

Link ideas and place on the website. Google application that enables people to go to the place on a map, and add comments and establish why a place may be problematic or raise issues. This can be done in a very simple way, using tools that are available – link ideas, values, and place.

Outcome: Values that represent what the public genuinely wants.

Step Two: Visualization. Show the public 3-D images of the implications of the values they’ve expressed. It needs to be done as a progression, in a process that’s transparent.

Columbus 2012 process: 1700 people in a single room, all technologically linked with keypads, to decide on key critical principles. Mayor issued 1.6 billion bond asking community to support their vision with their bond; got about 65% approval, even last November.

You have to bring the community along through a process, and ensure that they understand it, and know to come to the website to express their ideas – but first you have to establish your legitimacy and gain their permission. Earn it through getting their values right; translating that well into a vision; and then getting endorsement of specific policies through the generative nature of the process.

“I’m on Facebook! I never thought I’d be on Facebook! All my visions are on Facebook!”

The integration of public involvement and information ntechnology facilities the making of a plan in many ways. The benefits?
It places info at the public’s fingertips
It anticipates the future
It enables informed decisions
It gives us permission to ACT.

A plan is a fiduciary relationship with the public.

Robin’s Q: I really liked what you said, the past isn’t prologue! Planning has been about integrating land use and transportation to date. But the driving industry piece isn’t well understood and integrated, beyond retail. Today the public focus is going to be on jobs, jobs jobs!

Abigail: Go out and talk to these firms and industries. Ask they why they are where they are, and the competitive dynamics of their locations. It doesn’t have to be scientific; just go out and talk to them. Support competitive advantages

We are very deliberate about asking the question: Do you want to implement it? Elected officials think, why awaken the tiger, if you don’t really intend to do anything with it? Mayor was huge in driving the link between the vision, the plan and the implementation from the beginning – and the mayor was the critical link in thinking that way deliberately from the very beginning.

Q: What do you do when community members insist they already know what they want, and think they’re already the experts?

A: There’s a category of NIMBY that I call the civicly obessessed. It’s important to understand what the broader ßpublic really wants and needs, not just that small group, not just what those six people want. It’s your responsibility as a planner to pull in a broad community; bring the public input and the technical analysis to the same level. I do think the public are the experts. But you have to bring in the larger community, not just let a small coterie dominate the dialogue, and represent that as what the public wants.

Jennifer Carlat, AICP Community Plans Manager,
Metro Nashville/Davidson County Planning Dept.

Stared using urban design overlays, UDO; not ue-based zoning
Overlay on base zoning, regulates form, not use, no variances, limited opportunit to modity

Severity and flexibility varies by zone
Good example: West End park UDO
Ideaty that form and character matters more than density, really moved the community along in accepting that more density would be okay, as long as it fits with neighborhood character

In mid-2000 – explained the Transect as a tool that encourages matching the density of development to the existing character of individual neighborhoods
Did a transect for the entire county, divided into 14 different communities, based on who they understand themselves to be, and who they want to be in the future. People loved it!

Change dialogue from land-use and density to form and character. Figure out, what’s your intent? Are we trying to preserve what’s already there? Enhance it?

When they updated the Downtown Plan, ended up updating the . Now working on Downtown Code that’s an update to a form-based code, with 16? Different neighborhoods within Downtown. But also helped them see they’re linked through transportation to outlying regional areas. Do we want to be a drive-through area, or a destination?

Tony …
Stephanos P’s firm

Tehachapi

Goals: Maintain quality of life and character of small town

But, existing general plan and requirements and procedures were working against that, not for it. City has very efficient administration of bad policies that weren’t supporting the citizen’s real goals for the character of their town; breeding typical ugly suburban sprawl instead.

Worked very fast; had a 90-day building moratorium and one week of analysis to work with community to come up with a vision and a diagram. Yielded a rudimentary vision, that a year later when they were hired to do the general plan, they could build a system to make it happen. Projected out growth that would take 30 years to happen, so they could determine how they wanted it would play out – including economic and fiscal factors and others. Including maintenance planning, for how what’s done today will impact future generations and their maintenance and redevelopment costs.

How do you make good decisions? How to you translate that into a general plan? Deploy the three community types you want, and deploy those administratively at the city. Let’s the city weigh each proposal that comes into that neighborhood.

Once you map the neighborhoods, you need a place-types and intention plan. You end up with a policy manual. After looking at a lot of plans, that were way too long and hard to understand and use, we decided on a short version with three chapters. Put all the details into the background, supporting document. Distill what you want to happen into three very short chapters. “What are you trying to do?” “How would you know if you’ve achieved it?” “What do we need to do to ensure we get the results we want?”

Glendale, California

Alan Loomis, City of Glendale, staff planner
In LA County; 30 sq. miles

Originally a streetcar suburb, with lots of period historic neighborhoods from 1920s; very conservative traditionally, home of American Nazi party, escorted Blacks out of town until the 1950s. But now 30-40% Armenian; very family-oriented and culturally oriented, very civicly involved in politics, has added a middle-eastern character. Glendale also has large Korean and Hispanic populations. The city is very well-versed in having conversations about neighborhood compatibility – although he doesn’t recommend using that term in design guidelines! They also have a downtown with high-rises and robust business sector.

Downtown is managed by Redevelopment Agency – which is their 5 city council members. New Downtown plan was the start, to encourage design excellence and augment height and density standards. It added a comprehensive multi-modal mobility strategy, that focused first on enhancing transit. Have had one of their civicly obsessed loud citizen voices show up and endorse every new project proposed under the new plan – “this is exactly the kind of project we want to see!”; that’s a sign of success, because “This was the kind of person who used to sue the city over new projects.

(To get good public participation, bring lollipops! Next time, we’re going to bring a dog. If you can attract the kids at public events, you get their parents.)

In future work, they won’t use the transect terminology, but they think it will map out along the same lines – as a “nested transect” scheme. He anticipates turning around the process, so that the community plan and design guidelines inform the zoning code, and thus determine what gets built – not the zoning code determining it, and the communities just having to accept what they get.

ANSWERS to QUESTIONS from audience:

A: You can’t deliver the desired environment without integrating the transportation network. It’s the critical part of shaping the public realm; just as we’ve learned to talk about building forms, on the private side. In Nashville, they’re updating road classifications. Adding another layer of street types – 4 lanes turn into a parkway, or an avenue, or … In doing community plans, we talk to neighborhoods about how they want streets to behave. A throughway, or a street that delivers visitors to your neighborhood.

A: The comp plan needs to inform the land-use code and transportation plan. Then the transition to a form-based code is a more natural one. But it’s not a linear process. In our work, we find the community is asking for the certainty that the form-based code gives, so that people can feel more assured of what the outcome will be.

But put it in writing into the comp-plan: We’re going to use form-based code to achieve the character goals of the community. That gives you the base you need to do it later.

Gianni: But we find form-based code is sort of like New Urbanist was 12 years ago; no one likes the term, so we have to kind of hide it.

But transportation planning has to be based on the function of the corridor, not just the context and character

KG’s Question: Can we change the terminology, and jettison the term “form-based code” in favor of something better, that ordinary people connect with in a positive way?
Speakers all agree that form-based code does not communicate well to the general public! No one likes it. Call it a place-based code, or a character-based code, or a context-based code. Goal-based code? Everyone agrees it’s not working as a term in communicating with the general public, although Gianni thinks that could change over time.

Tailor urban design objectives to particular areas of time. We tell people they won’t get a transect, they’ll get a place-based map that reflects their intents for their neighborhood. One criticism of comp plans is that they’re too general, in that they assume every area of town needs work. Instead, said Gianni, we prefer to emphasize priorities for areas that most need work in the next 5 to 10 years. Certain parts of community are just fine.

We create “A Community Character Manual.” But then people say – whoa! “I didn’t know I was in an area that’s more likely to be evolving and targeted for change.” It’s also a way to tie it into the projects that get funded through CIP’s – city capital improvement program.

Gianni: The elected officials are the ones who say, give us a character plan that expresses the INTENT for specific areas. A FLUM doesn’t help us much.