Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition

Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs

Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470934326, 9780470041239
• eBook ISBN: 9781118027677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Updated with a new Introduction by the authors and a foreword by Richard Florida, this book is a comprehensive guide book for urban designers, planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, and community leaders that illustrates how existing suburban developments can be redesigned into more urban and more sustainable places. While there has been considerable attention by practitioners and academics to development in urban cores and new neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, there has been little attention to the redesign and redevelopment of existing suburbs. The authors, both architects and noted experts on the subject, show how development in existing suburbs can absorb new growth and evolve in relation to changed demographic, technological, and economic conditions.

Retrofitting Suburbia was named winner in the Architecture & Urban Planning category of the 2009 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards) awarded by The Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers

PART ONE

THE ARGUMENT

Chapter 1

Instant Architecture, Instant Cities, and Incremental Metropolitanism

INSTANT CITIES AND SUBURBAN RETROFITS

The goal of urbanizing suburbs calls into question many long-standing cultural stereotypes. If cities are conventionally understood as old places with new buildings versus suburbs as new places with simulations of older buildings, how do we make sense of suburban retrofits?¹ How do these projects challenge expectations of responsible urban design—both in terms of respect for the immediate context and reconfiguring metropolitan areas? How should we evaluate their success? This chapter situates the arguments for retrofitting suburbia within contemporary urban design polemics at three different scales: instant architecture, instant cities, and incremental metropolitanism.

In alignment with democratic ideals, professionals engaged in city making have come to share a pervasive enthusiasm for incremental urbanism—cities that evolve over time through gradual accretions and infill so that the collective form bears the imprint of a broad spectrum of interests. Much as case law is shaped by incremental judicial decisions to reflect both our past and our current values, urban form that has been continually added to and adjusted is generally perceived as an authentic representation of culture. Organic metaphors further reinforce our perception that urban growth naturally morphs not through the artifice of master plans and government policies but in response to ever-changing conditions.

There is no question that the world’s great cities exemplify incremental urbanism and that sensitive interventions that both respect the existing urban structure and advance evolving cultures over time contribute to great places. Much of the motivation behind this book is to encourage more such interventions in suburban areas.

However, love of incremental urbanism can also lead to indiscriminate disdain for that which is perceived as inauthentic. Large new urbanist projects in particular are often derided as “instant cities” and “faux downtowns.”² This kind of design critique applies to many suburban retrofits, but often fails to distinguish the detrimental effects of “instant architecture” from the potential benefits of “instant cities.” At a time when climate change and peak oil prices call for vast swaths of existing suburban areas to be retrofitted on a scale and at a speed that is beyond the capacity of incremental urbanism, it is worth recognizing when the kind of large-scale changes associated with “instant cities” might be welcomed rather than shunned.

The global urgency of reducing greenhouse gases provides the latest and most time-sensitive imperative for reshaping sprawl development patterns, for converting areas that now foster the largest per capita carbon footprints into more sustainable, less auto-dependent places.³ The transforming of aging and underperforming shopping centers, office parks, garden apartment complexes, and other prototypical large suburban properties into more urban places allows new population growth to be redirected from metropolitan greenfield edges into more central, VMT-reducing, greyfield redevelopment.⁴ It also allows for the development of an incremental metropolitanism at a scale far more capable of confronting the problems of sprawl than incremental urbanism is. This jump in scale is more relevant both to the realities of contemporary development practices and to the scope of the challenges confronting us. Ironically, at a time when well over 75% of U.S. construction is in the suburbs, the critiques of faux urbanism often betray more nostalgia for no-longeras-tenable development practices than the projects’ designs do.

Later chapters document the before and after transformations of these low-density, auto-dependent, single-use, suburban formats into urban places, and the roles of the public and private realms in effecting these changes. Some of the changes have in fact been incremental and indicative of both gradual demographic shifts and public efforts to induce change. For instance, every one of the original Levittowns has added not only countless additions to individual houses but also multiunit housing for seniors as inhabitants have aged. A decade after Boulder, Colorado, revised zoning and setback regulations along suburban arterials, new mixed-use buildings with sidewalk cafés appear cheek by jowl with older carpet-supply stores set behind large parking lots.

Across the country those older stand-alone retail buildings are also increasingly being adaptively reused for community-serving purposes. A dozen Wal-Mart stores were converted to churches between 2002 and 2005. As described in Chapter 4, La Grande Orange in Phoenix is a reborn strip mall whose locally owned restaurants and shops have become so popular that it has its own T-shirts and is regularly mentioned as a selling point in real estate ads for the neighborhood. Daly Genik Architects made an L-shaped mini-mall into an award-winning elementary school in Los Angeles. The addition of sidewalks and pervious public green space figured into both Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle’s elegant transformation of a grocery store into a public library in Texas, and The Beck Group’s award-winning conversion of a Super Kmart into a megachurch in Georgia. Many other vacant big-box stores have been converted to call centers and office space—including the headquarters for Hormel Foods, which includes the Spam Museum in a former Kmart in Minnesota. There are countless additional examples of this kind of recycling that show welcome but minor improvements to the physical and social infrastructure. ⁵

However, retrofitting’s greater potential goes well beyond incremental adaptive reuse or renovation. By urbanizing larger suburban properties with a denser, walkable, synergistic mix of uses and housing types, more significant reductions in carbon emissions, gains in social capital, and changes to systemic growth patterns can be achieved. On emissions alone, new comprehensive research asserts that “it is realistic to assume a 30% cut in VMT with compact development.”⁶ The key to achieving this target is the appropriate balancing of uses so that, once on-site, residents, shoppers, office workers, and others can accomplish multiple, everyday trips without getting back in their cars or back on the road. This allows mixed-use new urbanist greyfield retrofits to routinely achieve projections of 25% to 30% internal trip capture rates. In turn, this means that such projects will generate 25% to 30% fewer net external trips on nearby roads than a project of equivalent density but without the same urban qualities. Such capturing of internal trips is dependent upon achieving the critical mass associated with instant cities, not with incremental changes to the suburban pattern.

Are these projections to be trusted? Atlantic Station, an example of compact mixed-use development adjacent to midtown Atlanta on a former steel mill site, is generating far greater reductions in VMT than initial estimates projected. In a region where the average employed resident drives 66 miles per day, employees in Atlantic Station are driving an average of 10.7 miles per day and residents an average of 8 miles per day.⁷

The most dramatic and prevalent retrofits tend to be on dead mall sites, retrofits such as Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado; Mizner Park in Boca Raton; and Cottonwood outside Salt Lake City. The numerous examples have each replaced a typical low-rise enclosed shopping mall surrounded by parking lots with a more or less interconnected, walkable street grid, lushly planted public spaces, and ground-level retail topped by two to eight stories of offices and residences. In Denver alone, seven of the region’s thirteen malls have closed to be retrofitted. There are also, however, significant retrofits on the land adjacent to thriving malls. Retrofits such as Downtown Kendall/Dadeland outside Miami incorporate a mall (the Dadeland Mall) and new twenty-plus-story residential towers, as does Perimeter Place adjacent to Perimeter Center Mall in Atlanta. Both are examples of how thirty-year-old “edge cities,” even bête noire Tysons Corner, are being repositioned by infilling and urbanizing.

Suburban office and industrial parks are also being retrofitted. The parking lots of an Edward Durell Stone–designed office park of ten-story Kennedy Center–like buildings in Hyattsville, Maryland, are getting infilled with a new Main Street and mix of uses to become University Town Center. The owners of a low-rise industrial park in Westwood, Massachusetts, are taking advantage of its location on a commuter rail line to redevelop it as Westwood Station, a 4.5-million-square-foot, four-to-five-story live-work-shop TOD and the largest suburban development project ever in Massachusetts.

Golf courses, car dealerships, park-and-rides, garden apartment complexes, residential subdivisions, and entire commercial strip corridors are being retrofitted in ways that integrate rather than isolate uses and regenerate underperforming asphalt into urban neighborhoods.

What’s driving all this? Several factors: reduced percentages of households with children and a growing market for multiunit housing in the suburbs, ⁸ continued growth in the percentage of jobs in suburban locations; regional growth patterns that are giving leapfrogged suburban areas a new centrality; rising gas prices making housing on the periphery less affordable; lengthening commutes making leapfrogged suburban locations more attractive; and local smart-growth policies and transit investments that are limiting sprawl and redirecting growth to existing infrastructure. Rising land values; the dearth of good, cheap, undeveloped sites in increasingly built-out suburban markets; and aging greyfield properties with an abundance of surface parking lots are all factoring into a changed suburban market.

Collectively, these market forces and policies are enabling implementation of the principal benefit of projects like these: the retrofitting of the underlying settlement structure itself so as to change unhealthy suburban patterns and behaviors into more sustainable ones. Incremental infill within as-of-right zoning in most suburban municipalities is simply not a feasible path toward achieving diversification or densification. The larger, denser, and more urban the redevelopment, the more ability its designers have to change the existing development pattern and

• reduce vehicle miles traveled and improve public health by creating a transit-served or transit-ready mix of uses in a walkable street pattern connected to adjacent uses

• reduce land consumption and per capita costs of public investment by absorbing growth that without alternatives would otherwise expand in sprawl and edgeless cities

• increase the feasibility and efficiency of transit

• increase local interconnectivity

• increase permeable surfaces and green space

• increase public and civic space

• increase choice in housing type and affordability

• increase diversification of the tax base

• establish an urban node within a polycentric region

The key design challenge to altering the suburban settlement structure is internal and external integration of the parts over time and over multiple parcels. This research has yet to uncover built examples of connected culs-de-sac (a long-standing holy grail of suburban reform) or other perfectly seamless transitions between properties. But designers are producing innovative adaptations to zoning and subdivision regulations to overcome suburban fragmentation. Michael Gamble and Jude LeBlanc have proposed trading the right to build liner buildings within the front setback along arterials for giving up half the width of a new street on the side setback as a means to gradually establish a finer-grained street and pedestrian network on suburban superblocks. Similarly, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Victor Dover, and Joseph Kohl have developed a unique strategy for linking open spaces within Downtown Kendall/Dadeland’s 324 acres. Working for Miami-Dade County on new zoning across numerous parcels, they devised a system of points at the corners of property boundaries to which each owner’s mandated 15% of open space had to connect. Their suggested, rather than mandated, shapes of public space have been substantially followed by property owners and are far more appropriately sized to the development as a whole than a series of uncoordinated 15% bits would have been.⁹

Internal integration of parts is indeed far easier to control on single-parcel sites—especially sites of 30 or more acres. Projects as small as 15 acres, such as San Diego’s Uptown District on the site of a former Sears store, can transform the character of suburban areas and excite local imagination about further change. But larger parcels can more easily justify the inclusion of public space, decked parking, and a fine-grained street network on suburban superblocks.¹⁰ Large sites are also more likely than small ones to be able and/or required to include housing for a mix of incomes. This has not been universally achieved—witness the exclusively high-end residences at Santana Row or exclusively lower-end apartments at CityCenter Englewood—but projects like Mizner Park, Belmar, and Perimeter Place provide a range of housing types, tenures, and costs. While they do not contain the social and physical diversity of incremental cities, the degree of internal integration, diversification, and densification of these “instant cities” deserves commendation.

Large, single-parcel projects also foster integration external to the property. By forcing municipalities to address rezoning and use tax-increment financing to provide infrastructure upgrades for the new density, larger projects are gradually reforming the regulations and financing practices that otherwise continue to favor sprawl. Large projects in particular increase a municipality’s experience with and capability to further permit mixed use, mixed incomes, shared parking, form-based codes, context-sensitive street standards, transfer-of-development rights, and other tools, standards, and regulations that foster urban development patterns. As a result, one successful retrofit tends to breed another.

At the same time, the financing and development communities are gaining experience with evaluating mixed-use public-private deals. Gradually, the financial performances of large projects are providing the predictable metrics that lenders require to offer the most competitive rates not only to conventional suburban development but also to urbanizing redevelopment (increasing the feasibility of including affordable housing). Evidence of the magnitude of change in the rules of the game is that the big players have now stepped onto the field.

As detailed in Chapter 7, General Growth Properties, the second-largest mall owner in the country and the second-largest U.S.-based publicly traded REIT, is retrofitting the Cottonwood Mall outside Salt Lake City as a test case for repositioning its underperforming and/or redundant properties into mixed-use town centers. Recognition of the changed market has also led many of the country’s high-production single-family home residential builders over the past two years to start “urban” divisions offering lofts, yoga studios, and billiards lounges.¹¹ It should not be surprising that these divisions have been the best performers when the rest of the housing market has tanked.¹²

INSTANT ARCHITECTURE, INSTANT PUBLIC SPACE

On the one hand, the urban divisions by K. Hovnanian Homes, KB Homes, Toll Brothers, and Centex Homes, along with smaller “urban” retail formats by Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot (their “neighborhood format” is approximately 30,000 square feet in two stories instead of 115,000 square feet on 10 acres, and it incorporates more “do i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• 2011 UPDATE
• Preface
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE - THE ARGUMENT
• PART TWO - THE EXAMPLES
• Epilogue
• ENDNOTES
• IMAGE CREDITS
• INDEX
• COLOR PORTFOLIO