Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout1997-10-23 TranscriptionOctober 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 1 Council: Nov, Lelunan, Norton, Thornberry, Vanderhoef. Staff: Karr, Miklo, Franklin, Davidson, Head, Boothroy, Long, Winsted, Yapp, Kugler, Schoenfelder. Tapes: 97-147, all; 97-148, Side 1 Lecture: Iowa City's Future NeiEhborhood 97-147 S1 Miklo/My pleasure to introduce to you Victor Dover, an architect and designer from Miami, Florida. I met Victor at a National Association Homebuilder's Conference in Beauford, South Carolina in April of this year. There we toured a project that Victor had worked on in the town of Port Royal. From viewing that subdivision it was clear to me that this was a very innovative subdivision, yet it was based on traditional town planning techniques and Victor was very enthusiastic about how the town got to that point and how he had worked with the developer in the town to create this very nice subdivision. This subdivision reminded me very much of Iowa City's better older neighborhoods but it was new housing, it was affordable and it was acceptable by the community. Those of you involved in the development process here know that that is not always the case. That the community often objects to new development. It was clear that Iowa City could benefit from some of the development techniques that the rico-traditional town planning and the housing techniques that were used in this particular development and other developments that Victor has been involved in. So without much further introduction, I will turn this over to Victor. I would also like to thank, at this point, the Homebuilder's Association, University of Iowa Graduate Urban and Regional Planning Program and Environmental Advocates for co-sponsoring this lecture with the city. I understand that Victor's presentation will take about 45 minutes. Then we will have discussion and questions after it. Victor Dover/The first thing to find out is how many of the folks in this big room tonight already know how to speak or translate southern. Who knows what y'all means? Y'all means you all. And hi means hi. I do speak southern. I try real hard to penetrate that for the benefit of audiences where people may not have heard much of that before. What I am going to talk about is change. Change is a big old scary word. Change is a very thing that most of our America citizens on this continent have learned to be very suspicious of during the last four or five decades of growth and change in their neighborhoods. Growth and change in This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 2 the form of development, re-development and that is for very good reason. They look all around them and the built evidence on the ground reinforces this conditioning. It conditions them to be suspicious of change because they look around and they see the growth and change as in many cases have made things worse rather than better. The good news is it doesn't have to be that way. But there is one key ingredient without which you will always get change that makes things worse rather than better. And with this ingredient change can make things better rather than worse and that ingredient is design. Not something that is added on extra at the end after all the big decisions have already been made by the technicians, the attorneys, and the marketing folks. And you know, not something that is put onto the surface at the end but in fact, an essential ingredient without which you will not survive. That is the quality of life and the physical things that you love about your neighborhoods will not survive. Bob, actually, I think if you lose those, we will have plenty of light through the window and we will get a clear image on the screen. That is better. I enjoyed my brief tour around Iowa City today because it was a little bit like a drink from a fire hose. So much wonderful example inventory in your old town coming at me. I took some pictures of that. I realized that you have here the genetic code for good design already all around you, on the ground, visible, tested, proven, field tested for many many years. Now there is a big national conversation going on that you all are involved in. The conversation here about growth and change and neighborhood very much mirrors one that is going on all around the country and in other countries right now as we re-think how to make neighborhoods. How to get home from nowhere as the Atlantic Monthly put it. Or how to make walkable neighborhoods. How to recover what is best about our broken suburban dream, Newsweek, that is pretty mainstream. Are suburbs changing. A seminal book the subtitle of which is "Toward An Architecture of Community." Now listen to that. For a long long time we thought architecture was about building, like an object on a piece of real estate. The architecture of community incorporates that but goes beyond that to say that there is a design path before the designer, architect, landscape architect, town planner that deals with the spaces and qualities of the physical form between buildings. And that is the architecture of community. The jargon varies, the new urbanism, neo-traditional, traditional neighborhood design. I prefer traditional neighborhood because that is the most authentic label we can place on it when it fact that is the real goal. To build neighborhoods that are real. And you see a cry going on all over the media about the need for a better neighborhood model and look where they are finding the answer. By looking back at traditional towns, places that have the quality and character of the place This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 3 that people try to move into first. In almost every city like Iowa City there is a neighborhood or two where new arrival are either directed by their friends by word of mouth or directed by the Realtors. Go try to find something there first. And then failing to find it, they go settle for something less. If you're in Boulder, it's Mapleton Hill. Here you have neighborhoods that cry out or obviously standout as examples, like Brown Street or in Winter Park, an 1880's town in Florida in Central Florida, where the Realtors take the prospects first to the Main Street. They show them Park Avenue, one of the great examples of a successful main street, and then they show them the houses. When was the last time a broker showed you around to look at houses or apartments and if they did, did they take you first to see the strip shopping center and then to see the houses or the apartment complex? Design makes it possible to do that. Now thinking about town form is not new. It's intrinsic to our traditions and cultural heritage, not just on this continent but elsewhere. Of course the European examples really get at this idea of maximizing the sense of place and the walkability. They've been at it a long, long time. We've got a long way to go. Which of these looks more like a great public realm? Nothing about the two pictures you just saw is that different. They both have restaurants. They both have florists. They both have parking. Where would you prefer to live? Part of the problem that we have to address in this revival of good town making in America is how to put the pieces back together. In this image, you can see housing, houses in this case, up here. You can see a school. You can see shopping. Here's a supermarket. I like this example because if you live here in this so called neighborhood and you want to get a quart of milk on Sunday morning or rent a videotape on Friday night or buy a newspaper or get a popsicle, these are all classic examples, you of course get in your car, drive around the neighborhood, come out the gate, turn on to the regional road network where you compete with thousands of other cars doing the same thing, circle your way around, and then circle the parking lot looking for a parking space that is probably farther from the door than your house was. Now this is a good example because they did put in the token sidewalk. I think the pedestrians would be really entertained in this environment. They enter along side the dumpsters. People in your climate say, nobody will walk here. There's too much snow. In our climate they say, nobody will walk here. There's too much sun. But basically, it's a self fulfilling prophecy when the pedestrian environment is designed to be hostile. Now this one they did manage to include the mandatory by code six foot concrete block and stucco wall separating the two uses, commercial and residential, and obviously getting the two together is a major problem. Usually we put a canal in between them just for good measure. All right. So obviously something's gone terribly wrong in terms of This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 4 how we put things together and the environment between the buildings is out of control. If you compare that to classic American neighborhoods whether they are denser and more intense or less intense like the detached house street on the left, you can actually see that the environment between the buildings is a great place to be. In fact it's part of what one sells. And the left over things are not just left over. They're not just unusable land or the tough part. They're the great public spaces, the parks and squares and central gathering plazas and so forth that are part of it. These things go together to make up a public realm. That's the pointy headed parlance for that stuff between the buildings. Conventional zoning will not get you a public realm. In fact what you're looking at here in this picture is completely orthodox, visa vis the thick book of regulations in the community where I shot this photograph. Now here the public space between the buildings is just an inconvenience you have to put up with and of course this scene was created at a time after we began to enshrine on the fronts of the buildings those things which we consider most important to our culture, the double wide or triple wide garage door. And they say no one will walk in America so there's a question. Where would you prefer to live? Let me show you a pair of cartoons. Here's that same scenario with the auto oriented uses on the big roads. Of course the big roads serve regional purposes, local purposes, in between purposes, and then houses are one place. Housing is another place. Office are another place. Fast food is another place. Fast food religion is another place. For what it's worth I should point out that this cartoon is of course inflammatory. Everyone looks at this picture and says, Victor, no one in their right mind would zone it that way or design it that way or build it that way or lease it that way. And of course I agree but I want to tell you I traced this from an aerial photograph. Everything you see in that picture is true. The basic problem is that each applicant proposal is dealt with in isolation as if it has no neighbors and there's no guiding principle for how the parts are supposed to add up like a bunch of asteroids. And of course as places density and intensify, they get more complete and grow, the asteroids start to bump up against one another and the collisions cause all sorts of conflicts and anger and anxiety and political turmoil and so forth. And that's always going to happen when you deal with each site in isolation, permit of the week, variance of the week, and so forth. Now there's an alternative. And of course this is an amalgam of images and ideas from many places and not a tracing of a real photograph. But what about instead of going on endlessly into the distance, having towns that have definite edges. What about making the memorable center of the neighborhood a place that you would take someone when you're introducing them to the neighborhood. That first place you'll go with a visitor from out of town to say this is my neighborhood. It's not so different than This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 5 you're Market Square Park from the classic Iowa City Historic Plan. What if our commercial uses and our office uses and so forth were designed to work with one another to add up to place and to be very efficient in terms of parking and transportation? What if we had an interconnected street network so that every single one of local trips need not enter the regional road network and compete for space with all those other cars and all those other trips? What if all the houses were not alike but rather within neighborhood you could find large lot homes with large houses on them and smaller lots with smaller houses on them and row houses and apartment buildings and apartments above shop fronts and accessories above the garages and so forth? Where would you prefer to live? The most important thing to learn tonight is if you're already doing it continue and if you're not yet doing it start looking at the place you've got in detail, because there lies the geometric detail of how to pull it off when you build some place new. Now that's my partners Joe Cole and Robert Gray walking an old neighborhood in Cornelius, North Carolina, and pacing it off and measuring it. We walk around with measuring tapes and cameras everywhere we go because we realize that in these old neighborhoods there are physical conventions, distance between buildings, the width of the sidewalks, the space that's given for the tree to grow, the width curb to curb of the street, and so forth, that will end up being the genetic code for good neighborhoods that are added. You don't have to invent them. Now traditional neighborhood design, there are a lot of pieces to that puzzle but there really are five basic physical features. The first one is that a good traditional neighborhood or neo-traditional neighborhood will have an identifiable center and edge. It doesn't go on forever into the hinterlands, but it has the identity that comes from knowing where the neighborhood starts and stops. It doesn't mean a wall. Sometimes the edges between neighborhoods are the great center streets that connect them and form their seam. The second thing is that the neighborhood is limited in size to about five minutes walk from center to edge, a five minutes average walk. That's about a quarter mile. And if you have so much land that it gets bigger and bigger, you make multiple neighborhoods with multiple centers. That limitation in size is a convention you can find throughout history for five thousand years of experience our species has had in city building. You'll see it in the plans of Washington DC or in the Daniel Burnham of Chicago. You'll see it throughout the history. In fact I think you could probably find it on the ground here in Iowa This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 6 City. You'll find that the neighborhood is not just one thing. You don't have neighborhood of houses, okay. You don't have apartment complex that is a neighborhood. An office park. A shopping center. All those two word names are beware. The two word names. The neighborhoods have a mix of things. That means they have houses of a variety of types and sizes to own or rent, have varying prices and for varying households and life styles. It also means that you'll be able to find within that five minutes walk that videotape you want on Friday night, an ATM, a place to buy stamps and drop off letters, and a popsicle at a minimum. One of the most important features of a traditional neighborhood is that instead of a loopy swervy plan of disconnected cul de sacs, one of these spaghetti plans, you have an integrated network of walkable streets. Now it doesn't have to be a gridiron necessarily. The key word is network. They have to connect and not always directly, not always all the way through, but the blocks are small so they're walkable. You can get around the block. How many of you have had the experience of trying to, of visiting a friend who lives in one of those cul de sac communities, so called communities, and then you go for a walk and you can't find your way out because you keep going around and the streets all end. This is also a recipe for bad transportation problems if you have a disconnected street network. A connected street network spreads the load across many intersections and many pieces, many links of streets, so that they can handle traffic in a calm and normal way. There's a great analogy for this. The difference between the way the old fashioned telecommunications system works and the way the modern cellular phone network works is a parallel for this question of disconnected versus connected streets. The old model, both for transportation and communications was the trunk line model, the big central trunk line that leads everything to the center and then branches off into first the fat branches and then the skinnier and the skinnier and the skinnier until it gets to you. And of course that means, when you do the same thing in transportation, that every basic trip ends up on the regional road network instead of being able to be handles within local streets. And the cellular phone network doesn't work like that at all. It handles a lot of traffic but in small amounts in each of many many nodes. And the difference of course that has made is the tremendous boom in telecommunications capacity. We would not have nearly the negative impact of new development that people associate with all of the traffic problems and so on that people connote with new development if the new development had an This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 7 interconnected street system. Okay? So there's one of those key design ways that all developments are not created equal. Now the streets themselves have to be walkable and we'll talk a little bit about how you do that. And then last of the five, big five principles is that special sites are reserved for civic purposes, like the site for a civic building that might terminate a key street, just as your Old Capitol building terminates the most important street in your town. Or they might anchor an important public space like the square or a key vista to a natural feature. In a traditional neighborhood, the best real estate of all is reserved for these anchors of civic importance, the geometrically best sites because the views lead to them or the views from them are best or the flat spot is best for building the square. They're reserved for that. And of course in traditional neighborhoods you don't always know what all of the future civic building kind of needs will be. We don't really have to know right now in setting aside that small site whether that's a library or church or a post office. Fundamental imperatives of good urban design is to give a shape, a legible visible shape to the public space. Think of the street in a walkable neighborhood as being like a public room with walls and a floor. Okay. When the walls are too far apart, the sense of enclosure goes away and when the walls are closer together, the sense of enclosure increases and that sense of enclosure directly translates to a heightened sense of place, and that's why many of the places you recognize as tourist destinations where people go and live their lives with camera out the whole time have tighter street cross sections from building face to building face. Actually the dimension from curb to curb is not all that important in this respect. It might be important for controlling the behavior of vehicles so that doesn't get out of control but the important thing is the dimension from building face to building face. This is not mysterious. We've been doing it all along. In fact the great traditional neighborhoods have shallow setbacks between say the front porch side of one house and front porch side of the house on the other side of the street. And that creates that sense of belonging that's so important. It has some benefits in other ways and I'll talk about those in a moment. I'm not making this up. It's right there in the literature if you read The Fundamental Text of Architectural Practice published by the AIA, you see this diagram. It basically shows that a ratio of height of buildings to width between them is what creates that sense of a public room. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 8 This is not something that is different today than it was 1000 years ago or 100 years ago. We're not that much different in size and the human eye has not changed its physiology so much in the time in which we've got cars and so on. Even in pioneer situations, in absolutely new start development, history shows that it's important to create that sense of enclosure. A lot of towns spend an enormous amount of their governance money, time, and energy on controlling things like that, like the exact colors, like there are no glossy colors allowed on the Texaco sign. It has to be a certain number of inches from the ground and no more, controlling that, and then they wonder why is there no there there. The reason is because they ignored the more important thing, which was the position of the building on its lot that creates that sense of public space. No harm done in regulating the control and size and all that on signs, but it really isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is building placement. Now why bother with all this? We have learned over the last decade that there's a right way and a wrong way to approach the development community about traditional neighborhood design. Typically the wrong way is to say, Mr. or Ms. Developer, we really think you should do these things because it would be good for you and it would also help reinforce all these important cultural, social, and environmental goals which we hold dear in our community. That's not going to work. A much better way is to say, Mr. or Ms. Developer, how would you like to make more money, get your permits faster, spend less, get more with less, and be a good guy wearing a white hat instead of a bad guy wearing a black hat. By the way to do all these things, you have to fulfill certain cultural, social, and environmental objectives. then you'll get their attention. Our clients, Vince Graham and Bob Turner, have been noticed by a very conservative eyes of The Wall Street Journal for their success in applying these principles of the new traditional neighborhood model and making a lot of money doing it. No harm done. There's some specific reasons why designing traditional neighborhoods can make bottom line sense and since about half our work is with local governments and community groups and the other half is with developers, I see this from both sides. And you need a community as a community if you're enthusiastic about these ideas, as I know you are in the recently adopted city policies and your objectives for the peninsula and so on, then you need to start putting them in terms that the development community can get enthusiastic about too. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 9 There are several reasons why T.N.D. can make bottom line sense. My buddy Dan Camp from Starkville, Mississippi, if you're ever down that way, go see what he's built in the cotton district. Dan was neo-trad when neo-trad wasn't cool, and he's been doing this for 20 years and he's self made, made a good living building a traditional neighborhood called the cotton district. There are several things he will tell you about what you can do in a traditional neighborhood that you cannot do in conventional sprawl. You can build streets the right size and you don't have to build them as inefficiently as the curvy swervy thing does. And the traditional neighborhood buyer or resident is attracted to very simple amenities. No golf courses required. No elaborate recreational system necessary required before you can sell any houses. You can use more of the lot including building without having to push things so far apart. That translates into being able to either build more units or build on less of the land, running infrastructure less far. You can build rectangular buildings. Normal traditional buildings are quite often boxes with nice roofs and they don't have to be wiggly squiggly buildings with 75 gables on them when the public space is under control. Of course more yields from the land is one prospect. Traditional neighborhood design takes the negatives out of higher density. Probably the only condition under which you should accept higher density. Traditional neighborhood design doesn't have to be done all at once to make sense. You can build a little bit of it and people can see it and get excited about it. You can charge more for phase two. In all the markets where a traditional neighborhood design has been introduced and offered at least one of any quality and integrity, that development has immediately begun beating the pants off of the conventional subdivision competitors. If you look at the greater Orlando market where Disney has introduced in a big way their traditional neighborhood project called Celebration, Celebration dominates the new house and attached house development market in that region, and it's only been under way for a couple of years and they have 900 families living at Celebration in that short time. If you go to Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the Kentlands designed by our friends at CPZ and Company has been in the ground since the early '90's, you'll see that basically in the greater DC depressed real estate market, the only place in greater Gaithersburg where's there's much construction at all is at the Kentlands. For any given moment there are literally 100's of houses under construction at a time. So faster absorption is important. There's not just one customer. Our developer colleagues are very fond of market analysis, and what This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 10 they tend to develop is very very narrow so-called buyer profiles. Our buyer, she is Hispanic. She's a single mother. She's 37. She's earns $30,000/year, and she has two kids. They know what kind of car she drives. They know everything about her zip code habits. But it's a very narrow description. Our buyers. They are empty nesters. They're 65. They're go go retirees who golf a lot. And they know everything about this person but the problem is people don't stay single. They don't stay 65, able to drive, for example. People change in their lives over time and that's a problem when there's only a very narrow profile, but the more immediate problem for a development is when there's only one kind of household being prepared for physically in the design, you've limited the number of customers and market niches you can attract. Some developments have found it possible when offering a better mousetrap to charge more for it. Fifteen percent more was the experience at Kentlands. And then last, wearing that white hat. The most economically feasible place to introduce traditional neighborhood design is the place where the local government will not have it any other way. Okay. Let me- You've got to tell them that's the way you want it. Now in Florida there's a great imperative because our sprawl has preceded from Miami west into the Everglades at a very very frightening pace and the same from Tampa and St. Petersburg east along Tampa Bay to the point where our environmental crisis is all over the news and I'm sure you've heard about that. Correction, Bob, I'm from South Miami, which is a little town of 10,000 people in the shadow of big bad Dade. But you can see that white stuff is basically urbanized area and the yellow is the rapidly disappearing agricultural area. ~ What's happening is that we're taking places that look like this, and we're building these across them, and then they're turning into places that look like this. Before and after. That image was created eight years ago and it's a projected 20 year build out for that place along Interstate 75, and it's more than half built at this point, so it's outpacing the predications of that at 20 years. Now everything in that picture was built based on the projected build out according to the recently approved zoning. Has anybody drawn a picture of what Iowa City would look like if it were completely built out according to code? What are you going to be when you grow up? That's the question. Now how did we get here. Planning wasn't always like this. Planning was quite different, especially on this continent from Colonial times up to the 1940's. This is the great L'Enfant plan for Washington DC. What do you see in a picture like this? You see boulevards This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 11 and blocks and streets and parks and special sites for civic buildings. How the land meets the water. You see a basic logical diagram. Or the Oglethorpe plan for Savannah. How many of you have been to Savannah, Georgia, on a vacation or seen Forrest Gump when he's sitting on a park bench waiting, eating a chocolate. That's the square, right there. These squares are the first four of what became the real genius of the Savannah plan, which was the central square like the one where Forrest Gump was sitting. Savannah began as a single family large lot detached subdivision. You see the houses? Not attached, on larger lots. At the point where they ripped the town out of the wilderness, they said, we'll start and work from a plan. And later, as this town grew and changed and densifted and industrialized, the great row house street scenes of Savannah were created. Right on those same streets, right around those same squares and it got better rather than worse when it became denser. In fact what started on about quarter acre lots, which sounds like a lot of your subdivisions, your recent ones, eventually densifted into being row houses on narrow lots. Then the row houses were often subdivided into flats early in this century and as industrial employment heated up to the point where the same blocks that started out as four units to the acre are in many cases now holding 25 or 30 or 35 units to the acre. But they can do it because the building types and the basic design of the streets supported the notion. When you just casually replace your great old neighborhoods with denser building types without the consideration for design or traditional building types, you may not be satisfied with the results. Fast forward to early in this century, the 1909 plan for Chicago created by Daniel Burnham and Hayward Bennett. Same idea. Special sites for civic buildings, a network of streets, the most important spot for the civic site, Michigan Avenue. When you go there and enjoy it in its present form, remember that Michigan Avenue became what it is because it was designed to be just that way. Grant Park, the sites for the museums, the Chicago Hilton, and so on. According to plan. And you may not know that the Burnham plan was actually regional in scope. Here's the central city and they'd also planned for the regional transportation network and the creation of self contained villages surrounded by the green of preserved areas and the working landscape of farming and of course that's where they blew it, because they didn't keep that piece of the diagram green. Great quote from Burnham, it says, basically a noble logical diagram will never die. The L'Enfant plan remains the basic blueprint for how to build in This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 12 Washington and Oglethorpe's plan remains the basic guidance for how to build in Savannah and Burnham's in Chicago. Now, contrast those traditions in city building with this picture. In the others you can see streets and blocks and boulevards and civic buildings and neighborhoods, towns, villages, countrysides. Pretty normal common sense ordinary vocabulary, right? In this. one we see zones. The red zone is for commercial. The orange zone is for higher density multi-family housing. The yellow zone is for single family detached houses, and green for recreation and blue for preserve and on and on. There's purple for industrial. A color coded bubble diagram kind of land use map is not a plan and it is not a design that will guarantee the result. There's all sorts of funny language. I didn't say anything in there about villages towns, neighborhoods, streets, blocks, civic buildings, because we don't know any of that by looking at a map like this. We just know zones. And a few other things, this circle, anybody want to take a guess? It's an activity center. Want to guess what the activities are? When I hear the words activity center, I imagine at the center of all of this stuff, the people place, you know, where one gathers to meet a friend where you enjoy the urbanity part of the life equation. That intersection was intriguing on the map because of the activity center and so I went out and photographed it for you. It actually turns out the activities are driving and road widening and selling, there's some selling going on. There's a flag. In other words, the activity center is dead except for folks strapped in 3000 pounds of steel body armor playing bumper cars. The result of this mistake in planning model is that we're driving ourselves crazy. It's costing us a great deal as a nation. Of course the quality of our life goes down. The time we have for kids goes away and so on. It wasn't suppose to be this way. We were assured by the experts from out of town, like me, that it was going to be great. This giant, plastic, metal, and unbreakable glass city of the 21st Century. It was going to be a place of atomic power and high culture. Broadacre City envisioned for the prairie by Frank Lloyd Wright. It can be a place where every house has a big yard. And if there is a tower, they are far enough apart so they can cast their shadow on the land without hitting other buildings. And Norman Belgetti, a fascinating figure from our century, the father of the actress Barbara Belgetti, great industrial designer, applied his industrial design model for the city and came up with this, Futurama, the City of Tomorrow at the 1939 World's Fair. You see how clean the diagram is. The building is now detached from that pesky street thing. The street goes through efficient, lifted from the ground uninterrupted for the free flow of moving traffic and the buildings can be designed as truly sculptural and wonderful objects, pedestrians, expressed traffic, local traffic. Each will be This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 13 given a clear path by 1960. But today, four miles in five are stop and go. This message brought to you by Super Shell. Like it wasn't suppose to be bad but it turned out to be the nightmare scenario. The golden age of the automobile. At the time when it was a marketing necessity to convince us of the culture, to move from the family car to the personal car. One required for every individual above 16 years of age as an essential tool of survival. But you have got to understand, there is an economy of scale here. Drive more, it gets cheaper by the mile. This message brought to you by ethyl corporation. And this is what we do with all of our money. The treasury of our country has begun to gradually be bankrupted by expenses to keep up that failed experiment. The typical highway off ramp will cost $7-8 million. A real interchange, maybe $25-30 million or to get something really fancy, like where 1-595 meets 1-95 and 1-75 within a few kilometers of one another, you can spend even more money. This is Broward County, Florida. This intersection, this interchange and it's approach road have so far, it is still under construction, cost $990 million and counting. One billion dollars. Does anybody know how much a billion dollars is? A billion dollars is enough money that if you put it in the bank for one year and somebody reasonably prudent and invested it and then the next year you built the interchange with the interest you have earned in that one you, you could about build five new high schools. So we don't have money for education. That is where our money is going and of course, as planners, we are taking a real hit because of this. I am here to deliver something of a warning to you from Florida because we are #1, we are absolutely top of the list in terms of pedestrian fatalities per year in the State of Florida because we have built more recently and we more purely embodied the Norman Belgetti's diagram than some of your more and more settled and mature places like Iowa City. It is not all that difficult to design streets that are accommodating for the automobile but also workable and functional for the pedestrian and cyclist. There are several basics. You have got to have shade. The streets have to go somewhere, okay. You have got to have natural surveillance and calm traffic. That is eyes on the street from the nearby houses and cars moving by at a pace that is not threatening. And it has got to hold your interest and be memorable and beautiful. We do those five things, we will have pedestrian friendly streets, whether they are new ones or ones that you are going back and correcting. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 14 Remember, this is an investment. When you are selling traditional neighborhoods, the street detail is the amenity, not the golf course club house or the gate or the swimming pool or what have you. Public realm is what adds value. And you have got great examples already here in your town of how to do this well. In fact you have generously wide streets and in many cases, have been used to make a generously wide planting strip which has allowed your street trees to grow handsome and large and really work. And little details. Of course on this street, which is one of your remaining brick streets, very very positive naturally occurring traffic calming affect. Look at the corner detail here. That curb is very very small, probably a three foot radius around that corner. Jeff, in a new subdivision, according to the standard rules, is there a normal corner turning radius that you would foresee? Davidson/It depends on the street classification. Dover/There is kind of a chart of hierarchy of streets. In most new subdivisions, I don't know about the ones here. But in most of the ones around the country, this little detail has been lost and big broad tractor trailer oriented corner turning radii have been introduced and this is a problem because when people see that they can take the corner at high speeds, they do. It is a self fulfilling prophesy. Audience/Those standards are listed in design manuals. Dover/That is right. In fact, that is one of the problems. We need to really work on the standards. However, if you read the 9th addition of Architectural Graphic Standards, which is the new one or you read the new circulars being put out by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the standards are starting to get better than they were for 40 years, really. Think about it. You know, you go to a convention and you are there with specialists to do what you do. Maybe it is the traffic engineers or the civil engineers, the transportation planner. And everybody is sitting around, got to have a project, so they up the standards and then they publish the new version the next year. And kind of in a sequential way, year after year after year. People say well, in our town, folks are now driving more and driving faster. So we had better accommodate them and they begin gradually eliminating things like street trees and small turning radii and narrow streets, on-street parking from the equation and that is a problem. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 15 So the important thing is to have a real broad menu of street types, of rich menu of skinny streets, bigger streets, and using each where they are appropriate. One nice thing about the small turning radius is that there is an occasional black mark on those beautiful stone curbs where someone has hit it and sometimes I will show a slide of that and an alert person in the audience will jump up and say look at those black tire marks on that corner. And the answer is someone got CHANGE TAPE TO REEL 97-147 SIDE 2 to the neighborhood where you are expected to drive and behave yourself like a regular person and they will never do it again on that same corner. Anyway, the great streets I saw today in your town are exemplar. The street trees but also the shallow setbacks that are in many of your older neighborhoods and the front porches. It creates this really inviting street scene. There are lots of other towns struggling with the same thing you are. The City of Winter Park, I talked about before. This is their main street. Park Avenue is the great success story in Winter Park. It is the main street that killed the mall. In fact, a mile away, the Winter Park Mall herald in the 1960's as a beacon of progress tanked in the 1980's economically, not good news for anybody. But they did so because Park Avenue is so strong and so robust. It has both the national retailer, getting some credibility from that I suppose and but also all the homegrown long time merchants of Winter Park right there on the avenue. And it is a mixed use place, apartments and offices above the shop fronts. Facing the central park, which is here, that is the with the little fountain I showed you in one of the first slides. And guess what, Central Park is what you see when you get off the train in the Amtrak Station and 200 feet from where you are standing are the shops of Park Avenue. In other words, the transportation system is very thoroughly integrated. Now a problem, in the 1950's a consultant came to town in Winter Park and blew it. He said really, you know, this is a problem. You have got these skinny streets that are totally retrograde and out of fashion and not tuned to our new high speed life. And in several cases they widened their roads, they took out their medians, they added a bunch of downtown parking where park and buildings use to be and they are not better off for it. And so Winter Park is now, 40 years later, engaged in a very expensive and politically complicated process of reversing that decision making back then. So I am not saying you should never listen to an out of town expert, otherwise you would all get up and This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 16 leave. But you do need to use your own common sense and your local models and local history to guide you. If you have had anything similar happen here, then by all means, remember it. Now mixing uses. Remember that photograph of that strip shopping center and the houses in the distance, where everything was so dog gone far apart. Look at this picture. That is a house and that is a house and this is a corner store and they are nine feet apart. Actually part of this one is a tavern. And this is the most desirable neighborhood in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, called Fourth Ward. It is the place where everyone wants to go first. If they can't find a house, they settle for one of the other neighborhoods. And part of the reason is that they have that corner store. It is, of course, the center of social activity in the neighborhood. Everybody comes there to learn the latest gossip and it is extraordinarily convenient. You know, it is on a 50 foot wide lot. It has no parking lot in the front. There are a few spaces on the street and a few behind. What if, in the interest of flexibility, we said make it a one story building instead of a two story building and what if, just to be flexible, we said okay, you can put it 60 feet further back from the front property line and put the parking in the front. And instead of making it tall but fairly narrow, make it low slung and wide, maybe 60-70 feet wide with a big red plastic roof across the front. Okay. What I am explaining to you is why design makes mixing uses okay. Because if you made, in the interest in flexibility, that little change, of course everyone would be nervous about adding commercial to their residential neighborhood. Adding red to my yellow part of the land use map. Design is the essential ingredient to mixing uses a good idea. We mourn the passing of the Seaton's Store because, and for reasons as I understand it that have more to do with big government policy and state policies than they do with economics of that store. But this neighborhood lost when that building ceased this year to perform those same mix use functions. Why? Because now you have to get in your car and drive to get some basic things you once upon a time, not very long ago, could do on foot. So your congestion will now be added to the regional road network. Conventional suburbia and places like Florida and Texas generate 14 car trips per day per household. Some of the ones in southwest Dade County, which is the county where I live, those trips average ten miles in length. Okay. Enormous amounts of travel that is totally unnecessary. From 1983 to 1993 the number of vehicle miles traveled, VNTs the technical term engineers use, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 17 increased nationwide 45 % in just a decade. One of the reasons it happen is because we forgot to put these non-residential uses within reach of our neighborhoods. I like to compare this idea of the corner store to the more conventional stuff developer sometimes think they have to have to sell real estate. If you want to build a golf course you need about 150 acres. You are going to spend a lot of money. It is not an easy thing to do. It has complicated professional staff and of course, all of that pesticide and fertilizer, stormwater runoff and so forth. Even though it looks green, it is not exactly environmentally ideal. That is not to bash golf, I am just saying if your purpose is to sell houses, doing this kind of investment, to get them ready for sale, is a very hard thing to do and of course, that is why a lot of conventional subdivisions in the 1980's ended up in the hands of the Resolution Trust Corporation because they couldn't sustain this model. Now the little corner store you just saw the picture of takes one lot. It is an inexpensive rectangular building. The business model is understood. Not very many people have to work there and it is green because it is reducing and shortening the number of trips and the vehicle trips that remain are made shorter as a result. So even if it had to be subsidized, it is a very beneficial thing. And it is the classic time honored way to get that cross section across as a town center to give you the heightened sense of place, apartments above the shops. Now pushing things far apart, setbacks they are usually called, maximum lot coverage. These are tools which are normal to conventional zoning. However, the great lesson in historical places, including the ones where tourists come just to be there, is that instead of things getting pushed further and further apart, things are actually growing closer and closer together. This is Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, one of the most expensive places on a per square foot basis on the planet. And the buildings aren't far apart. The buildings are close together. The values haven't been harmed by that. They have been enhanced. In fact, the public right-of-way begins back here at the storefronts and all of this over the arcade is built out over the public right-of-way in addition to what the landowner had to buy for their buildings. So, pushing things far apart doesn't guarantee the result anymore than pushing the density low or segregating the uses does. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 18 Now density. Here is a little image that conjures why a lot of people fear high density. The sort of garage-scape development. This has got a different roof than you would have in your neighborhoods here but it is basically a nightmare scenario that could easily apply here in terms of what attached housing when some key design rules are forgotten. Like the fact that buildings have fronts and backs. And certain things belong in the front and other things do not. My partner, Joe Cole, pointed out after the 150th time I showed these pictures. He said Victor, did you notice that lamp post? How long has it been broken? Who is suppose to fix it? Nobody knows because the public realm is an inconvenience that you put up with and all the emphasis is on the unit. The brochure for this place tells you there is a Jacuzzi, a cathedral ceiling and there is an automatic garage door opener and a security system and it doesn't tell you anything about the outside. Joe Garreau in his book called Edge City has a little appendix in the back, very entertaining, "The Laws of Modern Real Estate Development." One of them is the Law of Severed Continuity. It says you name a place after the first species driven out and the most obvious natural feature eliminated by building there. This is called Fawn Creek, I think that is very appropriate. I know the deer issue is a big deal in Iowa City right now. This is high density. In fact, this is higher density than the image you saw with the orange roof. And this apartment building which sits in the Dillworth Neighborhood in Charlotte sits absolutely cheek by jowl with single family detached houses and it is a good neighbor partly because of design. Everybody knows that affordable housing drives down the value of the adjacent market rate real estate, right? Not right, wrong. It is not true. It is a lie, don't believe it. If it is designed poorly and executed poorly, affordable housing will drive down the value of adjacent market rate real estate. But if design is in there and you do it right, it doesn't have to bring it down at all. Here is a great example from Montgomery County, Maryland. Now the county has a policy that says basically we are not doing warehouses for low income anymore. We are not doing enclave of only first time home buyers anymore. We want the market rate and the affordable stuff mixed up. And you are seeing that kind of policy changes in jurisdictions all over the country and so this developer had to go out and do it. And look what they did. This is called Windcrest and it is in Montgomery County, Maryland. Here is a house that is $170,000. And here is a house next to it that is $77,000. From the street This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 19 actually, this one has the wood facade and the little one has the brick facade. Just a little irony built into the plan. They're equal in terms of their dignity when seen for the street. Part of the reason is there is an alley and of course, all of the garage stuff, garbage collection, all that is in the back and the front has front porches, stoops, the face of buildings. Keep going up the block. $255,000; $265,000; $300,000 all together. This sold out immediately and is a run away success. It is called Windcrest. This was built about four years ago. So this isn't only something you can do in a redevelopment setting. It is something that does work in new development. Now how did they do this? First of all a time honored method for delivering affordable housing is to do attached dwellings, row houses in this case, where the finish facade with all the expense is minimized, Okay, so that is one way. Then, notice that the more expensive ones have a little bit wider lots and those less expensive ones are less generous in terms of the width. This house and the other one on the end are three story row houses. Whereas the little ones in the middle are two story. Notice that their footprint is shorter and that the market rate ones got garages and in this case a garage with an accessory unit on it. And the more affordable ones don't have garages and everything is okay. They can easily be added later. But the affordable units still have private outdoor open space and they have a great street scene and they have a great address and they live in a normal neighborhood instead of being all into themselves. So did we shatter that myth? There are a few sacred cows that we have to gore here. If we don't fillet them, you will not build traditional neighborhoods. High density is not bad, mixing uses is not bad. Small houses are not bad. This is a house that is 18 feet wide. And it is right in that same neighborhood with the tavern and corner store in Fourth Ward in Charlotte. We have many examples of the same width of build. Look at the alley in this case just off of Brown Street. I guess this is Gilbert. The alley system you have in Iowa City is one of your great treasures and I hope that you are not abandoning them or vacating them or getting rid of them or closing them. You should be holding them and you should be incorporating alleys into your new neighborhoods. There are very great devices. They are very modest here, extra pedestrian connections and they collect all that garbage and all the overhead wires. You know, it costs 1/12th as much to put the wires in the rear as it does to bury them in the front. 1/12th of the expense to put them here. And of course, the result of that is that the street scene is intact. I think the track record you have This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 20 here with accessory building, like the garage apartments, the granny flats, sometimes a student house, in the rear of lots where there is a main house is really quite spectacular. You should continue incorporating those in new developments. It is one of the naturally occurring forms of affordable housing. Now look at the street we get when that garage thing and alley thing is under control. Buildings have fronts and backs and the front, stuff like the front porches and the flag. And there is a great social dialogue that is set up across these streets that face one another with their front porches. This is place, of course, you step out to get your newspaper and you see your friends, you see your neighbor and you get to know one another. And in that garage-scape scene that stone social contact is not going to occur. And so the ties that bind community together are harmed in the garage-scape conventional sprawl versions. They are strengthened in the traditional neighborhoods. This is a kind of a neat example in another way. It is quite common in your streets to see the elevation of the house up a bit from the level of the street and the sidewalk, even though the setbacks are shallow. So the deck of the porch is a couple of steps up on Steve's house and the- You don't know I was going to do that, did you? And the house is another step up. What that is doing is something very magical. When you go by on the sidewalk and you look at Steve's house, he has his curtains drawn open, you will see his chandelier but you won't see him sitting on the couch. So there is privacy just through a simple vertical dimension change that wouldn't be there with the building close to the street if everything was slab on gray. Okay, design matters. Now the current movement toward traditional neighborhood has been underway in this country since 1980. You probably all know the example of Seaside widely published, kind of the little 80 acre project that made America re-think on a continent wide basis on how to make neighborhood. All over the place these changes are beginning to see implementation in real new developments. This is McKinnsey Town in Calgary. We go to the other end of the continent. This is Windsor on the east coast of Florida near Zero Beach. The village is set within the recreational stuff and has a meaningful center and edge. And of course, the 900 pound gorilla of neo-traditional development, Disney's Celebration. If you go down there, go see Celebration. There are lots of things to learn from it. All the details are not right but there is an unmistakable quality of place being created that is not there in other places. Now I think we will all have the benefit of studying that example. But with those projects that I just showed you, the charges often leveled- well, what about affordability? New urbanism, neo-traditional development must just This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 21 be for the rich. In the little town of Port Royal proves otherwise. It is a town of 3,800 people with an annual budget of $1.7 million which is not very much to run a city on. Port Royal is the place where the ferries use to stop, train station use to meet it, so that recruits who were being brought from North and South Carolina to Paris Island Marine Station for training could move from the train to the ferry boat and get over to Paris Island. They had a thriving main street as part of that that led down to the ferry landing and then all the traditional neighborhood design that came around it. In fact it was first settled in 1562, that is well in advance of Jamestown by a Huguenot group and then they were over run by garrison from St. Augustine, a Spanish garrison. So it hasn't been continually settled but because it was settled so long ago, the little town of Port Royal has a letterhead that says the Town of Port Royal, birthplace of American civilization. In other words, a very proud little town. Then they built a bridge to Paris Island and they killed the town because it no longer had that economic reason for being. Recruits weren't getting off the train and getting their haircut and kissing their girlfriends good-bye and all of that stuff before they got on the ferryboat and the town went to seed. And one by one the buildings on the main street began to disappear and the school fell into disrepair and the houses began to disappear and be replaced with mobile homes where they were replaced. And the corner stores, there were five grocery stores on South Paris Avenue in 1900's and there are none now. Little transportation change a few miles away. It changed their whole town's life. Meanwhile, Hiltonhead and Beauford were discovered and became a very very popular places to go and build and vacation destinations and all that stuff and if you've Hiltonhead in the season, you know that conventional sprawl that built up over the last 30 years was pretty much of a traffic headache at this point. And so people in this last few years begun to rediscover Port Royal where some changes began to occur. But not necessarily for the better because long forgotten it was the armpit of Beauford County. They had to figure out what to do to turn the whole thing around. A very unique partnership between the developer, Bob Turner, one of the ones in The Wall Street Journal article, and the town led by an entrepreneurial public official and their town manager turned the whole thing on its head. They conceived and entered into a parmership where the thing called the Village at Port Royal, which is one of those names, I know, which is here. Can you see the two colors of buildings on the map? The dark brown is the existing buildings and the reddish color is new development and at this point, after two This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 22 years, all of the houses you see in here have now been built and a number of other ones, including all of these have begun to be added and they are amazing. In the process they have also gotten the first restored main street building here, a new one really and a restoration of one here around the town hall. A new town hall, a new post office, a newly revised Port Royal elementary school. That is the envy of the school district, another key partner in the game. Port Royal houses are affordable. They are very modest and here is seen in a winter shot where you can really see everything. They are on narrow lots. They are close the street. They are simple rectangular buildings with front porches. They also look like the traditional affordable housing of the low country in South Carolina. It is no accident. When Bob Turner put the first house on the market in this new development inside old Port Royal, it sold for $75,000. Now this isn't a place where a Hiltonhead house or a house in Beauford, old Beauford, might cost $175,000. But in Port Royal where they were just building mobile homes, this was an unheard figure. Nobody had bought a house in Port Royal in recent memory for as much as $75,000 and the appraisers all got very confused very quickly. By the time they had 11 houses done, they were selling for $130,000. And now the houses that they are buildingSrange from around $80- to around $150,000 in the Village of Port Royal. It is an economic miracle for the town. The tax base suddenly revived after all those years of neglect and decay. There are people up and down the town's main street now at all hours as a result of just getting that first 45-50 houses in there. It has been a very, very interesting case. But the big thing was persuading the builders that you didn't have to build a very complicated roof. You didn't have to build a very complicated building to still produce some very dignified structure. The town is recently working on the next big infill site which is 19 acres owned by the Port Authority that they don't need. And so that is going to be sold to a developer to continue the infill process. The town got together to design in detail the map of how they wanted it and that is including the RFP, the requests for proposals, to the developers. The developers are also invited in the text that is in that request for proposal to propose alterations or refinements to the town's idealized scheme to make it more viable or to make it better. But the conversation begins with what the town envisions and wants instead of just whatever somebody comes in with. Lots of other little towns are doing the same approach. Now this is the town of Davey in western Broward County, Florida. It is their rodeo arena. Yes, they have a rodeo. And this is the Davey Settlement infill plan being built around it, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997~ WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 23 underway now. This is in the new town of Miami Lake. This is a new main street which the phase you see here, breaks ground next month, an urban entertainment kind of retail definition that is actually quite intense. The housing, offices, shops and so on. The parking lot doesn't necessarily always have to be on the front. In project after project we are seeing now kind of upsurge of developer interest and press interest also in real neighborhoods with connected streets, meaningful centers. This is 100 acre new village for a flat site in southwest Dade County. It basically creates a center for an area of surrounding residential subdivisions that have no mixed use. So the center piece of that development will be quite intense and will not surprise you, is modeled on the great squares of Savanna and that central park in Winter Park. In South Carolina, not too far away from Port Royal and Mount Pleasant, which is across the river from Charleston, developers have broken ground and built the first street of what will be probably the most important traditional neighborhood development in the Carolina's, a joint effort of our office and DPZ with the same developers in The Wall Street Journal article. The Charleston traditional side yard house. There is the corner store, domesticated non-residential. Here is one of the neighborhood centers and you can see how the detached houses and the live-work combination are integrated together around the little square. The streets in the new development are very deliberately mimicking what is learned from the great streets of old Charleston. And the most intense parts of it like these lakefront apartments of are kind of a venetian model. The edge is really really important. What you see as you approach, for example, is one of the things that has to be controlled. This is for a 4500 acre new town that Mobile Corporation is paying for in South Martin County. And in this case you see some of the same kinds of principles applied in our project for Hyvolla, which is a new town outside Istanbul. The neighborhood center, the attached, the detached integrated. So this is going on all over the place. The individual neighborhood isn't where it all has to stop. In fact when you can think more regionally about sets of neighborhoods, lots of good things begin to occur like continuity to the open space and natural systems. Not a new idea. Frederick Law Olmsted 'emerald necklace plan' for Boston incorporated this idea a century ago. Here an emerald and sapphire necklace. It handles the stormwater runoff and all the natural systems needed for this part of Dade and Broward County. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 24 So as you begin to think more regionally, you can also start to work on things like how the neighborhood connect for transit. This is a rail corridor in South Martin County. And the plan actually encompasses about 130 square miles. So these ideas naturally progress up in scale. Each of these villages that is centered around transit stops on the rail corridor. That is following the traditional model for South Florida development. You know, you are a progressive city with a serious interest that we also see in other college towns like Boulder and Ann Arbor in real transit for real people and that is good. Just a word of caution about how to make transit stops that really really work. This is not the way to do it. This is the bus way in South Dade. I will take you on a little ride. There is the jitney that runs up and down the bus way. Here is the stop. Now envision getting off the system right there and now look left or right 180 degrees at the scene all around you, like this little button. This is not transit oriented development in case you wondered because what happens is when people leave the transit system, they are encountering this very negative landscape of sort of urban or suburban wasteland with things that are far apart, nothing to walk to. Basically the only activity one can do there is drive around in and out of congested intersections or get on and off the transit system. [ urge you, when you are designing places or considering a permit, visualize yourself standing in the center of it and then visualize in your mind design. Or ask for illustrations. What is it going to look like as we look 360 degrees around this place. Will it be 100% model of what we are trying to build or will it just be 2 %, like the transit system. Alternatively transit stops can look like this. This is Lake Forest, not far away from here at all. And this is what you see when you get off the train. The most important space in the town center is devoted to the spot where one gets on and off the transit system and it is not surprising that because it has such a great sense of place and historic character and so on and it is cherished by the people, so that sort of mainstream national retailers are even attracted into those quirky buildings. So now we are beginning to see in a very meaningful way all over the country this idea of transit supportive neighborhood design or transit oriented design. One of the things that that means is where transit stops, you don't just have the park and ride parking lot or parking deck. But you put those things farther away. This case for Tampa, here is the station and it faces the square just like in Lake Forest and the parking is beyond which means that the donut shop and the Kinko's Copies and the daycare center are on your walk between where you get on and off transit and where you park if you did use Park and Ride and that is intended to give those businesses and better chance of surviving. But also to add This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 25 things that the new residential users and the existing neighbors really want and need. This idea applies to new development, of course. It also applies to existing places. This is our town, South Miami. Our office is right there and that is the transit stop. This is existing conditions, circa 1992. The town got together and produced a master plane of what it wants to do when it grows up which shows a way every lot can be built, including this site which is, in the intervening years already been redeveloped in a $200,000 million investment, privately funded, motivated by the plan. And any number of areas like these public areas that have been approved by the town, the first kind of public scene improvement in 60's. That is the transit stop. And here is the main street that leads to it as it looked in 1992. Following the citizen's master plan it has been transformed. This is a simulation. It has since it has been built to create one of really the most important places in town, with wide sidewalks and outdoor dining and so on. Now college towns are tough places because you have PhD's pumping gas, right. Everybody wants to stay here or to come here to live. I understand that. Davidson is one of those kinds of places. A new development is very controversial there. In the town of Davidson, when we were asked to help design a new traditional neighborhood in this area right here, the first thing we did with the help of the neighbors in the city was really understand where are the neighborhoods of Davidson, five minutes walk from center to edge. And then how is what we are adding really a process of completing another neighborhood that has already been begun. So that it occurs in the context of the big picture and then the public is invited to help design it. Not in the back, in the dark in some room or in some agency. But in the sunshine, designed in public. It really really worked in Davidson. People came out by the score, had 80 people at one such meeting in a charret. Kind of hands on town meeting, barn raising effort where we put real markers in the hands of real people and said what do you want the neighborhood to be like and they gave us enormous amounts of information. And from that the plan was developed. We showed the citizens alternative plans. They chose the one that was the most dense, the most connected, the most diverse. The one that had the most impact on the neighborhood. Part of the reason they did it was visualization because it showed them what the neighborhood would be like in pictures, not just words. If I say small town home town feeling, you get an image in your head, right? And your image is different from mine. If we draw or we use photographs and we say like this, then we got the same message, right? And so I urge you to visualize. It This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 26 really does work. We ask for a show of hands and the less dense, less connected one, in 80 person grouping got zero hands and the most dense, most diverse, most connected one got a unanimous endorsement. Well, partly because we showed them not just that there was going to be a new church but that there was going to be a new church that was positioned in the right way. Bottom line, there is no real reason why new development has to be so controversial. has to cost more, has to yield less, harder to sell and not a very nice place to live. The bottom line is all those things can be turned on their head with design. Thanks. I know I ran long but I thought maybe seeing some of the pictures of Iowa City would help draw the comparisons from my east-coaster flat-lander example. Closer to home for you all. Do we still have time for a question or two? Okay, yes ma'am? Audience/(Can't hear). Dover/I am not sure I understood. Audience/(Can't hear). Dover/It is a well tested traffic calming technique. The woonerf is a street where there is no real clear demarcation saying this is where kids play and this is where pedestrians walk and that is where cars travel. But rather they are all mixed up in a very low speed high eye contact situation. The Dutch have probably had more experience than anyone else. The British are building a lot of them now and the Australians. All of these are highly motorized countries and that seems to be working. What I suggest is that that woonerf should still feel like a public place, with eyes on it, natural surveillance, still have front and some of the examples that have been built have been perhaps a little too informal so that that one demarcation line, which matters a lot, the line between the public realm and the private realm is obscured. That we should avoid. But otherwise, the idea of combining those things is a good one. You can't do it for 3,000 linear feet. You know, you do it for a small close or a little muse or in a key intersection. But that is one traffic calming technique from a really big menu. Lots of other things, like skinny streets, on-street parking and street trees are also traffic calming devices and beyond that, round-abouts have made a come back. They are in all the engineering standards manuals now. So traffic calming is good news. Nobody even knew what traffic calming was 7-8 years ago when we first started showing pictures of those things and we kind of got laughed out This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 27 of a few rooms. I am feeling reassured because the engineers have caught up. Our colleagues in architecture and planning have been a little slower to adjust their ethics if it weren't for the new thinking. Audience/Can no urbanism be applied to retrofitting existing suburban sprawl development? Dover/Retrofitting strip shopping centers and things like that? There are a few examples. Probably 70 % of our work in in redevelopment and if you look in Peter Katz book, The New Urbanism Toward An Architecture of Community, there is a whole section of those kinds of projects. There is a Mountainview, California example that is really quite stunning where a strip center was reversed and turned into a combination of housing and shops that has been an economic success. Closer to where we are, you may have heard of a project called Misner Park, which is in Boca Raton. With public assistance, they had a community redevelopment agency sponsor the project. They took out the failed Boca Raton Mall, which is just what is sounds like. You know, a big mall in the middle of the site with parking all around. And replaced it with what is now really the community's main street. It has four and six story buildings on either side of a wide street with a big median in it. It is formal in the sense of your access that leads to the state capitol. No one had delivered apartments above shops for shopping centers that had only on-street parking in the front and the rest of the parking in the back in Boca Raton for 45-50 years. So all marketing data said it couldn't be done. When they put the first 130 apartment units out to lease, it was before they had a model to show anyone, all but 10 leases before they built the first one and the other 10 leased within a week. The developers were responding to pent up demand. No one had delivered apartments above shop fronts for so long, no one new how popular it would be. And the developer said their only regret was they didn't sell it because it could have made a killing. Now they are locked into all of these leases. So- That is good news examples where bad stuff has been retrofit. That one was really kind of a slash and burn approach where they removed the old stuff and brought in new stuff. And we are starting to see now more gentle things where parking lots are infilled but the old strip center is not taken out. There is one of those in Charleston, South Carolina. But I think probably the next 5-6 years we are going to really see more of those small scale examples. Port Royal has gotten a little bit. Audience/(Can't hear). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 28 Dover/Very few. Very very few because it is politically difficult. Predictability or certainty is the main driving force behind the ordinances and the subdivision regulations and the homeowner's association covenants and so on that underlie a lot of these new developments. And I predict that we are going to have to be working in the marginal areas for a long time and use up a lot of those where the land values for some reason is depressed because there is a crisis or there are the opportune infill site like that one in Davidson which is really in town and incomplete. Do those first and these things will begin to catch on in the places that are otherwise are typified by large lots or garage-scape or cul-de- sacs. They may not change at all but it is what you- What you really want is a community that has the broadest spectrum of living options and choices and possibilities. Then figure that the large lot subdivision with the California triple wide garage door house on the cul-de-sac and even the strip shopping center is in great supply. We have a lot of that already. Now you just add the other stuff and get balanced. I think that is probably a more likely way to make it work. Now we are seeing places, North Boulder is one where we worked a lot, Boulder, Colorado, where the pattern is that conventional subdivision, suburbia. But they are retrofitting trails to get better pedestrian and bicycle continuity. They are retrofitting a little bit of convenience commercial. Are they getting all the great package of benefits that we are associating with traditional neighborhoods? No, they are getting some of the benefits, you know. Some of the sizzle but not the real steak but it is better than nothing and they should do those improvements. Does that help? Audience/I like your reference to main street that killed the mall. What would you advise regarding multiple ownership? Dover/An excellent question. It easier where there is a common owner and to do a unified scheme. And it is far more difficult where you have hundreds or several hundred property owner each having 50 feet. The one truth is that the only entity capable of gathering the disparate interests and working through the painstakingly slow glacial process of getting a plan together for free development in those fragmented ownerships is the city. And is the cities aren't doing that then they are not doing their job. What can the cities do? And what can they do to get people behind the plans? Code reform is one of the most fertile areas. I don't know how far you have already gone and I realize there is a lot of interest in these concepts here. So you may have implemented some of them. I just don't know your rules. But if you are simplifying the permitting process and streamlining the rules themselves to concentrate on the 4-5 things that matte the most, that is usually very popular and the kind of thing you can This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 29 have landowners get excited about on that. A lot of places have, in response to bad growth, you know, cancerous kind of growth instead of healthy muscular kind of growth, have made the process almost with no other option. They see no other way out. So they have made the process of obtaining permits onerous and burdensome. I don't know, is that true here? I see heads going both ways. So that means you are like everywhere else, it is not universally agreed upon. One thing you can do to build support and give incentives to property owners for improving their properties along a new model is to create a two track system. That is what we did in Davidson and the Davidson new code which was written by Demitrius Backus and their town planner, Tim Kean has been in pace for about three years. CHANGE TAPE TO REEL 97-148, SIDE 1 Dover/ The option is still there. Every one is pulling their permit following the new code because the old code is a mess. But also the new code has some incentives built in. To follow the old code, there is no guarantees. You still have to go through a long discretionary review process. So a developer looking at options or a property owner looking at options has two choices. Under track #1 you can go first to this board and then to that board, then to this hearing, then to that hearing, follow a book of standards which is as thick as the New York telephone directory and then at the end, after having spent all this money, face the risk that you may still be told no. Okay. Option #2, you can have a permit in an afternoon but you have to follow the vision that has been set forth in the community plan. Now, what is the developer going to do. The first option is fraught with risk and expensive land all of that. So they will exhaust every opportunity to follow the new code before they resort to the old one. You haven't removed any property rights but you have added new ones. That is one way to get a group in redevelopment situations as a business community behind an alternative model. In South Miami we wrote an overlay ordinance and just changed the code. It is not optional, you follow it. But the thick book was replaced with a poster which is a technique we learned from DPZ and was implemented a simple idea. On that poster, which an architect can have beside their desk, okay. You can basically see all the rules that apply to your kind of lots at a glance instead of having to put posted notes all over all those pages of sets of ordinances and the designers and the developers love that. And so we have seen a flurry of permits improving the town, including that really big one where another failed mall in the town was ripped out and was being replaced. Audience/Is design specified in the code? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 30 Dover/Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. You have to do design. It is easier only in the sense that there are guarantees that you know what is going to be acceptable to the town in advance. You are not guessing, okay. But more investment in one sense is required because you can't do hearing #1 through #3 with a bubble diagram. The process starts with real design. Towns also, in redevelopment cases, it is really good to have a coach as opposed to a regulator necessarily. It might be someone with the authority to say no also. In Port Royal they have a supervising planning team of which is a fancy way of saying there is a person in town hall who is waiting for you and you go there and they can explain the options. There is this architect in that group who can help you design a work around when you don't know how to do it. So they are kind of like a coach. Robert Gray, who works with us, you saw in the picture, coaches six year olds in Pop Warner football and he came back with a eureka moment after practice one day. He said, You know, I figured it out. You can't teach six year olds to play football by training them on the rules of the game of football. I mean I can give them the booklet and they have the same rules that all the other teams have. You teach them to win by teaching them plays. The team with the great play book wins. Right?. I said yeah, yeah, what does this have to do with design. He said, Well, we need the main street play, the row house plays, the porch house plays, the courtyard apartment building play and so that is the way the Port Royal Code was re-written as a play book. And now you go and there is literally a picture of how to do it and several examples from the historical stuff of the town and as much graphic material in the code as there is written. So it is not a mystery on how to do it and so far so good. Franklin/Would you suggest that the city do must at the design work up from. This is kind of a change in philosophy. Dover/The truth is, your final project, especially when they are larger, is going to be an amalgam of what you foresaw and what the developer's creative team comes forward with and adds to that initial vision. But you are right, you have to do design and it isn't that strange. Burnham's plans is full of design for Chicago. Seattle paid Frederick Lau Olmsted his hourly rate to sit on train for a week to come from the east coast out to Seattle to work on their town master plan and they were just basically getting started. And then they paid his hourly rate to sit on a train and go back. And the reason was they said this is our town. This is the most important thing. I am selling services, I apologize. This is why we do it. I don't charge as much as Olmsted. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 31 Franklin/ Dover/It isn't about what consultant but what really matters is that is to say you know, these are 100 year, 200 year investments. When were the streets laid out in old Iowa City? How long do you suppose this investment will continue to repay itself in those great old neighborhoods? Those neighborhoods are likely to look a lot like they do now, even if all the buildings were replaced after a monster tornado or something or another flood. Those streets and those environments are going to look a lot like the way they do now for another 200 years. This is long term stuff and those areas you were asking about, which have been messed up with sprawl models are going to stay the same way they are for a long time, too. So the design effort is really kind of worth it. So what the local government can do is not try to take it all the way to the end. The developer and property owners don't want you to design every building for them and tell them every door knob. They don't want all that stuff. But they want you to articulate the four or five things that matter a lot to you. Where does parking go in a lot? Where is the front of the building suppose to sit? Which part of the lot is the front? Which street is it most important to connect? And that stuff you can do and doesn't restrict the flexibility of the creative response from the developer. Yes ma'am, you have been very patient, by the way, thank you. Audience/Could you address alleys? Dover/Well, alleys are good. There are not always essential. In fact you have a lot of nice neighborhoods where there aren't alleys and they have front driveways. I noticed that the garages in most of those situations were behind the house or behind the front plane of the house and not thrust out in the front like the snout of the house and I noticed that those driveways were skinny an done car wide, not four cars wide. So there are definitely right ways and wrong ways to do neighborhoods without alleys. One of the sort of easy simple things is to let two houses share one driveway, so called Hollywood driveway where they fork at the back. But the thing that crosses the sidewalk is only half as wide as it would have to be if they both had driveway. So that is about when you don't have an alley. An alley is not essential when the lot gets big enough. Now when the lots get really really narrow, the alley becomes pretty important to avoid that garage door upon garage door appearance that would otherwise be there. And so they come naturally with urban form and higher density. It depends upon where you are. I have seen communities where there was no debate about alleys and communities where there was great fear of them for various reasons. Probably the most important thing to understand is that they don't have to be designed This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 32 like streets. We have had communities make the mistake of assuming they have to be gold plated with perfect curbs and perfect gutters and have to be concrete throughout and they have to be pristine and manicured and if one little blade of grass grows through the cracks, then it is a problem. That is not a good way to make the alleys. The alleys are kind of a utilitarian investment which can be somewhat looser and more ragged like the example form here that I showed you. So one thing is to understand that the cost doesn't have to be extreme. You can do the alleys in an economical way. You don't have to be really wide, it can be narrow. I like your point about how when you make one decision, it then cascades into a bunch of other ones and policy and so on. And it isn't just alleys The streets are the same way. A decision about how wide to make the street is a decision about which garbage collection vehicle to buy and which fire truck to buy and that kind of stuff. There are places that make the mistake of picking out the vehicle they want and then designing their streets and public spaces around the vehicle. This is not the way to do it. The vehicle might have a, if it is a really nice one, a useable lifetime of 20-25 years. The street and the urban form has a useable lifetime of 100's of years. So you should size the vehicle to the street you want instead of the other way around. That is why I showed you the example of the narrow corner, the small radius corner which is great. So that is one of the things that you have to get in whack and if it is not in whack now, like which kind of snowplow to buy, then you should- It is going to be a lot easier to fix your fleet than it is to fix your town. Does that help? Nov/You use the word single loaded in describing a street. What does that mean. Dover/I am sorry. I should avoid the jargon. When a street has lots served by only one side, it is called a single loaded street and they are expensive because obvious you can build just as many linear feet of road, pipes and storm water and curbs and all of that stuff, but you get half as much development yield, half as many houses, half as much for sale frontage in commerce. That kind of thing. And so they are to be avoided. They are essential in some places, like where the important waterfront view is created or the overlook or the edge of the town scene where you want is faced by the fronts of buildings instead of the back. Often the case in towns of topography that the single loaded street is a necessity. What we found in conventional sprawl, that inside the pod of the subdivision, sometimes they are gated little things. Inside those pods there is a premium place on minimizing the amount of street length versus lots produced for natural reasons, cut the cost of development, makes it a lot more efficient. Sometimes to an extreme where all you get is disconnected cul de sacs and giant blocks which you can't walk around and all of that. But those same places, like This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 33 the typical big golf course communities that grew up around Palm Beach County near us, they have this grand entrance Blvd. which snakes through nowhere and goes besides the backs of houses everywhere. In other words, getting nothing for all of that length of road that you have to build. In the traditional neighborhood says every street investment can be minded for real estate value, either because of an amenity or because the view is nice or because the scene is good or because you got more lots. Thornberry/The main street in Winter Park is single loaded. Dover/Classic single loaded condition. Thornberry/The shops are expensive on Park Avenue in Wintergreen. Dover/Park Avenue has a problem is that it is sort of moving out of the normal neighborhood serving scene and into this Rodeo Drive. There is also a place for the great word streets, the Baha strasse in Zurich, where the prices are higher than anywhere else in Europe or the Grand Bazaar. And so sometimes the place takes on either such a great national reputation that far exceeds those walking distance boundaries or an importance in a regional sense. That it becomes more like one of those destinations and less neighborhood serving. Thornberry/The locales drive to the mall and shop. Dover/Right. There is something important. Not the Winter Park Mall because they blew it in design, they don't go there. Thornberry/(Can't hear) They do not go downtown. Dover/The interesting thing that is happening now, I don't know when the last time you were there. You should go look at the west side of the park, on New England Avenue, west of Central Park. South of there. The west side, which was sort of the wrong side of the tracks, literally across that railroad track, is starting to now flourish as the neighborhood serving area. We have seen a few restaurants move out of Park Avenue making room for something fancier and more chi chi to pay the higher rent per square foot. They are relocating on West New England. You see the same thing in Boulder. The Pearl Street pedestrian Mall is pretty successful, it is sort of yuppyfying itself a lot and become more expensive and losing that- But West Pearl which was kind of the second tier, the red headed step child of Pearl Street is becoming the place where the real locals This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397 October 23, 1997 Victor Dover Lecture page 34 go. There may be some natural economic process in all of this. But, right now if I had to choose between having Park Avenue with a bunch of vacant storefronts or having it go up into those great world streets, I would pick the latter. And it is 3,000 feet long, 1,000 feet of it face the park. So there is really a lot of it that is double loaded, too. A classic example. We should all go there on a bus and study it. Audience/(Can't hear) Are utilities in the from or in the rear? Dover/It varies. The condition where you have a good continuous alley network is good for distribution of utilities also. Sometimes you have the water in the front and the sewer in the back or the other way around for reasons of keeping those separate. Electric, gas and phone and cable have all been recently built in the streets because neighborhoods don't have alleys. But where we introduce alleys, we move as much of the utilities into the back as we can. In South Florida we have this pesky little thing called hurricanes, they are like your floods. And what we noticed is that the neighborhoods that had alleys, got their electric power and their phone back in South Florida a lot faster than the ones that didn't because of working through all the trees and all of the access problems that happen when you don't have them. So that was good. But I think in the end you are likely to see some of the utilities in each place, front and back for the foreseeable future, just because water and sewer like to be far apart and cable doesn't always like to be with the phone and there is the competition about who is going to use flat telecommunications duct and that kind of stuff. So I think you probably just need to be flexible. If you are going to have overhead wires, have them in the back for price reasons. Miklo/I understand our cable tape if running out. Dover/That is a good sign. Miklo/ I am sure Victor will stay around for a few minutes if you want to ask a few individual questions. I also encourage anyone here who has an interest in this topic to pick up a copy of our Comp Plan. It contains some of the concepts we talked about and the council will hold a public hearing on that on November 11. So pick that up. It is at the library or you can get it from the Planning Office. I appreciate you all coming out. Adjourned: 9:00 PM. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of October 23, 1997 WS102397